Gaia Community: metgat's Blog

Remembering Frederic Myers -- Frederic Who?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:47:33 GMT

Above: Frederic W. H. Myers

Theodor Flournoy, a world-renowned University of Geneva psychology professor, once opined that the name Frederic W. H. Myers should be joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, completing "the triad of geniuses" who most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought.

Pioneering psychiatrist William James, wrote that Frederic Myers "will always be remembered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it."

"Frederic Who?" you ask. Put Frederic William Henry Myers into a Google search and the first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia entry identifying him as an English poet and essayist, hardly a reason to justify the glorious comments by Professors Flournoy and James.

Everyone knows the name of Sigmund Freud, but very few know that of Frederic Myers, a man who seems to have been ahead of Freud in developing a systematic conception of the subconscious mind.

Although not educated as a psychologist, Myers, a Cambridge classical scholar was a de facto psychologist who referred to the subconscious as the "subliminal." When, in 1911, Freud joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was co-founded by Myers in 1882, he wrote an article making it clear that Myers' "subliminal" was not the same as his "unconscious." Essentially, the difference was that Myers saw a soul enveloped in the subconscious, while Freud accepted atomic materialism, which denied the existence of a soul.

Why isn't Myers remembered today? Perhaps, because, as Aldous Huxley saw it, Freud was focused on the "rats and beetles in the cellarage," while Myers was more interested in the treasures and birds in the attic, something Freud, who was a mere teenager when Myers began developing his ideas of the subconscious, ignored.

In a newly-released biography of Myers, Immortal Longings, author Trevor Hamilton explains that Myers is not remembered today because the prevailing paradigm in those early years of psychology, as it remains today, was the Wundtian approach, which holds that the only things that make sense are those which can be scientifically measured and quantified. The soul was not subject to scientific measurement, so was rejected.

Huxley saw Myers as a classical scholar, a minor poet, a conscientious observer, and a platonic philosopher, someone who "was free to pay more attention to the positive aspects of the subliminal self than to its negative and destructive aspects," as with psychologists and psychiatrists of then and now. Hamilton quotes Huxley as saying that Myers' "unconscious" was superior to Freud's in that it was more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience. How much Myers influenced Freud is not clear, but there is little doubt that Myers' ideas significantly influenced William James and Carl Jung.

Sir Oliver Lodge, the esteemed physicist and electricity pioneer, stated that Myers had, before his death in 1901, been "laying the foundation for a cosmic philosophy, a scheme of existence as large and comprehensive and well founded as any that have appeared."

In his autobiography Lodge wrote that Myers had a remarkable interest in science and a portentous memory. He knew the Ǣneid by heart and could recite many of the Bab Ballads without difficulty. Lodge remembered attending one of Myers' lectures on the poet Crabbe, calling it a remarkable tour de force. "He had no notes," Lodge recalled, "but after speaking of Crabbe and his poetry in unexpectedly eulogistic terms, he recited from memory whole reams of Crabbe's poetry, which I had never heard before, and was ignorant of."

It was Myers, Lodge explained, who broke down his skepticism and showed him the reasonableness of the survival hypothesis. "He it was who put evidence in my way such as gradually convinced me of the truth of the doctrine."

Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, said: "If Myers was not a mystic, he had all the faith of a mystic and the ardour of an apostle, in conjunction with the sagacity and precision of a savant."

The latter part of the 19^th Century was a time of despair and hopelessness for many. "We were all in the first flush of triumphant Darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond," Myers is quoted by Hamilton in explaining why he set out in search of the soul.

As with so many other educated people, Myers, the son of a minister, had lost his faith, and life had become a march toward an abyss into nothingness. He recognized that there were many who were "willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually dissipate and obscure the larger hope" during life's death march, but, perhaps because he was a deep thinker, Myers was unable to effectively use the defense mechanism called repression to overcome his death anxiety and his concomitant fear of extinction.

Subtitled "FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death," Hamilton's book details the efforts of Myers and several of his colleagues to make sense out of various paranormal phenomena which seemed to suggest that the world is not totally mechanistic and that consciousness does survive physical death.

Although Professor William Barrett, a physicist, is recognized as the prime mover in setting up the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, he relinquished the leadership roles to Myers and his two Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, and Professor Henry Sidgwick. Their objective was to scientifically study the phenomena, including hypnotism, telepathy, multiple personalities, and mediumship, to see if they offered any evidence that mind was not totally dependent on brain and that there is something beyond the five sense. But they had to do it discreetly, cautiously, and indirectly. "To admit the literal reality of the ghost was to move back to the dark ages," Hamilton explains their dilemma. There were simply too many "newly enlightened" people in the upper echelons of society who could not make a distinction between matters of the spirit and the superstitions of the church they had left behind and now scoffed at.

"It is too simple to represent Victorian England as a pious, fundamentalist land shaken by the advances of a materialistic and iconoclastic science," Hamilton states, pointing out that the census of 1851 revealed that well over five million people did not attend church on Sunday, March 30, 1851. However, it was clear, Hamilton adds, that the educated middle classes and upper-middle classes were emancipating themselves from their evangelical roots as a result of the scientific and scholarly advances. Darwinism might have been the crowning blow, but this emancipation had begun well before Darwin, during the "Age of Reason."

Drawing from Myers' diary, a short autobiography written only for his friends, and other references, Hamilton explores Myers' early life and the influences which shaped his beliefs and disbeliefs. He acquaints us with his days at Cambridge, when he was called, "Myers the superb," and then discusses his conflicting love interests as well as other trials and tribulations. He tells how Myers hooked up with Gurney and Sidgwick and how the three intellectuals complemented each other in various ways - Myers often brash and assertive, Sidgwick reserved and cautious, Gurney meticulous and somewhere in between Myers and Sidgwick in his enthusiasm for their mission.

The SPR exposed many fraudulent mediums, although there is controversy over some of the exposures, including that of Madame Blavatsky. The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino was also very controversial, some members of the SPR convinced that she was a charlatan and other that she was a genuine medium, whereas the truth seems to be that she was a "mixed" medium - producing genuine phenomena at times and faking some at those times when her powers failed her. Theosophists, in the case of Blavatsky, and Spiritualists, in the case of various other mediums, argued that the researchers simply didn't understand the phenomena and were applying terrestrial science to celestial matters which they didn't understand.

As Hamilton sees it, Myers was caught in a Victorian dilemma. "One set of desires, the yearning for the immortal, spiritual universe, was opposed by another set, which was the wish for privacy and the hiding of any evidence that breached the unimpeachable façade of familial and moral behaviour," he writes. "His need to prove and even preach survival was counterbalanced by his reticence over intimate evidence."

That "intimate evidence" involved a number of evidential messages coming to him through different mediums from Annie Marshall, his great love of the early 1870s (although apparently a platonic affair because of her marriage to Myers' cousin). When Annie killed herself because of her many frustrations, Myers grieved deeply. When he later married the beautiful and wealthy Eveleen Tennant, their marriage was troubled somewhat because of Annie's communications with Myers from beyond the veil - communications which Myers kept private and which were destroyed by his wife after his death.

Myers died at age 57 of Bright's disease, a kidney disorder. William James, who was present in Rome when Myers, his friend, died, wrote that "his serenity, in fact, his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle and deeply impressed the doctors, as well as ourselves."

After Myers death, various mediums began receiving messages purportedly coming from Myers. Some of these messages were very fragmented and made no sense until they were collected and pieced together to make complete ideas. "The whole process seemed at times like a giant Victorian word game (anagrams, cryptic puzzles, strange puns and rhymes), of which, in fact, Myers and his colleagues...were inordinately fond," Hamilton explains. These so-called "cross-correspondences" were interpreted by other researchers as attempts by Myers, as well as by Gurney and Sidgwick, both of whom preceded him in death, to overcome some of the objections to mediumship, including fraud and telepathy. "[They suggested] a high level of collective design and purpose, implying character, intention and personality," Hamilton states.

One of the more simple cross-correspondences came through on January 17, 1904, when Alice MacDonald Fleming, the sister of author Rudyard Kipling, received the biblical reference I Cor. xvi, 12 from Myers by means of automatic writing. Living in India at the time, Fleming was instructed by Myers to send the message to SPR headquarters in London. He further told the SPR that he tried to get the entire wording through in Greek but could not get Fleming's hand to form Greek characters, and so he gave only the reference. On the very same day, thousands of miles away in England, Mrs. Margaret Verrall, an automatic writing medium who was a member of the SPR, also received the same biblical reference from Myers by means of automatic writing. This biblical passage, "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong," was the wording inscribed in Greek over the gateway of Selwyn College, Cambridge, under which Myers frequently passed.

One message for Sidgwick's widow, Eleanor, who had been very active in the SPR, read, "Now, dear Mrs. Sidgwick, in future have no doubt or fear of so called death, as there is none."

In another communication, Myers gave this message about the afterlife: "The reality is infinitely more wonderful than our most daring conjectures. Indeed, no conjecture is sufficiently daring."

Myers was apparently ahead of the times in the area of physical fitness as well. His diary indicates that he ran two miles most days, one day finishing his run in 13 ½ minutes. "Beside the record of his time he added ‘Inextricable sadness,'" Hamilton writes. "Through his life, while he was fit enough, one hazards that these runs, at times virtually every day, coincided with periods of intense spiritual and emotional disturbance."

On a trip to the United States in 1865, Myers decided to test himself by swimming across the Niagara River, from the Canadian side to immediately below the falls. "I plunged in; the cliffs, the cataract, the moon herself, were hidden in a tower of whirling spray; in the foamy rush I struck at air; waves from all sides beat me to and fro; I seemed immersed in thundering chaos, alone amid the roar of doom." Myers wrote in his diary.

Hamilton concludes the book by asking if Myers' quest had been successful. "In personal terms it was," he opines. ""He became convinced, on the basis of the intimate sittings he had with both Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson, that he had communicated with human beings (however different their nature and post-mortem existence) who had survived bodily death. This belief was underpinned by his wide ranging reading and research in paranormal and abnormal activity across Europe and in the United States. It led to him bearing the onset of death with a kind of joyous resilience, almost even insouciance..."

On the other hand, Myers obviously failed in his wider hope of establishing immortality for the spiritually-challenged masses. While the search for immortality continues today, more than a hundred years later, the foundation established by Myers and his colleagues seems to be slowly but increasingly appreciated.

Hamilton offers a very interesting, intriguing, informative, in-depth, and even inspirational look at one of history's most overlooked and unappreciated contributors. One wonders if or when modern psychology will ever escape from the muck and mire of scientific fundamentalism and catch up with Myers.
Immortal Longings is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.com.UK

Tags: Frederic W. H. Myers, Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings, spirituality, life after death, mediumship, Society for Psychical Research

A Near-Death Experience to Die For

http://metgat.gaia.com — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:37:11 GMT

above: Fanny Ruthven Paget

In her 1917 book, How I Know that the Dead Are Alive, Fanny Ruthven Paget offers one of the most vivid and detailed near-death experiences ever recorded. While not clearly stating her illness, one might infer that Paget, a resident of Houston, Texas, suffered from severe pneumonia for several days during 1911.

"All about and above me I could see nothing, but fancy my astonishment if you can, when looking down, I saw my body resting peacefully on the bed, representing what is commonly called a ‘dead person'," Paget recalled. "I could not move my eyes from it; it fascinated me as it lay in the cold whiteness, robed in a gown of lavender silk, with dainty laces and ruffles...The deep blue ‘windows of the soul,' the eyes, were at half mast; the soul being absent the light was gone; the lips slightly parted wore just a suggestion of a smile; the left hand rested lightly on the breast - the engagement ring scintillating as brightly as ever; the right, which no doubt had been lifted unconsciously at the shock of impact, had fallen a little apart from the body and lay, palm upturned. How peaceful it looked!

"Thus every detail of the clay image fastened itself upon my consideration as I viewed it dispassionately, realizing that it was a cast-off garment for which I had no further use. However, I felt a protective kindliness toward it; it had been a faithful servant, executing my every wish and whim and now that I had passed beyond the range of its services, it pleased my fancy to robe it in the white, pearl-be-decked dress, the wearing of which had meant so much to me in quite a different way."

Paget then concerned herself with her fiancé in another town and found herself being propelled by a vibratory sensation to his sleeping body. "As I looked upon him I saw the shadow body more distinctly than the physical. Viewed from the other side of life, the ‘shadow' body seemed the original and the physical the duplicate, the soul the real, the body the unreal. Within and interpenetrating all was a light, which I had not before perceived as being a part of the spiritual anatomy. This light penetrated from within, both the shadow and physical bodies, maintaining through and about the body an aura or illumination which enveloped it; clothing it, as it were, in a magnetized illumination. How wonderful this three-in-one life-manifestation seemed, especially when we generally recognize only the one - the physical!"

Talking to the Living

Moving closer to her fiancé, Paget attempted to converse with him, but he slept on, even though his soul, which was not sleeping, responded joyously and tried to help her penetrate his physical consciousness as he moaned and turned restlessly in his sleep. After a few moments, he cried out, "Fanny, Fanny," and sat up in bed, wide awake. As he turned on a light and reached for his glasses and a magazine, she tried to communicate, but he did not react to her words. "I am dead, that is why he cannot hear and see me," she thought, further recalling that she felt more alive than she had ever felt. "There was something pitiably painful about being so near one beloved, seeing him plainly and hearing him distinctly, even knowing that he was thinking of me, and yet having him utterly ignore my presence, and above all knowing that he would never recognize me again - never hear my voice no matter how ardently I called, while I was the same in every way minus the physical body."

Then she perceived that her vibratory environment did not harmonize with his. "Mine was the vibration of perpetual motion - his more like a ‘dead sea' into which these vibratory currents ebbed and flowed, and it seemed such an easy matter to move out of the ‘deadness' into the ‘ebb and flow' that I waited and watched a long time before I realized that he would make no effort to do so."

Realizing that she would not be able to penetrate his physical consciousness, she bade him farewell and attempted to move on; however, the vibratory force seemed to restrain her. "Persistently the force held me, as though inviting me to further considerations of earth interests, but I had none. My material possessions were disposed of as I desired; there was no life-work I was leaving incomplete; I had no children, no one depending on me; nothing held me to the earth. My desire had been to go beyond it and now that I had done so, I was well pleased and wanted to go on to the joys I felt awaited me beyond the influence of earth. Yet the force held me, try as I would to pass beyond it, until, instead of struggling against it I tried to understand it - to wrest from it its reason for thus detaining me, feeling that there must be some reason for such marked persistence. Almost instantly the lesson sank into my consciousness and I realized that the long arm of mundane interests can reach into the Beyond and hold its victims within the shadow of earth - pitting its magnetism against the promise of higher things."

She then felt herself moving in an undulating way within the propelling vibration and was suddenly enveloped in oppressive heavy darkness, feeling alone in eternity and waiting in awesome uncertainty. She perceived that the darkness was really within her and could be eliminated only from within. "There were loved ones and many others welcoming me and rejoicing that I was with them." Her spirit guide, who identified himself as Meon, was also there. She now felt light and carefree.

Visiting "Hell"

Meon then told her to follow him, "and with a soft, bluish light playing about and enveloping us, we floated out on the undulating waves of space." As they were propelled by vibratory waves, they encountered a "red darkness" where she found herself among many others. "I was listening, trying to hear what they were saying but the vibrations were evidently not in harmony, so I could not hear distinctly, and after a long time of vain effort I turned to Meon, and asked ‘What place is this?'" Meon explained that they were in a place still very much within earth's magnetism, or spiritual gravitation. Paget asked why the souls were detained there and Meon informed her that some desire it while others were not yet strong enough to progress beyond that point. "Earth interests hold them," he explained.

"There was no bar to their going on but they did not want to; some did not know they could not give up the earth life," Paget related. "In this dark earth-magnetized region disembodied spirits lived the mundane existence much as the psychic lives the spiritual while yet in the mundane - one in progression, the other retrogression. Disembodied spirits living the mundane life do so at the expense of human beings in the earth life, while the mundane person living the spiritual life is obeying the law of evolution and progression."

Paget observed spirits of love and mercy attempting to help those souls stuck in this "hellish" realm, but most of them had not yet acquired "spiritual hearing" and did not respond to the offers of assistance. There were some, however, who heard and struggled up from the vortex. Meon informed her that no soul was irretrievably lost, no matter how many aeons it may remain in the darkness.

Paget began to wonder if this was to be her new abode, but Meon assured her that it was not. "Did not the Christ descend into this place before his ascension?" he addressed her concern.

"Far out beyond the red-fringed darkness I could see light, in which rainbows seemed to play, pale as the dawn, of a gray-weird loveliness, coming and going as though flirting with the darkness, for to embrace it would be to destroy," she continue on. "For delicate beauty it seemed I had never seen anything more fascinating or alluring than this kiss of the dawn and the darkness in the Soul world - it was like kissing death goodbye."

The Dawn World

They passed into what seemed to be another world. Paget called it the "Dawn World," since it seemed that the light began to neutralize the darkness. "There were houses, flowers, trees, everything was so life-like it amazed me. I almost fancied I had returned to earth." The inhabitants conversed with her, but they did not seem to realize that they were in the "after life," as they were not entirely free of earth's magnetism. Paget witnessed some of them going earthward, as though drawn by something of paramount importance. "While there seemed no doubt that these people once inhabited the earth, I saw no one I had ever known in this life. They had possibly progressed there out of the darkness and would go back to help those less fortunate into the higher condition which they had attained."

Meon and Paget vibrated onward in ever increasing light. "So enchanting was this riding on vibratory waves of space in a gentle undulatory way, that I felt like going on forever, and forever, never tiring, never stopping, but after abandoning myself to the witchery of it for some time, I perceived the vibrations changing, merging into a quivering sensation, even more exquisite, and then, as if part of it, my feet came upon something different, something firm and reliable."

She now found herself in a city of light, one of whiteness, boundless in expanse. "It seemed I had reached the limit of my ability to float in space. It seemed that I was heavier than my surroundings in some way. Everywhere were the most exalted souls I had yet seen. Some came forward and greeted us, addressing Meon as though he were one of them, and then, together, we entered into a building immeasurable in space and height, the veritable soul of architectural magnificence. The material had the transparency of glass of a variegated whiteness, into which colors, harmonizing in the most delicate way, were coming and going, ever changing. Electricity seemed to be the power which held it all together, as the electric blue would merge into violet and play incessantly, in a serpentine way, into which almost imperceptible yellowish streams seemed to flow. It was self-illuminated...It seemed that all the wisdom of all the ages was mine as I stood there. Life and death gave up their mysteries, and I no longer wondered but observed as one who understood. The machinery of earth existence was operated and regulated by and through the power of this plane. It was actually in contact with the earth. No happening on earth escaped the observation of the great spirits who seemed to have nothing else to do but watch over the beings of earth, to teach them, to lift them up through darkness, watch over reincarnations, create teachers and place them where they were most needed. With these teachers they were in direct communication at all times and knew exactly what was going on through some form of wireless telegraphy or telephony, perhaps, but they communicated as though there were no distance.

"They seemed to draw the highly evolved souls of earth up to them mentally, and these cooperated consciously, responding unerringly. It was marvelous to watch the process or rather processes, as there were many phases of this supervision. There were coming and going all the time. I saw many go out and disappear into the depths, all rejoicing in their work, the uplifting of humanity. The souls were countless, the space immeasurable, yet there was no confusion - it was system idealized, each recognizing his mission and doing it. Truly, it was the Christ principle manifested, for they were laboring for others, not themselves."

Meon took Paget even higher, where the influence of earth was not felt. A great soul came forward and asked her if she would like to return to earth. She said she would like to return only if she could do good by telling others what she had experienced. The being warned her that many would not believe her and that she might suffer from her efforts, but Paget said she was up for the challenge.

