Last night in a lecture hall on the west side of Manhattan, Alex Imich, former chemist/current parapsychologist/lifelong intrepid explorer of all things outside the box, celebrated his 106th birthday. The occasion was introduced by Michael Mannion, a science writer and co-founder (with his partner Trish Corbett) of The Mindshift Institute. Here is the story Michael told: When Michael started dating Trish, he soon understood that before anything serious could happen, he would have to pass muster with Trish’s friend, Alex Imich. At the dinner they shared, Michael learned why ... and why Alex was Alex. A Polish Jew, Alex escaped the Nazis by fleeing east — only to end up in a Siberian slave labor camp where inmates worked in 49 degree-below-zero weather and slept on top of each other to keep warm. One night, Alex could not sleep, so he stepped outside of his barracks to get some air. What he witnessed changed everything. “I saw the aurora borealis,” he told Michael, still in a state of awe more than a lifetime later. “And that’s when I decided to make this into an adventure.”
The title of the evening was The Sixth Annual Alexander Imich, Ph.D., Lecture on Consciousness and Human Capacity: Mind without Brain, delivered by Jenny Wade, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist who spoke about fetal and non-local memory.
The work of The Mindshift Institute is to challenge thinking, deepen emotions, and open possibilities.
The mind-expanding gift of the evening, for me, was Alex Imich’s story.
By the way, I first met Alex when we were in the same healing school class. He had enrolled in the four-year program at the age of 94.