Posted on 24 August 2010, 9:33

Early in 1974, a small group of religious friends began gathering periodically at the modest home of Thomas and Olive Ashman in Christchurch, New Zealand. “We would reverently pray for protection, and be silent,” says the Rev. Michael Cocks, an Anglican priest from Christchurch. (Rev. Cocks, below) “Tom would sit upright in a chair, relaxed. After two or three minutes he would begin to pale and to breathe deeply. Then his body would give a slight jerk as Stephen seemed to take over.”

In effect, Tom Ashman is, or was, a trance medium and was entering an altered state of consciousness as his body was being “taken over” by the entity called Stephen, who would then speak to the group using Ashman’s vocal cords. Stephen would dialogue with the group, which, in addition to Cocks and Ashman’s wife, Olive, also included a liberal Catholic priest, a Buddhist, and other curious observers. But this was not just any Stephen; it was Saint Stephen, the first Christian Martyr.

Cocks states that normally Stephen spoke through Ashman in a “rather curious English,” but that he twice spoke in an ancient Greek dialect, which apparently was for the purposes of confirming his identity.

“For myself, I do not speak [English] and I never have,” Stephen related in one of the sittings. “I activate these words that are in Thomas’s memory and are known to him. Occasionally there is a little ‘magic,’ when I join together sounds and symbols that are in Thomas’s mind so that words may be spoken that are not known to Thomas.”

Cocks realizes that the story is difficult for most people to accept. At first, he had a hard time accepting it himself. Even after he came to believe that St Stephen was actually communicating with the small group, he was reluctant to discuss it with many people outside of the group. “Part of it was fear of social ostracism for claiming to receive teaching from a saint,” he explains. “Part of it was my not having quite absorbed what Stephen was trying to communicate; part of it was that the meaningful coincidences came thick and fast, and I wrote a book about them called Into the Wider Dream. I thought at the time that such a book would be more acceptable to the public than a seemingly improbable story about communications from a Christian saint.”

After one of the early sittings in which Stephen spoke in Greek, Cocks consulted a lecturer in Greek at the University about Stephen’s Greek words. “She reported my request to the then bishop, who called me for a chat,” Cocks recalls. “To him, I denied being interested in spiritualism, as was definitely the case in those days.”

It was not until 2000, with the publication of a book titled The Stephen Experience or Teachings of Stephen the Martyr, that Cocks decided to tell the whole story. It seems to have begun in 1973 when Tom and Olive Ashman were living in Sevenoaks, Kent, England. One night, Olive heard Tom speaking in what sounded like Latin while he was sleeping. When this continued on subsequent nights, Olive began recording the words, which turned out to be profound spiritual teachings. About the same time, Cocks began receiving prophecies from a woman in the North Island of New Zealand. These prophecies covered many of the themes that would eventually come up in the Stephen dialogues.

The Ashmans moved to Christchurch in early 1974 (Tom Ashman, below) and Cocks met Olive at the Bycroft Psychic Library there. “I was brought up in a liberal but believing clergyman’s family, and was always religious,” Cocks explains his interest in psychic matters. “My father was interested in mystics and in direct communication from spirit. I was interested early in telepathy as a way of demonstrating the spirit realm. A loved great aunt spoke much about the revelations of Swedenborg, so I never had prejudices against mediumship.”

After meeting Olive, Cocks paid a visit to the Ashman’s home to learn more of their experiences. A few days later, Stephen spoke through Tom in a room at Cocks’s church. Over the next five to six years, there were, Cocks estimates, around 150 sessions in which Stephen spoke through Ashman.

Cocks, who earned a Master’s Degree in philosophy at the University of New Zealand and a Master’s in theology at Oxford University, is certain that the Ashmans were not attempting to pull off some kind of parlor trick. “Tom was deeply sincere, as was his wife, and he was plainly undergoing personal change as the result of what was being spoken through him,” Cocks states. “There was no desire to impress, no question of financial gain, and the communications were made in the presence of a group of about twelve friends.”

Moreover, Cocks points out, Tom Ashman’s personal views were somewhat at odds with the teachings coming through him. “He gradually became more and more frustrated because most of the time Stephen spoke through him, he was unconscious, and had to wait a week for transcripts of the session to be printed out,” Cocks continues. “He often felt out of it.”

While convinced that Ashman was not a charlatan, Cocks remained skeptical during those early sittings. He wondered if Tom had some kind of secondary or fragmented personality that was taking over his dominant personality, as has been reported in multiple personality cases. No doubt this would be the explanation provided by mainstream psychiatry, which is always looking for a reductionistic answer to such a phenomenon. But multiple personality disorder would not explain how or where that secondary personality obtained the knowledge and wisdom flowing from the entity calling himself Stephen. If the wisdom were flowing from Ashman’s subconscious, how did it get into his subconscious in the first place?

Ashman had a Catholic mother and Jewish father, and had always thought of himself as a Jew, although he had no strong belief system. Nothing in his history had exposed him to such profound teachings. What was most convincing to Cocks was the verification that the Greek spoken by Stephen in those early sittings was a version of Attic Greek of 2,000 years ago as spoken in Thrace where St Stephen’s parents had lived. Stephen himself was born near Ancyra, in Galatia. While familiar with Greek from his university days, Cocks did not know enough to rely on that alone. He consulted experts in the field and did extensive research into Stephen’s Koiné Greek, all of which he discusses in the appendix of his book.

But Stephen was not the only communicator. On October 23, 1973, these words, apparently coming from Christ, flowed from Ashman’s vocal cords: “The task of your servant Stephen is that of messenger and he speaks with great authority. The task of yourselves is the decision as to which way you choose use those messages…”

Christ spoke through Ashman on several other occasions. “We believed it to be the voice of Christ, partly because Stephen agreed that it was, and partly from an awe-inspiring presence that had a very strong emotional and spiritual impact,” Cocks says. “The messages were of course very appropriate if they were from Christ.”

In one of the early messages recorded by Olive Ashman, Christ said: “The way to your God is through two things alone, and these things are your witnesses. Love and sacrifice. For these are the lances of the Lord. For love to pierce your heart, and the sacrifice to come into your heart are what is needed; for you must sacrifice the lesser for the greater. At all times your ears, your mind and your eyes are assaulted with half-truths and blasphemies.”

Still, Stephen was by far the most frequent communicator. He told of his early life in Ancyra, now modern Turkey, mentioning that his actual name was “Stenen” and that he was 14 years old when Jesus was crucified. He further stated that his death by stoning is reported “quite accurately” in the Bible, but stressed that he was not communicating to tell about his life but rather to help them understand their own lives. He explained that he was no longer the Stephen of the Bible, that he had given up his separateness “to be one with the Whole,” but that to be of service to the Father and make those with whom he was communicating more comfortable he had to “put on again the clothes of Stephen.” When Cocks asked Stephen if he felt like “Stephen” or “The Whole,” or even a figment of Cocks’s imagination, Stephen replied: “For I speak that I am Stephen, I must first create Stephen, and be he. For I cannot be nothing. For once I decided I was nothingness, then I have learned nothing of nothing.”

Some of Stephen’s teachings were hard to grasp since he was seeing the group together in a whole, rather than as separated personalities. “Sometimes I think he communicated very effectively, but, yes, many of the messages are hard to understand and require thinking about again and again,” Cocks offers. “Often we needed to discover the concrete experience which makes things come clear. Often we had to wait for meaningful coincidences to illuminate his intention.”

In one sitting, Stephen explained that abstractness increases as we go inward. “But there is also the question of the nature of afterlife existence,” Cocks continues, pointing out that Stephen’s stories and illustrations are clearly from the Middle East of two-thousand years ago. “He is aware of the modern world, but the center of gravity, so to speak, of his mind seems to be back at that time and place. That in itself would make this thinking not so accessible.”

In one philosophical discussion during 1973, Stephen offered an analogy in explaining why humans do not fully comprehend the physical life. He likened God to a surgeon. “…think how a surgeon would act if, when he had to operate, he had to keep the patient conscious, adjust mirrors so the patient could see the operation that would be beyond his understanding in any case. Should he perhaps have each patient undertake advanced studies before an operation? Or would it perhaps not be better only to operate on a surgeon?” Stephen went on to say that the complexity is such that the patient must trust his surgeon.

At times Stephen joked with the group. On one occasion he observed that Tom’s feet did not touch the floor. “Verily, I must be spirit!” he quipped. “Stephen was always warm and friendly, yet spoke slowly as if declaiming his words,” Cocks relates. “Sometimes there were pauses while Stephen thought, but he never seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying. When a session was completed, after a while there would be a slight jerk as Tom resumed ownership of his own body, and then Tom would rather dazedly ask whether anything had happened. Sometimes it had not. Like me, I think Tom felt the responsibility of Stephen, and would joke to dispel the too serious atmosphere.”

Realizing that his book is not likely to make any “best seller” list, Cocks has often wondered why St Stephen bothered with the small Christchurch group. “Sometimes I wonder if it was just for the benefit of myself and a few friends,” he muses. “Were we worth all that effort over all those years? Wasn’t it meant for many others also? Wouldn’t it be nice if Stephen and other advanced souls could get things in motion more to help more of his teachings to be heard?”

But Cocks is reasonably certain that it was the Stephen he and his friends had dialoged with. “I did so much work on the Greek,” he ends the interview. “It is indeed very close to proof of Stephen’s authenticity. But because the proof is so complex and many-sided, people don’t really study it carefully. The study convinced me, but not many other people. I am sort of like Cassandra, the poor person of antiquity, fated to tell the truth, and not to be believed.”

Some of what Stephen had to say:

Purpose of life: “Remember, that in the beginning there was the coming away from the Source, for the correction of many disorders…Acquiring a physical body is only one stage in the corrections…It seems a contradiction in itself, unless you understand, that it is for this reason each and every one of you is in the position that you are, for the reason that you may develop; that disorder may be corrected. Each is in the situation where he must learn, develop and correct disorder.”

On truth: “Each of us knows that in the place where we are now, under the circumstances in which we are, that is the truth. It must be, for we are here. The place where we are, is the place that we have received. This is the direct communication. For it can only be the truth. You hear, touch, see and feel, direct. For what you see, what you hear, and what you touch is the direct communication, and is the language of the Father. Not words. For the Father speaks not with the tongue, nor with limited vocabulary. “

On Jesus, as Savior: “The saving is the saving of the slavery to your own minds, the release of bondage to imagined ills and wrongs, desires that are not within you, but are created by the environment, and by the desires or imagined desires…We often get an image that in some way the death of the body of Jesus in itself cleanses us, yet we fail to see how he showed that the body itself was meaningless.”

On being a spirit: “Perhaps if I told you this, that Thomas (Ashman) even now is in that state that we all will be, as I am, when I return to Thomas this, his body. What you feel is what you are. I will ask Thomas if he feels that he is without something that he should have. He said that he is not without. Then this the way that you would feel. As you feel now.”

On the afterlife: “Think not that when you are without your body, you are going to be much different, for your needs are different. Except through feelings there is little association, for your tasks and your needs are no longer what they were, and the tasks and needs of them that are still in the body are different. These are the first things you learn.”

On scientific proof of the afterlife: “The facts are there, if one would wish to see. The fact that he thinks, the fact that he has emotions, the fact that time is an exact science, are all there to be investigated. That is, if the investigation would be willingly undertaken. Look then at these results, that cannot be explained by using only limited facts or measurements: you might measure water with a jug or a similar small vessel, you cannot measure the ocean with the same vessel. If we confine what we wish to know to what we already know, we will have great difficulty. Be sure then, that the limitation that is being used, is not the limitation of want.”

On reincarnation: “The answer is most difficult. The understanding of the phenomenon is sometimes beyond even myself, but hear me now. Even as I speak through this body, I am Stephen and reincarnate possibly a thousandfold. The confusion is not in the reality of this. It is on the concept of your conscious mind where it can but think of one body.”

Visit the Ground of Faith website, and go here for more information on the book.

