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Depression often comes along with trauma

Traumatic stress can result from many different experiences, including those that are dangerous or shocking, and can cause people to feel and think differently about the world around them. For example, someone who survived a car crash might start to feel anxious whenever they hear a car screech to a stop, or may start noticing themselves believing the world is a basically unsafe place. People that experience traumatic stress – and the mental health diagnosis it causes, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – are also more likely to develop other conditions, including depression. We examined this connection in a recent study.

Have you ever met someone who felt strangely familiar to you? As if you had met them before, though you know you haven’t… in this life? If so, they might be a soul connection with which you have shared one or many past lives.

IONS would like to celebrate the long life of a remarkable man who contributed to IONS as a Life Director and as an inspiration to many around the globe.

How can visual arts help us access the noetic realms? In this ConnectIONS Live webinar, three artists explored the alchemy of image and imagination as a medium for sensing the interconnectedness of all things. 

People initiated into a Buddhist dream yoga monastery spend a minimum of three years learning to master the art of lucid dreaming (or realizing within a dream that you are dreaming it)  and applying it to Buddhist principles while lucidly aware in the dream state.  

Have you ever thought about taking a workshop to enhance your intuition, deepen your meditation practice, or better understand yourself? In recent years, these types of personal development workshops have taken off, especially ones that promise to be transformational for participants, or cause long-lasting shifts in the way one experiences and relates to themselves and others. 

In a previous article, we explored how breathwork can change us. What’s so fantastic about breathwork is how accessible it is. Anyone who breathes can practice breathwork! And you don’t need to pay for a 1-hour class to experience the benefits: just a few minutes of intentional breathing can already lift your mood.

It is not always clear what makes an ideal image stimulus for use in parapsychological experiments and applications. For example, in remote viewing (RV) research, many have speculated that beyond the contents of an image, certain important psychological properties such as numinosity, or the emotional or spiritual connection it can evoke, may be predictive of RV success or could explain some instances of displacement (i.e., perceiving correct impressions of the wrong image). These stimulus properties may have similar implications for other areas in parapsychology such as for Ganzfeld studies and presentiment research as well as for traditional psychological experimentation. Yet, aside from anecdotal reports and speculation, there have been few attempts to quantify and empirically validate which, if any, subjective dimensions of an image may be the most influential for participant’s perceptions and study outcomes. 

From Outer Space to Inner Space traces two remarkable journeys―one through space and one through the mind. Together they fundamentally alter the way we understand the miracle and mystery of being, and ultimately reveal humankind’s role in its own destiny.

The “Observer Effect”

One of the unsolved puzzles in quantum mechanics is known as the “measurement problem.” The classic way to demonstrate this problem is with a double-slit optical system. In such systems a beam of photons, such as that produced by a laser, is directed to pass through two tiny slits. A camera on the other side of the slits captures how the photons behave after they go through the slits. If nothing is known about which of the two slits each photon goes through, then the pattern observed by the camera is alternating light and dark bands. This is what one would expect if photons behave like waves. Waves, like ripples in a pond, can interfere with each other and in so doing they produce a characteristic pattern of peaks and troughs (or in the case of photons, lighter and darker bands of illumination).