A Life Review

Paget then felt alone with bowed head. She then saw a little light vibrating directly before her. It began shaping itself into something. "It was not unlike a moving picture." She began to see figures and a small girl emerged. She soon realized that the young girl was herself and she was reliving her life on earth. She saw herself reveling in her grand passion, music, which held her in bondage as she grew in the joy and mastery of it. "How the little, white fingers, too small to span an octave, subconsciously caught fragments from the ‘choir invisible' and imprisoned them on the piano!

She saw herself grow through college and into a proud, self-centered woman. There appeared before her three roads, one labeled "Good," one "Evil," and the other, the center, was unlabeled. She found herself on the center road, which had many more people than either of the side roads. "These roads were guarded by invisible creatures, according to the indicated propensities of each, who were always calling to those who traveled in the center, in an endeavor to influence them to more determined tendencies. Ever and anon there were paths leading from the center to the outer roads and from one outer road to the other, showing how easily one can change ones course at will."

Paget then saw the young woman dreaming of becoming a great singer, the compensation being the homage of the world. "I saw her holding to heart in enchanted fancy, as the only thing worth while, the emptiest of all life's coveted cups - Fame." There was no one to remind her that ‘by ambition fell the angels."

The "movie" of her life continued on to the time she came down with a severe case of laryngitis and lost her singing voice. She saw herself cursing God and being enveloped by a shadow-stained covering of materialism. She saw both her parents pass into the spirit world, leaving her alone, fighting the bitter fight. She saw even the most trivial matters in her life review. "Its faithfulness to detail was perfectly marvelous. Nothing was hidden, nothing slurred over. It was all there. I was standing face to face with my earth life just as I had lived it, awaiting its condemnation or justification."

When the life review ended, Meon stood waiting. He told her that the purpose of the review was to build an edifice on the ashes as she returned to earth life.

‘Meon and other spirits were hovering about me. I could feel the electrified essence, which had manifested its presence everywhere during my voyage, drawing itself away - letting me go, as it were. Then the burden of physical life was full upon me and what a misfit I was!"

Tags: near-death experience, death, life after death, spirituality, consciousness, Fanny Ruthven Paget

What is the "Second Death"?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:52:28 GMT

In my years as a competitive long-distance runner, I regularly experienced the phenomenon referred to as the "second wind." Even for the well-conditioned runner, the first 150 to 200 yards of a race involves some stress and struggle as the heart and lungs are asked to suddenly quicken. However, after around 30 seconds, the second wind kicks in and the body settles down into a relatively effortless rhythm. It is like a car going through first and second gears before finally shifting into high gear.

As I have come to understand it, the "second death" is something akin to the second wind. That is, immediately after the silver cord breaks and the physical body releases the spirit body, i.e., "gives up the ghost," there is some stress, some confusion, some struggling in the spirit person's attempt to adjust to his or her new condition. When the adjustment is made, the second death is experienced.

The term "second death" is found in the New Testament Book of Revelations four times:

2:11: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.

20:6: Blessed is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

20:14: And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving, and abominable, and murders, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

Bible scholars don't seem to agree on the meaning of those verses. They do agree that physical death is the "first" death, but beyond that interpretations become very convoluted. One popular fundamentalist interpretation puts it that he who has accepted Christ has already died the second death - death to sin. Therefore, it cannot hurt him. Those who actually experience the second death end up in a "lake of fire."

While we might infer from the Biblical interpretations that the second death means some kind of condemnation, the more metaphysical interpretations suggest just the opposite - a graduation of some kind from a lower state to a higher state.

The predominant theory is that the second death takes place within hours or a few days for the spiritually advanced, but may take months of years in earth time for the spiritually challenged, those who remain "earthbound." In effect, the second death is an "awakening" to one's condition based on one's spiritual consciousness in the earth life. The second death might be equated to the now popular expression, "going into the light" at the end of the tunnel as well as to the "Ground Luminosity" of the Buddhist.

"We might with justice speak of a first and second death because not only the physical body has to be shed but the next body also," a spirit entity calling himself "Scott" communicated to Jane Sherwood. "Think of the whole man as being composed of four interpenetrating forms. The second of these is very near to the physical in substance and is very closely knit to it. It is the etheric or life-body and gives the power of sensory experience. It never leaves the physical body, even in sleep, but at death it parts from the physical along with the astral and ego bodies. It is too closely related to the physical to allow the higher bodies to pass clearly into their proper sphere, so it also has to be shed and this is the second death."

This transition stage - between the first and second deaths - has been referred to as Hades, which is not synonymous with Hell, as some religions would have us believe. There may be great confusion, a "fire of the mind," so to speak, by materialistic or spiritually-challenged souls; hence the belief that Hades is the Hell of religion. In effect, Hades seems to be an intermediate or staging area of sorts where the soul must adjust its vibrations to the spirit world. It is said that even Jesus needed a period of adjustment, or at least wanted to experience it so that he knew what others were going through. Thus, he initially spent a day or more in Hades and then on the third day "rose into Heaven." That is, he apparently experienced the second death on the third day. Of course, there are many who would argue with such an interpretation.

The spiritually-challenged souls are frequently referred to as "earthbound" spirits, because they cling to earthly ways. Referring back to the long-distance runner comparison, it seems appropriate to liken these earthbound spirits to the overweight couch potato who attempts to run a marathon. He might run for 200 yards, but instead of getting a second wind, he is forced to slow to a trot or just walk, and even surrender in frustration.

"The duration of the state of confusion that follows death varies greatly," explained Alan Kardec, the pioneering French psychical researcher of the 19^th Century. "It may be only of a few hours, and it may be of several months, or even years," Kardec wrote. "Those with whom it lasts the least are they who, during the earthly life, have identified themselves most closely with their future state, because they are soonest able to understand their new situation."

Kardec went on to say that there is nothing painful in this mental confusion for those who have lived an upright life. "He is calm, and his perceptions are those of a peaceful awakening out of sleep. But for him whose conscience is not clean, it is full of anxiety and anguish that become more and more poignant in proportion as he recovers consciousness."

One spirit communicated to Kardec that his state was a very happy one and that he no longer felt the pains he experienced during his final days in the earth life. "The transition from the terrestrial life to the spirit life was, at first, something that I could not understand, and everything seemed incomprehensible to me; for we sometimes remain for several days without recovering our clearness of thought; but, before I died, I prayed that God would give me the power of speaking to those I love, and my prayer was granted." He estimated that it took him about eight hours in earth time to regain clearness of thought.

Silver Birch, the spirit entity who spoke through the entranced Maurice Barbanell, said the same thing. "This [awakening] depends on the degree of awareness that the newcomer possesses," he explained. "If completely ignorant of the fact that life continues after earthly death, or if so indoctrinated with false ideas that understanding will take a long time, then there is a process of rest equivalent to sleep."

Silver Birch went on to say that the time for realization is self-determined. It can be short or long, as measured by our duration of time. For the enlightened, at least those whose actions in the physical world were in accordance with their enlightenment, it is a speedy process.

A very similar message comes from the writings of medium Alice A. Bailey and her teacher, the Tibetan master, Djwhal Khul. They point out that most people, being focused on the physical plane, experience a semi-consciousness in the period after death, usually one of emotional and mental bewilderment. The etheric body of the spiritually-undeveloped person can linger for a long time near its discarded physical shell because the pull of the soul is not as potent as the material aspect is.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead refers to this period of awakening as the "Ground Luminosity" or "Clear Light," and says that the vast majority of peopledo not immediately recognize the Ground Luminosity and are therefore plunged into a state of unconsciousness. As explained by Sogyal Rinpoche, the spiritual director of Rigpa, an international network of Buddhist groups and centers, consciousness continues without the body and goes through a series of states called "bardos." The problem is that in the bardos "most people go on grasping at a false sense of self, with its ghostly grasping at physical solidity, and this continuation of that illusion, which has been at the root of all suffering in life, exposes them in death to more suffering, especially in the ‘bardo of becoming'."

Communicating through Geraldine Cummins, Frederic W. H. Myers said that he could not generalize as to the conditions in Hades, which he also referred to as the "place of shadows," because conditions varied so much. However, he stated that the "average man who has led a well-ordered life" may very well experience communion with deceased loved ones and see fragmentary happening of his earthly life, judging himself, before resting, seemingly in a veil while in a state of semi-suspended consciousness. He added that three or four days of earth time may suffice for the Hades experience, but also pointed out that many souls "linger a long while in Hades and wander to and fro in its grim ways, encountering certain strange beings who hover near the borders of the physical world, who wake old sorrows and troubles in the minds of men, and who play upon the understandings of certain individuals they would possess while still in the flesh, dethroning the reason, stealing from man his birthright."

Myers had died, at age 57, on January 17, 1901 while in Rome. The first communication from his came through Rosalie Thompson, a medium, to Professor Oliver Lodge and his wife on February 19, 1901. However, it was clear that Myers was struggling to communicate. He told the Lodges that he was confused when he first arrived on the other side, before he realized he was dead. "I thought I had lost my way in a strange town, and I groped my way along the passage," he said. "And even when I saw people that I knew were dead, I thought they were only visions. I have not seen Tennyson yet by the way."

Many other spirit communicators have said that awareness or consciousness on that side of the veil is in proportion to the spiritual awareness or consciousness while on earth. Thus, there are some who immediately recognize that they have departed the earth life, while others are slow to understand their condition. "I awoke standing by my dead body, thinking I was still alive and in my ordinary physical frame," Julia Ames communicated to William T. Stead. "It was only when I saw the corpse in the bed that I knew that something had happened."

Stead, a world renowned author and journalist who was very much involved with Spiritualism, was a victim of the Titanic disaster in 1912. One survivor recalled Stead sitting calmly in the smoking room while apparently reading a Bible as chaos gripped nearly everyone else on the ship. Not long after his death, Stead began communicating through a number of mediums in both Great Britain and the United States. Communicating to his daughter, Estelle, Stead recalled that his first awareness that he had passed over when he found a number of deceased friends with him. "I knew it suddenly and was a trifle alarmed," he communicated. "Practically instantaneously I found myself looking for myself. Just a moment of agitation, momentarily only, and then the full and glorious realization that all I had learnt was true."

All of the victims seemed to gather in one place as their bodies floated in the ocean below. Some of them were mental wrecks, wondering if they would be taken to meet their Maker and what their sentences would be, while others were more concerned with loved ones left behind. There were a number, however, who seemed more concerned about their valuables that went down with the ship.

After all of the victims gathered together, they seemed to rise vertically into the air at a terrific speed, as if they were all standing on a platform. "I cannot tell how long our journey lasted, nor how far from the earth we were when we arrived, but it was a gloriously beautiful arrival. It was like walking from your own English winter gloom into the radiance of an Indian sky. There was all brightness and beauty."

After their arrival, they were greeted by many old friends and relatives and then all parted company. Stead's father then accompanied him to a temporary rest home, which he was told was for newly-arrived spirit people. "It was nearest to earth conditions and was used because it resembled an earth place in appearance," Stead explained his arrival in what seems to have been the Hades condition, going on to say that the main objective was to get rid of unhappiness at parting from earth ties.

"On arriving here there is often much grief," Stead continued. "Grief that is sometimes incapacitating, and no movement forward can be made until the individual wishes it himself. Progress cannot be forced upon him."

A number of spirit communicators suggest a period of conscious confusion, followed by a "sleep" and then an awakening. A spirit identifying himself as Thomas Dowding, a schoolmaster who joined the British army and was then killed on the battlefield, communicated to Wellesley Tudor Pole that one moment he was alive and the next moment he was helping two of his friends carry his body down the trench labyrinth. "I did not know whether I had jumped out of my body through shell shock, temporarily or for ever," he told Pole. "You see what a small thing is death, even the violent death of war! I seemed in a dream...Death for me was a simple experience - no horror, no long-drawn suffering, no conflict. It comes to many in the same way."

Dowding said he experienced no pain when struck by a shell splinter. After his body was taken to the field mortuary, he remained near it the entire night, expecting to wake up in the body again. He then lost consciousness. When he awoke the next morning, his body was gone and he began hunting for it. He then realized that he must be dead. Once he recovered from the shock of that realization, he felt as if he were floating in a mist that muffled sound and blurred the vision. "It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything was distant, minute, misty, unreal. Guns were being fired. It might all have been millions of miles away...I think I fell asleep for the second time, and long remained unconscious and in a dreamless condition."

When he "awoke" the second time, he felt cramped, but this feeling gradually left him. "I think my new faculties are now in working order," he continued his story. "I can reason and think and feel and move."

He was welcomed by his brother, William, who had died three years earlier, and accompanied to a rest hall. William explained to him that it took some time for him to help him because the atmosphere was so thick. "He hoped to reach me in time to avert the ‘shock' to which I have referred, but found it impossible."

It was after reaching the rest hall that things became clearer and he was no longer confused.

According to those who see more than a single spirit body, there can be a third death and even a fourth death as the spirit sheds the additional bodies or goes to a higher vibration. I can relate the running experience to this as well. Although it was a very rare experience, there were several times during my many years of long-distance running when, after acquiring the second wind, I achieved a state of what might be called effortless euphoria. There was no stress at all, no matter how fast I seemed to be running. It was if I had no limitations and could go on and on forever. Unfortunately, however, those few experiences all came during training runs, not during races. Perhaps the ego was too much involved in the race experience.

Tags: second death, death, spirituality, life after death, afterlife, Hades, Ground Luminosity, going into the light

When the Silver Cord is Severed

http://metgat.gaia.com — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:42:27 GMT

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. - Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

One Bible reference suggests that the above Old Testament passage be interpreted by taking the "silver cord" to mean the marrow of the backbone, the "golden bowl" to mean the membrane that covers the brain, the "pitcher" to mean the veins of the body, the "fountain" to mean the liver, the "wheel" to mean the head, and the "cistern" to mean the heart out of which the head draws the power of life.

I infer from Ecclesiastes that the loosening of the "silver cord" is one of several ways by which the physical body and spirit body separate at the time of death, perhaps referring to old age. Clairvoyants and out-of-body travelers, however, see the severance of the silver cord involved in every kind of death.

Frederic W. H. Myers, the Cambridge scholar who became a pioneering psychical researcher, communicated extensively through the mediumship of Geraldine Cummins of Ireland, considered perhaps the most famous and credible automatic writing medium ever, after his death in 1901. Myers referred to the spirit body as the double, explaining that it is an exact counterpart of the physical shape. "The two are bound together by many little threads, by two silver cords," Myers explained. "One of these makes contact with the solar plexus, the other with the brain. They all may lengthen or extend during sleep or during half-sleep, for they have considerable elasticity. When a man slowly dies these threads and two cords are gradually broken. Death occurs when these two principal communicating livens with brain and solar plexus are severed."

Myers went on to explain that life occasionally lingers in certain cells of the body after the soul has departed. "The double still adheres to the shell by means of certain of the threads which have not yet been broken," he continued. "The soul does not suffer in the physical sense if thus delayed in his journey. He may suffer in the sense that he has, thereby, a greater awareness of the immediate surroundings of his physical body. It gives him the power to perceive his friends and relations wherever this worn-out garment lies. As a rule, however, he obtains complete freedom from earth's detaining grasp within an hour - or a few hours - of death."

The soul slowly rises into the double and for a brief time hovers above the physical shell, Myers further explained, adding that a "little white cloud" or "pale essence" can be discerned by some.

Estelle Roberts, one of England's most famous mediums, recalled being at the bedside of her husband, Hugh, as he died. "I looked again at dear Hugh, recalling the happiness we had enjoyed together, and while I sat there I saw his spirit leave the body. It emerged from the back of his head and gradually molded itself into an exact replica of his earthly body. It remained suspended about a foot above the body, lying in the same position, and attached to it by a cord to the head. Then the cord broke and the spirit form floated away, passing through the wall."

Roberts also reported hearing strange, terrifying noises as if someone was "rending linen" and occasionally sounding like the cracking of a whip. This apparently the spirit body breaking loose from the physical body.

In his 1929 book, A Curious Life, George Wehner, a trance medium and clairvoyant from Detroit, Michigan, tells of his many mediumistic experiences and other paranormal observations, including the passing of his mother. "A misty blue-white form, the counterpart of my mother's, but radiant, like a blue-white diamond's flame, was slowly rising from her body on the bed," he wrote. "This form lifted at an angle, the feet rising higher than the head, which remained attached to the physical head. The form now seemed to try to free itself, and after several tugs, the misty head separated from the body's head, and the freed form righted itself in the air exactly as a log rights itself after it has been dropped into deep water. For a second, I saw several arms and hands materialize in the air and reach downward to welcome the new-born soul. Then, like a shadow, the spirit-form of my beloved mother glided rapidly upward through a corner of the ceiling."

In his 1916 book, Raymond or Life and Death, Sir Oliver Lodge, the esteemed British physicist and radio pioneer, in a séance with medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, discussed the subject with Raymond, his deceased son who had been killed on the battlefield in France. Raymond told him that the body doesn't start mortifying until the spirit has left it. He went on to tell his father that he had witnessed a scene several days earlier in which a man was going to be cremated two days after the doctor pronounced him dead. "When his relatives on this side heard about it, they brought a certain doctor on our side, and when they saw that the spirit hadn't got really out of the body, they magnetized it, and helped it out," Raymond explained through Feda, Leonard's control. "But there was still a cord, and it had to be severed rather quickly, and it gave a little shock to the spirit, like as if you had something amputated. But it had to be done."

Raymond suggested that there should be a seven-day waiting period before cremation. "People are so careless," he said. "The idea seems to be ‘hurry up and get them out of the way now that they are dead."

There have been other reports of difficulties in "giving up the ghost." In Zeitschrift fuer Parapsychologie, a clairvoyant man who preferred to remain anonymous reported sitting at his dying wife's bedside and seeing an "odic body" take form over his wife's physical body. It was connected to the physical body by a "cord of od." The arms and legs of this odic body were flailing and kicking as if struggling to get free and escape. Finally, after about five hours, the fatal moment came at last. "There was a sound of gasping," the man reported. "The odic body writhed to and fro, and my wife's breathing ceased. To all appearances she was dead, but a few moments later she began to breathe again. After she had drawn her breath twice, everything became quiet. At the instant of her last breath, the connecting cord broke and the odic body vanished."

Communicating through the direct-voice mediumship of Lillian Bailey, Bill Wootton, a World War I victim, described the life cord this way: "It is a silver cord which is thick. It glows and glistens. From it we can tell the health of persons. When we see their cord getting very thin until it's right down to a hair's breadth, we know that the physical body is not going to be held very long by that spiritual cord."

Wootton said the cord emerges from the pineal gland in the head and extends to the solar plexus. "It is the life force that belongs to the spirit YOU, which pours in through the glands and makes the body work." When death takes place, the cord is severed as if a rope were snapping at a worn-out point, Wootton added.

Wellesley Tudor Pole, another British medium, reported on his experiences as he sat with a dying friend, whom he refers to as "Major P." Death seemed close at hand as Major P. remained unconscious. Pole noticed a shadowy form hovering in a horizontal position about two feet above the bed. "This form is attached to the physical body on the bed by two transparent elastic cords," Pole recorded at 3 p.m. "One of them appears to be attached to the solar plexus and the other to the brain. As I watch this form it grows more distinct in outline, until I can see that it is an exact counterpart, so far as the form is concerned, of the body on the bed. I can see what looks like spiral currents passing up through these two cords, and as the physical body grows more lifeless, the form hovering above seems to become more vital."