Next Post: September 7-8

Posted on 10 August 2010, 11:50

No, the roguish-looking person pictured below is not Billy the Kid, Jesse James, or some other legend of the American West. True, since his first name was William, he may have been called Billy as a kid, and his last name was James. But he was no outlaw.

Yes, it is Professor William James, the renowned American philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. The picture was taken during his Amazon expedition in 1865, when he was 23.

Since August 26 will mark the 100th anniversary of James’ transition from the material world, I thought it a good time to remember him.

Reading about James and reading his works is a lot like reading about Wyatt Earp, the legendary US Marshal of the American West. One is never quite sure if Earp is an outlaw wearing a lawman’s badge or a real lawman who sometimes strayed outside the law. With James, one is never sure if he is scientist with a religious bent or a religionist posing as a scientist.

‘Tactically, it is far better to believe much too little than a little too much,’ James explained his fence-sitting position, adding ‘better a little belief tied fast, better a small investment salted down, than a mass of comparative insecurity.’

On another occasion, he stated: ‘I have myself been willfully taking the point of view of the so-called ‘rigorously scientific’ disbeliever, and making an ad hominem plea.’

Born in New York City on January 11, 1842, James, the son of prosperous parents and ancestors, was educated by tutors and at private schools in New York, Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mur. In 1861, he entered Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and three years later entered the Harvard School of Medicine. However, he took time out from medical school to travel with a zoological expedition in the Amazon and to study physiology and philosophy at Berlin University. He received his MD degree in 1869, but never practiced medicine.

During his final years at Harvard and immediately thereafter, James is said to have suffered from fits of depression, what he called ‘soul sickness,’ and even considered suicide. Apparently, the ‘death of God’ and the increasingly materialistic world view of the times brought on by the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment and then Darwinism, seriously impacted him. However, he overcame his depression to some extent in 1872 when he accepted a position to teach physiology and anatomy at Harvard.

Soon thereafter, James integrated his physiology course with psychology and in 1876 founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology in the United States. Along with Wilhelm Wundt, John Dewey, and Sigmund Freud, James is considered one of the pioneers of modern psychology. He gradually moved from psychology to philosophy as he felt that psychology was too limited.

At the urging of Professor William Barrett, a British physicist who was instrumental in founding the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England during 1882, James organized the American branch of the SPR in 1885 after repeated observations of Leonora Piper (pictured above), a Boston medium, during which he received much evidential information.

James referred to Mrs Piper as his ‘white crow,’ the one who upset the ‘law’ that all crows are black – the one who proved that all mediums are not charlatans. ‘I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the waking use of her eyes and ears and wits,’ he wrote in his report for the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). ‘What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.’

Because of his academic duties and other interests, James was unable to devote much time to investigating Mrs Piper and other mediums. Thus, Dr Richard Hodgson, a hard-core skeptic, was imported from England in 1887 to serve as executive secretary of the ASPR, and his first task was a thorough investigation of Mrs Piper. In spite of his intentions to debunk Mrs Piper, Hodgson soon came to believe in her gift.

Initially, however, both Hodgson and James rejected the spirit hypothesis. They reasoned that Dr Phinuit, Piper’s spirit control, was a secondary personality buried in her subconscious and that this secondary personality somehow had the ability to read minds. When information came through that was unknown to the sitter, the theory was expanded from telepathy to teloteropathy. This theory held that it is possible to pick up thoughts from a person anywhere in the world. James also speculated that there is some kind of cosmic reservoir where every thought or utterance ever made is recorded and that the medium had the ability to draw information from that reservoir.

The emergence of George Pellew (Pelham in the research records) in 1892 won Hodgson over to the spirit hypothesis. Pellew had been a member of the ASPR and an acquaintance of Hodgson’s before dying in an accident at age 30. Soon after his death, he began communicating with Hodgson through Mrs Piper without the assistance of Dr Phinuit, offering much in the way of evidential information. As the ‘personality’ of Pellew came through clearly, Hodgson reasoned ruled out the secondary personality and telepathic theories.

While others members of the SPR and ASPR were gradually won over to the spirit hypothesis. James remained on the fence, sometimes, however, leaning toward an acceptance of the spirit hypothesis. ‘One who takes part in a good sitting has usually a far livelier sense, both of the reality and of the importance of the communication, than one who merely reads the records,’ he reported. ‘I am able, while still holding to all the lower principles of interpretation, to imagine the process as more complex, and to share the feelings with which Hodgson came at last to regard it after his many years of familiarity, the feeling which Professor Hyslop shares, and which most of those who have good sittings are promptly inspired with [i.e., the spirit hypothesis].’

In spite of his fence-sitting relative to the results of psychical research, James waged war against the materialistic mindset that had gripped the educated world after the acceptance of Darwinism, which was first announced in 1859. He rebuked the strictly scientific point of view relative to God and immortality. ‘I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor which WK Clifford once wrote, whispering the word ‘bosh!’ Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.’

He rejected the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, which had become very popular with the ‘intellectuals’ of the era. In effect, Spencer said we should be satisfied to realize that such things as God and Immortality are unknowable. James called it ‘agnostic substantialism’ and said it was philosophy designed to give Philistines a certain security.

He also rejected the philosophy of the ‘moralist,’ today’s humanist. ‘The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well – morality suffices,’ he explained. ‘But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind.’

To the simplistic advice of the moralist that one should ‘live in the moment’ and not concern himself with what comes after death, James responded:

‘The luster of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place around them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular-science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.’

James believed that a true philosophy must eliminate uncertainty from the future and found it difficult to understand why most philosophers of his day ignored this aspect, the result being a ‘haunting sense of futurity.’ He cautioned against becoming anti-religious because of the mistakes of organized religion. ‘It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.’

In summarizing his belief system, James said: ‘The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous as certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure of this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.’

On March 6, 1889, Alice James (seen above), the wife of Professor William James, and Robertson James, William’s brother, sat with Leonora Piper, the Boston medium who was being studied by Dr Richard Hodgson of the ASPR. They were informed by Phinuit, Piper’s spirit control, that ‘Aunt Kate’ (Kate Walsh) had died early that morning and that a letter or telegram saying she was gone would be received later that day.

It was known to the two sitters that Aunt Kate had been seriously ill, but neither was aware that she had died. After leaving Mrs Piper’s home, Robertson James stopped by the ASPR office to report the sitting to Hodgson and Professor James. ‘On reaching home an hour later I found a telegram as follows,’ William James recorded: ‘Aunt Kate passed away a few minutes after midnight. – ER Walsh.’

Alice James recorded her version: ‘It may be worth while to add that early at this sitting I inquired, ‘How is Aunt Kate?’ The reply was, ‘She is poorly.’ This reply disappointed me, from its baldness. Nothing more was said about Aunt Kate till towards the close of the sitting, when I again said, ‘Can you tell me nothing more about Aunt Kate?’ The medium suddenly threw back her head and said in a startled way, ‘Why Aunt Kate’s here. All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate has come.’’ Then followed the announcement that she had died very early that morning, and on being pressed to give the time, shortly after two was named.’

On November 7, 1889, Hodgson sat with Mrs Piper and received some fragmented and confusing messages from Aunt Kate, which he passed on to William James. James replied: ‘The ‘Kate Walsh’ freak is very interesting. The first mention of her by Phinuit was when she was living, three years or more ago, when she had written to my wife imploring her not to sit for development [as a medium]. Phinuit knew this in some incomprehensible way. A year later [in a sitting] with Margaret Gibbens [sister of Mrs James], I present, Phinuit alluded jocosely to this fear of hers again, and made some derisive remarks about her unhappy marriage, calling her an ‘old crank,’ etc. Her death was announced last spring, as you remember. In September, sitting with me and my wife, Mrs Piper was suddenly ‘controlled’ by her spirit, who spoke directly with much impressiveness of manner, and great similarity of temperament to herself. Platitudes. She said Henry Wyckoff had experienced a change, and that Albert was coming over soon; nothing definite about either. Queer business!’

In a later report, James wrote: ‘The aunt who purported to ‘take control’ directly was a much better personation [than Phinuit], having a good deal of the cheery strenuousness of speech of the original. She spoke, by the way, on this occasion, of the condition of health of two members of the family [Henry and Albert] in New York, of which we knew nothing at the time, and which was afterwards corroborated by letter. We have repeatedly heard from Mrs Piper in trance things of which we were not at the moment aware. If the supernormal element in the phenomenon be thought-transference it is certainly not that of the sitter’s conscious thought.’

James went on to report that when his mother-in-law returned from Europe, she could not locate her bank book. ‘Mrs Piper, on being shortly afterwards asked where this book was,’ James continued, ‘described the place so exactly that it was instantly found.’

At that same sitting, James was told by Mrs Piper [or by Phinuit] that the spirit of a boy named Robert F. was the companion of his deceased child, Hermann, who had died as an infant in 1885. The F.’s were cousins of his wife and were living in a distant city. On his return home, James told his wife of the reading and asked for particulars on the baby lost by her cousin, as he did not recall the name, sex, and age of the child being as reported by Phinuit. However, his wife corrected him and confirmed Phinuit’s version. ‘I then learned that Mrs Piper had been quite right in all those particulars, and that mine was the wrong impression.’

Next Post: 23-24 August

Posted on 27 July 2010, 10:54

As a helicopter gunship pilot, Mark (not his real name) killed many people during his 18 months service in the Vietnam War. He was also shot down seven times and wounded twice. The confrontation that bothered him the most involved four boats filled with Vietnamese soldiers.

Unmarked and without flags, the boats had trespassed into a military canal. Mark and the four other gunships under his command attacked the boats and ‘blew them out of the water.’ He recalls seeing bodies flying in the air. Two weeks later, he was informed that they were friendly troops.

‘It stays in your mind and really weighs on you,’ Mark told me when I interviewed him for an article I wrote for NEXUS magazine a few years ago.

The memory of that mistake had continued to haunt him for more than three decades and in 2002 he sought treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at a veteran’s hospital. While there he was offered the opportunity to undergo a relatively new therapy called Induced After Death Communication (IADC).

IADC is an offshoot of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy and was discovered accidentally in 1995 by Dr Allan L Botkin (pictured above), a clinical psychologist now practicing in Libertyville, Illinois, while experimenting with EMDR. In IADC therapy, people grieving the death of someone or otherwise disturbed by someone’s death, are asked to focus directly on their sadness during eye movements.

The typical IADC involves the patient reporting having seen a deceased person and that deceased person having told him or her that everything is OK and not to grieve. In a number of cases, the deceased person relates information previously unknown to the patient.

When the therapist explained the IADC procedure to Mark and asked him if he’d like to try it, he was more than willing. After the eye movements were administered, Mark focused on the boat mishap. ‘What happened then is that I saw a formation of Vietnamese coming at me,’ Mark related, the memory still very vivid in his mind several years later. ‘What was interesting is that they were in a Russian formation, not a US formation. Two of the commanders stepped forward and began talking to me in Vietnamese.’

Mark didn’t understand them until another eye movement was administered. They continued speaking in Vietnamese, but Mark somehow telepathically knew what they were saying. ‘They said that they understood that I did what I had to do and they had no grudge against me, that they are in a better place, and not to worry about it. Then they marched off. It was really cool and a big load off my shoulders.’

At another IADC session, Mark saw a woman holding his first son, who had died as an infant in 1978. As his focus was on the boy, he didn’t immediately recognize the woman as his deceased mother. In that session, the child did not speak, but in subsequent sessions, the boy appeared again, first as a teenagers and then as a young adult. ‘My son says to me, “Don’t worry, Dad, I’m okay. I’m going to see you soon.” I didn’t know what to make of that, if I’m going to die soon, or what, but it was very soothing.’

Mark also reviewed one of his helicopter crashes, including the intensity of the pain. He struggled to explain the images. ‘The quality and clarity of the images are much greater than in dreams,’ he said. ‘They are absolutely three dimensional and they stay with you. You have to experience it to know what it’s like. It’s not like hypnotism. It’ll spook you, but it is really something. The main thing is that it gives you closure and life has more meaning after you have experienced these things. There is a sense of continuity. It’s very comforting.’

