Rao, K(oneru) Ramakrishna (1932-)

Lecturer in philosophy and parapsychologist. Rao was born on October 4, 1932, in India. He did his college and graduate work at Andhra University, Waltair, India (B.A. hons., philosophy 1953; M.A. hons., psychology 1955; Ph.D., 1962). He was a lecturer in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology at Andhra University from 1953-58. He left in 1958 to come to the United States as a Fulbright scholar. His stay at the University of Chicago was extended a year with a Rockefeller Fellowship. He returned to India in 1960 as chief librarian at Andhra University (1960-61), but then moved on to North Carolina to work with J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

He returned to Andhra University in the mid-1960s and in 1967 established the Department of Parapsychology, the only such university department of its kind in the world. In the meantime he had become a charter member of the Parapsychology Association and was elected as its secretary in 1963 and its president in 1965. (He was again elected president in 1978). In 1977 he became the director of the Institute for Parapsychology, but again in 1984 went back to Andhra to become the university's vice-chancellor. The following year he established the Institute for Yoga and Consciousness at Andhra and became its director. In 1987 he again became head of the Institute for Parapsychology, where he has remained to the present.

Rao has authored a number of papers and books on parapsychology and related fields. More than any other person, he embodies the internationalization of parapsychology and the involvement of a growing edge of the field among scholars with non-Western backgrounds in the last half of the twentieth century.

Sources:

Rao, K. Ramakrishna. The Basic Experiments in Parapsychology. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984.

——. "A Consideration of Some Theories in Parapsychology." Journal of Parapsychology (March 1961).

——. Experimental Parapsychology. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1966.

——. Gandhi and Pragmatism. Calcutta & Oxford, N.p., 1968.

——. J. B. Rhine: On the Frontiers of Science. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1982.

——. Mystic Awareness. Mysore, India, 1972.

——. Psi Cognition. India: Tagore Publishing House, 1957.

——. "Vedanta and the Modus Operandi of Paranormal Cognition." Philosophical Quarterly 1955.

Rao, K. Ramakrishna, and K. S. Murty. Current Trends in Indian Thought. New Delhi, 1972.

Rao, K. Ramakrishna, and P. Sailaja. Experimental Studies of the Differential Effect in Life Setting. N.p., 1972.