An Interview with the author of "The Articulate Dead"

      My book, The Articulate Dead, was released during December by Galde Press.  I have had numerous questions concerning the book from friends, correspondents, and from a half-dozen Internet radio stations.  Thus, I decided to put these questions together in something of a self-interview in an attempt to explain what the book is about and why I wrote it.   

      So, Mike, what's the book about?

      It's about psychical research that took place between 1850 and 1940 - research aimed primarily at proving that humans survive physical death and continue on in other realms of existence.

      Yuck, sounds like a pretty dull read.

       It probably is for those who prefer to escape reality by reading fiction, or for those who find spiritual enlightenment in reading Harry Potter.

       Who is your audience?

       Anyone who expects to die, but primarily people suffering from "GR-10 Syndrome."

       GR-10 Syndrome?  What's that?

        I'm glad you asked.  It's something I identified after I retired and started coming in contact with other retired people.  I call them the 10 G's of Retirement:  Graying, Grunting, Grumbling, Grimacing, Groaning, Growling, Griping, Grieving, Groveling, and Groping.

        Far out!  But how does your book deal with those things?

        As I see it, most older people are suffering from a number of those GR's  because they sense their lives winding down and they have nothing to look forward to.  They see death as the grim reaper, nothing else.   The material in my book suggests that there is something beyond death and that death is to be embraced.         

      ‘One life at a time' is my motto.  Shouldn't we be living in the present rather than looking ahead to some future life, if there is one?

      Definitely.  But this life can be so much sweeter, especially in our final years, if we are assured that there is meaning to it and that we are not all just marching toward an abyss of nothingness or total extinction.  Once we begin to see the bigger picture, we don't live in the past, nor do we live in the future.  The best way to live in the present is to "live in eternity."  To do that, you must accept this life as a small part of a much larger life.

      But various polls say that 80-85 percent of the U.S. population believes in an afterlife. 

       I know quite a few of those people.  They say they believe, but they really just hope.  Some of them go to church on Sunday, but the rest of the week they strive to be "one with their toys," living the hedonistic lifestyle and envying people like Hugh Heffner and Britney Spears.   Celebrities have become our gods.  Blind faith based on religious dogma just doesn't do it for most people these days. A recently report study in the Journal of American Medical Association suggested that dying cancer patients who relied strongly on their religious faith to cope with their illnesses were three times more likely than others to receive intensive, invasive medical procedures, even during their final days.  While there might be other explanations for that, one might infer that they are more afraid of dying than others.

      I don't believe in an afterlife and I'm content.   

      William James, the renowned psychiatrist, said he had tried to adopt that frame of mind but called it all humbug - so much bravado that melts away as the person approaches death's door.  I know some people who do a very good job of repressing the idea of death by escaping into mostly meaningless activities.  Kierkegaard called it "Philistinism" - man fully concerned with the trivial, so focused on meaningless things that he has lost sight of the big picture. There may be some people who have no fear of extinction, of obliteration - of their march toward nothingness - but few people are able to adopt such a "courageous" outlook on death. I don't think there is any question that the vast majority of people fear death and do everything possible to repress the idea of it. .  

     
       And how does your book play into all this?

       It offers quite a bit of evidence that man survives death and lives in a spirit world.  Seeing the evidence offered by the various researchers helps one move from disbelief or from blind faith to true faith or conviction. 

     
      Who are the researchers?

       A number of distinguished scientists and scholars, including two British physicists, both  knighted for their discoveries in mainstream science, a British chemist also knighted for his work in science,  a world-renowned American chemist and inventor, a professor of logic and ethics at Columbia, a Cambridge classics scholar and poet, a New York Supreme Court chief justice, a biologist who was Darwin's collaborator in the theory of natural selection, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, two Christian clergymen, and a French educator, to name the primary researchers I discuss in the book.

     
     What did their research turn up?

     They concluded that humans can communicate with the spirit world, and, concomitantly, that consciousness survives physical death.

      
     How did they come to that conclusion?

     By investigating mediums - intermediaries between other dimensions of reality and the material world.   And I'm not talking about one or two observations.  Consider that Dr. Richard Hodgson spent 18 years observing Leonora Piper of Boston, Mass. or that the Rev. William Drayton Thomas had well over 500 sittings with Gladys Osborne Leonard of England.

     
      But isn't that all outdated science?  

      That's what the pseudo-skeptics and debunkers want you to believe. They say it was all pseudo-science and that those distinguished researchers were all victims of charlatans.  The fact is that the methods used by those early researchers are the same methods used today when mediums of that quality are found.  Unfortunately, though, we don't seem to have the quality of mediumship today that we did 75-150 years ago.

     
      Why is that?

      Those same pseudo-skeptics and debunkers will tell you that it is because the mediums on whom the research was based were all frauds and were exposed as such. No doubt there were a number of frauds, but there were clearly genuine mediums.  There are two primary explanations for the lack of such mediumship today.  For one, it involves a lot of quiet time, experimentation, and small harmonious groups.  In those days before radio and television, people had the time to experiment and had the patience to wait for results.  They gathered together in harmonious mediumship circles, sang and listened to music while waiting for the proper conditions.  Sometimes they waited an hour or so before the spirits could draw enough power from the medium and the sitters to come through. In today's fast-paced world, people don't have the patience for that type of thing.  They'd rather watch television.      