Botkin states that the EMDR/IADC process does not involve hypnosis. ‘Hypnosis induces the patient into a relaxed and focused state of mind,’ he pointed out. ‘EMDR, on the other hand, increases information processing in the brain.’ He likened it to a movie projector, with the projector slowing down during hypnosis and speeding up during EMDR.

Botkin also put me in touch with Ivan Rupert, another veteran, who was bothered for many years by a memory of carnage in Vietnam. As a combat photographer, he was called upon early one morning to take photos of a Vietnamese bus that had been blown up. ‘There were bodies and body parts all over the place,’ he recalled, ‘but the one that really stuck in my mind was that of a young pregnant woman. You could see the baby and umbilical cord connecting them.’

The scene came back to Rupert over and over again in his dreams for many years until undergoing IADC with Botkin. What especially bothered him was that he was more intent on getting some good photos than feeling bad about what he was witnessing. During the IADC, the Vietnamese woman communicated with him. ‘She told me she was in a much better place and helped me understand that I was not the monster I thought I was. She said she didn’t blame me for any of it.’

Rupert can’t say for sure whether the woman spoke in Vietnamese or in English. ‘It was sort of mind to mind, heart to heart,’ he explained, adding that he no longer has the awful dreams relating to that scene.

There is no doubt in Rupert’s mind that he was actually communicating with the Vietnamese woman. ‘I was very skeptical when it was initially explained to me,’ he said. ‘It sounded like a lot of mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, but it was the real thing. I’m certain that I was not hallucinating and I was not hypnotized.’

Botkin discovered IADC during a session with a patient to whom, for privacy purposes, he gives the pseudonym ‘Sam.’ While in Vietnam as a combat soldier, Sam befriended a young orphan girl named Le and had hoped to adopt her. One day, while Sam and other soldiers were helping Le and other orphaned children board a truck to take them to an orphanage, they came under enemy attack. When Sam discovered Le’s lifeless body in the mud behind the truck, he was devastated and the grief remained with him right up to that 1995 session with Botkin.

During the EMDR, Sam saw Le as a beautiful woman with long black hair in a white gown, surrounded in a radiant light. Le spoke to him and thanked him for taking care of her before her death. Sam was ecstatic and convinced that he had just communicated with Le, and that he felt her arms around him.

Initially, Botkin assumed that Sam had hallucinated and was concerned that Sam had compromised his ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. But after similar experiences reported by several other patients, Botkin decided to experiment.

His first intentionally induced ADC was with a patient named Gary, whose daughter, Julie, had died at age 13. Because she had been severely oxygen deprived at birth, Julie had never developed mental abilities beyond those of a six-month old child. After suffering a heart attack and rushed to the hospital, she was placed on life supports. As she later showed some signs of being able to breathe on her own, she was taken off the respirator. She struggled to breathe and died in Gary’s arms.

‘Tears rolled down Gary’s cheeks as he told me his story,’ Botkin recalled. ‘I explained my new procedure to him and asked him if he wanted to give it a try. He said he was willing if I thought it might help, but he was convinced it wouldn’t work for him because he was an atheist and didn’t believe in such things.’

After Botkin took him through the entire procedure, Gary closed his eyes.  “When he opened his eyes, he had a look of amazement,” Botkin continues the story.  “He then said, ‘I saw my daughter.  She was playing happily in a garden alive with rich and radiant bright colors.  She looked healthy and seemed to move around without the physical problems she had when alive.  She looked at me and I could feel her love for me.’ We then talked about his experience. Gary was convinced that his daughter was still alive, although in a very different place.”

But Gary’s look of amazement then shifted to one of sadness.  When Botkin asked him what was wrong, Gary replied that he still felt sad because he missed his daughter.  Botkin then administered another set of eye movements and asked him to keep that thought in mind.  Gary closed his eyes and sat quietly for a few moments.  “When Gary opened his eyes, he was smiling,” Botkin goes on.  “He said, ‘I was in the garden again and I could see Julie looking at me.  She said to me, ‘I’m still with you, Daddy.’”

Gary told Botkin that Julie couldn’t talk when alive.  He left the session feeling happy and reconnected to his daughter.  Botkin contacted Gary a year later and was informed that he still felt reconnected with his daughter.  Gary’s new belief was that “people don’t really die; they just take on a different form and live in a different place, which is very beautiful.” 

Since discovering the procedure, Botkin has trained a number of therapists in IADC, including Hania Stromberg of Albuquerque, NM (pictured above). In one experience, as she was administering the eye movements to a client, she felt a ‘presence’ entering the room and then saw a woman in a colorful dress and high heels. The woman, the client’s deceased mother, addressed the client by a special name of endearment and began discussing problems the client was having. After the session, Stromberg compared her notes with what the client related and all were confirmed – the special term of endearment being especially evidential since Stromberg had not been aware of it.

‘Occasionally I get visual impressions or pictures, but it is not always visual,’ Stromberg, who apparently has some clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities, told me. ‘I always have a strong sense of the presence of the deceased, often hear something they try to convey. It is either an auditory experience or sort of an auditory thought impression that I know is not mine.’

With co-author R Craig Hogan, PhD, Botkin wrote about IADC in his 2005 book, Induced After Death Communication (Hampton Roads). I recently re-contacted him to see if there have been any new developments.

‘Perhaps the most important development in IADC is that there are now trained IADC therapists in eight different countries,’ Botkin said. ‘In fact, after October 2010, when I train another large group in Heidelberg, there will likely be more IADC therapists in Europe than in the U.S.

‘On a more theoretical level, there have also been some advances,’ he continued. ‘In my book, I made the observation that IADC experiences were essentially identical to NDE experiences. The only exceptions, besides the obvious difference in perspective, were the ‘being of light’ and the ‘life review,’ which are two primary components of NDEs. While no one has yet described a being of light in an IADC, there have been some further developments regarding the life review in IADCs.

In 2005 I noted that the deceased consistently appeared in IADCs as though they had been through a life review, i.e., they were always very aware of the pain and suffering that they caused in other people. In more recent cases, there have been more direct experiences with life reviews. For example, in one case a woman experienced her WWII ‘German soldier’ uncle experiencing his own life review. Her uncle’s response to his life review had a profound meaning for my client. In another case, a man actually experienced his own life review during a session. These developments, of course, further support the idea that NDEs and IADCs are essentially the same phenomenon.

‘Also, I recently read Dr Jeffery Long’s new best-selling book, Evidence of the Afterlife. His descriptions of meeting deceased friends and relatives during an NDE are identical to my patients’ IADC reports. Dr Long does not provide any observation for which the meeting of the deceased in NDEs is different from IADC content. I can’t believe that this is just a coincidence.

The similarities include: a) A high percentage of experiences with the deceased involve family members; b) The deceased encountered in both experiences who were thought to be alive were later discovered to have previously died; c) Sometimes the experiencer encounters deceased family members he/she never met in life; d) Those who died old and sick are routinely experienced as younger and healthy; e) Those who die young are sometimes experienced as older.’

While IADC is receiving growing support from professional therapists around the world, Botkin is not especially disappointed that it has not been more readily accepted by the Veteran’s Administration and various mental health organizations. He feels that progress is necessarily slow as it takes time for independent research studies to validate it. ‘I am confident,’ he said, ‘that independent scientifically controlled studies will confirm what IADC therapists and patients have been saying now for some time.’

Next post: August 9

Posted on 12 July 2010, 9:12

Over the past 35 years, near-death experience (NDE) researchers like Drs. Raymond Moody, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Bruce Greyson, Melvin Morse, Barbara Rommer, Sam Parnia and others have built a very solid wheel, one that supports the idea that we have a spirit body as well as a physical body and that consciousness remains with the spirit body after physical death. Close-minded skeptics keep trying to make the wheel collapse by bending the spokes and throwing obstacles in the path of the rolling wheel.

Every now and then, as happened a month or two ago, the theory that the NDE is nothing more than abnormal brain activity resulting from oxygen deficiency gets resurrected and makes its way around the Internet and the print media as if it is news rather than something that goes back 25 or more years. The pseudoskeptics’ blogs make it out to be some sort of victory in their war on superstition and ignorance, and they seemingly take great pride in their ‘intellectualism.’

Fortunately, new researchers come on the scene to debunk the pseudoskeptics and keep the wheel rolling. In his recently released book, Consciousness Beyond Life, Dr. Pim van Lommel (pictured above), a world-renowned cardiologist practicing in The Netherlands, dismisses the oxygen-deprivation theory based on the fact that it is ‘accompanied by an enhanced and lucid consciousness with memories and because it can also be experienced under circumstances such as an imminent traffic accident or a depression, neither of which involves oxygen deficiency.’

Tunnel effect

Van Lommel also dismisses the theory that the tunnel effect experienced by many NDErs also results from a disruption of oxygen to the eye or the cerebral cortex. He points out that oxygen deficiency in these areas cannot explain meeting deceased relatives in the tunnel, as has often been reported, or hearing beautiful music. He explains why carbon dioxide overload, various chemicals, and other physiological theories do not account for the NDE. ‘When new ideas do not fit the generally accepted (materialist) paradigm, many scientists perceive them as a threat,’ van Lommel writes. ‘It is hardly surprising therefore that when empirical studies reveal new phenomena or facts that are inconsistent with the prevailing scientific paradigm, they are usually denied, suppressed, or even ridiculed.’

Having grown up in an academic environment, van Lommel was of a materialist/reductionist mindset before he began studying the NDE and the nature of consciousness. He has closely examined all the arguments made by the scientific fundamentalists and now has a more positive outlook. ‘That death is the end used to be my own belief,’ he states with conviction. ‘But after many years of critical research into the stories of the NDErs, and after a careful exploration of current knowledge about brain function, consciousness, and some basic principles of quantum physics, my views have undergone a complete transformation. As a doctor and researcher, I found the most significant finding to be the conclusion of one NDEr: ‘Dead turned out to be not dead.’ I now see the continuity of our consciousness after the death of our physical body as a very real possibility.’

In another 2010 book, Evidence of the Afterlife, Dr. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist in Houma, Louisiana, comes to the same conclusions as van Lommel. ‘Near-death experiencers almost never have confused memories that are typical of the experience of hypoxia,’ he writes, (hypoxia being reduced oxygen levels in the blood and tissues). ‘The fact that highly lucid and organized near-death experiences occur at a time of severe hypoxia is further evidence of the extraordinary and inexplicable state of consciousness that typically occurs during NDEs.’

Many researchers, fearing professional sanctions and obloquy from their peers, beat around the bush when it comes to the life after death implications of the NDE, but, like van Lommel, Long does not cower in this respect. ‘By scientifically studying the more than 1,300 cases shared with [the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation],’ he writes, ‘I believe that the nine lines of evidence presented in this book all converge on one central point: There is life after death.’

One of the more convincing aspects of the NDE for Long is the ability of some blind people to ‘see’ during the NDE. ‘…blind people who have near-death experiences may immediately have full and clear vision,’ he offers. ‘This is further evidence that vision in NDEs, including near-death experiences in those who are not blind, is unlike ordinary, physical vision.’

Life review

Long reports many interesting NDEs, including one by a man named Roger who was in a head-on auto accident and immediately left his body. He told of seeing events from above. ‘I went into a dark place with nothing around me, but I wasn’t scared. It was really peaceful there. I then began to see my whole life unfolding before me like a film projected on a screen, from babyhood to adult life. It was so real! I was looking at myself, but better than a 3-D movie as I was also capable to sensing the feelings of the persons I had interacted with through the years. I could feel the good and bad emotions I made them go through…’

Skeptics seem to have a theory for every aspect of the NDE, including the life review which so many others have reported. The skeptical take on the life review is that it is a psychological defense mechanism permitting a retreat into pleasant memories. But Long points out that many memories are not pleasant and that such unpleasant memories would not be expected in a psychological escape.