At 3:40 p.m., Pole noted that the "double" had become more distinct and that he could see the currents passing through the cords gathering greater momentum. "The life-force is steadily ebbing out of the body, and is apparently passing into the form above."

At 3:55 p.m. Pole observed two figures stoop down over the bed and break the cords at points close to the physical body. "Immediately I see that the form or double rises about two feet from its original position, but remains horizontal, and at this same moment Major P.'s heart stop beating."

Similar reports come from those who have had a near-death experience (NDE). Long before Dr. Raymond Moody published his findings on NDEs, Dr. A. S. Wiltse, a Skiddy, Kansas physician, reported a personal experience that was no doubt a NDE, as he suffered from typhoid fever. He was informed by his attending physician, Dr. S. H. Raynes, that he was without pulse or perceptible heartbeat for about four hours. "Dr. Raynes informs me, however, that by bringing his eyes close to my face, he could perceive an occasional short gasp, so very light as to be barely perceptible, and that he was upon the point, several times of saying, ‘He is dead,' when a gasp would occur in time to check him."

During the time that he appeared to be dead, Wiltse curiously observed what was going on. "With all the interest of a physician, I beheld the wonders of my bodily anatomy, intimately interwoven with which, even tissue for tissue, was I, the living soul of that dead body. I learned that the epidermis was the outside boundary of the ultimate tissues, so to speak, of the soul. I realized my condition and reasoned calmly thus. I have died, as men term death, and yet I am as much a man as ever. I am about to get out of the body. I watched the interesting process of the separation of soul and body. By some power, apparently not my own, the Ego was rocked to and fro, laterally, as a cradle is rocked, by which process its connection with the tissues of the body was broken up. After a little time the lateral motion ceased, and long the soles of the feet beginning at the toes, passing rapidly to the heels, I felt and heard, as it seemed, the snapping of innumerable small cords. When this was accomplished, I began slowly to retreat from the feet, toward the head, as a rubber cord shortens. I remember reaching the hips and saying to myself, ‘Now, there is no life below the hips.'"

Dr. Wiltse could not recall passing through the abdomen or chest, but he recollected that his "whole self" was collected into his head. He appeared to himself something like a jelly-fish in color and form and remembered thinking that he would soon be free.

"As I emerged from the head, I floated up and down and laterally like a soap bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe until I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly arose and expanded into the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked. With a painful sense of embarrassment, I fled toward the partially opened door to escape the eyes of the two ladies whom I was facing, as well as others who I knew were about me, but upon reaching the door I found myself clothed, and satisfied upon that point, I turned and faced the company."

Wiltse recalled being surprised at how pale the body looked but congratulated himself on the way he had composed his body, his hands clasped at his chest. He marveled at how well he was feeling, when only minutes before he was in extreme distress. He then looked back through the open door, where he could see his body. "I discovered then a small cord, like a spider's web, running from my shoulders (of the spirit body) back to my body and attaching to it at the base of my neck in front."

Since Wiltse returned to life, the cord apparently was not severed.

Much more recently, Dr. Peter Fenwick of England and his wife, Elizabeth Fenwick, quote one NDEr as feeling "like a kite on an endless string." This "cord" seemed to be attached to the back and the person could feel it pulling her back into her body.

Another NDEr told the Fenwicks that although he could not see his body, he could see that he was attached by a light grey rope.

Dr. Sam Parnia, another NDE researcher, was told by an experiencer that she found herself standing beside herself looking at a cord that connected her to her body and thinking how thin and wispy it was.

In effect, the silver cord appears to be the counterpart of the umbilical cord. While the umbilical cord must be severed when we come into the material world, the silver cord must be severed when we return to the real world.

Notice: Dark Lore III is now available from Amazon.com I have contributed one of the 14 stories to this anthology concerning the paranormal. My contribution is on the Glastonbury Scripts, which involved the excavation of the Glastonbury Abbey ruins in England. Frederick Bligh Bond, the architect and archaeologist hired in 1907 to excavate the ruins, decided to employ a medium and contact long-dead monks who had lived at the abbey for information as to where to dig. Over a period of some 12 years, interrupted by World War I, Bond received more than 60 messages from the monks directing his excavations. Many of them were exact to the inch. Some, however, were a little off due to overlapping construction over the centuries.

The other 13 stories touch upon a wide variety of paranormal subjects. Nick Redfern gives a different spin to the Roswell E.T. theory. Greg Taylor, the editor of the anthology, discusses some of the pre-Raymond Moody near-death experiences, including that of Dr. George Ritchie, whose NDE inspired Moody's 1975 best-seller. Greg Bishop presents the very intriguing story of Dr. Mario Tazzaglini, who is said to have channeled aliens. Neil Arnold investigates the monsters of Dutch folklore, while Theo Paijmans gets to the occult roots of Nazi Technology and Robert Bauval searches for the secrets of Menkaure, builder of the third pyramid of Giza. Other contributors include Mike Jay, Philip Coppens, Blair MacKenzie Blake, Robert Schoch, Geoff Falla, Adam Gorightly, and "The Emperor," with the subjects ranging from the "Philadelphia Experiment" to ancient biblical sites. Check it out at

http://www.amazon.com/Darklore-3-Greg-Taylor/dp/0975720090/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242250773&sr=1-1

Tags: silver cord, death, dying, spirituality, Ecclesiastes, consciousness, Frederic W. H. Myers, George Wehner

The Conversion of Dr. Richard Hodgson -- Part 2 of 2

http://metgat.gaia.com — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:42:20 GMT

above: Leonora Piper
Before March 1892, Dr. Richard Hodgson, the executive secretary and chief investigator for the American Society for Psychical Research (SPR) rejected the spirit hypothesis of mediumship. He believed that the purported "spirit control" of the medium was a "secondary personality" buried in the medium's subconscious and that it was somehow reading the minds of the sitters. To some, this explanation was more fantastic than the belief that spirits were actually communicating, but it was, nevertheless, a popular one among educated men and women.

Hodgson's views changed after the death of George Pellew, a 32-year-old member of the ASPR, as a result of a fall from a horse during February 1892. Sometime before his accident, Pellew, the author of at least six books, including biographies of statesmen John Jay and Henry Addington, had told Hodgson that he could not conceive of an afterlife but that if he died before Hodgson and found himself "still existing" he would attempt to let Hodgson know.

On March 22, 1892, a little over a month after Pellew's death, Hodgson brought John Hart, a friend of Pellew's, for a sitting with Leonora Piper, a Boston, Mass. trance medium whom Hodgson was studying. Mrs. Piper would go into a trance and Phinuit, her spirit control, would speak through her, relaying messages from other spirits. Apparently, it was too difficult and risky for other spirits to occupy her body; thus Phinuit acted as an intermediary.

Early in the sitting, Phinuit announced that "George" was there. He then gave his full name and the names of several close friends, including the sitter. To give assurance that it was actually him communicating through Phinuit, Pellew told Hart that the pair of studs he was wearing were once his and were given to Hart by his (Pellew's) parents, which Hart confirmed as true. Pellew then mentioned some mutual friends, Jim and Mary Howard, and asked Hart if he could get them to attend a sitting. He also brought up a discussion he had had with Katharine, the Howard's 15-year-old daughter, about God, space, and eternity. As neither Hart nor Hodgson, who was also in attendance and taking notes, was aware of any such discussion with Katharine, this information, later verified as fact, clearly fell outside the scope of telepathy.

Hodgson recorded that many personal references were made by Pellew and that Hart was very impressed, mentioning that various words of greetings and speech mannerisms were very characteristic of Pellew, even though relayed through Phinuit.

Some three weeks later, Jim and Mary Howard had a sitting with Mrs. Piper. As was the procedure, Hodgson did not tell Mrs. Piper their names or give her any clue as to their connection with Pellew. Yet, Pellew communicated. However, rather than Phinuit speaking through Mrs. Piper and relaying messages from Pellew, Pellew took over Mrs. Piper's body and spoke directly to his friends. "Jim is that you?" Hodgson recorded Pellew's initial greeting. "Speak to me quick. I am not dead. Don't think me dead. I'm awfully glad to see you. Can't you see me? Don't you hear me? Give my love to my father and tell him I want to see him. I am happy here, and more so since I can communicate with you..."

Pellew went on to tell his friends that he was very limited in what he could do as he had just "awakened to the reality of life after death." He told them it was all darkness at first and that he was puzzled and confused. He said that he could see Jim, but that his voice sounded like a big bass drum. Jim Howard asked Pellew if he was surprised to find himself still living. "Perfectly so," Pellew responded. "Greatly surprised. I did not believe in a future life. It was beyond my reasoning powers. Now it is as clear to me as daylight. We have an astral facsimile of the material body."

At a later sitting, the Howards brought their daughter, Katharine. Pellew came through and asked Katharine about her violin lessons, commenting (apparently jesting) that her playing was "horrible." Not realizing the humor in it, Mary Howard spoke up to defend her daughter's music, but Pellew then explained that he mentioned it because that is what he used to do when in the flesh. It was intended as verification of his identity.

However, there was some confusion on Pellew's part in responding to various questions put to him by the Howards. Pellew explained that he was somewhat "dull" in his new sphere and that his memory was not much different than when he was on the earth plane, i.e., that he couldn't always recall everything in a moment. He went on to say that he had lost all sense of time in his new environment, but he was determined to make his identity clear. "Hodgson, I mean, and Jim, I want you both to feel I am no secondary personality of the medium's," he told them, adding that he lives, thinks, sees, hears, knows, and feels just as clearly as when he was in the material life. "...but it is not so easy to explain it to you as you would naturally suppose, especially when the thoughts have to be expressed through substance materially."

Phinuit broke in and took back control from Pellew, commenting that Pellew had bypassed him by mistake and that he would act as the go-between the remainder of the session. Phinuit began speaking fluent French to Katharine, who had lived in France and knew the language. Someone known to Mary Howard as Madame Elisa then interrupted, speaking in Italian. Mary Howard responded in Italian. (Piper did not know French or Italian.)

As a further test of telepathy, Mrs. Howard brought three pictures to a sitting and asked Pellew to identify them. Pellew correctly identified the first picture as the Howard's summer home. He correctly identified a second picture as a country place where they had stayed, recalling a little brick henhouse which was not in the picture. Mrs. Howard confirmed the accuracy of this report and then showed a third picture, which Pellew could not identify. In fact, Pellew had never seen it. Had Mrs. Piper been reading Howard's mind, she should have been able to identify it, unless, of course, she could also read Howard's mind relative to the test, and her subconscious was aware and devious enough to know that it was more important to show ignorance than it was to identify the location in the picture.

The communication with Pellew caused Hodgson to abandon all other theories in favor of the spirit one. While the earthly existence of Phinuit could not be verified, there was no doubt that Pellew had lived in the flesh. Moreover, there was too much individuality, too much purpose and persistence, expressed by Pellew to attribute it to telepathy of a limited or expanded nature. It was one thing for a medium to tap into another mind or cosmic reservoir for information, quite another for that other mind or reservoir to come back with the fullness of a personality rather than just fragmentary bits of information.

"I had but one object, to discover fraud and trickery," Hodgson wrote. "Frankly, I went to Mrs. Piper with Professor James of Harvard University about twelve years ago with the object of unmasking her...I entered the house profoundly materialistic, not believing in the continuance of life after death; today I say I believe. The truth has been given to me in such a way as to remove from me the possibility of a doubt."
Pellew then began sharing "control" duties with Phinuit and eventually took over for him. Hodgson noted that when someone Pellew had known when alive happened to be sitting, he (Pellew) would greet him or her by name. When someone unknown to him was sitting, he didn't address the person by name. The non-recognition went against any telepathy theory. "There are thirty cases of true recognition out of at least one hundred and fifty persons who have had sittings with Mrs. Piper since the first appearance of G.P. (George Pellew), and no case of false recognition," Hodgson reported. "The continual manifestation of this personality - so different from Phinuit or other communicators - with its own reservoir of memories, with its swift appreciation of any reference to friends of G.P., with its ‘give and take' in little incidental conversations with myself, has helped largely in producing a conviction of the actual presence of the G.P. personality, which it would be quite impossible to impart by any mere enumeration of the verifiable statements."

At a sitting on June 17, 1895, Hodgson asked Pellew what Phinuit was doing when he (Pellew) was the only one using Piper's body. Pellew replied that Phinuit was holding back "a million others" from interrupting him.

Tags: Leonora Piper, Richard Hodgson, mediumship, spirituality, spirits, George Pellew, consciousness, secondary personality

The Conversion of Dr. Richard Hodgson -- Part 1 of 2

http://metgat.gaia.com — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:12:51 GMT

above: Richard Hodgson

Having heard that Dr. Richard Hodgson, an Australian teaching in England and serving as an investigator for the Society for Psychical Resarch (SPR), had supposedly exposed Madame Blavatsky as a charlatan, Mr. R. Pearsall Smith of Philadelphia instigated the offer to Hodgson to come to America and head up the American branch of the SPR. Smith's intent was to debunk all mediums, as his grieving brother had been led astray by a charlatan.

Soon after his arrival in the U.S. in April of 1887, Hodgson had his first sitting with medium Leonora Piper, who had greatly impressed Professor William James of Harvard University. James had arranged the sitting for Hodgson, careful not to reveal Hodgson's name or purpose for being in the country.

After Mrs. Piper went into the trance state, "Phinuit,' her spirit control at the time, took over her body and mentioned the name "Fred" to Hodgson. "You went to school together, and Fred was very fond of playing leap-frog," Phinuit relayed the message from Fred. "He was swinging on a trapeze when he fell and injured his spine, finally dying in a convulsion. You were not present at the time of his accident or death."

Phinuit continued: "Fred states his father was your mother's brother. He also wants to remind you of Harris at school. He was a very able man. Fred says you come from Australia. After your father's death you went to Germany. Fred was with you then in spirit. While there you got provoked with a lady. You said she was deceitful, a story teller. He also says one of your chief reasons for choosing St. John's College (at Cambridge) was that Wordsworth was a Johnian."

Hodgson was stunned by the accuracy of the communication, as he recalled his cousin Fred, whose father was his mother's brother, excelling at the game of leap-frog by taking long flying jumps that attracted crowds of schoolmates. Fred injured his spine in a gymnasium in Melbourne in 1871 and died within a matter of days. Hodgson was not present at either the accident or the death.

Harris was the name of their schoolmaster in 1868 or 1869. While in Germany, Hodgson charged a lady with falsehood under somewhat peculiar circumstances, although Hodgson recalled going to Germany before his father's death in 1885, not after it. And it was true that Hodgson chose St. John's College because Wordsworth had been educated there.

At a second sitting, Phinuit described a lady with dark hair, dark eyes and a slim figure, but he could not get her name. He could get only that her Christian named ended with an "sie." "She was much closer to you than any other person," Phinuit communicated. "Too bad, you were not with her at the time. She died in England when you were across country. The lady had two rings, one went with her body to the grave, the other ought to have gone to you...She had a brother and a sister. She had a black lace collar, with a pin with a head, and a ring with a stone which she wanted given to you. This lady had beautiful teeth. She wants you always to keep a book of poems which you had given her and had been sent back to you. You had written her name in it in connection with her birthday."

Phinuit went on to tell Hodgson that the woman was a great friend of his sister's and that he (Hodgson) heard about her death from his sister. Still struggling with the name, Phinuit suggested it might be "Ellerton," He then said that her left eye is brown and on the right eye there is a spot of a light color in the iris, the spot being straggly and of a bluish cast. He said it was a birthmark.

Hodgson was further impressed, although there were several bits of information that he was unsure of. He did not recall a brother or sister, although he remembered that at least one sibling had been stillborn. Not wanting to name his friend in his report, Hodgson referred to her only as "Q." He confirmed that she was his sister's good friend and that his sister informer him of Q's death. Moreover, her name ended with a "sie." (Hodgson's biographer Alex Baird later revealed that her name was "Jessie D----.") Strangely, Ellerton was the surname of one of Q's other cousins.

"The description of "Q," her relationship to me, the manner of her death, and my absence from her side are true," Hodgson recorded. "She died in Australia while I was in England." But Hodgson knew nothing about the rings. He recalled the black lace collar distinctly and the pin vaguely, but not the stone in the ring. He did not recall that she had beautiful teeth. Rather, he recalled that a year or two before her death she had some teeth extracted (which may have been replaced with "beautiful" teeth).

As for the book of poems, Hodgson remembered lending her Tennyson's The Princess and her having returned it. He remembered writing her name on one of the fly leaves.

Hodgson further recalled the eye blemish, but thought it was grey rather than blue. He asked Phinuit how he knew about the eye. Phinuit replied that "Q" was standing close to him and showing him her right eye, so that he could see it plainly.

Phinuit went on to tell Hodgson that his mother was living but his father and little brother had died. "There are two Toms in your family, both brothers, one alive and one in spirit," he continued. Hodgson confirmed the facts as given by Phinuit.

"Here is a schoolmate, with a lot of freckles, little fellow with red hair," Phinuit continued. "Name like Wingford, he lived with his grandmother." Hodgson knew to whom Phinuit was referring, although he recalled the boy's name as Grimwood, not Wingford.

Another old schoolmate then presented himself to Phinuit. Phinuit said he was lame when he was a boy and that his name sounded like Brookford. Hodgson recalled the lame boy but remembered his name as Brooks.

Phinuit informed Hodgson that his young married sister would soon have another child, a boy. This prophecy turned out to be true, as his sister gave birth before the end of the year.

As biographer Baird saw it, Hodgson's whole attitude about mediums began to change with those first few sittings.

After Hodgson's death in 1905, fellow psychical researcher Hereward Carrington wrote that Jessie ("Q") continued to communicate with affectionate and evidential messages for Hodgson, a life-long bachelor, in his many additional sittings with Mrs. Piper over the next 18 years.

Tags: Richard Hodgson, Leonora Piper, mediumship, life after death, Phinuit, spirits

An Interview with the author of "The Articulate Dead"

http://metgat.gaia.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:15:18 GMT

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

Tags: life after death, afterlife, death, Michael Tymn, consciousness, mediumship, The Articulate Dead, psychical research, ical

An Interview with Pamela Rae Heath, M.D., Psy.D.

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:44:57 GMT

above: Dr. Pamela Rae Heath

My interview with Dr. Heath was for the March issue of "The Searchlight," which I edit for the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies. For more information on the Academy, go to http://aspsi.org/ Note that the Academy's annual conference is scheduled for June 19-22 at DeSales University.

As she sees herself, Dr. Pamela Rae Heath is a bridge between psychics and parapsychologists. "I try to help parapsychologist understand how to design better studies, which control situations without making their research participants feel like objects instead of people," she explains. "And I try to help psychics understand their own gifts better, and how to control their abilities."

Co-author of "Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife?" with Jon Klimo, Ph.D., Heath, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, is a semi-retired anesthesiologist who is more focused these days on parapsychology and the paranormal than medicine.

After obtaining a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1976, Heath received an M.D. from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 1980. She then practiced medicine at different locations, including Abilene, Orlando, and Miami. After experiencing abilities of her own during the early 1990s, she returned to graduate school and received a Psy.D. from Rosebridge Graduate School of Integrative Psychology (now the American School of Professional Psychology, Argosy University, San Francisco Bay Area Campus) in 1999.

Her dissertation was a phenomenological study of the experience of performing psychokinesis. She has since published "The PK Zone: A Cross-Cultural Review of Psychokinesis," and other articles on this subject in parapsychology journals. She is a certified Master Hypnotherapist and a member of several paranormal research organizations.

I recently put some questions by e-mail to Dr. Heath:

Would you mind explaining the nature of those spontaneous psychic experiences you had during the early 1990s?

