I am saddened at the passing of an old friend and a giant in the field of parapsychology:  William Braud (you can find many of his papers available for download at his website:  http://www.inclusivepsychology.com/). He was a remarkable man indeed.  I never got to spend a lot of time with William, although I often wished I could.  I remember once picking him up at a hotel to tote him somewhere else when the Parapsychology Association was meeting in Durham.  At the end of the short ride I noticed something subtle but remarkable.  I was calmer than I had been when I picked him up.  Not from anything in particular he had said or done.  I don’t remember anything special about that.  Just his presence.

Reflecting on it, I realize that just being around William always had this effect on me.  He calmed me down.  I’ll bet that many who knew him had that experience.  And this effect didn’t depend upon on physical proximity, as evidenced by some of his own wonderful studies.  In one study, he and Marilyn Schlitz showed that when they watched people who were sitting alone in a room over a tv monitor, and had the intention of soothing them, the people being watched did relax significantly as evidenced by psychophysiological measurements.  Especially the ones who were particularly nervous to start with as evidenced by their being chronically anxious, suffering from hypertension, or other stressed-out kinds of states.  But you might wonder if this was just a result of the person sitting alone in a room for awhile?  No, the calming effect was significantly greater when William and Marilyn watched and intended it than during control blocks of time during the session.  The people being watched didn’t know when they were being viewed with the soothing intention and when they weren’t.  Were he and Marilyn unique in their soothing powers?  William set out to prove this wasn’t so by training a group of people in what he called “connectedness.”  This involved things like group exercises in which you stared in another person’s eyes and got to the point where you could not only tolerate it but enjoy and value it.  Then these trained people acted as agents who did the tv-monitor-looking routine with other persons sitting alone, again not knowing when they were being viewed and when they weren’t.  They became calmed too, especially if they were anxious or lonely to start with — as if the agents imparted a soothing sense of connection at an unconscious level to these somewhat unhappy participants.  This is remarkable because the great bulk of studies on the-effect-of-being-stared-at-remotely have shown that this normally results in the person becoming more agitated or aroused.  This is not surprising when you remember that being stared at by a stranger is normally experienced as threatening.  Apparently the unconscious mind thinks so too, and reacts accordingly, even when the only connection to the viewer is extrasensory. William and his group showed that this normal effect can be reversed.

William the Peacemaker.  And so now he has passed.  To what?  Many who are interested in parapsychology wonder about this, and I am certainly not sure myself.  However, if William is somewhere, and there are troubled souls (so to speak) there, they surely benefit from his presence.  I think he affected all of us, nudged us a bit in the direction of humanity, courtesy, warm regard.  I hope these effects persist, nonlocally.