But how can a person see every moment of his life flash before him in an instant? As van Lommel sees it, many aspects of the NDE correspond with or are analogous to some of the basic principles from quantum theory, which is non-local, i.e., timeless and placeless interconnectedness. ‘The findings of NDE research suggest the possibility that (nonlocal) consciousness is present at all time and will therefore last forever,’ van Lommel explains. ‘The content of a near-death experience suggests a continuity of consciousness that can be experienced independently of the body.’

Lost dentures

One of the more veridical and interesting NDEs reported by van Lommel involved a 44-year-old man brought into the hospital while in a deep coma. When a nurse started to intubate the patient, she discovered he had dentures. She removed the upper dentures and put them on a nearby cart. The patient remained comatose throughout the procedure and for a week after.

After regaining consciousness, he was returned to the coronary unit and as soon as he spotted the nurse, he asked about his dentures. ‘…you took my dentures out of my mouth and put them on that cart,’ he told her. ‘It had all these bottles on it, and there was a sliding drawer underneath, and you put my teeth there.’ The patient said that he watched from above as the doctors and nurses worked on him and that he unsuccessfully tried to let them all know that he was still alive, and that they should not stop. Possibly, he was not ‘unsuccessful,’ since they did continue to work on him and he did survive.

Interestingly, Long reports that it takes as long as seven years or more for a person to fully integrate the NDE into his or her life. This is consistent with the biological rule that we turn over every cell in the body every seven years. It is also consistent with the ‘seven-year itch’ idea, which holds that there is an inclination to become unfaithful after seven years of marriage. That idea has been broadened to suggest that there is an urge to move on from any situation after seven years, whether it is a hobby or some other passion.

Organ transplants

Something I have found particularly troubling over the years is the possibility that organs are being harvested before bodies are actually ‘dead,’ even though the person might be pronounced ‘clinically dead.’ Van Lommel devotes several interesting pages to the debate on this subject, pointing out that when brain death has been diagnosed, 96 percent of the body is still alive. While not in principle opposed to organ transplants, van Lommel suggests that more consideration should be given to the nonphysical aspects of organ donation, including the fear of death. As I interpret his comments, he is saying that perhaps that in many organ failure situations we should let nature take its course and not concern ourselves so much with surviving in this world.

Long quotes Sir John Eccles, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist who studied consciousness: ‘I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as superstition…We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.’

Posted on 29 June 2010, 22:18

The Viktor Korchnoi vs. Géza Maróczy chess game, which began in 1985 and ended in 1993, lasting 7 years and 8 months, is without a doubt one of the most intriguing cases ever in the annals of psychical research. It was reported by Dr. Wolfgang Eisenbeiss and Dieter Hassler in the April 2006 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

‘This case appears to be one of the most remarkable cases supporting evidence for survival of an intelligent component of human existence after bodily death,’ opines Dr. Vernon M. Neppe, director of the Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute in Seattle, Washington, and professor in the department of neurology and psychiatry at St. Louis University in Missouri, himself a chess champion at a more modest level than Korchnoi and Maróczy, who were ranked 13th and 29th, respectively, all-time in a 1978 study.

The match was arranged by Eisenbeiss, a Swiss stockbroker and a doctor of economics with a long-standing interest in psychical research. Knowing that Eisenbeiss had considerable experience in studying mediums, a dentist named Waldhorn, suggested to Eisenbeiss that he attempt to initiate a chess game between a living person and a deceased person.

Intrigued by the idea, Eisenbeiss persuaded Korchnoi, known as Viktor the Terrible (pictured above), who had defected from the Soviet Union and was living in Switzerland, to take part in the experiment. He then asked Robert Rollans (1914-1993), a long-time acquaintance and an automatic-writing trance medium who was living in Germany, to participate. Rollans was a particularly good candidate as he did not know how to play chess and was willing to participate without remuneration. Moreover, Eisenbeiss had complete confidence in Rollans’ integrity.

Eisenbeiss then gave Rollans a list of deceased grandmasters and requested that he have his control spirits (Tata and Gabriel) attempt to locate one of them in the spirit world and agree to such a match. On June 15, 1985, Tata and Gabriel communicated and said that Maróczy (seen below) would accept the challenge. They then said that Maróczy would attempt to communicate directly.

‘I am Maróczy Géza,’ he wrote through Rollans’ hand. ‘I say hello to you [Continuing in German.]. I can talk German so first of all I can answer the identifying question. It was the opening with the king’s pawn and the French defence. I am unable to continue. I will finish writing. [Letters became untidy] I am going to tell everything to my friends. [Continuing in Hungarian.] Goodbye.’

Tata and Gabriel returned, explaining that because Maróczy was not accustomed to writing through an earthly arm, he tired quickly. However, he was able to convey the second move to them, d2-d4. It is not clear from the report, but these were apparently test questions which Eisenbeiss devised beforehand to be sure that a grandmaster was taking up the challenge and not some impostor spirit.

Before the game actually got underway, Maróczy expressed concerns about his ability to compete because he had gone so long without practice. ‘I was and will be at your disposal in this peculiar game of chess for two reasons,’ he communicated. ‘First because I also want to do something to aid mankind living on earth to become convinced that death does not end everything, but instead the mind is separated from the physical body and comes up in a new world, where individual life continues to manifest itself in a new unknown dimension.’ His second reason had to do with the glory of Hungary.

The game started with Maróczy making the first move, writing ‘e4’ through Rollans’ hand. Rollans sent the move to Eisenbeiss, who sent it on to Korchnoi. Korchnoi responded with ‘e6’ to Eisenbeiss, who forwarded it to Rollans. (It should be noted that Eisenbeiss gave Rollans some basic lessons so that he would know where to place the pieces.)

‘During the opening phase Maróczy showed weakness,’ Korchnoi commented after the 27th move. ‘His play is old-fashioned. But I must confess that my last moves have not been too convincing. I am not sure I will win. He has compensated the faults of the opening by a strong end-game. In the end-game the ability of a player shows up and my opponent plays very well.’

In his detailed analysis of the game, Dr. Neppe states that the alleged Maróczy ‘played at least at the Master level, and very debatably and less likely, at a rusty, lowish grandmaster level.’ He adds that this level could not have been achieved by Rollans even after much training, assuming that he was not a chess genius. He also points out that Maróczy’s slow start may have been the result of an opening theory that developed after his death.

‘Because of major stylistic differences, the computer could not have simulated the game, nor could many living chess players play at this high a level,’ Neppe further offers. ‘Early outside validators (news media, analysis by an expert player) militates against fraudulent collaboration.’

Because Korchnoi was frequently traveling and e-mail not yet available, the match proceeded slowly. According to Rollans, he would feel a tickle in his body when Maróczy was ready to communicate a move to him. It usually took about 10 days for Eisenbeiss to receive the next move from Maróczy/Rollans after receiving Korchnoi’s move and mailing it to Rollans.

As might be expected, the skeptics suspect that Rollans was consulting with live chess experts before communicating his move back to Eisenbeiss. Neppe believes this unlikely as the play was ‘stylistically compatible with Maróczy.’

‘It’s ridiculous to think that Rollans would have asked other grandmasters what he should give me as a move,’ Dr. Eisenbeiss writes. He adds that Rollans was as curious about the results as he was, and so was Korchnoi. He stresses that neither Rollans nor Korchnoi was paid for his participation and so there was no real motive to cheat.

‘Let them believe [what they want],’ Eisenbeiss says, pointing out that there will always be people unable to accept the truth of such phenomena.

It was more personal information coming from Maróczy that convinced Eisenbeiss that he was actually communicating with Maróczy and which Neppe cites as significantly reducing the potential for fraud.

During the match, Eisenbeiss put many questions to Maróczy in order to confirm his identity. While the answers to some of them might be found with limited research, most required extensive research and involved some private information. On July 31, 1986, Rollans received 38 handwritten pages from Maróczy in response to some questions. He also said that he was disappointed in his play, which he felt was due to his rustiness as well as difficulties in communication transmission.

In order to confirm the accuracy of Maróczy’s responses, Eisenbeiss contacted the Hungarian Chess Club and was put in touch with Laszlo Sebestyen, a historian and chess expert, who agreed to do some research and determine if the answers were correct. Sebestyen was led to believe that the information was for some kind of biographical work on Maróczy. Sebestyen, who was paid for his services, consulted several libraries in Hungary and Maróczy’s two surviving children, both over 80 at the time, and a cousin. He put in more than 70 hours in finding the answers to nearly all of Eisbenbeiss’ questions.

Out of 92 statements made by Maróczy, Sebestyén was able to confirm 85 of them as factual. The remaining seven may have been factual, but no records could be found to confirm them or the records were unclear.

One particularly evidential exchange between Eisenbeiss and Maróczy (through Rollans, of course) had to do with a match Maróczy had in 1930. Eisenbeiss, who had found a record of the match, asked Maróczy about the player he had defeated, an Italian named Romi. Maróczy replied that he never knew anyone by that name, but that he did defeat a man named ‘Romih.’ Even though the historical records showed the name as ‘Romi,’ Eisenbeiss found a program of the 1930 match in which the name was spelled ‘Romih.’

Because Korchnoi was frequently traveling and competing, the game was drawn out for those seven-plus years. Maróczy, who played in an ‘old fashioned’ style, resigned after 47 moves. Rollans died three weeks after the completion of the game.

Dr. Neppe also feels that the Super Psi theory advanced by some parapsychologists is less likely than the spirit hypothesis as Super Psi would have required the active cogitation of a master chess player or players while alive, extended over a prolonged period of time.

The bottom line here is that the Korchnoi vs. Maróczy chess game strongly suggests that consciousness survives physical death and lives on in a spirit world. At his website, author and researcher Miles Edward Allen ranks the case as the third most evidential among his top 40 cases.

Next blog entry approx. July 12

Posted on 12 June 2010, 8:15

‘If you could go back in time and interview anyone in history, who would it be?’

That question was put to me by a friend over a cup of coffee not long ago. When I first chose Jesus of Nazareth, my friend asked me to limit it to the last thousand years. It didn’t take me long to mull it over and choose Sir Oliver Lodge, the distinguished British physicist, inventor, and psychical researcher. He edged out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and President Harry Truman as my first choice.

My friend was a bit taken aback as he didn’t even know who Lodge was. I provided him with a little history. Born in 1851, Lodge received his doctorate in 1877, going on to teach physics and mathematics at University College in both London and Liverpool. In 1900, he became principal of Birmingham University, remaining there until his retirement in 1919. Knighted in 1902 for his scientific work, Lodge was known primarily as a physicist, especially for his work in electricity, thermo-electricity, and thermal-conductivity. He perfected a radio wave detector known as a “coherer” and was the first person to transmit a radio signal, a year before Marconi. He later developed the Lodge spark plug. He authored more than 40 books on scientific subjects. He transitioned to the spirit world 70 years ago this August at the age of 89. His obituary in The Times read, in part:

Always an impressive figure, tall and slender with a pleasing voice and charming manner, he enjoyed the affection and respect of a very large circle…Lodge’s gift as an expounder of knowledge were of a high order, and few scientific men have been able to set forth abstruse facts in a more lucid or engaging form… Those who heard him on a great occasion, as when he gave his Romanes lecture at Oxford or his British Association presidential address at Birmingham, were charmed by his alluring personality as well as impressed by the orderly development of his thesis. But he was even better in informal debate, and when he rose, the audience, however perplexed or jaded, settled down in a pleased expectation that was never disappointed.

My interest in Sir Oliver is primarily a result of of his work in psychical research. He investigated many mediums, including Leonora Piper of Boston, Mass., Gladys Osborne Leonard of England, and Eusapia Paladino of Italy. Through his investigations, he came to accept the reality of mediumship and to believe in the survival of consciousness at death. Much to the dismay of many of his materialistic colleagues in science, Sir Oliver made his beliefs public. While many of his peers in the scientific world sneered at such a distinguished man taking an interest in what they saw as nothing more than fraud and superstition, Lodge was no wimp, as so many others have been when it comes to stating a belief in a non-mechanistic world. He courageously stood his ground and often reasserted his beliefs based on empirical evidence.