"Looking back on it, I realize I started meditating (without knowing what I was doing) and having visions in third grade. But I didn't think of myself as psychic until many years later. I was a doctor in my 30s when several things started happening at the same time. I began knowing what kind of cases I was going to do as emergencies on call that night. I freaked people out by answering (in specific terms) their questions before they had been said out loud. And I began to wake up just before the telephone rang on call, never waking up when it didn't ring except for one time when I later learned they'd been dialing my number when the patient had died in the ER. It got where I couldn't deny any more that something odd was happening. So, I went to a psychic who had a reputation for being the real deal. He told me I was psychic. It really freaked me out. It was a month before I could even say the word psychic. After that, I started to experiment to see what I could do."

Generally, what was your attitude about such psychic experiences and paranormal phenomena before you had those experiences?

"I was a big science fiction fan from third grade on. So, before I had my psychic experiences as an adult, I believed that psychic abilities were possible, but it never occurred to me that I might have them."

What prompted you to collaborate with Dr. Klimo on a book about suicide?

"I met Dr. Klimo in graduate school. He often spoke about an experience that he had of gathering information for a woman who was interested in committing suicide. The thought was that if she knew what she was getting into, that she wouldn't do it. I felt that it was the kind of information that could save lives, and told him he should write a book about it. I kept saying it, but he had not kept his original pages and didn't want to start over from scratch. I finally realized that it wasn't going to get written unless I did it. But I had gotten the idea from Jon, and have great respect for him as the world's expert of channeling, so I dragged him in on the project with me."

What are your conclusions relative to suicide? Can suicide ever be justified?

"I think that there can be many causes of suicide - it can be an accident, a desperate cry for help, feeling like you don't belong or have no other options to name just a few. The spirit realm sees taking the life of a healthy body as selfish and shortsighted. In the case of assisted suicide, they do not see it as murder, but still encourage people to think it through and make sure those around them are comfortable with this choice before proceeding. They tell us that, hard as it may be to accept, there are sometimes purposes served by suffering. However, relatively few assisted suicides that were channeled had regrets."

Has your experience as an anesthesiologist given you any insight into the nature of consciousness?

"I actually probably have gotten more insight into levels of consciousness from my hypnosis training than I ever did as an anesthesiologist. None of my patients ever came back to tell me of out-of-body experiences during the time they were under."

Do you have any particular focus or project in the area of psychic phenomena going on at this time?

"My areas of expertise are mind-matter interaction (formerly known as psychokinesis) and experiential research. I've also done quite a few ghost investigations over the years with Loyd Auerbach and the Office of Paranormal Investigations. I just finished rewriting and updating The PK Zone, and even gave it a new title: Mind-Matter Interaction: The Stories, Research, and Theory. I'm also finishing up a new manuscript, which will again be with Jon Klimo, which will be about the stages in the afterlife. It is looking like it will be available from North Atlantic Books in Spring 2010. The book might have been finished earlier, but I got sidetracked by the death of both of my parents earlier this year. I made sure both of them moved on to the Light, but it made the subject too painful to work on for several months."

How do your peers in the medical community react to your interest in psychic phenomena?

"I've actually been surprised at how well many of my medical colleagues have accepted my other work as a psychic and a parapsychologist. Several asked for tarot reads, and were really interested in ghost investigations. Of course, it helps a lot that I'm in California! This wouldn't go over as well in many other parts of the country. However, a lot of being accepted has to do with the terminology you use. Doctors are very body-oriented, so if you talk about "gut instinct" they tend to accept it, where they wouldn't accept things like "intuition" or "psychic."

Do you see the medical community as being any more open or accepting relative to psychic phenomena now than when you were in medical school or an intern?

"It's been a very long time since I was a medical student in Texas, so things have changed in a lot more ways than simply more openness to alternative healing! However, I would say that how well psychic phenomena are accepted by the medical community really depends on where you live. In California or Oregon, I suspect you'd see a lot of openness. If you're in the South, you can probably safely talk about the prayer healing studies. In the Midwest and much of the East Coast, I'd doubt you'd see much acceptance. But I could be wrong."

What are some of the misconceptions out there concerning psychics?

"One is that some people are psychic while others aren't. Everyone is psychic, even skeptics. They may use their abilities to block other people from succeeding at psychic tasks or to overly fail psychic tests by scoring worse than is possible through random chance, but this is a normal ability that everyone has. Another misconception is that psychic abilities always start in childhood. Untrue. Psychic talent often starts in a person's 30s and can continue to grow in power at least until his or her 50s. However, the most important thing I try to get across to folks is that psychic abilities are need based. What you can or cannot do depends on what is important to your unconscious mind. So, if you can do one thing and not another, it doesn't tell you anything about your own limits. All it tells you is what's important to your unconscious mind. Should what's important to you unconscious mind change, then so can your abilities."

Have you had any experience with séances?

"About a month or so after I got told that wasn't going crazy, that I really was psychic, I started taking anomalous healing classes from the Reverend Mary Smiley at Casadaga, Florida, one a few Spiritualist camps in the United States. Mary charged me only $4 a lesson, as she really wasn't in it for the money. However, as one of her students, I got invited to some of the private séances they held for their own entertainment. I was the only non-professional medium there, and never got charged a cent. Generally about 6-8 of us would meet, all bringing covered dishes so we could eat when we finished. I had a great time! The most dramatic experiences I had were of chasing a heavy wood table from the center of the room all the way to the edge of it and back again (all hands on top of it, with everyone in short sleeves for a Florida summer). It took six of us to carry that wood table into the living room, and I knew from the circumstances that it hadn't been faked! That table was really booking, too! It was moving fast. The other dramatic thing I remember was watching the profile of the person next to me literally change shape when she channeled. I think back on those experiences as one of the highlights of my life. I love physical phenomena!"

It often seems to me that parapsychology is going backward, sort of reinventing the wheel discovered by psychical researchers a hundred years ago and turning out a square wheel. Moreover, they have moved away from survival research and into more mundane fields of ESP. It is as if they are trying to rebuild the spokes on the wheel and ruining the wheel itself. How do you see this?

"As a full member of the Parapsychological Association, I know a lot of the folks working in the field today, at least in the US and Europe. You have to understand that from the time parapsychology was first formed as a scientific form of endeavor, survival research has been one of the cornerstones of the field (the other two are ESP and Mind-Matter Interaction research). I would say most of those in the field are cautious believers, though they disagree about what form in which survival takes place. Most would agree that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If the soul represents a form of energy (which is suspected but unproven), then it would make sense that some kind of survival of that energy would occur. Where you get into arguments, is whether there is any survival of personality or sense of individuality. Some people think the soul re-merges with a kind of collective consciousness. Perhaps the strongest evidence, and one that has swayed many parapsychologists to become believers in survival, is that of Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research. It's very persuasive stuff. Add to that instrumental transcommunication research, Gary Schwartz's work testing mediums, forensic past life regression, near-death experiences, and you start to see a consistent pattern suggestive of not just survival of the soul, but some kind of survival of personality."

But hasn't parapsychology reached a point of diminishing returns? What is the point of doing further work in telepathy when the ganzfeld experiments are about as good as one could hope for?

"I think there is ALWAYS reason to gather evidence of ANY phenomenon - whether ESP or otherwise. When I'm gathering information, I don't worry about what that information is going to say. I want the evidence to reveal its own truth to me. I let it tell me what's going on, rather than worry about proving a point. That's actually what makes me a good experiential researcher. I never worry about proof. Proof simply doesn't matter to me. I want to see what is. And that's also my philosophy for writing books. I start by gathering as much data as possible, and then let it show me the natural pattern that falls into place. I think of it as being like putting together an extremely complex jigsaw puzzle, where I don't know the frame shape or what the final image will be. There's a lot of uncertainty. But there's also the excitement of knowing that if I can discover enough pieces, I'll be able to see how they fit together, and a pattern will emerge. To be honest, that's why I enjoy writing so much. I figure things out as I organize the material for a book and see how it all falls into place."

Since you are working on a book about the stages of the afterlife, I assume that you believe that consciousness survives physical death.

"You have to understand that I was psychic before I trained as a parapsychologist. I'd seen physical phenomena, spontaneously remembered past lives, and talked to spirits. Although I don't advertise my talent, I have mediumship abilities. So, I have never doubted that there is (at least temporarily) some survival of personality."

What are the stages of the afterlife as you see them?

"Let me add my caveats. I'm still fine tuning my understanding of things, and it needs to be recognized that the stages to the afterlife vary in length from one soul to the next and can sometimes occur out of order or even simultaneously. However, the main elements appear to be: 1) recognizing they are dead; 2) separating from the body; 3) being greeted by spirit helpers; 4) moving through levels; 5) reunion; 6) rest and recovery; 7) life-review and self-judgment; 8) spiritual work; and 9) reincarnation. There also appear to be an optional stage in there of visits to the living (which can include going to your own funeral). The upcoming book will also talk about afterlife adjustment problems and how these souls can be helped both by others in spirit and those in the physical plane."
Visit Dr. Heath's web site at http://www.pamelaheath.com/

Tags: spirituality, life after death, parapsychology, Pamela Rae Heath, consciousness, suicide, psychic phenomena

Can Spirits Control Animals?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:08:36 GMT

above: Clever Hans

Every now and then I'll hear a story about how either a bird or butterfly, or a group of butterflies, is accepted as a sign that a deceased loved one is around. The bird may suddenly appear on one's window sill at a regular time every day and exhibit unusual behavior or the butterflies may swarm on a regular basis.

If such stories are supposed to suggest that the deceased loved one has returned in a lower life form, I am highly skeptical and I don't know why such stories would offer comfort to the bereaved. If, however, the stories suggest that animal life can be influenced and directed by discarnate humans, I am much less skeptical.

Consider the case of the Elberfeld horses, which I wrote about for the current (March/April) issue of Atlantis Rising magazine. The closed-minded person will immediately dismiss the whole story as laughable, but the open-minded person will consider the testimony of a number of distinguished scientists and scholars and recognize that there may very well be something to it.

In 1900, Wilhelm von Osten of Elberfeld (then Central Prussia) is said to have taught his Russian stallion, Hans, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The horse would strike out an answer to a problem by striking his hoof so many times. For example, for 35, Hans would strike his left front hoof three times and his right front hoof five times.

Professor Edoward Claparede of the University of Geneva studied the horse and called the phenomenon "the most sensational event that has happened in the psychological world." Of course, mainstream science could not accept such a verdict and sent Oskar Pfungst of the Berlin psychological laboratory to rescue science. Pfungst reported that the horse merely obeyed visual clues, whether conscious or unconscious, given by von Osten. This became known as the "Clever Hans effect," a term still used by animal trainers today.

Von Osten was humiliated and apparently refused to give further demonstrations. However, when he died, he left Han to a friend, Karl Krall, a wealthy merchant, who had seen enough of the horse's ability to discount the Clever Hans effect. Krall also bought two Arabian stallions, Muhamed and Zarif and began training them in the same manner von Osten had taught Hans. Within three weeks, Muhamad was doing multiplication and division and within four months he knew how to extract square roots, cubic roots, and even fourth-power roots. Zarif was a little slower, but eventually could do most of what Muhamad could do, while Hans went to the back of the class. Krall also taught the horses how to read and write. They would communicate by tapping a hoof one time for each letter of the alphabet, e.g., five strikes for E.

Hearing of these horses, Maurice Maeterlinck, a world-renowned Belgian author and Nobel Prize-winner in literature, decided to investigate. At the first demonstration, he was astounded and commented that he was rather disturbed, as such abilities were in total opposition to his worldview.

When Krall took a trip to town, Maeterlinck was permitted to test the horses on his own. Maeterlinck gave them some problems of which he did not know the answer - a way of ruling out the Clever Hans effect as well as mental telepathy, another theory that had been advanced, as fantastic as a mind-horse might seem. It was only after he received the answer from one or the other horse that he did his calculations to determine if the answer was correct.

In one test, Maeterlinck asked for the square root of a number, not realizing it was a surd - a number which had no square root. Muhamed lifted his foot, paused, and then shook his head.

Maeterlinck reported on tests run by Dr. H. Hamel while Krall was on a trip. Hamel asked Muhamed for the fourth power root of 7,890,481, which Hamel himself did not know until checking Muhamed's correct answer of 53. It took the horse about six seconds to begin striking out the answer.

But the horses were sometimes wrong. Professor Claparede asked Muhamed for the fourth power root of 614,656 and received the correct answer of 28, but when he wrote the number 4,879,681 on the blackboard in front of the horse, Muhamed tapped out 117. When told he was wrong, he tapped out 144, also wrong. The horse then gave up.

A New York Times article dated March 3, 1912, told how Zarif was asked for the date by the reporter and tapped out 25 for February 25. When asked how many days left in the month, Zarif tapped out 29. It was a leap year. When asked how often leap years occur, the horse tapped out "every four years."

Maeterlinck, Claparede, and Hamel were not the only researchers to study the horses. At least eight other respected academicians observed the horses and apparently were satisfied that it was not fraud or the Clever Hans effect. Yet, modern references all seem to accept the Clever Hans effect as the only explanation.

Maeterlinck theorized that the horses had mediumistic ability and were able to tap into some kind of cosmic soul. Even though Maeterlinck believed in mediumship, he did not believe that spirits could communicate through mediums. The cosmic soul theory, first advanced by Harvard's William James seemed more fantastic than the possibility that a mischievous spirit or spirits were having some fun by influencing or controlling the horses.

In effect, seven possibilities were recognized:

1. Outright fraud: Considering the fact that the horses performed regularly in the absence of the trainers, this appears to have been ruled out.
2. Fabricated Story: It seems highly unlikely that a man of Maerterlinck's reputation would make up such a story, especially when so many other respected scientists, scholars, and journalists all observed the horses and also reported on it.
3. Clever Hans effect: Here again, the horses performed when no trainer was around and when the researchers themselves did not know the answers.
4. Telepathy: Since the horses gave correct answers when the researchers themselves did not know the answers, this theory seems to have been ruled out.
5. Cosmic Soul: This theory can't be disproved, but it seems to be the most far-fetched of all.
6. Spirit Control: As one historian on spirit phenomena suggested, if spirits can levitate tables and humans, then there was no reason to believe they couldn't control the horses.
7. True Intelligence: Horses and perhaps other animals are really much smarter than we realize. If they can figure fourth-power roots in a matter of seconds, they may even be more intelligent than humans.

Based on all the facts available, number 6 is the only one that begins to make sense to me, even though I struggle with it. But if dicarnates can actually control horses, then why not birds and butteflies?

For a more detailed report on the Elberfeld horses, see my article in the current issue of Atlantis Rising. See http://www.atlantisrising.com/index.shtml

Tags: Elberfeld Horses, spirituality, animal intelligence, consciousness, life after death, Maurice Maeterlinck, Clever Hans effect

Why You Might Not Realize You Are Dead

http://metgat.gaia.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:09:43 GMT

There have been numerous messages and signs from the spirit world indicating that many spirits are slow in recognizing that they are "dead," some floundering in this state for a long time, however time is measured in that realm. This phenomenon was popularized in the hit movie, The Sixth Sense, a few years back, when the Bruce Willis character apparently didn't know he was dead.

It is difficult to comprehend how a person, or soul, cannot know he or she is dead, but we need only ponder on how we escape into movies and even print fiction to begin to understand it.

Although I find very little on television that interests me these days, I admit to being hooked on the "24" action series. I get so into the excitement at times that I find myself on the edge of my seat and "living" the action. When a segment of the series ends on its usual cliffhanger and a commercial comes on, I am to some extent reminded that it is just a TV program, not real life. But my consciousness will not fully accept the fiction or unreality of it. Some part of my consciousness still holds onto the emotion and action of it while anxiously awaiting the next segment to see what happens to Jack Bauer.

On the other hand, I don't lose myself in the movie as much as some people. My wife refuses to watch bloody scenes and if one catches her by surprise she will let out a scream. I have no difficulty watching such scenes, although I'm sure that if I were witnessing them in real life my reaction would be much different. Thus, even though I am somewhat absorbed in the movie and not completely distinguishing between reality and unreality, my consciousness is straddling the "threshold of awareness" enough so that I do not react too emotionally to violent scenes.

When a trip prevented me from seeing a weekly segment of "24" last year, I felt conflicted. I had to know what was going to happen. My mind tried to reason with my consciousness by re-"minding" it that it isn't real and that I shouldn't care what happens, but my consciousness struggled to accept what the mind was telling it and I was determined to see the next segment.

Having recently read "To Die For" by James E. Beichler, Ph.D., I now have a framework by which to better understand the struggles between mind and consciousness, including why some spirits don't realize they are dead.

"Mind interprets our sensed world and environment using reason, the cumulative result of real experiences of the material four-dimensional world placed within a specific mental framework or worldview," Beichler, a semi-retired physics professor, explains, "while consciousness deals more with intuition, our innate feelings and subconscious understanding of the larger five-dimensional framework of physical reality."

As Beichler sees it, when mind is much more evolved than consciousness those making the transition from this life to the larger life may be faced with a very big gap, thus not recognizing that they are dead. If the person had achieved a higher level of consciousness while occupying the physical body, "then the mind would already have memories of five-dimensional experience and would then merge with less difficulty into its new state of being," he explains, adding that this mind remains stuck in its four-dimensional reality.

In other words, the mind (the soul) separates itself from the physical organ (the brain) and then attempts to orientate itself based upon the spiritual consciousness that it has achieved during the time it occupied a physical shell. If the spiritual consciousness is well developed, the mind quickly awakens to its new and true reality. But if that consciousness is not well developed - if it is still grounded in the material world - this "handicapped" mind does not quickly "awaken" and may not even realize that the physical body has been shed, i.e., the soul doesn't realize that it is "dead."

"The mind/consciousness complex retains its identity (the person still remains) after a manner in the fifth dimension, in so far as self-identity is not a material but still a physical quantity or quality," Beichler further explains. "However, the extent to which the complex is ‘conscious' or mindful of its own existence, its being, would depend upon the extent to which it was ;conscious' or aware of its five-dimensional connections before the death of the four-dimensional body and what is perceived by the mind as ‘self' while the body still lived and functioned."

It is difficult to grasp, but it makes sense. After all, do you know that you are "alive" when you are dreaming while asleep? And while watching a movie, are we constantly reminding ourselves that it is not real? There would be no pleasure or entertainment in watching movies if our level of awareness were so high that we were so reminding ourselves.

Indications are that there are many degrees of awakening and consciousness on the Other Side and that many souls go back and forth over the threshold of awareness, just as most of us do in watching a good movie. That is, the conflict between mind and consciousness continues so that some souls realize at times that they have passed from the physical world but at other times they cling to the physical world and temporarily forget that they are "dead." They are in a struggle with earth's magnetism. I suspect that the majority of souls are in this in-between state, fluctuating back and forth over that threshold of awareness, "earthbound" at times and free from the "earthbound" condition at other times, however time is measured in that realm. Only those who are totally self-centered and materialistic in earth life don't realize their new state at all, at least initially.

Another perspective on this is to view the earth life like a movie, an illusory life, being viewed by the real self - the soul. When the earth life ends, the soul that is totally absorbed in it is still experiencing it, just as many of us are still affected by the movie after it ends.

Beichler's model explains many of the characteristics and properties of the near-death experience. For example, noting that not all experiencers undergo a past-life review, he concludes that those who have a highly-developed consciousness - one that has kept pace with the development of the mind - may not need a life review as they probably reviewed their lives when alive in the flesh. At the other extreme, there are those not advanced enough in their conscious evolution to appreciate a life review, and still others who may not accept a life review because they deny their death and sense nothing at all. "In other words, people's minds seize upon the most familiar surroundings when they enter the new environment of the five-dimensional universe," Beichler offers, "but can still reject the experience completely depending upon their mind set and mental priorities at the time of death."

