As promised I want to share with you some personal reflections I received from the recipients of the first Lisette Coly Awards that were provided so that Ana Stefanova, PhD from Bulgaria and Ramses D’Leon of Mexico could attend. I am thrilled that as you read below they seemingly had very valuable experiences. We can only hope that the take away from their participation will lead to more fruitful work within the science of parapsychology.
Ana Stefanova writes:
“In general I would like to say that the PA Convention, 4-6 July 2019 in Paris was on a highly scientific level. It gave place and time for specialists in different scientific fields to exchange ideas, facts, methods and results. It gave the feel of one interdisciplinary team. The physical space, a large comfortable building coupled with the summer season in Paris, made for great communication and subsequent impact. Everyone had the opportunity to present personal positions and to share their experience.
Ana Stefanova, PhD
For me, personally, Paper sessions I and 3, Near-Death and Exceptional Experiences and Historical and Study Cases were of special interest. Being a folklorist and Jungian Psychologist, these topics with their presented material gave me the possibility for future psychological analysis with parallels in folklore material (beliefs, tales, rituals and more), rich in symbols which, by using the method of amplification, may foster interesting conclusions about the dynamics of the psyche.
I will share my experience and notes on the convention’s topics with my colleagues. I hope to be able to in future contribute my own paper. I am very glad to have been part of this event and would like to give my special thanks to Lisette Coly and the Parapsychology Foundation who gave me this opportunity.”
Ramses d’Leon writes:
Ramses D’Leon
“As this year’s Program Chair, I am probably too biased to give an completely objective overview so I would like to share a personal note on how I lived the convention. The Parapsychological Association is a community of international and interdisciplinary researchers, therefore I was honored and excited (and a bit terrified) to be responsible for the convention program. This involved mailing constantly with people who I have admired for years, collaborating with an international committee of reviewers and having the responsibility for the final word on which submissions should be presented.
As I was unable to finish any of my research to submit, I experimented a bit on the event’s organization. I tried to highlight the work done by young researchers, and tried to give each person submitting an opportunity to present, share and learn from the community. This resulted in a three day convention packed with almost 60 events, culminating as one of the mostly highly attended PA European Conventions. Obviously, there were oral presentations and panel discussions, but I was most proud of the poster, art and mini-experiment session; it was scheduled for 45 minutes, but drew so much attention that after two hours I had a hard time to ask people to leave the room so they could in a timely fashion attend the convention banquet.
During the convention there were many chaotic moments behind the scenes; audiovisual problems, late arrivals, the necessity of session rescheduling but there was always a meaningful resonance evident in the halls…dialogues, experiences, theoretical debates and experimental propositions that had the opportunity to flourish at the convention that normally would not have been discussed in everyday life. You could sense the emotion and enthusiasm rushing through the air, and sense the astonishment of revelations in every corner evident when you could perceive the epiphanies of the attendees as their eyes grew wide. The average age of the PA members is over 55 but it appeared that all the attendees despite their age were like excited kids in an amusement park—myself included!
Being able to participate on a team that provided an opportunity to make these moments flourish will always be one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. And I couldn’t have been able to experience it without the support of Lisette Coly and the Parapsychology Foundation, and for that, I’ll be grateful as long as I live. I am so thankful for this opportunity, I will not forget it and will cherish it all my life.”
So you can well appreciate how happy and proud I am that PF’s board honored me in the creation of this award recognizing my 50 years of service within the field. In this fashion I can well remember and revisit my initial introduction to the field along with my youthful enthusiasm coupled with my belief that the work MUST continue which has remained with me even if my youth has fled.