Although I couldn’t find a time machine in which to go back and visit Sir Oliver, I did manage to “interview” him. Taking his words from his books now in the public domain, I formulated some questions. Here is my “interview” with Sir Oliver:

Sir Oliver, how did a dedicated physicist become interested in studying mediums?

“For myself, I do not believe that physics and psychics are entirely detached. I think there is a link between them; neither is complete without the other. A study of the material world alone may be a narrowing influence. It leaves untouched the whole ‘universe of discourse’ apprehended by artist, philosopher, and theologian. To emphasize the importance of one part of the universe we need not decry or deny the remainder.”

Prior to getting into psychical research, what were your views of survival?

“It did not seem to me possible that a man could survive the death of the body. I did not think that we could ever know the truths about things of that kind, and was content with whatever destiny lay in store for us, without either inquisitiveness or rebellion. I felt that our knowledge would not make any difference, and that we had better leave questions of that kind to settle themselves in due course.”

So what changed your mind?

“The verification of the fact of telepathy, indicating obscurely a kind of dislocation between mind and body, was undoubtedly impressive, so that it began to seem probable, especially under (Frederic) Myers’s tuition, that the two –mind and body – were not inseparably connected, as I had been led by my previous studies under Clifford, Tyndall, and Huxley to believe they were. I began to feel that there was a possibility of the survival of personality.

“Then came the revelation, through the mediumship of Mrs. Piper, in the winter of 1889, not only that the personality of certain people could survive, but that they could communicate under certain conditions with us. The proof that they retained their individuality, their memory, and their affection, forced itself upon me, as it had done upon many others. So my eyes began to open to the fact that there really was a spiritual world, as well as a material world which hitherto had seemed all sufficient, that the things which appealed to the senses were by no means the whole of existence.”

But so many of your scientific colleagues have denied things paranormal.

“Science is incompetent to make comprehensive denials about anything. It should not deal in negatives. Denial is no more fallible than assertion. There are cheap and easy kinds of skepticism, just as there are cheap and easy kinds of dogmatism.”

How did you rule out telepathy with Mrs. Piper?

“That was not an easy matter, as is obvious when you come to think of it. But I decided to invite Mrs. Piper to my house at Liverpool, and make the attempt. Suffice it to say that the attempt was successful. I got into ostensible touch with old deceased relatives of whose early youth I knew nothing whatever, and was told of incidents which were subsequently verified by their surviving elderly contemporaries. I also investigated many other faculties that she possessed, such as the reading of an unopened letter applied to the top of her head, a phenomenon which had already been testified to by Kant and Hegel, though by them it was called ‘reading with the pit of the stomach.’ At any rate, it was reading without the use of the sense organs, and therefore represented another obscure human faculty commonly called ‘clairvoyance.’”

Would you mind summarizing your conclusions relative to death and the afterlife?

“I tell you with all my strength of the conviction which I can muster that we do persist…I say it on distinct scientific grounds. I say it because I know that certain friends of mine still exist, because I have talked with them.

“Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is. We change our state at birth, and come into the world of air and sense and myriad existence; we change our state at death and enter a region of – what? Of ether, I think, and still more myriad existence; a region in which communion is more akin to what we here call telepathy, and where intercourse is not conducted by the accustomed indirect physical process; but a region in which beauty and knowledge are as vivid as they are here, a region in which progress is possible, and in which ‘admiration, hope, and love’ are even more real and dominant. It is in this sense that we can truly say, ‘The dead are not dead, but alive.’”

You say that with so much conviction.

“I am as convinced of continued existence on the other side of death as I am of existence here. It may be said, you cannot be as sure as you are of sensory experience. I say I can. A physicist is never limited to direct sensory impressions; he has to deal with a multitude of conceptions and things for which he has no physical organ – the dynamical theory of heat, for instance, and of gases, the theories of electricity, of magnetism, of chemical affinity, of cohesion, aye, and his apprehension of the ether itself, lead him into regions where sight and hearing and touch are impotent as direct witnesses, where they are no longer efficient guides.

“I shall go further and say that I am reasonably convinced of the existence of grades of being, not only lower in the scale than man but higher also, grades of every order of magnitude from zero to infinity. And I know by experience that among these beings are some who care for and help and guide humanity, not disdaining to enter even into what must seem petty details, if by so doing they can assist souls striving on their upward course. And further it is my faith – however humbly it may be held – that among those lofty beings, highest of those who concern themselves directly with this earth of all the myriads of worlds in infinite space, is One on whom the right instinct of Christianity has always lavished heartfelt reverence and devotion.”

Some have said that the death of your son, Raymond, during the war has affected your objectivity. What do you say to them?

“It must not be supposed that my outlook has changed, appreciably, since [Raymond’s death]. My conclusion has been gradually forming itself for years, though undoubtedly it is based on experiences of the same sort of thing. But this event has strengthened and liberated my testimony. It can now be associated with a private experience of my own, instead of with the private experience of others.”

You had the opportunity to observe many types of mediumship. Which type impressed you the most?

“The direct-voice seems the clearest intermediate phenomenon – a voice produced in the air independent of the medium’s normal mode of utterance, and saying things outside his or her normal knowledge. From one point of view it is physical – there are undoubtedly vibrations of the air that might be recorded on a gramophone; from another point of view it is psychic, as the if the utterances were produced by some person, dead or alive, but, anyway, not present in the flesh.”

It has been suggested that survival research is outside the scope of science, that there are things not explained by science and that never can be explained. What do you say to that?

“I should myself hesitate to promulgate such a markedly non-possumus and ignorabimus statement concerning the scope of physical science, even as narrowly and popularly understood; but it illuminates the position taken up by those savants who are commonly known as materialists, and explains their expressed though non-personal hostility to other scientific men who seek to exceed the boundaries laid down, and investigate things beyond the immediate range of senses.”

Why do you think mainstream science object so to psychical research?

“The aim of science has been for the most part a study of mechanism, the mechanism whereby results are achieved, an investigation into the physical processes which go on, and which appear to be coextensive with nature. Any theory which seems to involve the action of Higher Beings, or of any unknown entity controlling and working the mechanism, is apt to be extruded or discountenanced as a relic of primitive superstition, coming down from times when such infantile explanations were prevalent.”

Is there any way to overcome such a mindset?

“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.”

What would you tell some materialistic but open-minded students?

“The material side of a picture is canvas and pigment, nothing else would be detected by a microscope; but to such an examination there is no ‘picture,’ the ‘soul’ or meaning – the reality – has evaporated when the material object is contemplated in that analytical manner. So it is with our bodies; dissected they are muscle and blood-vessel and nerves – a wonderful mechanism; but no such examination can detect the soul or mind.”

Considering the negative reaction of some your fellow scientists, do you have any second thoughts about having gone public with your views on spirit communication and survival?

“I should be willing to face the stake rather than be unfaithful to so vital and pregnant a truth – a conclusion so illuminating in our understanding of the meaning of existence, so instructive in relation to the scheme of the universe, and so vitally affecting the hopes and aspirations of man. I do not even feel tempted to succumb to either ecclesiastical or philosophical censure concerning the initial stages of what may be described as the scientific discovery of the soul, as a verified and persistent entity.”

Some have suggested that we can get too hung up on investigating and confirming survival to the detriment of fully living our lives now? Would you agree?

“It is no doubt possible, as always, to overstep the happy mean, and by absorption in and premature concerns with future interests to lose the benefit and training of this present life. But although we may rightly decide to live with full vigour in the present, and do our duty from moment to moment, yet in order to be full-flavoured and really intelligent beings – not merely with mechanical draft following the line of least resistance – we ought to be aware that there is a future, a future determined to some extent by action in the present; and it is only reasonable that we should seek to ascertain, roughly and approximately, what sort of future it is likely to be.

“Inquiry into survival, and into the kind of experience through which we shall all certainly have to go in a few years, is therefore eminently sane, and may be vitally significant. It may colour all our actions, and give a vivid meaning both to human history and to personal experience.”

The scientific world doesn’t seem to be any more accepting of the research done by you and other pioneers of psychical research now than it was 100 years ago. Do you see any point in continuing with it?

“Experience must be our guide. To shut the door on actual observation and experiment in this particular region, because of preconceived ideas and obstinate prejudices, is an attitude common enough, even among scientific men; but it is an attitude markedly unscientific. Certain people have decided that inquiry into the activities of discarnate mind is futile; some few consider it impious; many, perhaps wisely mistrusting their own powers, shrink from entering on such an inquiry. But if there are any facts to be ascertained, it must be the duty of some volunteers to try to ascertain them: and for people having any acquaintance with scientific history to shut their eyes to facts when definitely announced, and to forbid investigation or report concerning them on pain of ostracism, is to imitate a bygone theological attitude in a spirit of unintended flattery – a flattery from which every point of view is eccentric; and likewise to display an extraordinary lack of humour.”

Thank you, Sir Oliver, do you have any closing thoughts?

“I rejoice in the opportunity of service, and am thankful for the kindly help and guidance always forthcoming, though not always recognized at the time. Forward, then, into the unknown!”

Next blog post approx. June 28

Posted on 28 May 2010, 9:14

As a very liberal Unitarian minister, Dr. Horace Westwood (pictured below) did not believe in any kind of afterlife. He was a humanist who believed that the objective of life was to make the world a better place for future generations. He did not stop to ask what future generations might strive for beyond comforts and pleasures once Utopia was attained. ‘The only immortality of which I was sure was the immortality of influence,’ he offered. ‘Beyond that, I had nothing to offer.’

Born in Yorkshire, England in 1884, Westwood emigrated to Canada in 1904, ministering in both the western and eastern parts of the country. As he explained in his 1949 book, There is a Psychic World, his philosophy relative to survival and the meaning of life began to slowly change in 1918 when he observed messages coming over a Ouija board at a friend’s house. Curious, he purchased a Ouija board and began experimenting in his own house with his wife and her cousin, who lived with them.

Their initial efforts were a failure. When Westwood’s four children and ‘Anna,’ the cousin’s 11-year-old daughter, asked what was going on, Westwood explained that it was kind of a toy. They asked to try it and he consented. Nothing happened with Westwood’s children, but when Anna tried it things did happen.

‘She had hardly touched it, when the indicator began to move with startling rapidity and with equally startling accuracy, spelling out words and sentences in complete and intelligent sequence,’ Westwood wrote. ‘But the subject matter of the sentence was extraordinary to say the least. Things were revealed which the child could not possibly have known. Circumstances and events were told concerning each adult that were not known to the other two. At times it was embarrassing, at least, to me.’

Westwood turned the board around and blindfolded Anna, but it made no difference. The indicator continued to deliver a wealth of information with swiftness and accuracy.

‘My immediate reaction was that the natural sensitivity of the child enabled her, by some process beyond my ken, to explore the subconscious levels of the minds of the adults and to bring forgotten and buried memories to light,’ Westwood explained.

The following day, Westwood made his own Ouija board with the letters in different places. He brought Anna to the board in his den while blindfolded and placed her hand on the tumbler over the board. ‘It was literally amazing,’ he recorded. ‘Her hand was not confused in the least. The tumbler found the letters with the same swiftness and accuracy as the day before. And to my great surprise the first message that came through was to the effect that I was a fool for my pains, the arrangements of the letters made not the slightest difference and that ‘they’ would prove that they were invisible entities seeking to communicate on the physical plane.’

Among the messages was one purporting to come from Fred, an old college friend who had died several years earlier. Still, Westwood refused to believe in spirits. ‘I positively refused to grant them any real existence,’ he continued, adding that he was certain it had to be some aspect of the subconscious mind that he did not understand.