Dr. Beichler's book is available from Trafford Publishing (888-232-4444) or at Amazon.com

Tags: life after death, afterlife, death, not knowing you are dead, James Beichler, spirituality, consciousness, mind

Did Confucius really speak with the professor?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:55:18 GMT

Skeptics claim that stories involving the paranormal are often exaggerated over time by both the original storyteller and those who pass on the stories. I have no doubt that this is frequently the case. I have retold a personal paranormal experience so many times over the past 10 years that I am not now sure whether I have added to the original story. It was not something I documented in writing at the time of the experience, although I now wish I had.

On the other hand, time has a way of diminishing the impact of certain paranormal stories when subject to attacks by skeptics. Consider the case of medium George Valiantine of Williamsport, New York. Based on several books and articles written about Valiantine by credible researchers, he was a very gifted direct-voice medium, in that extremely evidential information was provided through him to numerous people. However, he did not particularly impress some researchers representing the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) when they studied him in 1927 and he was accused of cheating in a 1931 séance. When you access information about Valiantine in books or on the Internet today, you read mostly about his failures and alleged cheating and hardly anything about his successes. Thus, the tendency is to completely dismiss him as a charlatan.

Consider the story told about Valiantine by Dr. Neville Whymant in his 1931 book, Psychic Adventures in New York. I summarized this case in a previous blog entry (click on the "popular" tab at on the right side of this screen and then click on "The Most Awesome Spirit Story You'll Ever Read." as well as in the book, Dark Lore I, published by Daily Grail, and more recently in Psychic News, a UK publication.

To further summarize,Whymant was a professor of linguistics at both Oxford and London universities and was in the U.S. in 1926 while studying the languages of the American Indian. He reportedly could speak 30 languages, including several dialects of Chinese. While in New York City in October 1926, he was invited to the Park Ave. home of Judge and Mrs. William Cannon. He didn't realize until he had arrived at their home that he was being invited to a séance involving Valiantine. Mrs. Cannon told him that in several previous séances that a Chinese speaking entity was communicating and she hoped that Whymant could translate if the voice came through again. She was afraid that if she told him the reason for the invitation that he would decline. Whymant wrote that he had no real interest in Spiritualism and was very skeptical of it, but he agreed to sit through the séance.

It is important to understand that in the direct-voice, the spirit voices do not come from the medium's mouth, as in the trance-voice phenomenon. Rather, they come through a floating trumpet, which amplifies the spirit voices. Generally, the voices resemble that of the communicating spirit when in the flesh.

After hearing voices communicate with others in the room, Whymant heard a spirit claiming to be Mrs. Whymant's father communicate through the trumpet. Whymant noted that the voice had the same characteristic drawl reminiscent of the West County of England that his father-in-law had. Whymant then heard a voice directed at him speaking in an ancient Chinese dialect, which he recognized as that of the Chinese classics and colloquially as dead as Sanskrit or Latin. When Whymant asked the communicating entity if he could speak in a more modern dialect, the entity consented and identified himself as K'ung fu-tsu, the name by which Confucius was canonized.

To test the spirit, Whymant recited the first line of the third ode of the first book of Chou non, after which the voice recited the remaining 14 lines. Additionally, the voice put a new construction on the verses, giving the entire poem a meaning somewhat different than Whymant had understood it. Whymant then asked about another poem which had confused many scholars. The communicating spirit then explained that it was wrongly translated and pointed to two words that were in error. It all made perfect sense to Whymant.

Whymant attended eleven more sittings with Valiantine and heard 14 different languages spoken, including Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Basque, Sanskrit, Arabic, Portugese, Italian, Yiddish, German, and Greek. In one of the sittings, a spirit spoke a strange French dialect, which Whymant recognized as Labourdin Basque. Although he was more accustomed to speaking Spanish Basque, he managed to carry on a conversation with the voice.

Let's look at the arguments against the validity of the story and Valiantine's mediumship:

Famous people don't communicate: "Confucius, sure, and Cleopatra and Princess Diana, too," the "clever"skeptic will say with a smirk, as if to suggest only the non-famous dead can communicate, assuming such communication exists at all. Of course, if no one famous ever communicated, those same skeptics would ask why only unknown people communicate. If spirit communication is possible, why wouldn't we expect to hear from some famous people? Of course, there are indications that devious, low-level spirits sometimes attempt to impersonate famous "dead" people and that is why the New Testament tells us to "test the spirits" and to "discern" the messages.

In the Confucius case, such an impostor spirit would have had to know or have access to the ancient dialect of Confucius and be very familiar with his poems, familiar enough to recite them and point out errors in the modern translations.

Valiantine must have been a skilled ventriloquist: Skeptics claim that direct-voice mediums are skilled ventriloquists. However, researchers were always on the lookout for this. While Whymant was not a researcher, per se, he was aware of such claims and noted that there was enough light for him to observe Valiantine speaking American English to the person sitting next to him at the same time voices were coming through the trumpet. Moreover, it's one thing to "throw" a voice, quite another for the voice to provide evidential information in 14 different languages, including ancient dialects.

Darkness provided a perfect opportunity to cheat: Skeptics have no problem understanding that darkness is required in developing photographs, but refuse to accept the fact that light affects the ectoplasm produced by the medium and can result in injury or even death to the medium, who must reabsorb the ectoplasm. Skeptics won't even accept the existence of ectoplasm, which has been seen, handled, and tested by a number of esteemed scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. In the direct-voice the ectoplasm is required for the spirits to build the artificial larynx. In a 1924 sitting with Valiantine, Joseph DeWycoff, one of the sitters, reported seeing a floating trumpet, hearing Valiantine groan in distress, after which the trumpet fell to the floor. He was about to turn on the light when Bert Everett, one of Valiantine's spirit controls, told him not to turn it on. Nevertheless, there was enough light for DeWycoff to observe Valiantine enveloped in a whitish sort of film. Another sitter, Carodac Evans, touched it and said that it felt a slimy, frothy bladder, which his finger could not penetrate. Valiantine was able to reabsorb the ectoplasm, but remained weak and in bed the following day. DeWycoff reported that there was a large black bruise on Valiantine's stomach, apparently caused by the shock of the returning ectoplasm.

Perhaps the skeptics think the darkness allowed Valiantine to smuggle a gramophone into the Cannon's home, then turn it on and play various voices in different languages, but this would not account for the give-and-take dialogue that took place, as well as "Confucius" responding to questions put to him by Whymant.

Whymant made up the whole story so he could sell some books: If we can believe Whymant, he didn't even want to write the book, but tired of telling the story over and over again and was persuaded by friends to write it. And, if Whymant made it up, he must have had Judge and Mrs. Cannon, along with Valiantine, to share in the meager profits.

Whymant must have been hypnotized or hallucinating: f you can believe this theory, you're probably the type of person who thinks the Holocaust didn't take place.

Whymant didn't really hear the voices as well as he suggests in the book: This is a theory that was advanced by the SPR and accepted today by some modern parapsychologists. It seems to be based on a sitting Valiantine had with the SPR in 1927. That sitting produced "whispers," some of which sounded like Chinese to the researchers but were very unclear. When the SPR asked Whymant to listen to the gramophone recording of the voices, he couldn't make them out, either. One SPR researcher, in her report, pointed out that there are many "Chinamen" living in America and Valiantine probably learned a little Chinese from them, enough to make Whymant think that he was hearing Chinese and he subconsciously filled in the blanks. It suggests that Whymant was a complete idiot. It also suggests that Valiantine learned enough of 13 other languages, including Sanskrit, to further dupe Whymant and also that he memorized the poems of "Confucius," or Whymant just imagined he heard the voice recite a lengthy poem and also imagined that "Confucius" explained the mistakes in one of them.

Whymant gives no indication in his book of not being able to understand the voices, other than having difficulty understanding the ancient Chinese dialect. He stated that some of the voices were so strong that he could feel the vibrations off the floor. He further describes the "Confucius" voice as "tremulous," which is consistent with the theory that advanced spirits, as Confucius must be, have a more difficult time communicating as they must lower their vibrations much more than lower-level spirits whose vibrations are closer to the earth plane.

What many people don't understand is that a sympathetic link and harmony are usually necessary for good communication to take place. SPR researchers were sometimes intent on debunking a person and the hostility they displayed toward Valiantine resulted in poor phenomena. This hostility seems to have resulted from conflicts the SPR had with H. Dennis Bradley, one of Valiantine's biggest supporters. Bradley was an SPR member himself, but at some point in time took issue with the SPR over the need for strict controls on Valiantine, i.e., tying him up and gagging him, etc. Bradley's feeling was that the darkness had no bearing on the mental phenomena, i.e., the evidential information and that constantly making Valiantine uncomfortable would discourage him from continuing with his mediumship. As a result, the SPR called his research unscientific and this seems to have created a bias against Valiantine. Much of the SPR report on Valiantine focuses on lack of strict controls in the physical phenomena, offering different ways he might have cheated, while admitting much in the way of evidential information that came through the trumpet, information which could not have been researched beforehand.

Valiantine was caught cheating in 1931; therefore, he was clearly a fraud: The most damaging evidence that the skeptic can offer is that sometime in 1931 Valiantine was accused of cheating. It had nothing to do with voices. Rather, the case involved an attempt to fingerprint a communicating spirit claiming to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died the prior year. Apparently, an attempt was going to be made to compare the print with an actual thumb print left by Doyle. A print was somehow obtained, but it turned out to be Valiantine's big toe. Bradley, Valiantine's biggest supporter, was present and wrote about the incident. Valiantine claimed he had no idea how his toe was imprinted in the plaster cast.

Certainly, Valiantine could not have been so stupid as to think his toe print would match up with a thumb print left by Conan Doyle or with anyone's thumb. The only conclusion one can come to here is that some devious, low-level spirits were playing games with the researchers.

Telepathy or Super PSI might explain the voices: A popular theory among some parapsychologists is that the medium is reading the mind of the sitters and feeding information back to them. Since some of the information coming through to Whymant was unknown to him, this theory fails. The Super PSI theory suggests that there is some "computer in the cosmos" which the medium can access. This is the "God without an afterlife theory," God being the computer. However, it is one thing to access some bit of information in the cosmos, quite another to have the computer dialogue with the person. The Super PSI theory is clearly more fantastic than the survival hypothesis.

The Bottom Line: There is absolutely no reason to believe that Whymant was not a credible reporter of facts. He was a distinguished scholar who had little to gain and much to lose by making up such a story. The phenomena he reported go far beyond any known tricks employed by charlatans and similar phenomena were observed by many other people over a period of years. Applying Occam's Razor, I contend that the spirit hypothesis offers us the best explanation of what Whymant experienced.

Tags: Neville Whymant, Confucius, life after death, mediumship, George Valiantine, spirituality

What the Spirits Told the Professor!

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:31:42 GMT

above: Professor Robert Hare

      One of the distinguished scientists of yesteryear featured in my recently-released book, The Articulate Dead, is Dr. Robert Hare, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania during the 19th Century. Like most of the other scholars and scientists investigating mediumship, Hare started out as a disbeliever and expected to debunk mediumship.

        After receiving very evidential messages from his deceased parents and sister, Hare became a convert. “I did not yield the ground undisputed, and was vanquished only by facts and reasons which, when understood or admitted, must produce in others the conviction which they created in me,” he explained. “If I was the victim of an intellectual epidemic, my mental constitution did not yield at once to the miasma. It took some three months to include me among its victims.”

        The son of an English emigrant, Hare invented the oxy-hydrogen blow-pipe, a forerunner of the modern welding torch, before he was 20 years old. He was the first person to fuse lime, magnesia, iridium and platinum. In 1816, he invented the calorimotor, a type of battery from which heat is produced. This led to his invention of the deflagrator, which was employed in volatilizing and fusing carbon. In 1818, Hare was called to the chair of chemistry and natural philosophy at William and Mary and that same year was appointed as professor of Chemistry in the department of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would remain until his retirement in 1847.

       After his first few sittings with mediums, in which the communication came primarily by table tilting or raps, Hare, inventor that he was, immediately went to work contriving an apparatus which would facilitate and expedite communication, as the process he had observed was very slow. He devised a machine, called a spiritoscope, with a circular disc, the letters of the alphabet around the circumference of the disc, and with weights, pulleys, and cords attaching it to the tilting table. The medium would sit behind the table in order to supply the “psychic force” through which the spirits caused the table to tilt, but the medium could not see the wheel and had no idea what was being spelled out.

      Put to the test, the contraption worked and the first spirit to communicate was Hare’s deceased father, Robert Sr. When Hare continued to doubt, the message came through, “Oh, my son, listen to reason!” At a second sitting, his father again communicated, saying that his mother and sister were also there but not his brother. Personal information was given to Hare, information which Hare was certain the medium could not have researched.

      While reasonably certain that his spiritoscope prevented any kind of trickery by the mediums with whom he was sitting, Hare continued in his investigation with caution, asking the communicating spirits for information that would prove their identities. In his third sitting, when the message was spelled out that his sister was there, Hare asked her for the name of their father’s early business partner. She responded correctly with the name “Warren.” He then asked her for the name of their English grandfather’s partner, who had died in London more than 70 years earlier. She again responded with the correct name. “The medium and all present were strangers to my family, and I had never heard either name mentioned, except by my father,” Hare recorded. “Even my younger brother did not remember that of my father’s partner.”

       With another medium, Hare asked his father for the name of an English cousin who had married an admiral. The father spelled out the name. Hare also asked his father for the maiden name of an English brother’s wife. The Spiritoscope spelled out “Clargess,” which was correct.

       It was explained to him by his father that the spirits direct currents of vitalized electricity on the particular muscles of the medium which they desire to control. It is not necessary that the medium be a person of good moral character or have a balanced mind, but an advanced spirit would not be able to control the organs or mind of a medium unless in affinity with the medium. When spirits wish to impress the mind, the spirits can dispose and arrange the magnetic currents of the brain so as to form or fashion them into ideas of their own. They can instantly determine the sphere of a spirit, in or out of the body, by the particular brilliancy and character of the light in which he or she is enveloped, as well as by the peculiar sensation which his or her presence creates.

        At a sitting with a Mrs. Hayden, Hare received a message from a spirit identifying himself as C. H. Hare. “Not recollecting any one of our relations of that name precisely, I inquired if he were one of them,” Hare wrote. “The reply was affirmative. “Are you a son of my cousin Charles Hare, of St. Johns, New Brunswick?” Hare asked. “Yes,” was then spelled out. “This spirit then gave me the profession of my grandfather, also that of his father, and the fact of the former having been blown into the water at Toulon, and of the latter having made a miraculous escape from Verdun, where he had been confined until his knowledge of French enabled him to escape by personating in disguise an officer of the customs.”

         Hare was unaware of the young man’s death, but the brother of the communicating spirit visited Hare in Philadelphia some time later and informed him that his brother, Charles Henry, had been killed at sea in a shipwreck. Here was a message clearly outside the telepathy hypothesis, which held that the medium was reading the mind of the sitter.

       In that same sitting with Mrs. Hayden, the words “pulsatque versatque” and “Quadrupedante” were spelled out by Hare’s father. Hare immediately recognized the words as being from Virgil and recalled his father explaining the English meaning of the Latin words to him some 55 years earlier.

     “As soon as convinced that the phenomena were due to the shades of the dead, I looked with eagerness for some consistent information of their abodes, modes of existence, of the theological doctrines entertained by them, and the actual diversities of their situation consequent to various degrees of moral and intellectual merit,” Hare stated.   His father explained that the spirit goes to a sphere for which it is morally and intellectually adapted based upon a sort of “moral specific gravity.”

      The first sphere above the terrestrial one, i.e., the second sphere, is the abode of “degraded” spirits, meaning not only evil spirits but “misdirected” ones as well. He pointed out that there are millions of such spirits in the second sphere, what religions call Hell, Hades, or Purgatory, who are groping and unable to free themselves from the fetters of earthly conditions. This sphere is said to be the abode of as many spirits as all the five spheres above it. Nevertheless, contrary to the teachings of many religions, the spirits on this sphere are not permanently confined there as “onward and upward” is the motto of the spirit world. Sooner or later, spirits from higher levels are able to reach them and help them see the light.

Because of the barriers spirits must overcome in communicating with the material world, the senior Hare warned his son to discern the messages and not take everything literally. He was further informed that there are no visible boundaries between spheres, but spirits have a peculiar sense which makes them understand when they are passing from one sphere to another.

       Each sphere, the senior Hare said, is divided into six circles, or societies, in which congenial spirits are united and subsist together according to the law of affinity. While these spirits generally agree in moral and intellectual matters, there are individual differences and some disagreements.

      Spirits united by ties of consanguinity and marriage may or may not be linked together in the spheres and in the same society. It depends on the affinity between them, including the level of advancement. However, a spirit in a higher sphere can pass to a lower one to visit with loved ones. But a spirit can never ascend to the higher spheres until fully prepared for such a transition.

       After Professor Hare gave a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he spoke of his interest in spirit communication, some members of the organization called for his expulsion from the organization. However, this apparently resulted in Hare becoming even more entrenched in his belief and he went to his grave certain that there was something beyond death. “No evidence of any important truth in science” he offered, “can be shown to be more unexceptionable than that which I have received of this glorious fact that heaven is really ‘at hand,’ and that our relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are worthy of happiness while describing themselves as ineffably happy, are still progressing to higher felicity; and while hovering aloft in our midst, are taking interest in our welfare with an augmented zeal or affection, so that, by these means, they may be a solace to us, in despite of death.”
      To read more about what Professor Hare was told about the afterlife, you might consider my book, “The Articulate Dead,” which can be purchased at http://www.galdepress.com/ or at http://www.amazon.com/

Tags: Robert Hare, life after death, afterlife, spirituality, mediumship, psychical research, The Articulate Dead

Being in Two Places at Once

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:24:23 GMT

In his 1942 book, Life Now and Forever, Arthur J. Wills, Ph.D., president of the U.S. College of Psychic Science and Research, tells of his own experiments with out-of-body travel and then goes on to tell the story of an experiment carried out by Mary C. Viasek and Mrs. Z. J. Allyn, a materialization medium.

Mrs. Viasek, who had learned to travel out of body, told Mrs. Allyn that she would attempt to visit her circle on September 28 while she was traveling by train from California to Toledo, Ohio. At the time of the séance in Los Angeles, the train was in Utah. After leaving her body, Viasek willed herself to Allyn's circle in Los Angeles. The circle was already in progress and Viasek entered the materialization cabinet, where she found Allyn entranced in a chair and a number of spirits waiting to materialize. The "cabinet guide" told her that she was welcome to observe but because she was mortal she could not participate.

Viasek then observed three "spirit chemists" collecting something. Looking closer, she saw a band of light, of bluish-grey vibrations, resembling heat waves, passing around the circle and into the cabinet. "The stream of vibrations started from the medium's husband, Mr. Allyn, who sat by the right side of the cabinet, and gradually increased in size as the various members of the circle contributed their vibrations to it," Wills quoted the report, going on to explain that the stream was about two inches in width and six inches in depth and increased in size as it passed around the circle and then into the cabinet, at which time it was about a foot in width and 18 inches in depth. It was further noted that not all of the sitters contributed to the stream, as it appeared to go around a couple of them.

Once the stream reached the cabinet, a spirit chemist took it and appeared to pour it into the back of the head and neck of the medium. At the same time that the light, bluish-grey vibrations were being poured into the medium, a white substance (not named, but apparently ectoplasm), began to emanate from the medium's chin, throat, and chest. This emanation was then taken by another spirit chemist and put over the spirit to be clothed. As he was pouring the substance over the spirit, he said in a firm positive voice: "Think your features! Think your face! Think your eyes! Think your form! Think positively! Think your form as you were on earth! Think your arms!" As the spirit thought these things a form gradually built up over him.

