Word for word: Ghostbuster U

By COLETTE BANCROFT
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 3, 2002

Amid layoffs and an uncertain economy, many people are rethinking their careers, willingly or not. Always on the lookout for opportunity, we submit the Diploma Course in Parapsychology. It's a certification program offered by the American Institute of Parapsychology, headquartered in Gainesville (although the distance-learning course allows you to earn your degree by mail and e-mail).

According to the Web site for the institute, www.gotoaip.org, its staff includes executive director Andrew Nichols, professor of psychology and chairman of the department of social sciences at City College in Gainesville, and Jerilyn Rogers-Nichols, a lawyer and director of education at City College, who is associate director and senior psi sensitive for the American Institute of Parapsychology.

The course takes 9 to 12 months to complete and costs $1,250 plus textbooks. Successful graduates are eligible to take the national board examination in parapsychology offered by the institute; if they pass, they are awarded the title of certified parapsychologist.

-- COLETTE BANCROFT, Times staff writer

This course is offered only to members of the American Institute of Parapsychology. No particular entry qualifications are required, but an adequate standard of general education and written and spoken English is assumed. You should be able to cope with study at the college education level.

This course will be of great benefit to anyone who has a deep personal interest in psychic or paranormal phenomena, to those who would like to study the subject systematically, and to all those who might become involved with such phenomena either directly or indirectly, including: counselors, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists, ministers, mental health workers, law enforcement agents, psychic investigators, cult investigators, researchers, journalists, mediums, psychics, healers, dowsers, workers in the tourism industry, and persons working or living in or near reputedly haunted sites.

Syllabus

1. History of Parapsychology: This unit traces the birth and development of parapsychology via mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research, the work of J.B. Rhine, and modern developments such as ganzfeld, remote viewing, Soviet psychic discoveries, figures such as Ted Serios and Uri Geller, the near-death experience, reincarnation and attempts to build theories of the paranormal.

2. Developing Your Psychic Senses: This unit takes us on a remarkable intellectual and intuitive journey by a psychotherapist into how to access and develop the sixth sense or "psi." We learn about multiple routes to psychic opening, what unfolding psychic awareness can feel like, the role of the implicate order, the use of imagery to access psi, and 23 tips for developing and maintaining psychic awareness. There is also a section on ethical issues of psychic work.

3. Testing Psychic Claimants: This unit gives careful, practical yet flexible guidelines to help researchers and investigators assess the purported abilities of those who claim to be psychic. The aim is to be fair to the person being researched or investigated, avoiding both false positive and false negative results.

4. How to Investigate Paranormal Phenomena: Here you will learn how real-life psychic investigators approach cases, together with succinct definitions and characteristics of a range of unexplained phenomena including ghosts, poltergeists and out-of-the-body experiences. You will also learn the principles of psychic investigation.

5. Channeling: An authoritative study of many types of channeling from both human and electronic sources. The original text has had 100 pages added for its new edition to take into account a range of new examples of channeled communication.

6. Conducting Extrasensory Perception Research: The student will learn how laboratory tests of ESP have been conducted over the past 50 years and how many of these experiments have had methodological problems. Though many writers have proposed how experiments should be made more rigorous, this study assembles a range of relevant material in one handy volume and gives checklists and guidelines for researchers. Students of this course will not have to conduct laboratory experiments but will learn the principles and practicalities of sound research. This unit should be of great help to editors, book reviewers, journalists and other researchers.

7. Psychic Warfare, Historical and Modern: A study of the practice of psychic spying over the past 5,000 years, from its origins in ancient Egypt, through the story of Queen Elizabeth I's spy John Dee, to Nazis and the occult, the CIA and the Cold War, the clandestine roles of Aleister Crowley and Ian Fleming, and the remote viewing activities of Joseph McMoneagle.

8. Authenticated Cases of the Paranormal I: In this unit you will study a superb collection of papers by world-famous experts: Guy Lyon Playfair on Mirabelli; Paola Giovetti on mediumship in Italy including the famed Eusapia Palladino; Gissurarson and Haraldsson's investigation of the mediumship of Indrida Indridason; Imich's study of the seances of Matylda; the physical mediumship of Teofil Modrzejewski; physical mediumship in prerevolutionary and contemporary Russia; and a collection of spectacular cases of psychic phenomena in China. The text has a collection of rare illustrations.

9. Authenticated Cases of the Paranormal II: A highly accessible account of favorite well-authenticated cases of psychic phenomena. The cases described are drawn from three continents and cover over 100 years of psychical research by some of the foremost investigators in the field.

10. Parapsychology of Spirituality: Well-qualified experts takes us into the realms of the meanings of spirituality, evidence for the paranormal, channeling, nonphysical worlds, religion and consciousness, God and the soul.

11. Final integrative essay (3,500 words): The student may propose his or her own essay topic or brief project in consultation with the tutor. Your project may involve additional study and purchase of additional books. We will advise on book lists for your specific subject of interest.

Examples of subjects which you may study for your project or essay (additional reading involved): spiritualism, dowsing, UFOs, psychic development, past life regression, after-death survival, near-death experience, shamanism, remote viewing, soul retrieval, soul rescue/spirit release, transpersonal hypnosis.

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