Concerned about the effect of all this on Anna, Westwood discussed it with her, her mother, and his wife. As Anna seemed not to be affected in a negative way, he decided to continue with more experiments. Within a week, Anna developed the power of automatic writing. ‘It made no difference whether we blindfolded her or not, she wrote with the same perfect ease and accuracy. Her pencil never faltered and never was there the slightest hesitation in recording answers to questions that were asked.’

One message came from a child whose parents Westwood knew. For privacy concerns, he referred to her under the pseudonym ‘Charlotte Summers.’ She had been in the adjoining ward of the hospital Dr Westwood was in for surgery during 1913. She ‘passed over,’ at the age of six, before he left the hospital.

Charlotte began by giving her name and their mutual hospital experiences, as well as the circumstances of her death. ‘As the message continued, she revealed an intimate knowledge of her parents’ family life both during her earthly sojourn and since,’ Westwood documented. ‘She then made clear the purpose of her communication.’ She wanted Westwood to contact her mother, who had ceased to grieve, and let her know that she was still alive. ‘Give her to understand that I’m always near and that I am so happy over baby brother.’ Charlotte communicated in Anna’s hand.

Westwood was reluctant to contact the Summers and tell them of the communication, especially since he was still not sure that it was not all some kind of trick of the subconscious combined with mental telepathy. However, he proceeded to call them and received the reaction he had feared. Mr. Summers was shocked that Westwood would believe in such ‘nonsense’ and wanted nothing to do with it. However, about a month later, Mr Summers, apparently at the urging of Mrs. Summers, called Westwood and requested that Anna be brought to their home.

‘In response to the many questions asked through Anna of the alleged Charlotte [by the Summers], the replies indicated a wealth of detailed information entirely beyond any possible knowledge [Anna] might have possessed,’ Westwood wrote. ‘The parents were convinced that the communication were evidential and that through Anna they had come into touch with the daughter who had ‘passed over’ some five years before.’

Not long after the automatic writing began, Anna wrote messages from two apparently different sources. One signed her name ‘Ruth’ and the other ‘Ralph.’ They claimed to have been stenographers in Washington, D.C. in the employment of the U.S. Government and said they died together about two years earlier while in their late twenties. They provided some data about their life, but Westwood, still resisting the survival hypothesis, made no attempt to follow up and verify the information. ‘I was not interested in communing with the departed, and the problem of proving or disproving survival was not in my mind,’ Westwood explained as he wrote the book some three decades later.

While messages had come from other ‘entities’ earlier, they now came only from Ruth and Ralph. Anna suddenly became an expert typist while receiving messages from Ruth and Ralph. ‘Anna had never played with a typewriter,’ Westwood wrote. ‘But under control and blindfolded, she would operate the machine with perfect ease as though she possessed experienced hands. Yet, without control and without the blindfold, she had to pick out the letters, painfully, one by one.’

Westwood would place typed questions in the typewriter, blindfold Anna, who had no prior knowledge of the questions, and then receive swift replies from Ruth and Ralph. He even spoke with Anna about other matters as her fingers typed replies.

At one sitting, Ralph suggested a game. He instructed Westwood to take a ‘rook’ from his chess set and place a ping-pong ball on it, then to use his long briar tobacco pipe as a golf club and to hit the ball toward a certain object without knocking down the rook. ‘It was a task requiring the greatest delicacy in coordination and skill,’ Westwood related, mentioning that his four children and Anna all gave it a try. ‘Not once did any of us succeed. Usually, we knocked down the rook with ball. When we succeeded in hitting the ball without knocking down the rook, it went wild and we missed our object.’

Ralph then communicated that Westwood should blindfold Anna and place her in position. ‘Through Anna, Ralph assumed a stance, then swinging the pipe as a club, he struck,’ Westwood continued the story. ‘He did not miss, the rook did not fall, and the ball flew with precise aim and hit the object. We set ourselves up as targets around the room, and one by one, he caused the ball to hit us all.’ Anna remained blindfolded through it all.

Westwood then challenged Ralph to a game of chess. Westwood had previously taught Anna the game, although her skills were elementary. Nevertheless, as a precaution he again blindfolded her. ‘It was an extraordinary sight to watch her fingers move the pieces on the board,’ Westwood wrote. ‘But it was more marvelous still to realize that a genuine game was in process.’ Later, after Ralph had departed, Westwood tried to get Anna to play the game, but she could not see the pieces and therefore was unable to play.

There were times when Ruth and Ralph were absent. Westwood asked them what they were doing when they were not communicating with him. They informed him that they had duties and tasks, primarily that of welcoming to their side those who had just passed over. Ruth and Ralph explained that their time at the Westwood home was their recreation period. They further explained that their job of greeting new souls was very stressful, especially since many of them failed to realize that they were ‘dead.’ Some of those who had passed over from the battlefield continued to want to fight. It was as if they were men struggling in a nightmare.

Westwood pointed out that Anna never went into a trance. ‘Never, for one moment, was there even the suggestion of a lapse of consciousness,’ he explained. ‘While the alleged controls never ‘broke through’ or manifested in my absence, or without my expressed wish, when they did come through, Anna was always master of the situation. In almost every experiment, for example, she would at times throw off the control in order to make some personal comment or observation, thus showing that her own mind was watchful and fully alert.’

One evening, Westwood asked Ruth if she would play on the piano through Anna, who had taken a few lessons but was by no means an accomplished pianist. Ruth informed him that she was not musical, but that the following evening she would bring a friend named Kate, so gifted. The following evening, Westwood blindfolded Anna and sat her at the piano. ‘As long as I shall live, I shall never forget that night,’ Westwood reported. ‘She began with a slow melody, the like of which I had never heard before, for it was solemn in its majesty and almost unearthly in its beauty. As I watched the child play, the bodily action and the finger technique were entirely different from Anna’s own.’

Later, the alleged Kate (through Anna) took pencil and paper and began to write rapidly. She told Westwood that the scale structure on her side was different and thus it was difficult to express herself as she would have liked to. ‘Yet the whole performance was on an elevated plane, indicating a mental range and musical understanding far beyond the child’s normal power,’ Westwood wrote.

At another sitting, during which a number of family friends gathered, Ruth took charge and asked each person to write a question on a piece of paper, leave it unsigned, then fold the paper and put it into a container. Westwood then shook the container and gave it to Anna, who took out the pieces of paper one by one. In each case, Ruth identified the writer and answered the questions. In two or three cases, the answer was ‘I don’t know.’ One of the guests asked what the price of a certain stock would be on the stock exchange the following day. ‘Have you been imbibing too freely from the contents of your well-stocked cellar?’ Ruth responded to that question. This was during prohibition and the response was very embarrassing to the guest. Westwood pointed out that Anna, herself, could not possibly have known of the guest’s ‘well-stocked cellar.’

Still, Westwood remained a ‘doubting Thomas,’ not wanting to believe in the spirit hypothesis and thinking that Anna’s subconscious was somehow producing the phenomena. One night, Ruth and Ralph left and a nameless spirit who would only designate himself as ‘X’ began communicating. ‘I realized that we were in the presence of a decidedly superior intelligence, as far above Ruth or Ralph in intellectual grasp as a Ph.D. would be above a college freshman,’ Westwood documented. ‘X’ began discussing philosophical matters, some of which were beyond Westwood’s grasp. ‘The general point of view was that the underlying, in fact the all-permeating reality was consciousness, and that the universe by and large was designed for ‘being’ and ‘beings’ in an infinite series of gradations,’ Westwood further reported, admitting that his intelligence was no match for ‘X’.

Westwood then proposed an experiment. He would blindfold Anna and he would then walk backward into another room, the library. With his back to the bookcase, he would select a book at random. Without looking at the book, he would open it and place it on a buffet in the dining room with the open pages down. He would then return to Anna and ask ‘X’ to indicate the number of the right-hand page at which the book was opened and write the first 10-12 words. ‘X’ agreed to the experiment, which was carried out as Westwood requested, several other adults in attendance.

‘I do not hesitate in making the confession that I walked to the buffet with some trepidation,’ Westwood continued. ‘I did not believe that what I had proposed was within the realm of possibility. However, when I reached the buffet and compared the script (from ‘X’ through Anna), they corresponded. The script gave the correct number of the page. However, as to the writing, there was one slight variation. Instead of the words from the top of the page, they were the opening words of the first paragraph. Also, there was one slight discrepancy, the first word ‘Remember’ was spelled ‘Rember.’ Otherwise, the text was perfect.’

On Christmas Day, 1918, a young girl named Virginia, the niece of a member of Westwood’s congregation was killed in a tobogganing accident. Two days later, Ruth communicated that Virginia was there and she would allow her to communicate through Anna, even though Virginia was still dazed.

‘The first symptom was that of bewilderment bordering on fear,’ Westwood wrote. ‘In fact, the first words that came through were, ‘Where am I? I want my mother.’ This was repeated several times as she (Virginia through Anna) gazed around the room.’ Westwood told her that there was no need to be afraid, that she was in the study of the church. Virginia then settled down and asked how her mother and baby brother were. Westwood noted that neither he nor Anna knew that she had a baby brother. He asked other questions of Virginia and later confirmed the responses as fact with Virginia’s aunt.

While Westwood claimed to have no interest in survival, he wrote that he was forced to believe in it after his experiences with Anna, who lost her powers after about three years, upon the departure of Ruth and Ralph.

Posted on 14 May 2010, 10:38

Indications are that we take our mistakes and unfinished business with us when we die and that they can continue to fester with us in the spirit world. Consider the sitting that Dr Minor Savage (below) had with Leonora Piper, the famous Boston medium. Savage was told that his son, who had died at age 31 three years earlier, was present. “Papa, I want you go at once to my room,” Savage recalled his son communicating with a great deal of earnestness. “Look in my drawer and you will find a lot of loose papers. Among them are some which I would like you to take and destroy at once.”

The son had lived with a personal friend in Boston and his personal effects remained there. Savage went to his son’s room and searched the drawer, gathering up all the loose papers. “There were things there which he had jotted down and trusted to the privacy of his drawer which he would not have made public for the world,” Savage ended the story, commenting that he would not violate his son’s privacy by disclosing the contents of the papers.

As further reported by Savage and also recorded in the records of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), the Rev. W. H. Savage, Minot’s brother, and a friend of Harvard Professor William James, the man who discovered Mrs. Piper, sat with Piper on Dec. 28, 1888. Phinuit told him that somebody named Robert West was there and wanted to send a message to Minot. The message was in the form of an apology for something West had written about Minot “in advance.” W. H. Savage did not understand the message but passed it on to Minot, who understood it and explained that West was editor of a publication called The Advance and had criticized his work in an editorial. During the sitting, W. H. Savage asked for a description of West. An accurate description was given along with the information that West had died of hemorrhage of the kidneys, a fact unknown to Savage but later verified.

In a sitting by W. H. Savage two weeks later, West again communicated, stating that his body was buried at Alton, Illinois. He gave the wording on his tombstone, “Fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” Savage was unaware of either of these facts, but later confirmed them as true.

“Now the striking thing about this lies in the fact that my brother was not thinking of this matter and cared nothing about it,” Minot Savage ended the story, feeling that this ruled out mental telepathy on the part of the medium. “There was no reason for the [apology] unless it be found in simply human feeling on his [West’s] part that he had discovered that he had been guilty of an injustice, and wished, as far as possible, to make reparation, and this for peace of his own mind.”

A Mother’s Grief

There have been many messages from the spirit world suggesting that the grief of loved ones left behind weighs heavily on the departed soul. Such was the message communicated by Olive Thomas (below), a popular Hollywood actress of the silent-screen era, who died of a medication overdose during September 1920.

Communicating with J. Gay Stevens, a New York journalist and a member of the ASPR, through medium Chester Michael Grady, Thomas informed Stevens that she needed to get word to her mother that her death was accidental, not a “scandalous suicide” as had been reported by the press. She explained that when she couldn’t sleep she reached for a bottle of sleeping pills but took the wrong bottle, one very similar in appearance. It contained bichloride of mercury, which killed her.