All the while the circle members were singing in order to establish and maintain harmonious vibrations. When they finished one hymn and before starting another hymn, the materialization failed as "the substance fell from the spirit." The spirit chemist then began attempting to clothe another spirit and it also failed when the hymn was abruptly changed. Viasek noted that the vibrations changed when the singing changed and interfered with the manifestations.

During these failures, Viasek was in the cabinet but could not get her feet on the floor. When the group members started singing Shall we gather at the river, her feet touched and she found herself standing in front of one of the chemists. He said, "You are mortal. You cannot go," but she appealed to him and he then consented. The chemist then turned her around with her back toward him and began pouring the substance drawn from the medium over her, while saying: "Think your features positively, just as you are! Think your hair! Your eyes! Think your form! Think your arms! Think your hands! Think your feet!"

Then the chemist placed some substance over her to form her dress, a garment of white lace. "This was a creation of the chemist, not of her thought."

When Viasek stepped through the curtain into the circle, she felt that she was blind for several seconds, but her sight then came to her. However, she found she could not speak. As one of the sitters approached her, she received "strengthening vibrations" and was able to speak. As she began to talk to the group, something happened to upset the vibrations of the circle and Viasek felt as if her breath had been knocked out of her by a blow to the solar plexus. She stepped backwards toward the cabinet and seemed to lose consciousness before regaining it again and observing other materialization successes and failures. She could not discern exactly when the forms began to materialize, but she noted that they began to dissolve outside the cabinet. What little of the substance was left when the materialization dissolved flowed toward the incoming stream of light, bluish-gray vibrations.

Members of the circle confirmed Viasek's materialization and it was noted that her "breathing" problems began when Dr. H. H. Turner, one of the circle member, increased the light in the room so that he could make a note of the time and record Viasek's words.

Tags: astral travel, out-of-body experiences, bilocation, consciousness, mediumship, spirituality, Arthur J. Wills, spirit body

Make Dr. Death Your Friend in 2009

http://metgat.gaia.com — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:11:31 GMT

If you haven't already made a New Year's Resolution, let me suggest one: Make death your friend, your daily companion. Rather than thinking of death as the Grim Reaper, imagine "him" or "her" as Dr. Death, the greatest and wisest teacher and healer you'll ever have.

"Ridiculous," you say? If so, you're taking issue with some great thinkers. The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that it is psychologically beneficial to have death as a goal toward which to strive. Mozart called death the key to unlocking the door to true happiness. Shakespeare wrote that when we are prepared for death, life is sweeter. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne said that "to practice death is to practice freedom." Essentially, what they all say is that in understanding death, we come to understand life and better enjoy it.

When friends and acquaintances hear of my recently-released book, The Articulate Dead, they often react with some hesitation, as if death is a taboo subject. When I tell them that the book is about scientific research strongly suggesting that consciousness survives physical death while also telling a little about the afterlife environment as reported through various sensitives who have been able penetrate the veil, "One life at a time for me," is a typical reaction, a subtle and supposedly "intelligent" way of saying that the person is not interested in the subject matter.

I respond to that comment by saying that I agree that we should be living in the present, not looking ahead to some distant afterlife. But I add that the best way to live in the present, or to live in the "now," is to "live in eternity." That always brings puzzled expressions and requires some explanation.

It is not easy to explain how to "live in eternity," but the best analogy I can come up with is retirement from the work force. Most people, even those who find some joy and fulfillment in their jobs, look forward to retirement. They envision more freedom and opportunity to pursue things that really interest them and which involve less stress and conflict than their occupations. They anticipate more time for leisure activities, travel, maybe even an around-the-world cruise. Retirement is not something they constantly dwell on, but it is a motivator that more or less straddles the dividing line between the conscious and the subconscious. That's what "living in eternity" is like - having that long range goal in the back of the mind while still focusing on the present. It's like a baseball player taking each game as it comes, but still envisioning some day being in the Hall of Fame. It's something of a dream that continually inspires him to face up to the challenges.

What if retirement meant no income of any kind - no savings, no social security, no pensions? There would be nothing to look forward to except poverty, squalor and despair. Unfortunately, that is how most people look at death and the afterlife. Orthodox religion has not been able to paint a picture that offers anything more than a humdrum heaven or horrific hell. Assuming that a person feels qualified for the humdrum heaven, how can he or she get excited about floating around on clouds all day while strumming a harp, or in what seems like an endless Sunday church service singing hymns and praising God? How appealing is that?

In effect, there are three approaches to viewing death: 1) a march into an abyss of nothingness; 2) seeing the humdrum heaven and horrific hell of orthodoxy; 3) viewing it like beginning retirement with an around-the-world cruise. Those who make friends with Dr. Death usually settle on number three.

Various polls suggest that 80-85 percent of the U.S. population believe in an afterlife, but the problem is that they don't really "believe." They just "hope" for it while striving to be "one with their toys," worshipping celebrities as gods, and living in the moment, having no conception what death brings. They might as well be marching toward the abyss of nothingness that the atheist does his best not to think about.

"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else," cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in his 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. "It is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny of man."

To free oneself of death anxiety, Becker explained, nearly everyone chooses the path of repression. We bury the anxiety deep in the subconscious and go about our every day activities mostly oblivious to the fact that in the great scheme of things those activities are exceedingly short-term and for the most part meaningless.

"The enemy of mankind is basic repression," said Becker. The theme of his book is that the unrepressed life can bring into birth a new man. In another book along the same line, The Broken Connection, Robert Jay Lifton, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology, says much the same thing as Becker. "In real psychological ways, one must know death in order to live with free imagination," is the way Lifton puts it.

Lifton tells us that we have to be able to imagine it, to visualize it before we can accept the survival of consciousness. Therein is the failure of orthodox religion; there is nothing to visualize beyond harps and clouds. When we make Dr. Death our companion, however, we can begin to visualize something, even though it may never be completely in focus. In so visualizing, we begin to comprehend the divine plan. We are able to understand that there is no sudden enlightenment on the Other Side. There is no heaven-hell dichotomy. There are planes or dimensions to which our undying minds or souls gravitate based on the spiritual development achieved on earth. We are able to formulate a paradigm that involves a Creative Force, whatever shape He, She, or It takes, and are able to see how the divine plan plays itself out in cosmic evolution. We see how we are really souls occupying bodies rather than bodies housing souls and how our souls are progressing in finding their way back to Oneness with the Creator through the challenges, the adversities, the trials and tribulations offered us in a particular lifetime. We understand how a life without adversity offers little opportunity for growth. We come to appreciate the words of Mozart that "death, as we consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence."

That's as difficult for most people to understand as the controversial Atkins' Diet, which I have undertaken as part of my New Year's resolution to lose 20 pounds, is for me to comprehend. The Atkins' Diet calls for the dieter to eat all kinds of fatty foods, at least in the beginning stages. That makes absolutely no sense to me, but I know it worked for me in the past. Just as mainstream scientists take issue with the findings of psychical researchers who have discovered an "afterlife," many scientists find fault with the Atkins' Diet. It's hard to know what to believe, but one thing becomes clear and that is that science nearly always lags behind truth. There is something of a paradox in both death and the Atkins' Diet, but life often seems like one big paradox.

It is possible to view death in a positive light, in the same way we view retirement, but, unfortunately, orthodox religion has been as closed-minded as mainstream science in opening itself to true enlightenment. The Bible tells us to "seek and ye shall find," and further says that "seek ye first the kingdom of God." But you have to know where to look, and orthodox religion still doesn't know where to look.

And that is why I wrote The Articulate Dead, hoping that at least a few people might read it and visualize a spirit world, thereby helping them make friends with Dr. Death and "live in eternity." Moreover, many spirit messages suggest that knowledge of fundamental facts about the way things work on the "other side" facilitate one's "awakening" and progress in the new environment.

For more information on "The Artculate Dead" click on one of the two sites below

http://www.galdepress.com/books/paranormal/articulatedead.html

http://www.amazon.com/Articulate-Dead-Michael-E-Tymn/dp/193194248X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230787057&sr=1-1

Tags: spirituality, death, afterlife, life after death, consciousness, The Articulate Dead, Michael Tymn, living in eternity

Is Christmas Celebrated in the Spheres?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:39:07 GMT

According to Silver Birch, the spirit entity who communicated for nearly 50 years through the trance mediumship of Maurice Barbanell, a British journalist, certain groups in the afterlife spheres celebrate the holidays - both Christmas and Easter. However, he pointed out that these celebrations were going on well before the Christian era gave added meaning to them.

At what is now Christmas time, the birth of the sun was celebrated - the end of the long cycle when there arose the first sign that new life was being born into the earthly world. Then, when the sun attained its fully glory it was regarded as a period of resurrection. "Those times had significance to us because it was then that we received the greatest communion from the Great Spirit," he explained. "You do not yet understand very much the influence of the sun. At these times, we held for many days what you call séances. We received at those festivals much inspiration."

The festival of the birth of the sun was the most important, Silver Birch added, because it represented the beginning of a new era. It was the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. Because the festivals were held in the world of matter, they were celebrated in the world of spirit. "A spiritual meaning has now come out of them," Silver Birch continued. "Instead of celebrating the dawn of the new life, we now use it to withdraw from the world of matter to get new power of the spirit so that we can bring new light to the world."

At what might be called retreats here on earth, these advanced spirits take counsel from even higher spirits, share experiences, learn how far they have succeeded or failed, and formulate plans for future missions. Among those higher spirits who give counsel, he said, "is the great figure of the Nazarene, who is still imbued with the task of teaching humanity age-old truth enshrined in all that we seek to do, that love is the fulfilling of the law."

However, Silver Birch stressed that he is not the Nazarene of the Churches, exalted into a deified place, but rather a great spirit who strives still to serve through many instruments. "I wish that you could see and hear the Nazarene and feel that great love as he encourages us in our missions, as he expresses his knowledge of all that has been done and urges us to go forward with new strength, with new hope, with new vision, and with new purpose."

One of the sitters asked Silver Birch if in referring to the Nazarene, he was speaking of the man Jesus or the spirit forces working through him. "The man," Silver Birch replied through the entranced medium. "But he has since evolved and there is now a far greater spiritual consciousness expressed through him than there was in the earthly incarnation, for the amount that he expressed then had to be in consonance with the limitations of his day. There has never been on earth anyone through whom the manifestation of the spirit has been greater than through the Nazarene. There has never been any through whom the laws have revealed themselves at so great an intensity as through the Nazarene."

At another sitting, a person asked Silver Birch if Jesus was "God the Son," as the Church teaches, or if he was an ordinary man with great mediumistic powers. Silver Birch answered: "The Nazarene was a messenger of the Great Spirit who came into your world in order to fulfill a mission of the Great Spirit. He fulfilled his mission on earth, but he has not yet fulfilled the rest of his mission, which is till being directed from the world of spirit. It is wrong to worship the Nazarene, for worship should be given only to the Great Spirit and not to His messengers. The Nazarene came into your world by fulfilling the natural laws which the Great Spirit had ordained, the same natural laws which all must fulfill in order to be born into your world. You cannot live, you cannot be born into your world, you cannot pass from your world into mine, except through the natural laws of the Great Spirit."

Asked about the Christian doctrine of atonement, Silver Birch said: "How pitiable a conception is this of the Great Spirit and of the mission of the Nazarene! He was full of the love and mercy and gentleness of a loving Father. You are all placed in the world of matter to build your own character and accomplish your own soul evolution...All else is a doctrine of cowardice and injustice. If you have done wrong, be a man and pay the price! Do not attempt to shelve your responsibilities on to the back of another."

Homosexuality and Possession

In my blog post of November 7, reference was made to a book by Wanda Pratnicka, Possessed by Ghosts (2006), in which she claims that a primary cause of homosexuality is possession at birth by an earth-bound spirit of the opposite sex. Several people responded somewhat emotionally to the post, both at the site and by e-mail to me. A couple of them implied that I was endorsing the view or that it was disparaging to gays to even give recognition to such a theory.

As I told them, I am highly skeptical of that particular claim by Pratnicka, although I am much less skeptical when it comes to possession or overshadowing, in general. However, I offered Pratnicka's views on the subject as food for thought. I am not qualified to accept or reject her assertions on the subject. Moreover, to the extent that I find most everything else she states to be consistent with what others have written on the subject of possession, I think it would be irresponsible for me to reject her statements because it offends some people or because some people are unable to set emotion aside in considering such a "theory," even though Prtnicka presents it as fact, not theory.

I recently received the below e-mail from Dr. Paul D. Biscop, of Nanaimo, British Columbia, and would like to present his view on the subject:

"While I have not read [Pratnicka's] book, I would nonetheless like to respond for your readers from my professional point of view as a Registered Art Therapist (ATR) and a Cultural Anthropologist (Ph.D.) and from my personal point of view as a Spiritualist medium of 40 years.

"As a professional anthropologist teaching at College and University levels, my teaching specialties include Anthropology of Religion; Healing (Medical) and Human Sexuality, the latter of which I pioneered in teaching in western Canada, first at Simon Fraser University and then at Douglas College here in British Columbia. Patricka‘s claim that homosexuality is caused by possession at birth by an earth-bound spirit of the opposite sex is one that could be accepted only by those who might share what appears to be a mediaeval religious world view, one in which any kind of non-reproductive sex is considered "unnatural" and therefore "of the Devil", thus leading to an explanation of homosexuality as "unnatural" and more or less demonic, a demonic etiology of homosexuality if you will. I suspect her work is a published attempt to validate and legitimate not a clinical or academic point of view but rather a bizarre religious point of view. There are serious flaws of assumptions as well as ignorance of cross-cultural data on human sexual behaviors in general and the meanings given to the variants found, especially in regard to homosexual behaviour and gender as well.

"It appears that Pratnicka considers both sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) a part of "nature" (as ordered by God?) and not a part of culture, as created by humankind. From an anthropological cross-cultural perspective, a number of points are clear: biology provides the basis for sex (male/female/intersexed) but culture provides the meanings that become attached both to sex and sexual behaviour; sexual behaviour and sexual identity are separate and not necessarily consistent; gender roles are created by society and culture, and vary accordingly. In fact, both sexual and gender identities are far more numerous and flexible cross-culturally than the usual narrow definitions of orthodox Western thinking might expect. Sexual behaviour that has one meaning in one culture might have an opposite or other meaning in another culture. As for gender, there are many societies that permit of plural genders and gender identities rather than only two, as in Western concepts. In a few societies, gender is not fixed but assigned according to particular tasks which either men or women may take up or leave aside as they choose or are required.

"Homosexuality, as defined in Western terms, may or may not occur in every society, but homosexual activities may occur without any particular identity being attached to them. In some cases, the presence of homosexuality may be missed by outside observers because the natives have no particular term or perception of it as such. While the biological similarity of males everywhere, as females every where, is much the same, it is reasonable to expect some similarity in gender roles as well. This we find cross-culturally, but at the same time we also find considerable variation in gender roles.

"Indeed, the example of ritual homosexuality as required in some Melanesian societies, which is not defined as homosexual behaviourbut rather a necessity of biology in order to "grow boys into men", shows the poverty of Pratnicka's concepts. What the cross-cultural study of human sexuality strongly suggests is that "nature" gives us the drive to eroticize something or other, but culture and individual factors shape what is ultimately eroticized by anyone, male, female, intersexed or other. In fact, the variety of human sexual behaviour, and the flexibility with which it is expressed, would support not a genetic likelihood for homosexuality, but rather a socially learned pattern of behaviour and identity construction.

"Spirit possession beliefs and practices vary greatly from culture to culture as well, and, though common, are not quite universally found either. Both the kinds and nature of spirits are culturally conceived and experienced. Possession may be involuntary or it may be voluntary; most commonly, it begins as involuntary and progresses to be voluntary. I have not heard of any culture in which possession is believed to occur at birth and continue throughout the lifetime, whether that possession be by a spirit of the same sex or opposite sex. In some cases, spirits do not have sex as male or female at all.

"As an Art Therapist formerly in clinical practice with adolescents in a psychiatric facility, and as a cultural anthropologist, I am aware of many claims in our society to have "cured" homosexuality that generally do not hold up to scrutiny either clinically or over the long term. Most of these claims seem to serve only to validate the status of the claimant, whether scientist, pastor, therapist or snake oil salesman!

"Finally, I might add that in forty years of public mediumship, I have never encountered a case of actual possession under any circumstances. All I have ever seen is some great fiction, based loosely on some early social science research, and lots of anecdotal tales that cannot be confirmed. I have, however, seen possession that does fit the anthropological profile, and I respect the use of what is believed to be possession as a genuine means to spiritual experience in the context of those particular cultures in which it is documented.

"What we see in Pratnicka's tale is not science or social science, but the politics of explanation, in which explanation is tied to ideology and personal expedience at the expense of peoples' experience of human needs and even of truth itself. One can only shake one's head at such incredible nonsense."

Tags: Spirituality, Christmas, Silver Birch, atonement, Christ, Jesus, possession, homosexuality

An Interview with Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:34:05 GMT

Above: Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D.

This interview appears in the current edition of "The Searchlight," which I edit for the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Inc. Dr. Alvarado will be the keynote speaker at the Academy's conference June 19-22, 2009 at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. If you are interested in attending the conference, go to their web site at http://aspsi.org/?a89ae568

"Not only do I believe that scientific and scholarly approaches may help us to understand psychic phenomena more deeply, but I see the discipline as a unique strand of humankind's efforts to understand itself."

So writes Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado, assistant professor of research in psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Dr. Alvarado has agreed to be the keynote/Frank C. Tribbe Memorial speaker at the Academy's 2009 conference June 19-22 at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. He will discuss aspects of the history of out-of-body experiences.
Alvarado, who grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, received his BA in psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, an MSc in parapsychology from John F. Kennedy University in California, an MA in history from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Edinburgh.

He is the author of Getting Started in Parapsychology (2002), which he is currently updating. With his wife, Nancy L. Zingrone, he has been presenting continuing education seminars for psychologists in Puerto Rico about parapsychological topics. Also with his wife, he is currently analyzing the results of surveys involving depersonalization and dream experiences, and he is writing a variety of papers about OBEs and NDEs, funded by a grant from the Society for Psychical Research. One of those papers will be the basis for the keynote address at the Academy's conference.
I recently put some question to him by e-mail.

Dr. Alvarado, what motivated you to become a parapsychologist?

"When I was around 17, I developed an interest in psychic phenomena and related topics. It is an interest I cannot explain. I read about yoga, witchcraft and many other topics. In my readings I encountered the field of parapsychology and was immediately attracted to the scientific study of psychic phenomena. I started my study of parapsychology's literature around 1972. I remember reading various journals from cover to cover and books by authors such as Robert Amadou, Hereward Carrington, Frederic W.H. Myers, J.G. Pratt, J.B. Rhine, Louisa E. Rhine, René Sudre, and many others. Somewhat later, I started reading the old literature and was forever fascinated by the historical aspects of the field. At the time I was living in Puerto Rico and every time I visited New York City, I took the opportunity to buy old books.

"I wanted to be a parapsychologist. But due to practical considerations, such as the lack of employment and formal educational programs on the subject, I opted for the study of psychology instead."

Do you have any regrets about entering the field?

"I do not have regrets. However, it has been difficult to obtain employment due to my work in parapsychology. This was particularly true when I went back to Puerto Rico around 1997. For example, a friend of the family who took my CV to a person she knew in one of the administration offices of a private university reported back saying that this person handed the CV back to her with disdain for my parapsychological interests. There were other problems, including successful attempts to curtail my teaching of parapsychology in a local institution through various means such as telling students my courses were not going to be offered that particular semester when this was not true.

