Gnosis Association for Multidisciplinary Research on the Hypothesis of Survival

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Gnosis Association for Multidisciplinary Research on the Hypothesis of Survival

The Gnosis Association for Multidisciplinary Research on the Hypothesis of Survival is a parapsychology research facility founded by Giorgio de Simone (1925-) in Italy in July 1981. Simone, a professor at the University of Naples, began work in parapsychology in 1950 and for a quarter of a century was the president of the Italian Centre for Parapsychology (1963-89) For most of that time he was also editor of Informazioni di Parapsychologia (1964-89).

Parapsychology has concentrated on laboratory research into ESP (clairvoyance and telepathy ) and psychokinesis. It has largely neglected research on survival that was the mainstay of psychical research in the early twentieth century. Simone felt that the time had come for a renewed interest in the possibility that a self-aware autonomous nucleus (analogous to the soul) exists independently of bio-physical laws and is capable of operating on its own. That is to say, he was positing the possibility of this nucleus functioning with intelligence and decision-making abilities after the death of the human body.

Gnosis was established as an interdisciplinary effort to assemble, study, and evaluate all of the data, both research and speculative, on the single problem of the survival of the human self following bodily death. The object would be the formulation of a rational theory on the survival of the self beyond death. Gnosis has offered itself as a point of unification and discussion of survival in a context of objectivity and free from what is considered the "irrationality" of magic and religious dogmatism.

The Gnosis program has four main areas: Observation (primarily in philosophy, anthropology, and history of religions); analysis (parapsychology); critical elaboration (using material from other sciences), and experimental work investigating such phenomena as out-of-the-body travel, trance, hypnosis, etc.

Gnosis publishes a triannual journal, Quaderni Gnosis, and holds an annual convention. It is headquartered at via Belvedere 87, 80127, Napoli, Italy. Its website is at http://www.agora.stm.it.gnosis/wmoremt.htm.