When Stevens contacted Thomas’ mother, the mother wanted nothing to do with him, assuming that, as a journalist, he was just trying to add to the scandal. But Thomas pleaded for Stevens to make further efforts to convince her mother. Over a period of a dozen sittings, Thomas provided Stevens with personal information that had not been public knowledge, hoping that her mother would realize that she was in fact communicating. But the mother still resisted, concluding that as a journalist Stevens had special ways of gathering information. Moreover, her pastor told her that it must be the work of Satan.

Thomas insisted, however, that Stevens keep trying. She then provided some very evidential information that she felt certain would convince her mother that she was alive in the spirit world and communicating. She said that all of her jewelry had been returned to her mother after her death, except one item – her favorite brooch. She told Stevens that the brooch got caught up in the lining of a pocket in the steamer trunk now in her mother’s attic. She also told Stevens one of the pearls, the third from the top on the right, had come out of its setting and was loose in the tissue paper surrounding the brooch.

When Stevens brought this information to Thomas’ mother, the mother reluctantly agreed to go to the attic and search the steamer trunk. Finding the brooch with the loose pearl was enough to convince her that her daughter, not Satan, was actually communicating. She accepted the explanation that her daughter did not commit suicide and this apparently relieved much of her grief and also gave Olive a certain peace of mind.

Change in Will

One of the victims of the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat was Sir Hugh Lane, an art connoisseur and director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. He was transporting lead containers with paintings of Monet, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian, which were insured for $4 million and were to be displayed at the National Gallery. It was reported by survivors that Lane was seen on deck looking out to Ireland before going down to the dining saloon just before the torpedoes struck.

On the very night of the disaster, Hester Travers Smith (above) and Lennox Robinson were sitting at a Ouija board in Dublin, Ireland. As was their usual practice, Travers Smith, the oldest daughter of Professor Edward Dowden, a Shakespearian scholar, and Robinson, a world-renowned Irish playwright, sat blindfolded at the board, their fingers lightly touching the board’s “traveler,” a triangular piece of wood which flies from letter to letter under the direction of a spirit control.

They had experienced several controls over their years of operating the ouija board, but on this particular night the control was a spirit known to them as Peter Rooney. Rooney would be in touch with others on his side and deliver their messages for them if they lacked the experience to communicate on their own. Reverend Savell Hicks sat at the table between Travers Smith and Robinson, copying the letters indicated by the traveler.

“I am Hugh Lane, all is dark,” was spelled out by the traveler, although Travers Smith and Robinson were blindfolded and had no clue as to the message. In fact, they were conversing on other matters as their hands moved rapidly. After several minutes, Hicks told Travers Smith and Robinson that it was Sir Hugh Lane coming through and that he told them he was aboard the Lusitania and had drowned.

While they had heard of the disaster, none of the three was aware that Lane was a passenger on the ship. They continued receiving messages from Lane, who told them that there was panic, the life boats were lowered, and the women went first. He went on to say that he was the last to get in an overcrowded life boat, fell over, and lost all memory until he “saw a light” at their sitting. To establish his identity, Lane gave Travers Smith an evidential message about the last time they had met and talked.

“I did not suffer. I was drowned and felt nothing,” Lane further communicated through Peter Rooney that night. He also gave intimate messages for friends of his in Dublin.

Lane continued to communicate at subsequent sittings. As plans were underway to erect a memorial gallery to him, he begged that Travers Smith let those behind the movement know that he did not want such a memorial. However, he was more concerned that a codicil to his will would be honored. He had left his private collection of art to the National Gallery in London, but the codicil stated that they should go to the National Gallery in Dublin. Because he had not signed the codicil, the London gallery was reluctant to give them up. “Those pictures must be secured for Dublin,” Lane communicated on January 22, 1918, going on to say that he could not rest until they were.

At a sitting that September, Sir William Barrett, the distinguished British physicist and psychical researcher, was present. Prior to the sitting, Travers Smith and Barrett discussed how evidential the messages from Lane were to them, although they could understand why the public doubted. After the sitting started, a man who said he had died in Sheffield communicated first. Then, Travers Smith recalled, Robinson’s arm was seized and driven about so forcibly that the traveler fell off the table more than once. It was Lane, who was upset because of the doubts expressed relative to his communication.

More regrets over a will

On November 10, 1928, Mollie Ross sat with Geraldine Cummins (below), the renowned Irish automatic writing medium, in London. “Mo..Mo…Molly. I am here. I see you,” Molly’s deceased sister, Alice, communicated through Cummins’ hand. “It’s all true. I am alive. The pain went at once. I felt suffocating. Then, just after I got that awful chocking, I felt things were breaking up all about me. I heard crackling like fire and then dimness. I saw you bending down with such a white face and you were looking at me, and I wasn’t there.”

Alice said that she regretted not having treated her second son, who was living in East Africa, as an equal to Ronald. (Molly confirmed that Ronald was her sister’s favorite and that Ronald was favored in Alice’s will.)

Another deceased sister, Margaret, took control of the pencil and said that Alice was having a hard time “managing the words.” Margaret then communicated that Alice also regretted treating her husband badly. Molly noted that this was also very evidential as Alice “bullied her husband dreadfully.”

Margaret then mentioned that Alice still resented the fact that Margaret cut her out of her will and left her share to Charles, their brother, who had no need of the money. This was another very evidential fact to Molly, as it was clearly unknown to the medium. “She hasn’t forgotten yet the way I left my money,” Margaret wrote. “She feels it would have made a difference in her last days.”

Molly told Margaret that Alice’s family was managing financially. “Good,” Margaret replied. “I will tell her that, then she won’t bother about things. The fact of the matter is, she came out of the world with a dark cloud of years of troubled thought about money. It all accumulated and clung about her. But I think now it will be slowly dissipated…All that worrying before her death left her in a very scattered state of mind.”

Borrowed item not returned

Sometime around 1890, Henry Ward Beecher (below) told his friend, Dr. Isaac K. Funk, about a valuable coin, called “The Widow’s Mite,” owned by another friend, Professor Charles West, of Brooklyn, NY. During 1894, Funk, a partner in the American company, Funk & Wagnalls, borrowed the coin from West so that it could be illustrated in The Standard Dictionary, which the company published.

As Funk was to later recall, he gave the coin to his brother, Benjamin, the company’s business manager, and asked him to return it to Professor West after the photographic plate was made. Benjamin then gave the coin, along with another coin, both in a sealed envelope to H. L. Raymond, head cashier of the company. Raymond placed the envelope in the drawer of a large combination safe, where it would remain forgotten for some nine years.

It was in February of 1903 that Funk, also a member of the ASPR, was told about an apparently gifted medium in Brooklyn. On his third visit to this medium, the medium’s spirit control said that Beecher, who was unable to communicate directly, was concerned because of an ancient coin. “This coin is out of its place and should be returned,” the message came through. “It has long been away, and Mr. Beecher wishes it returned, and he looks to you, doctor, to return it.”

Funk pressed for more information and was told that it was in a large iron safe in a drawer under a lot of papers. At his office the next day, Funk had the bookkeeper check the company safe. There, they found the coin in a little drawer in the safe under a lot of papers. Since Professor West had also died, the coin was then returned to his son.

Although Beecher was not responsible for holding on to the coin, he apparently felt some responsibility for it or it may have been that West was unable to communicate and asked Beecher to remind Funk that it has not been returned.

The biggest regret

There are many other stories suggesting that we take our concerns, anxieties, mistakes, and regrets with us to the afterlife, but there have also been a number of communications saying that the biggest regret is not having found out more about the spirit world when alive.

Communicating with Allan Kardec, the distinguished French researcher of yesteryear, a spirit identified as Van Durst, who had been employed by the government before dying at age 88 in 1863, told Kardec that he very much regretted not paying any attention to spirit matters before his death. “If, before quitting the earth, I had known what you know, how much more easy and agreeable would have been my initiation into this other life,” Van Durst said. “I should have known, before dying, what I had to learn afterwards, at the moment of separation; and my soul would have accomplished its disengagement much more easily.”

Posted on 30 April 2010, 7:54

Outside of the actual evidence suggesting that consciousness survives physical death, the most important teaching coming through modern revelation is that we do not cross over into some humdrum heaven or horrific hell, as orthodox preachers would have us believe. We pretty much cross over as we are when we depart the material world spiritually.

That is the primary message conveyed by August Goforth and Timothy Gray in their 2009 book, The Risen. August Goforth is a pseudonym for a New York psychotherapist who for obvious professional reasons is reluctant to use his actual name. He is also an intuitive-mental and psychophysical spirit medium.

Timothy Gray was a New York City writer, editor, and photographer who transitioned to the spirit world during the early 1990s and then, about two years after his physical death, began communicating with ‘Goforth,’ his former partner in earth life, providing his own experiences in the afterlife as well as information given to him by ‘The Risen Collective,’ a group of more advanced spirit entities who use Timothy Gray to relay information to Goforth. The ‘Risen’ is the authors’ term for those who have transitioned to the spirit world and seen the light, i.e., excluding earthbound spirits.

‘Tim and I passionately want to share that there is no such thing as death,’ Goforth writes. ‘There is only Life – infinite varieties, forms, qualities, and expressions of it. What the majority of still-embodied people fear as ‘death’ is simply a transitional phase from one quality of life to another.’

The authors discuss everything from the initial experiences after death to dwelling places in the afterlife, the nature of the afterlife, and advancement in the afterlife. The authors discuss the nature of self, obstacles in communicating, materializations, the rescue of earthbound souls, dreams, out-of-body travel, mediumship, skeptical attitudes, dealing with grief, and misinterpretations relative to reincarnation, to name just some of the subject matter.

One especially interesting communiqué deals with skepticism in the afterlife realms. Apparently, there are scientists and others in the spirit realms who do not believe that the material world called earth exists. I recently put some questions to ‘August’ by e-mail.

August, when did you discover your mediumistic abilities? How did it develop?

They discovered me. The abilities were always there, and I experienced a wide range of phenomena as a child, but didn’t see any of it as unusual, including the moving musical lights, levitating toys, and laughing with ‘extra guests’ at my grandparents’ dinner table.

My earliest childhood was immensely happy due to all the spirit activity around me, and I can still remember the immense feelings of warmth, love, and safety while tucked into my big Victorian iron bed at night, listening to the gentle voices that spoke to me from just overhead. Often, and up into my early teens, an open book would appear over my head, face down and glowing in the dark, and I would read from it until I fell asleep; but I’ve no memory of what I read.

My grandmother transitioned when I was two, and thereafter often sat in my tiny rocking chair and silently watched me while I played. My parents never interfered, and if they did make negative suggestions, my ‘spirit family’ would counter those effects somehow, so I grew up not knowing that my experiences were not the norm. I was a solitary child, but never lonely, due to all the spirit company that was with me, and this remains so even now. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s when Tim first materialized to me that I reached a new level of awareness – sort of the ‘quantum leap’ that hit me over the head that something funny was going on. Then all the pieces fell into place. Duh! You’re a medium!’

Will you briefly explain how you now communicate with Timothy and the spirit world?

There are several levels or ‘species’ of communication that occur – some separately, others collectively, making for a rich, multidimensional experience. One I call ‘teasing,’ which are little, sometimes not-so-subtle hints of Tim’s presence, like moving objects about in significant ways only I would understand, or influencing events and people to remind me he’s never far away. Kind of like slipping little love notes into my lunchbox. We are almost always in ‘psychospiritual mental’ contact, where we share an exceptional vibratory spiritual and mental space created by our affinity and love for one another.

I can internally hear his voice clearly, and feel him as well. While it’s not like a thought in my head, but ‘somewhere else,’ only I can hear him. It’s in this space that we commune, a most intimate experience, and are gabbing away to each other, making jokes, offering emotional support and validation, from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep and can then join him more completely in an astral geography. We’re working on direct voice now, which is still very rare for us.