"While these problems made life difficult, particularly financially, I am aware that others have had far worse experiences. Life has been made easier due to my marriage to Nancy L. Zingrone, who also works in parapsychology and collaborates with me in research and other projects. And the work is fascinating to me. In addition, the phenomena of the field have implications about human nature that are of great importance."

What has been the highlight of your career to date?

"I do not think I would refer to ‘highlights,' but instead to things that were important to me professionally. Two examples were my association with persons that are no longer alive. Between 1982 and 1986 I worked for Dr. Ian Stevenson as a research assistant at the University of Virginia. I learned much from Dr. Stevenson, both from his work and from him as a person. My period at the University of Edinburgh pursuing a Ph.D. with Robert L. Morris was also important to me. Dr. Morris' positive and supportive attitude towards students was inspirational and something to emulate. Both of these events provided useful professional and personal development in ways I cannot start to describe in this short interview."

What are your main areas of interest in parapsychology?

"I am very interested in providing historical perspective to workers in parapsychology. This involves the publication of papers that remind current researchers that specific ideas and research are not new but have a history, and that knowledge of this literature can give you perspective and ideas for further research. Furthermore, this literature is sometimes essential for evidential and theoretical concerns. I discussed this in a paper I published in 1982 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research entitled "Historical Perspective in Parapsychology: Some Practical Considerations." With this purpose in mind, I have published many papers summarizing aspects of the old literature about such varied topics as out-of-body experiences, displacement in ESP, ESP and altered states of consciousness, parapsychological terminology, Ernesto Bozzano's ideas about bilocation, the concept of human radiations, SPR dissociation work, and mental mediumship and memory. The latter paper was published in 1980 in the Journal of the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research.

"I am also interested in more general historical issues beyond the practical use of the old literature for the interests of parapsychologists. There is much to learn from the past about the various factors that have affected the development of the field, as well as about particular ideas and methodologies without focusing on the reality of the phenomena. I have written papers along these lines about the influence of Eusapia Palladino on the development of ideas in psychical research, and the more general influence of mediumship in the development of concepts about the subconscious mind and dissociation."

When did you become interested in OBEs?

"I published my first paper on the topic when I was 21 years old. This was a review of experimental studies that appeared in the Spanish journal Psi Comunicación in 1976. Since then I have conducted research on the subject, first for my MS degree and later for my Ph.D. degree. This research - most of which I have conducted with my wife Nancy - has centered on questionnaire studies about the psychology of the person who has had OBEs, and about the features of the OBE, or characteristics such as floating over the physical body, seeing the physical body, and traveling to a distant location. The field of OBE research is very underdeveloped and much needs to be done. I have had the opportunity to study aspects of the experience that no one has focused on in modern times. This includes attempts to replicate the OBE feature patterns reported both by Sylvan Muldoon and Robert Crookall."

So much of modern parapsychology beats around the bush on the issue of the survival of consciousness after death, focusing more on the existence of ESP of one kind or another and seemingly pretending that it is unrelated to the survival issue or ignoring it. Where do you stand on the survival issue?

"For many workers in the field, survival research is not a main interest. To some extent this is academics as usual. People specialize in some areas and develop interests due to personality traits, life experiences, training, and employment opportunities, and parapsychology is no exception. Then there are concerns such as getting tenure and the belief that the area has many methodological difficulties. However, I believe that in some cases there is more than this. In some circles it is more "respectable" to conduct ESP experiments than working with survival-related phenomena such as apparitions or mediumship. I still remember how the director of a parapsychology unit within an university, wanting to keep a conservative image, discouraged students from pursuing topics such as apparitions for dissertation research.

"While I have my doubts about some of the evidence, overall I think there is enough to take the idea of survival seriously. For example, the best of the mediumship literature (particularly studies with Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard) is impressive to me.

"I agree with Ian Stevenson when, after discussing alternate explanations, he wrote: ‘I can say that I think reincarnation is, for some cases, the best interpretation. I am not claiming that it is the only possible interpretation for these cases, just that it seems the best one among all those that I have mentioned.'

"Something similar may be said about some cases of mediumship and apparitions, but we need to be careful about dogmatic opinions. I am continuously surprised about how sure many individuals are about many obscure issues relevant to survival to the point of preaching. For example, some assure us that consciousness needs a subtle body to communicate, while others are equally convinced that such view is nonsensical because consciousness has no need of such mechanisms to manifest. But not all of us can see the logic behind such convictions and in fact it seems that some presume to know too much without actual evidence, or without recognizing the ambiguity of some of the evidence. Similarly, others talk about nonphysicality or nonlocality as if they really knew the nature of the problem. While such ideas need to be discussed, and actually make sense in some instances, we need to realize that we know almost nothing about these constructs."

What other areas of parapsychology do you feel have been neglected?

"One of them is the importance of spontaneous cases, which I discussed in my 1995 presidential address to the Parapsychological Association entitled ‘The Place of Spontaneous Cases in Parapsychology.' Unfortunately parapsychology as a scientific discipline has neglected studies that are not conducted in the laboratory. My address was a critique of this situation from different points of view. I have made this point repeatedly in other papers.

"Another topic that has been neglected is luminous phenomena. In 1987 I published a paper listing and analyzing features of luminous manifestations seen close to the body of mediums, dying persons, mystics and saints, and others. In my paper "Neglected Near-death Phenomena," published in 2006 in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, I made a call, with specific suggestions for research, to consider phenomena such as physical events (clock stopping, falling pictures), and observations of ‘emanations' from the body of dying persons. Regarding other neglected phenomena, I have conducted statistical studies of haunting apparitions and auras.

"Most of my efforts in the last years have been the education of the general public through Web materials. Through my association with the Parapsychology Foundation, I have prepared several online materials that anyone can access. This includes over 40 short bibliographies on different topics."

It often seems to me that parapsychology is trying to reinvent the wheel and ends up with a square wheel. How do you see this?

"I still recall a conversation with someone that argued that he did not see the point in conducting more parapsychological research because we had already established the existence of the phenomena and its spiritual nature. But even granting these points for the sake or argument, such a view does not satisfy the scientific mind. There are still many questions that are unanswered. Just as saying that suggestion ‘explains' hypnosis, which is no explanation at all, we should not presume that evoking the nonlocal or spiritual aspect of humankind is really an explanation, or at least the end of the argument. If, as argued by William James and others, the mind is an independent agent that uses the nervous system to communicate, but is not generated by that system, even if its expression may be hindered or modified by it, there is much to investigate and to be learned about the presumed psychophysical interaction between these orders of reality.

"The point of science is not just to assert that something exists, but to understand its functioning. In addition, we do not understand the nature of parapsychological individual differences. Why are some people more open to psychic experiences than others? Why do some mediums receive information via possession, while others perceive images or words dictated to them? We are still at the beginning of our explorations."

What historical cases have impressed you the most?

"There are many old cases that I find impressive. Regarding mental mediumship, I can mention Leonora E. Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard. The case of Eusapia Palladino, even accepting the obvious evidence for fraud, is impressive in many respects.

"Many of the reports include much more than evidential information. This was the case of the features of ESP presented by Stephan Ossowiecki. Other examples are the 1892 and 1898 reports of Mrs. Piper authored by Richard Hodgson that have much information about trances and spirit controls."

If you could go back in time and meet one of the early researchers, who would it be?

"The history of psychical research presents us with so many fascinating individuals that I find it very hard to focus only on one. One of them has to be Frederic W.H. Myers, who was a brilliant individual. The way he brought together many aspects of psychology and psychical research was remarkable and very different from most of his contemporaries. He seemed to have experienced those subliminal uprushes he wrote about. I think that Myers was more influential in psychical research after his death in 1901 than has been recognized. But in some ways his ideas were watered down over time and, as happens in many fields, people adopted some concepts (such as the role of the subconscious) without crediting Myers. This topic deserves historical study.

"Another fascinating figure I would like to meet is Charles Richet. He showed much courage in defending psychic phenomena putting his scientific reputation at risk. While he conducted research, he also did much for the field using his social and scientific prestige to open doors for psychical research, particularly in France.

"While much less ‘prestigious' and with less formal education than Myers and Richet, Hereward Carrington devoted his life to the field. I have been studying the beginning of his career and it is interesting that his initial reputation in the field was made through his exposures of mediumistic fraud. He was also a prolific writer of books and articles for the general public. In my view his career would constitute an excellent case study in the popularization of psychical research."

Many of Dr.Alvarado's articles can be found at http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/Carlosbio.cfm

Tags: spirituality, psychical research, parapsychology, Carlos S. Alvarado, out-of-body travel

Real Dead Men Talking

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:53:46 GMT

above: Hamlin Garland

In case you missed this past Tuesday's segment of "The Mentalist," CBS's popular new detective program, it appears that Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker) may have been converted to a belief in life after death. In the first segment of the series, Patrick, a flamboyant private detective with special intuitive abilities, made it clear that he does not believe in psychics or in life after death. In Tuesday's program, Patrick was out to expose a "psychic who channels the dead" as a fraud, but he failed and clearly met his match.

One of Patrick's colleagues, who believed that the psychic was for real, lambasted him for trying to expose the psychic as a fraud, asking him to consider that he might be wrong and wondering how his deceased wife and daughter, both killed in an auto accident, may now feel realizing that he thinks they are extinct. Patrick's expression suggested his ego had never allowed him to consider that possibility. At the end of the show the psychic passed on a very evidential message from Patrick's wife, one which left Patrick crying and hopefully convinced.

So it is with the real-life "skeptics," i.e., the pseudo-skeptics, who say that stories like the one below are all bunk. They claim to be emissaries of truth, hoping to cleanse the world of religious superstition, while not really considering the possibility that they are wrong and, if they are wrong, how that makes our deceased relatives and friends feel or what a world without hope and looking only toward extinction might be like. Many of them display a certain bravado in that respect, but it appears nothing more than bravado.

In Dark Lore, Volume II, recently released by Daily Grail Publishing, Stephen Braude, a professor of philosophy and a popular author in the field of parapsychology, discusses the "Fear of Psi" that grips mainstream science. He points out how the pseudo skeptics resort to ad hominem arguments in their attempts to discredit valid phenomena. As an example, he cites the case of D. D. Home, the renowned medium of yesteryear, mentioning that books attempting to debunk Home suggest that he had an affair or that he might have been homosexual, apparently believing that by attacking his character they succeed in debunking him.

Braude also gives examples of the "straw man" arguments used by skeptics. They mention that some of the minor phenomena can be performed by magicians while ignoring the major phenomena which no magician has been known to duplicate.

"It's obvious that many skeptics are intelligent people, and I suggest that it is highly unlikely that these shabby criticisms of parapsychological evidence are simply the sorts of occasional and more or less random spasms of stupidity that all persons experience sometimes," Braude writes, going on to say that many skeptics are simply in a kind of conceptual panic and that in the grip of this panic their reason and integrity go by the wayside.

In another chapter of the Dark Lore anthology, popular author Michael Prescott addresses the attempts of skeptics to debunk the famous R-101 case, the subject of a recent blog entry here (See "Irrefutable Evidence of Life after Death" under the "popular" tab on the right side of this screen). The skeptics came up with all kinds of "could haves" or "might haves." As Prescott points out, as long as some of the facts are well in the past and cannot be verified one way or the other, the case cannot be considered airtight. Moreover, it unlikely that any single case can establish the validity of a phenomenon like mediumship. However, the cumulative weight of hundreds, even thousands of cases certainly offers a preponderance of evidence, if not evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt." (More about Dark Lore, Volume II, at the end of this entry)

Seemingly typical of the Patrick Jane mindset was a comment by Michael Shermer, the editor of a skeptic's magazine, in an A & E program this past week featuring a "psychic detective" who was called in to help locate a missing child. Shermer attempted to debunk the psychic detective by asking why, if she could really find people, she couldn't find Osama bin Laden or Jimmy Hoffa. Of course, such a statement appeals to the know-nothings, but clearly displays a lack of understanding of the psychic process. It's like asking why the psychic can't give you the winning lottery numbers.

This blog is dedicated to offering evidence - some of it strong, much of it clearly anecdotal - for the survival of consciousness after death. As Sir Oliver Lodge, the renowned British physicist, said many years ago, it was not any single case or communication that convinced him of survival. Rather it was, as suggested above, the cumulative evidence. It is such cumulative evidence that helps us move from open-minded skepticism or blind faith to conviction and the recognition that we are not marching toward an abyss of nothingness, or total extinction. Consider this case, as reported by Dr. Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of more than 50 books as well as a psychical researcher, keeping in mind that Garland was clearly a skeptic - although an open-minded one - when he began his investigations of mediums and psychics. Outside of claiming that Garland, clearly a man of honor and integrity based on various biographies, made up the story or considerably embellished it, how can the pseudo-skeptic explain it?

Shortly after the end of World War I, Hamlin Garland, was in New York City and was invited to lunch at the Bankers' Club on Wall Street by his old friend, Edwin Winter. Knowing of Garland's interest in psychic matters, Winter brought along another guest whom he introduced as Thomas Traynor, telling Garland that Traynor had the gift of second sight. Traynor informed Garland that ever since he could remember he could see "invisibles" and report their words to his friends and relatives. He didn't know how it worked other than that he was some kind of "wireless receiving station." Winter, a retired railroad company president, told Garland that he had heard from many of his deceased railroad cronies through Traynor's clairvoyance and clairaudience. He suggested they meet at his apartment so that Garland might experience Traynor's gift.

Several days later, Garland, his wife, Augustus Thomas (Garland's friend), Traynor, and Winter met for dinner at Winter's Park Ave. apartment. "Nothing was said of his mediumship during dinner," Garland recorded, "but an hour later as we were all sitting before the fire, with our coffee and cigars, Winter turned to Traynor and said, ‘Well, Tom, do you see any spooks in the room?'" Traynor replied that he saw a young woman standing beside Mrs. Garland. This startled her, Garland noted, as she disbelieved in spirits and ghosts and disliked all discussion of them. However, Traynor continued: "She says her name is Scales - Carrie L. Scales. She is about thirty-five. She is tall with brown hair combed up in a roll above her brow. She says to you, Mrs. Garland, that you were not with her when she passed out - neither was her husband."

Mrs. Garland immediately recognized the name and the facts but remained silent. "As he went on, he began to impersonate the dead woman," Garland continued the story. He spoke as if she were using his organs of speech. Addressing my wife directly, ‘Carrie' entered into most intimate details. ‘For a time I resented my husband's second marriage, but I am resigned to it now,' she said."

The communicating spirit described events of which Mrs. Garland had no knowledge and which Traynor could not have read. Mrs. Garland was deeply moved, commenting that every relationship and every description was accurate, at least those she knew of.

Traynor then turned to Winter and told him that there was a man there who claimed to have known him since he was a boy. "I used to see you on the platform of the station at Beloit, Wisconsin," Traynor quoted the spirit. "You used to come down to the train with pails of berries to sell to the passengers."

Winter agreed that he sold pails of berries to passengers at that train station when he was a boy, but didn't know what man was being referred to. Traynor then impersonated the man. "I was conductor on the local which ran from Chicago to Madison. I wore a fancy vest-you'll remember that vest - and it was my habit to wait till the last car came along before swinging on. You liked to see me do it. You admired me."

Garland noted that the tone of the voice then changed. "After you became a big man in the railway business you made me a division superintendent. That was a mistake. I wasn't big enough for the job."

Winter then recalled the man and remembered promoting him after he became general manager of the Northern Railway. He remembered the fancy vest and watching him swing on to the rear car platform. He further recalled that the man failed as a superintendent and returned to being a conductor.

Traynor then turned to Thomas and began talking about an old friend of his, which Thomas immediately recognized. Several other old friends were then mentioned. Garland noted that Traynor could turn his power off and on like twisting a key. Thomas suggested that it was a case of mind-reading and that even though the people mentioned to the sitters were not on their minds and in the case of the train conductor had not been thought of in years, that Traynor was somehow able to dig into their subconscious memories.

Winter brought out some papers in which he recorded the details of a previous sitting with Traynor. Traynor told him that there was "a queer, seedy, old chap, who says that he is a kind of uncle of yours." Winter didn't know whom he was talking about. The man then told him that he was married to his Aunt Sarah when he (Winter) was a child and gave his name as Milton K. Smalley.

Winter faintly recalled that his Aunt Sarah was married to someone when he was a boy but had never met him and had forgotten him completely. Winter asked what the man wanted. "He doesn't seem to want anything - just wishes to say that he didn't appreciate your aunt," Traynor said. "He would like to identify himself and clear his record. He says: ‘I left your aunt and went down to Lowell just before the Civil War broke out. I enlisted in one of the first Massachusetts regiments to go South and I was killed in the Baltimore riot along with four other men.'"

In an attempt to confirm the information, Winter wrote to the Adjutant General at the State House in Boston. The reply came that there was no such man as Milton K. Smalley in their records. The next time he saw Traynor, Winter told him of the search and negative results. Traynor then became silent and a fixed look came into his eyes. He then began impersonating Smalley: "Of course you didn't find me under that name. I enlisted under another name altogether. You see I'd been living with another woman since leaving your aunt, and I enlisted as Jackson Turner."

Winter checked with the Adjutant General again and confirmed that Jackson Turner was in the regiment indicated and that he had been killed in the streets of Baltimore along with three other men. Moreover, Winter contacted his sister and confirmed his Aunt Sarah's marriage to Smalley.

If Traynor had been mind-reading, both Garland and Winter wondered how he could come upon such facts that were definitely not in Winter's subconscious mind. While Winter vaguely recalled the marriage and may have heard the name Smalley, he clearly did not know the name Jackson Turner and the fact that Turner was killed in Baltimore.

Not long after, Garland arranged to have Traynor visit with him and his friend Brown, who was grieving the recent death of his wife. Sometime after they finished eating, Traynor began to impersonate Mrs. Brown. "From his lips came words which indicated that the dying woman had twice left the body and that she had visited friends during her first flight," Garland wrote.

"I heard your voice," the dead woman told her husband, "and returned to my body. I heard you, but I could not answer."

Traynor then turned to Garland and spoke in the dead woman's character. "I wanted to see you before you went home, but I was not able to do so. I was too weak." Garland confirmed that he was staying with Brown at the time, but had to leave to fill some lecture dates. Also, the apparent death of Mrs. Brown and her revival a few hours later was true, as was her reported appearance at the bedside of a friend during her "first flight."

In spite of many years of psychical research and having observed much similar phenomena, Garland could not bring himself to accept the spirit hypothesis. He preferred to see it as some kind of "perceptive sensing" which could not be understood. Nevertheless, he concluded that the case of Tom Traynor strengthened the case for personal survival after death.

Dark Lore, Volume II, a collection of stories about the paranormal to which I have contributed a chapter ( about pre-Raymond Moody near-death experiences), was released last week and is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Published by Daily Grail Publishing, this book has 15 stories on topics covering everything from mediumship and UFOs to the Crystal Skull and the Loch Ness Monster. Check http://darklore.dailygrail.com/ for a couple of sample chapters from the book.

Tags: spirituality, life after death, mediumship, skepticism, The Mentalist, Hamlin Garland, enlightenment

Is Homosexuality a Result of Overshadowing?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:42:31 GMT

In her 2006 book, Possessed by Ghosts, Wanda Pratnicka, a Polish psychotherapist, healer, and exorcist, states that one of the primary causes of homosexuality is possession of a child by a ghost of the opposite sex. “When a woman-ghost has dominated the mind of a boy, he will seek out contacts with men,” Pratnicka writes. “…The same thing happens by analogy to a girl who has been possessed by a man.”