      
      That's one explanation.  What's the other?        
      Some of the early spirit communicators said that they had just learned to communicate with us on this side of the veil.  It was reported that Benjamin Franklin and Emanuel Swedenborg, two of the world's greatest scientists when alive, figured out how to manipulate matter after many experiments on their side.  However, they and all the other spirit communicators who joined in didn't anticipate the resistance they were to receive.  They gave us all the evidence they could possibly give and saw no point in continuing, especially when seeing how innocent people were being hurt by being called fakes.   Why should they have to go on reinventing the wheel?   As they say in the engineering profession, efforts to keep reinventing the wheel eventually lead to a square wheel.

         What resistance are you referring to?

         On the one hand, there were the scientific fundamentalists - those scientists stuck in the muck and mire of scientism, unwilling and unable to accept things which could not be explained by strict scientific methods or mechanistic causes.   One Columbia University professor tried to have Professor James Hyslop fired when he found out about Hyslop's interest in psychical research.   In his defense, Hyslop, noting scientific efforts to find a species of useless fish to support Darwin's theory, asked "why is it so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?"

       Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the physicists involved in the research, put it this way:  "It is not easy to unsettle minds thus fortified against the intrusion of unwelcome facts; and their strong faith is probably a salutary safeguard against that unbalanced and comparatively dangerous condition called ‘open-mindedness,' which is ready to learn and investigate anything not manifestly self-contradictory and absurd."

       
        And on the other hand?

        On the other hand, there were the religious fundamentalists who saw that some of the things coming out of mediumship were in conflict with established dogma and doctrine.  To protect themselves, the religious hierarchy brainwashed their flocks with the idea that it was all the work of the devil.   And the press also played a big part in the resistance.  They sided with either the scientific fundamentalists or the religious fundamentalists in attacking both the mediums and the researchers.   They turned serious research into tongue-in-cheek spook stories, and that's how the media continues to treat it to this day. 

     
       But you mentioned two Christian clergymen among the researchers?

       Yes, one Anglican and one Methodist minister.  They were mavericks, just like the scientists and scholars were.   There are always courageous people more interested in getting at the truth than in protecting their reputations among ignorant people.

        Why isn't the research of those distinguished scientist better known today?  

        Because of the scientific and religious fundamentalism I just mentioned, as well as the ignorant media.  The scientific fundamentalists are unable to accept anything that falls outside of the mechanistic paradigm, while the religious fundamentalists are unable to accept anything they see as conflicting with the Bible.  And the media is more interested in sensationalism than it is in truth.

      
        Why did it end in 1940?

        It didn't really end then.  It began to tail off around 1925, but there was still some good research going on during the 1930s.  All of the distinguished researchers mentioned in the book had pretty much died off, Sir Oliver Lodge being the last, in 1940.  Seeing all the flak they received from mainstream science, others weren't willing to subject themselves to the same criticism.  A new field called parapsychology developed and most of its practitioners are more interested in examining extra-sensory perception while just beating around the bush on the subject of survival.  It was as if they had to go back and work on the spokes of the wheel rather than the wheel itself.

     
       Is the book like reading a bunch of scientific reports?

       No, that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. The original reports are written in the usual academic manner.  Academicians are very poor writers by journalistic standards.  I've tried to convert the academic language to language that people can understand.  A number of very interesting stories unfold, including spirits directing an archaeologist to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, spirits leading a researcher to crosses buried by American Indians, a deceased author completing his book through a medium, a Titanic victim coming back to tell about his new environment, a lost hunter contacting his family to explain what happened to him, soldiers killed in the war telling what it was like to die and then cross over to the other side, and three of the researchers involved in the original research dying and then continuing their research on the other side, communicating with their fellow researchers left behind, to name just some of the stories.

     
      But aren't there other books on the subject?

      Quite a few have been written over the years, but most of them are out of circulation.  There are a few fairly recent books dealing with the same subject.  Deborah Blum, Victor Zammit, Michael Schmicker, Craig Hogan, Ray Stemman, and Archie Roy all have good books dealing with the basic subject. While there is some overlap in the books, we all approach it a little differently and hit upon different aspects of the research. Look at how many books there have been during the past two years on atheism.  I can think of at least six, which all seem to say the same thing.  

       
       Is there any similar survival research going on today?

       Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona did some interesting research with clairvoyants and clairaudients a few years back and reported on it in a couple of books, but the pseudo-skeptics attacked him just as they did those distinguished scientists of yesteryear.

     
      So why did you write the book?

      Because I believe all the turmoil we are experiencing in the world today is a result of extreme materialism.  Materialism in the extreme is really hedonism or Epicureanism.   "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die."   As I see it, this attitude is a result of people not really believing in an afterlife, a larger life.  I felt that in resurrecting some of the best evidence for the survival of consciousness I might prompt a few hedonists or Epicureans to rethink their philosophy of life.

     
       And you expect your book to change all that?

       Of course not.  I'll be happy if a few thousand people read it.  This type of book doesn't sell well.  Most people would rather escape into some work of fiction.   As they say, though, small streams eventually create large rivers.  I just felt a need to add a drop of rain that might contribute to one small stream.

     "The Articulate Dead" is available from Galde Press http://www.galdepress.com/ or at Amazon.com