Many books on mediumship point out that the messages can be colored by the medium’s own mind. Do you see this as a problem or concern with your mediumship? If so, how are you able to distinguish between what has come from spirit and what from your own mind?

My spirit colleagues taught me to distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not me.’ Several chapters in the book are devoted to gaining awareness of the differences between one’s ego-mind and the voices of its criticizing simulate selves and that of one’s Authentic Self. To quote from it:

‘Until we can become familiar with these false inner gods and their agendas and methods, we will be unable to determine with confidence when a voice actually belongs to a Risen One. If we want to have conversations with the Risen, we must be able to at least temporarily silence the voices of the simulate selves. Second, until we become aware of the ego-mind’s lies about death, which keep us fettered to fear, and of our hidden beliefs that make us co-conspirators with it, we will have little chance of ever connecting with our Authentic Self, and then with the greater authentic reality of the Risen.’

A friend pointed out that he noticed that, rather than egotistically treating my abilities as unusual, or making me ‘special,’ I’ve integrated and normalized them in ways that easily fit into my life.

Skeptics and debunkers often point to the inability of mediums to get names as evidence that it is so much bunk. You talk about this in the book. Would you mind summarizing the problem as you now understand it?

I’ve lost track of the ‘St. Germains’ who claimed to have important messages for me, so I’m quite adamant about requiring proof and validation of a spirit’s identity. The Christ, Jesus set an example by commanding names and identities of spirits who made all kinds of claims and demands. A spirit can easily pick a name and identifying characteristics out of one’s mind and pretend to be that contact, and nobody’s the wiser.

A medium with little or no awareness of his simulate self voices may not be able to determine validity. Names would seem easiest, but light and sound move at a highly faster, finer rate in the spirit environment, so a medium may catch the sound as it zips past her spiritual ear—and not much more beyond that. ‘Mandy’ might sound like ‘M ee’ to her. It could be Mindy, Mandy, or Mikey. A great deal of time and ingenuity will be needed to continue to puzzle this out.

Experienced Risen Ones will forgo wasting time and energy on a name, hoping that other details and the feelings they evoke will be powerful enough to validate their identities. A medium must be exquisitely sensitive to intuitively understand where the Risen One is trying to lead. Skeptics will misinterpret this intelligent avoidance of names as lack of evidence, but their focus on what isn’t there disables them from being open to what’s actually there.

As I understand it, modern psychotherapy pretty much takes a materialistic/reductionist type approach to understanding and solving individual problems, thus ignoring possible spiritual causes. How are you able to deal with this conflict in your practice?

I avoid a reductionist approach, which breaks things down to supposedly identity causes and effects. It views the bits and pieces through a critical lens of pathology rather than one of health, so the finer, less apparent spiritual aspects of a patient’s wholistic being can’t be seen under such a delusional microscope. Looking at pieces instead of the whole will never give a complete picture towards a correct understanding and acceptance of a patient’s presenting situation.

My practice is psychodynamic, where the patient remains whole, and we develop a real and human relationship; our interactions reveal living energies and real-time aspects of our wholeness together. My stance as an accepting, nonjudgmental witness, and my self-awareness of this, give me access to those finer spiritual energies that reveal the hidden worlds all embodied people inhabit, as well as the spirit inhabitants of those worlds. My silent but conscious awareness is often all that’s needed to stimulate a patient’s previously inactive awareness of these dimensions and all they have to offer; and in time, they begin to draw on those supportive spiritual energies, and healing ensues. It’s not even necessary to talk about spirits or mediums or the afterlife with them, although, not surprisingly, these words or idea are often eventually brought up by the patient in some way.

Your book discusses the materialization of Timothy. I’d appreciate it if you would briefly explain this experience and your take on it.

While his materialization lowers him closer to my slower vibrating environment, they raise me up and closer to his space of higher vibrations. It’s largely an emotional experience, even though it’s also physical – but it’s beyond physical – it’s hyperspiritual. The experiences have permanently merged with my terrestrial body manifestation, transforming me on every level. Your question makes me cry, because it immediately evokes the events of his materializations, re-stimulating my vibrations to such an extent that they can still shake me to the core. The events were crisp, clear, stunning, and glowing; at the same time, they exuded such an immense feeling of love and safety that somehow, perhaps because of the lack of fear, enabled them not to feel strange or frightening, but rational, normal, appropriate, and sanely beautiful.

What are your conclusions on reincarnation?

They’re informed by Tim’s in-depth exploration about the subject, and so I refer to his current conclusions:

‘The evidence strongly indicates that we cannot be re individuated again…my observation is that there is never any need to go back to do it again, for the universe is infinite and never-ending and will provide me with unceasing opportunities, always new, fresh, and alive, to explore, learn, and expand my self-awareness on a continual basis. I don’t need to claim more than one life because my one life is enough. Because this one life is eternal it will always be more than enough, which is the core meaning of ‘abundance.’ Clearly, we are reborn upon our transition, but this rebirth is always into a new world and a unique state of existence, not back into the old one. The old one no longer exists—life is experienced in the continual now. We develop and carry forward the template for our new life. We are the template, and a new world will simultaneously arise from us as we arise from it, as a direct result of how we lived our lives on earth or from wherever we are continuously transitioning. The more brilliantly we live—that is, the more light-filled—the more spectacular will our lives manifest as we transmute ever onward. There are no limits to brilliance except as self-imposed. But even that is an illusion, for there is no real limit to anything.’

What do you see as the three most important messages coming from Timothy and ‘The Risen Collective’?

1. ‘Do not adjust your screens. This is not a test.’

2. ‘The very structure of the Intelligent Universe is light and music—singing, talking, and laughing. Life is real and death is not, so there is nothing to fear unless you fear life’s light-filled music. Death is not the end to life but another beginning, another birth. It is a door, a passage to more life, more than we could possibly imagine.’

3. ‘As beings of light we continue on endlessly—our immortal experience. This realization is of immense importance, for we are literally having our immortal experience in this very moment. Immortality doesn’t begin after we transition to Risen, but commenced when we first arose on this world, fired into life with a Divine Spark, to awaken and breathe and move up and out into this world, our earth.’

Check http://augustgoforth.blogspot.com and go to Amazon.com if you are interested in ordering The Risen.

Posted on 15 April 2010, 11:35

Birthdays are a good time to stop, pause, and figure out where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.  On the occasion of my 73rd birthday recently, I took time out to discuss this with my Higher Self.  Below is a transcript of our discussion.  (MT = me, my lower self; HS = my Higher Self)

MT:  As you know, HS, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about, reading about, and writing about the evidence for an afterlife and what that afterlife is all about.  My friends keep telling me that I am too obsessed with the subject and that I should focus more on this life.  What do you think?

HS:  Well, Michael, my boy, if you were half your age and still very much involved with raising a family and working a full-time job, I might agree with them, although I would still encourage you to have an interest in the subject.  But since you are no longer working a full-time job or raising a family, what would you do with your time?

MT:  That’s what I ask them, HS.  I guess I could take up golf and idle away my time by hitting little white balls into holes, or I could escape life by reading novels or watching fiction on television, or maybe I could go down to the senior’s center and play cribbage or lawn bowling with others my age.  I haven’t been able to come up with any really meaningful activities to focus on.  Any suggestions?

HS:  You could do more volunteer work than you are doing now.

MT:  I know, but, as you know, I volunteered for hospice last year and even went through their training program, but they still haven’t called me and have ignored my calls to them.

HS:  That’s strange.  Any idea why?

MT:  Probably because I made the mistake of discussing my interest in afterlife matters with the instructor.  I didn’t know it then, but it is now my understanding that this is more or less a taboo subject in hospice.  They don’t want volunteers to be discussing afterlife issues with patients.  They want that left to the chaplains.

HS: I’m sure you see the reason for that.

MT:  Yes, who is to say the volunteer knows what he is talking about? He or she might be a hell and damnation type of person and really do a disservice to the dying person.  Of course, I don’t think there are very many chaplains or ministers who are very effective when it comes to talking about life after death.  So it is a lose-lose situation.

HS:  I can’t disagree with you there, but how do you know your interpretation of what comes after death is any more correct than the hell and damnation preachers?

MT: I don’t know for certain, but it appeals to reason and can be reconciled with a just and loving creative intelligence rather than an angry, vindictive one.  And it just makes so much more sense than the humdrum heaven and horrific hell offered by orthodox religion.

HS:  So you think everything must make sense?

MT:  Well, not really, I don’t think we can really make sense of God or comprehend God, but ruling out nonsense is another issue and so much of what orthodox religion offers just seems like nonsense that discourages people from believing. 

HS:  Refresh my memory.  What do you see as the biggest difference between what you believe and what is taught by orthodoxy?

MT:  First of all, orthodox religion holds that blind faith is all that is necessary.  All well and good for the Philistine who does not think deeply about such matters, but blind faith doesn’t do it for most thinking people.  There is some pretty good evidence available to everyone which suggests that our consciousness survives bodily death.  That evidence can really help people move from blind faith to true faith, or conviction.  Once a person has that conviction, it is much easier for him or her to live a more spiritual and less materialistic life.

HS:  Most of that evidence has been around for some time and has been for the most part ignored.  Why do you think that is?

MT:  It was rejected by the churches because they saw some of it conflicting with established dogma and doctrine and it would have usurped their authority.  At the other extreme, the scientific fundamentalists rejected it because it couldn’t be tested by hard science and conflicted with what they had come to see as natural law. 

HS:  I agree with you there, too. You said, “first of all.”  What else?

MT:  Having a strong conviction that we live on in a larger life is just half the battle. You’ve got to be able to visualize the afterlife to some degree and realize that it is not that humdrum heaven and horrific hell taught by orthodoxy.  It is pretty difficult to look forward to spending eternity floating around on clouds, strumming a harp, and praising God 24/7, which is about all that orthodoxy offers.  To me, that is less appealing than extinction and nothingness.  As a result, even those who believe in an afterlife, fear death. 

HS:  What do you visualize?

MT:  There is an abundance of credible spirit testimony suggesting that we cross over pretty much as we are, that we build up a moral specific gravity by our actions and deeds in this life and that determines the plane, level, sphere, whatever you want to call it, that we end up in.  However, we go on evolving and progressing from there.  As Jesus said, there are “many mansions” on that side.  In some ways our activities there are much the same as they are here.  The thought world is the real life and all we are experiencing here in the material realm is just an illusory life.

HS:  You mentioned Jesus.  What is your take on him?

MT:  I totally reject the atonement doctrine as one of those nonsensical and unjust things, and I don’t know if Jesus is God, per se, because, as I said, I think God is beyond comprehension.  However, I do believe that Jesus was a highly evolved spirit who returned to earth to teach us or remind us that there is life after death.  This message has come through in countless spirit messages.  I see Jesus as the Chairman of the Board on the Other Side.  If not that, at least on the Board of Directors.

HS:  You know, Michael, I don’t want to inflate your ego, but I do think you are closer to the truth than those orthodox preachers.  As you know, I’m not all that advanced myself, just a vibration above you, but from my standpoint it sure makes sense. But tell me, why not be content with what you think you know and let others discover it on their own?

MT: That’s what I have been wrestling with, HS.  All I can say is that I feel impelled to share what I have found out with others. I’d like to think that you or some spirit guides above you are urging me to write about it and share it with others.  I really believe that all the chaos and turmoil in the world today is a result of the failure of religion to offer the evidence for survival and to present an intelligent afterlife.  Many people say they believe, but they really only hope. And the most they can hope for is to be spend eternity singing “Alleluia.”  That’s not enough to deter them from striving to be one with their toys.  The bottom line is that materialism prevails and has now regressed to hedonism.

HS: So you are going to continue writing a blog and writing articles for various publications?

MT:  Unless you or someone higher tells me to cease and desist.

HS:  It’s not like you have that big of an audience, Michael. 

MT:  Aren’t you the one who told me that seeds are being planted by many others and that those seeds take time to root and sprout?  I think you also said something about little streams all coming together in one big lake.

HS:  I was just testing you, Michael.  Go for it.