The Extraordinary Project

Healing, the ancient art of therapeutic intervention, once required sacred rituals and secret knowledge about the power of medicinal plants, energetic vibrations and indigenous wisdom. Today, we think about curing illness as surgical and pharmaceutical combat: we must fight, beat and conquer in order to heal. But when breast cancer survivor Lisa Zayas combines the ancient healing art of Qi Gong with modern medicine, a more comprehensive approach to saving her life yielded a positive, even miraculous outcome. Zayas tells the story of working with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner Dr. Effie Chow, a QiGong master, who takes her on a radical journey to recover from a terminal, incurable diagnosis with the elixir of self-love.

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Sleep Paralysis, or Night Terrors, are a weird but common nocturnal disturbance related to stress and difficult to treat. Characterized by a frightening figure that threatens the sleeper with its menacing presence, night terrors are a strange, uncomfortable and, oddly, hereditary category of dream. Most sufferers wait for them to go away. But what if the syndrome is chronic, and frightening figures chronically show up in your sleep space—persisting even after you awaken? Follow host Suzanne Clores into three night terror diaries, and take comfort in a truly extraordinary method of intervention.

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Host Suzanne Clores travels to Leeds, England for a conference on the intersection of science and Spiritualism in Victorian-era Europe. Clores looks at serious questions scientists asked about technology, innovation and spirit phenomena at the dawn of the 19th century, and endures the psychological consequences of asking those same questions today. Some disturbing audio effects may upset sensitive listeners.

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Host Suzanne Clores talks to photographer Shannon Taggart about her incredible photographic journey through the world of Spiritualism, the American 19th century religion that popularized the seance, or sacred circle in which to communicate with the dead. Taggart spent 17 years documenting entranced mediums in the historic Spiritualist community in Lily Dale, New York, and hunting across the world for mediums who could produce the elusive substance of ectoplasm. She shares her incredible discoveries about Spiritualist Mediums, Spiritualist History, and the art of capturing paranormal phenomena on film. 

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The Extraordinary Project is headed to California! Be part of the delegation! We will have a story table at the IONS Conference in Santa Clara, July 18-21. Come hear Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Julia Mossbridge, Dean Radin, and many others. Register here with the discount code Extraordinary: noetic.org/conference

Narrator Suzanne Clores agrees to conduct a field experiment in the city of San Francisco to see if EL's gift of intuitive mediumship and skill as a Remote Viewing can corroborate objective reality. From the lobby of San Francisco's Clift Hotel, Clores, EL and a group of perfect strangers agree to run an "outbounder" experiment, in which one stranger goes to an undisclosed location and the Remote Viewer tries to find them. This Season Finale brings new understanding to why our extraordinary encounters are so hard to explain, but impossible to ignore. 

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Spirit Communication, or contact with the discarnate through an intuitive medium, can shake one's sense of reality and prompt paradigm shifting questions. How could an intuitive medium possibly know intimate details about your life and loved ones? 

Skeptics—and common sense— say don't trust a stranger who purports to have unique knowledge about you. In Western Materialism, we believe much of a medium's intuition comes from cold reading personality traits and context clues. But mediums throughout the centuries have claimed that an invisible information field surrounds all of us. What if you could interview an intuitive medium and ask about their reading process? Discuss and deconstruct their intuitive information gathering? 

 In Episode 5, narrator Suzanne Clores does this very thing by following E.L., the elusive intuitive medium from Episode 4, across the country for a face to face interview about how the mediumship process works. The answer is chilling.

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Mediumship, the ancient practice of talking to the dead, posits that certain highly attuned individuals can perceive some part of our consciousness that survives death. While at odds with Western materialist science, societies for millenia have depended on mediums to contact their discarnate loved ones during periods of severe loss. In the Western world, loss due to war, disease and family tragedy continue to drive individuals to find skilled practitioners of this intimate therapeutic service to provide hope and guidance by reaching beyond the veil. 

Skeptics of mediumship, whether rigorous to amatuer, share the mission to disprove the objective reality of a medium's work. By focussing on literal or material evidence only, skepticism sometimes discounts the powerful transpersonal experience sought after by the medum's client. In this episode, narrator Suzanne Clores approaches her mediumship experience with open minded skepticism, laying aside the cultural taboo to engage in a personal encounter with the dead.

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Astral projection, the ability to send the "subtle" or energetic body across space and time, is an ancient shamanic practice with little relevance to professional gamblers. But much like card counting, this unusual technique appeals to a small sector of professional gamblers interested in gaining an edge. At the Applied Precognition Conference in Las Vegas, luck comes by way of a modern incarnation of astral projection known as Remote Viewing, a tested form of precognition once used by the military but now used by science-minded gamblers in sports wagering. Drawing the pictures in your mind can be profitable, they say. This episode explores whether the method really works.

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The Second Sight, better known as precognition or presentiment, is a predictive gift that dates back to the Old Testament and in mystical texts from around the world. Oracles, shamans and monks of the past offered intuitive guidance and insight to royalty and politicians based on precognition (detecting future events mentally across space and time) or presentiment (sensing a future event physically in the body), but our modern use and understanding of this extraordinary ability has lapsed into skepticism and ignorance. This episodes reveals the recent science and historical evidence of ordinary people tapping into the backwards flow of time. 

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