As Pratnicka defines it, a ghost is a spirit who has not passed through to the other side of death’s curtain and has to “hook up” to a living person in order to survive. It then steals the person’s energy. “For many ghosts this is, however, not enough so then they steal the person's body as well,” Pratnicka claims. “If such a ghost also succeeds in usurping a person's mind then we're dealing with total possession. Such a person is a puppet which is completely governed by a ghost.”

According to Pratnicka,, a ghost whose life revolved around satisfying sexual desires will likely continue the pursuit on the other side. “After death, their sexual urges pull them down and prevent them going further toward the Light,” she explains. “They are tied to the question which filled their whole lives, that is the pursuit of a suitable partner. Now this becomes their motive force, an obsession in the seeking out of anyone who happens to be at hand and who would satisfy their needs and unrealized dreams best of all.”

Children are most often chosen, Pratnicka says, because the possession is usually by a deceased relative and the child, knowing him or her, doesn’t shut himself off from the ghost. The possession is usually not perceptible to family members, but eventually family members may begin to comment that their child looks like and acts like Uncle Ivan or Aunt Ida, while assuming it is a genetic matter rather than one of possession.

“The ghost of any person who has died and not passed through to the other side of death's curtain may be the one which has just possessed us; so it may be our mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, granny, uncle, aunt, friend, work-mate, neighbor, school friend or some random ghost which just happened to be nearby,” Pratnicka offers, adding that sometimes it is a strong bond between people of which they may be unaware.

Pratnicka says she has encountered homosexuality as a result of possession hundreds of times out of the several thousand patients of hers world-wide. (Although living in Poland, she has U.S. and Great Britain phones numbers; see her website at www.TheExorcisms.com) She adds that she has been successful in exorcising such possessing spirits, but they often come back.

In a LifeSiteNews.com story on August 15, 2008, Father Jeremy Davies, a Catholic priest with the Westminster diocese in the United Kingdom, is quoted as saying that “among the causes of homosexuality is a contagious demonic factor.” An Oxford graduate who is also a physician, Davies is the author of Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism in Scripture and Practice, published earlier this year. The article goes on to quote Davies as saying that even heterosexual promiscuity can open up the individual to “evil spirits” and that young people are especially vulnerable.

Davies has served as exorcist for the Westminster Archdiocese s since 1986 and co-founded the International Association of Exorcists, which has hundreds of members worldwide. In a 2000 interview, Davies told an independent newspaper that incidents of demonic possession are rising dramatically. "At the centre of this is man's ever-growing pride and attempted self-reliance. Man trying to build a better world without God - another Tower of Babel," he was quoted. said.

In his 2003 book, Healing Lost Souls, William J. Baldwin, Ph.D., an Orlando, Florida therapist, states that “an attached entity of the opposite gender can cause confusion over gender orientation and sexual behavior. This confusion can lead to homosexuality, transvestism, or transsexualism, and gender reassignment surgery.” He goes on to say that many people who are unhappy with their sexual orientation have been freed after releasing the entity that caused the problem.

Baldwin tells the story of a 55-year-old man who had been a transvestite for 50 years. He first became fascinated with his mother’s underwear when five years old and during his teen years stole articles of women’s clothing from clotheslines to use in his own wardrobe. Regressing the man, Baldwin determined that a woman who had been his babysitter when he was a young child and who had died in a trolley accident had attached herself to the man. Through releasement therapy, the invading spirit was released, but it came back after four months. It was again released and had not returned after six months.

A 62-year-old male architect suffering from “gender dysphoria” was found to have been controlled by his mother’s girlfriend who had died in a boating accident before he was born. She had entered the mother’s womb and attached herself to him about the sixth or seventh week in utero. Through releasement therapy, he was also freed but the entity returned. The man concluded that the entity was also responsible for his artistic ability and decided to keep her attached to him.

Louise Ireland-Frey, M.D., a Tulane University medical school graduate, discovered hypnotherapy late in her medical career and came to realize that many medical issues are caused by spirit possession. Her 1999 book Freeing Captives: The Emerging Therapy of Treating Attachment discusses how “attached” entities can be responsible for any number of physical, mental, and emotional disorders. She defines several degrees of attachment. First is temptation of the living person by a wandering spirit. This does not involve an overwhelming compulsion but a thought of doing something out of character for the person. Second is influencing or shadowing, where the disembodied entity is affecting the host person with mood swings, irrational moments, sudden inexplicable fears or depression. Oppression is a word used for a harassing entity. Obsession is where the entity may invade not only the psyche but also the physical body and meld its own personality traits and former bodily feelings with those of the host. Possession is the condition in which the invading entity completely takes over the body of the host, pushing out the host’s own personality (soul).

“A soul that is still very heavy with negative emotions and undesirable habits such as rage, cruelty, greed, etc., may be too negative to be attracted to the Light, and will turn away, not perceiving it, and go to a ‘place’ (a vibrational frequency or dimension) that is likewise dark and heavy, appropriate for its own present nature,” Ireland-Frey explains, going on to say that such souls become wanderers and attach themselves to living people. They are usually drawn to people with the same addictions, vices, or desires so that they can satisfy their still earthly desires through the bodies and senses of the living. The best defense against such attachment, Ireland-Frey states, is a clear, clean, and strong aura – one developed by healthy habits of all kinds.

Dr. Carl A. Wickland, a psychiatrist, dealt extensively with such spirits through the mediumship of his wife, Anna Wickland, during the early part of the 1900s. A member of the Chicago Medical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and director of the National Psychological Institute of Los Angeles, Wickland specialized in cases of schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, addiction, manic-depression, criminal behavior and phobias of all kind. In his 1924 book, Thirty Years Among the Dead, Wickland stated that much of such mental illness was caused by intruding, or obsessing, spirits. “Spirit obsession is a fact – a perversion of a natural law – and is amply demonstrable,” Wickland wrote. “This has been proven hundreds of times by causing the supposed insanity or aberration to be temporarily transferred from the victim to a psychic sensitive who is trained for the purpose, and by this method ascertain the cause of the psychosis to be an ignorant or mischievous spirit, whose identity may frequently be verified.”

I do have a problem understanding why innocent children – those who have not yet reached the age of reason – should be left defenseless and so susceptible to attack by earthbound spirits. I put this concern to Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., author of The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln and a book not yet released in which she attempts to debunk reincarnation by showing that every one of the stories seemingly lending itself to demonstrating reincarnation can be explained by overshadowing, another word for possession.

Martinez referred me to her recent article titled “The Invented God,” in which she discusses how we wrongly blame God when thing go wrong. “… far too much credit has been given to the Supreme for the play of events and forces that we ourselves have unleashed in the world – which in fact God had nothing to do with. How ready we have been to blame our own come-uppance (or even dumb luck) on a higher power!” she writes. “responsibility is key – with both eyes open. Let us leave God out of the equation for a minute and see how far we can get on our own hook – confessing our weaknesses and pledging to set things aright with all our wisdom, love and power.”

The same lack of divine justice relative to possession or overshadowing may be applied to the death of young children. What kind of God allows an innocent child to die before attaining the age of reason? This is a question that Mary Lincoln asked in her bereavement at the loss of her young son Willie in 1862 before realizing the folly of her “rebelliousness”: "How often I feel rebellious, and almost believe that our Heavenly Father has forsaken us, in removing so lovely a child from us! Yet I know, a great sin is committed when we feel thus”

“If Heaven owes us any explanations, it comes not in distracted moments of bereavement or rage, but from a lifetime of thought and study,” Martinez offers. “I have just come across a Jewish parable that ends with this moral (I will end with it too): “Mortals see only the beginning of any of God’s work. Therefore they cannot understand the nature and the end of creation.”

Addendum: Since postng the above 14 hours ago, I have received several e-mail from friends who feel that the whole subject matter is inappropriate. It was not my intent to in any way disparage gays or lesbians.   I am not prejudiced against either.  To each his own. I had not heard of the overshadowing explanation of homosexuality before I read Pratnicka's book and it struck me as something to explore in an objective manner. It is not something I am emotional about one way or the other, but apparently many people are.

After reading Pratnicka's comments, I searched for other references on the subject and added those. I wasn't prepared to examine other explanations in this blog as it is already long enough.  One writer stated that there is evidence we choose our sexual orientation before coming into the world. Another suggested that it is related to past-life karma.   Another said that there is a study indicating that animals can be homosexuals and wondered if animals can be overshadowed.   (Actually, there is, but that's something for a different blog).

"Possession" is a very emotional word and perhaps I should have used "overshadow" to begin with. I do believe there is strong evidence for other types of overshadowing, including small children being overshadowed by musicians and artists, etc. thereby becoming "child prodigies."   Whether they can be overshadoweed in the manner described by Pratnicka, I don't pretend to know. As I stated above, I have a hard time with the idea that defenseless children can be overshadowed, but I wanted to set forth the views of those who believe they can as food for thought.

Tags: possession, overshadowing, Susan Martinez, Carl Wickland, William J. Baldwin, Louise Ireland-Frey

What Happens to Suicide Bombers in the Afterlife?

http://metgat.gaia.com — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:52:23 GMT

There are very extreme views as to what should happen to suicide bombers in the afterlife. At one extreme, they are seen as heroic martyrs in the service of God and should be richly rewarded. At the other extreme, they are nothing but savage murderers who should "burn in hell" for eternity. Emotionally, at least, there seems to be no middle ground.

As discussed in the last blog post here, suicide is one subject on which spirit communicators all seem to agree. They condemn it. At least, that is so with traditional suicide. However, there is very little in the many communications that have come to us from the spirit world in recent centuries relative to non-traditional suicide, more specifically to what we call suicide bombers. Of course, we are talking murder as well as suicide, which further complicates the matter.

Leaving emotion aside, the rational person can struggle in attempting to reconcile the act with the motive. If the suicide bomber truly believes that he (or she) is sacrificing himself and taking the lives of those he kills for a greater good and is doing God's will, it is difficult to believe that he will be judged harshly by a benevolent God. If we judge ourselves, as many modern spirit messages seem to suggest, rather than standing before a tribunal of judges or before God, why should we think that the suicide bomber will suddenly realize the error of his ways and judge himself harshly?

In their 2006 book, Suicide: What really happens in the afterlife? Pamela Rae Heath, M.D., Psy.D., and Jon Klimo, Ph.D., recognize the dilemma and the lack of material on the subject. "What ultimately lies behind the terminal behavior of a suicide bomber does not lend itself to simple analysis," they point out.

Indeed, underneath their supposedly idealistic objectives, some suicide bombers may be driven by hatred, anger, envy, pride, fear, frustration, even lust in the case of those who expect to be greeted by 72 virgins. If they see their afterlife as being better than their current squalor, it would seem that their reasons are more self-serving than altruistic.

At the same time, there may be some altruistic motives mixed in with the egoistic motives. There may be some suicide bombers whose motives are predominately altruistic while the egoistic motives control to a much lesser extent. In effect, it is not a black and white situation. There are various shades of gray that must be sifted through in analyzing the mindset of the suicide bomber and we should not expect them to be all of the same mindset. Further, there is the issue of whether the seemingly altruistic motives are spiritual or material. If the objective is to make one's relatives and friends better off materially rather than spiritually, then it may be misguided altruism.

It is difficult to believe that the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II were driven by hatred, anger, and rewards in the afterlife. At least history has been kind to them in that respect, suggesting that they were driven, to the extent they had any choice, by a sense of honor and loyalty to their emperor and country. If the kamikaze pilots and the modern suicide bombers were all victims of "brainwashing," should they be punished severely in the afterlife for having been "simpleminded" and for not having been stronger in resisting more powerful minds?

Because of the various shades of gray running through the minds of the suicide bomber, it seems reasonable to assume that they do not meet with equal "justice" in the afterlife. Of course, the orthodox religionist who believes in only a dichotomous afterlife, i.e., the traditional humdrum heaven and horrific hell, may struggle to grasp that idea or totally reject it because it is not consistent with established dogma and doctrine. Those not so fettered have come to see an afterlife with as many states as there are degrees of goodness and evil in this life. As Christ said, "In my Father's house are many mansions."

Heath and Klimo attempted to get an afterlife perspective on the situation by having several reputable channelers contact some of the suicide bombers or their guides in the afterlife. While recognizing that channeled messages can be distorted, misinterpreted, or otherwise may not be what they are said to be, Heath and Klimo presented their findings for whatever they are worth.

"...in one channeling session, the guides that came through insisted that all terrorist souls are met by an entity, if only to make sure that their emotion does not contaminate the astral realm," Heath and Klimo write, going on to point out that one of the guides communicated that they are dealing in terms that do not exist in our realm and therefore it is difficult to describe. But, generally, most of them seem to be bewildered and slow to recognize they are dead.

All terrorists spirits appear to undergo a life-review, as do all other spirits who pass over. However, as with many other spirits, this life-review is not so much about judgment as it is about learning. "This may be a long and difficult period, as the spirits have to review not only their own life, but that of those they had harmed, along with the impact their actions had on others," Heath and Klimo point out. "Their progress appears to be slowed down by the strength which terrorists hold on to their own belief patterns (and may not be helped by their argumentative nature). Only one terrorist spirit claimed to have finished his life review (which could not be confirmed through other mediums); some appeared to be in the midst of it, while many did not appear to have started the process."

In effect, most of the terrorists contacted by the channelers still seemed to be floundering in the "ethers," what one guide referred to as the "gray area." Another guide communicated that they appeared to be in a drugged state and slow to adjust to their new environment. In some cases, the terrorists seem to be placed in something of a "holding pattern" until the guides feel they are capable of learning and advancing. One guide pointed out that they can be in this state from a month to a thousand years in linear time. The channeled messages also suggested that relatively few suicide bombers express regrets compared to traditional suicides.

The bottom line seems to be that the suicide bombers do not realize the rewards they are told to expect, but neither do they experience the fiery hell of orthodoxy. They may experience a "fire of the mind," especially if their motives were more self-serving than altruistic, but all are given the opportunity to learn from the experience and eventually advance.

Tags: suicide, suicide bombers, terrorists, afterlife, spirituality, life after death, consciousness, Pamela Rae Heath, Jon Klimo

Fate of Suicides in the Afterlife

http://metgat.gaia.com — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:26:45 GMT

There was a dramatic increase in the suicide rate during the Great Depression of the 1930s. If people who are losing their life savings in the current economic crisis are similarly inclined, they should reconsider. According to messages from the spirit world, they’ll just take their problems with them.

While there is a certain amount of conflicting information coming through mediums, the discerning student of mediumship comes to understand that spirits are not all-knowing, that some know little, if anything, more than they did when incarnate, that some are devious and intend to mislead, and that for the well-intentioned spirit, explaining celestial matters in terrestrial terms can be extremely difficult. Moreover, messages are often unintentionally “colored” by the mind of the medium, or they can be misinterpreted by the medium.

However, suicide is one subject on which the spirit messages all seem to agree. While there may be some conflicting messages relative to suicide by terminally-ill people, the messages overwhelmingly condemn traditional suicide. They strongly suggest that the individual who hopes to escape from his or her problems here in the material world does not do so.

Communicating through Gladys Osborne Leonard, a trance-voice medium, Claude Kelway-Bamber, a British pilot killed during World War I, told his mother that nothing can kill the soul. “You see, therefore, a suicide, far from escaping trouble, only goes from one form of misery to another; he cannot annihilate himself and pass to nothingness,” Claude stated.

In her 1964 book, Post-Mortem Journal, Jane Sherwood, an automatic writing medium, related information coming to her from a spirit known as “Scott,” a pseudonym for a spirit later identified as Colonel T. E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia.” Scott told of encountering one of his old friends in the afterlife, one who had killed himself. “He was in a kind of stupor and I was told that he might remain in this state for a long time and that nothing could be done about it,” he penned through Sherwood’s hand. “We watched over him and were loath to leave him in the misty half-region where he was found…Until he regained consciousness there he had to remain; had we forcibly removed him his poor body would not have been able to stand the conditions of our plane…Now and again I went back to find him still in the same quiet coma, and seeing the state of his astral form I almost dreaded his awakening.”

Scott went on to say that such long-lasting comas are common with suicides. “It is really a merciful pause during which some of the damage to their emotional bodies is quietly made good.” Scott and others attempted to help their old friend, but his condition was such that progress was slow.

“I am told that there is a belief that suicides remain in coma until the time when they would normally have died,” Scott added. “This is one of those propositions which are impossible of proof, since no one can say when their hour would have struck had they not anticipated it. It is a fact that this state of coma lasts for varying periods, but there is also a long period of unconsciousness in many who have come by violent deaths. A suicide differs from such a one because his emotional state is usually far worse and takes much longer to clear, but a long period of coma may supervene on death in either case…Eventually he must awaken and take on the task of fitting himself to enter his own appropriate sphere of being. This is where he can be and is helped. There is often a long convalescence before he can get free of the sin and suffering of his violent end.”

Lillian Bailey, a renowned medium, also received messages about suicide. One spirit communicated through her that the suicide will have to live through that which his physical body would have had to endure. “He will see the whole thing happening. He will be consciously living with the same problems, although there will be no one condemning him and there will be beauty all around him.”

The spirit went on to say that even though the suicide may feel he was justified in taking his own life, he is still a “gatecrasher” and that things are not ready for him in the spirit world. “It is very difficult to tell you how wrong it is. He can’t go very far. He can only reach a certain ‘half-way’ stage His dear ones may not be able to get to him – something like Berlin’s Wall…”

Another spirit communicating through Bailey said: “It isn’t what you’ve got, or whether you are blind, deaf or dumb, it’s how you meet it. It isn’t so much what you do; it’s the motive you have for doing it.”

Red Cloud, the spirit guide of Estelle Roberts, one of England’s great mediums, communicated that the person who commits suicide undergoes a premature birth into the spirit world. “He cannot immediately reach the plane of consciousness to which is evolution would entitle him had he fulfilled his allotted span on earth. Instead he remains suspended between the earth and the astral plane, which the first stage beyond earth. In this state he is deprived, for the time being, of the company of his loved ones in the spirit world, unable to cross the barrier raised by his premature birth. Only when he has advanced in his evolution to the required degree can he rejoin those he knew and loved.”

For more than 40 years, a spirit entity calling himself Silver Birch (believed to be a pseudonym for a collective spirit group) spoke through the entranced Maurice Barbanell. Frequently, members of the circle put questions to Silver Birch. When asked what the status of the suicide is in the spirit world, Silver Birch replied that he could not give an answer that applies to everyone. “It depends on the earthly life that has been lived,” he said through Barbanell’s vocal cords. “It depends upon the soul’s progress; and, above all these things, it depends on the motive. The churches are wrong when they say that all suicide comes in the same category; it does not. While you have no right to terminate your earthly existence, there are undoubtedly in many cases, ameliorating factors, mitigating circumstances, to be considered.. No soul is better off because it has terminated its earthly existence. But it does not automatically follow that every suicide is consigned for aeons ot time into the darkest of the dark spheres.”

Many similar messages have come through other mediums. In their 2006 book, Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife? Pamela Rae Heath, M.D. , Psy.D. and Jon Klimo, Ph.D. examine scores of messages from the spirit world about suicide, some from the spirits who took their own lives. A good part of their book deals with suicide bombers and what happens to them in the afterlife. If they truly believe they are doing God’s will and see themselves as martyrs to the cause, are they judged harshly, or do they judge themselves harshly? While there is next to nothing on this subject in the historical literature, Heath and Klimo went looking for answers among modern channelers or mediums. The fate of the suicide bomber will be the subject of the next blog entry here, on October 25.

Tags: suicide, spirituality, consciousness, afterlife, life after death, Silver Birch