Posted on 24 February 2025, 7:55

As I stated in my blog of May 20, 2013, if anyone has done more than Victor and Wendy Zammit to spread the gospel of survival, I don’t know who it might be. Little to nothing has changed since then.  Their Friday Afterlife Report at http://www.victorzammit.com has continued over the past 12 years and marked 25 years of publication during January.

Victor Zammit, LL.B., Ph.D. (below) is a retired lawyer of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia.  Wendy Zammit, M.A. has contributed significantly to their research and publication. Their book, “A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife,” first published in 1996, under the title “A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife,” was published in paperback in 2013 by White Crow Books.

“We have only a rough idea of how many people regularly review it as it is published on our four Facebook groups which have about 5,000 subscribers each as well as our mail-out list which has many thousands from all over the world,” Wendy Zammit (below) replied when I asked her about the current circulation. “It’s great to see it being read regularly by people in more than 70 countries.”

I put some additional questions to both Wendy and Victor.

Victor, when I last interviewed you, almost 12 years ago, you said that disseminating the evidence for the afterlife on a global level had become a passion for you.  Based on your regular Friday Report, it doesn’t appear that your passion has been dulled at all.  What keeps you motivated to continue with your reporting?

VZ: Yes, Michael it is still an all-consuming passion, one which I hope to continue until my last day on Earth. I have learned to make direct contact with my guides and my higher self which is so wonderful. They all tell me of the huge need to erase the fear of death and help people understand the true nature of the greater reality.

Wendy, I’d like to put the same question to you and add:  Are there times when you feel like cutting back or perhaps approaching “burn-out” with the weekly report?

WZ: No Michael, I am enjoying it more than ever. It’s the feeling of connection with our community of fellow researchers, writers, mediums and subscribers that keeps me going. We have people who tell us that they have been reading the Friday Report every week since it started more than 25 years ago. They say that it connects them with each other and draws them back each week to what is important in life. It has been a joy for us to help bring your wonderful books and blog posts on the great mediums and research of the past to a wider audience. You have made accessible so much incredible material that could otherwise have been lost forever. My only problem is that I wish I had more time.

I know it is hard to measure, but do you see much progress being made in recent years relative to accepting the evidence for survival and related psychic phenomena?  If so, what do you use to measure the progress? 

VZ: Since our last interview in 2013 I have noticed much more acceptance of mediumship, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and after-death contacts in magazines, newspapers, movies and TV programs. It is definitely moving into the mainstream. They don’t talk about the evidence as such, but it’s as if they have just accepted the existence of the afterlife. There are more high-profile people who seem to have lost the fear of going public. The Bigelow Institute Essays, which you contributed to, have established a firm and accessible foundation as has the work of IANDS, The Windbridge Institute, and The University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies. Recently the Institute of Noetic Sciences has come on board with the Marco Project on physical mediumship and is running a course on The Science of Channeling. And we have all seen White Crow Books become a major force in spiritual publishing.

WZ: There has been a huge upsurge in interest even in the last 3 years, particularly in social media. The number of afterlife–related podcasts and interview programs has just exploded. When we last talked there was Bob Olson with “Afterlife TV” and Jeffrey Mishlove’s “Thinking Allowed”. Now it seems that thousands of YouTube channels, podcasts, Facebook groups, and Instagram and TikTok accounts explore afterlife-related topics. Suddenly hospice nurses are stars. For example, Penny Smith, a retired hospice nurse who talks about deathbed visions, has 864,000 followers on TikTok, 420,000 on Instagram and 275,000 on YouTube.  Next Level Soul, a slick professional interview program on YouTube has 1.1 million subscribers and individual interviews get hundreds of thousands of views.

Do you think that organized skeptics have much influence nowadays?

VZ: As you may remember I spent a lot of time rebutting the skeptics but they have ceased to be an issue for me these days. At one stage I would have received 50 emails protesting about things I wrote. But I never hear from them anymore. As the evidence has been piling up and more and more people of substance are going public, their influence has disappeared.

WZ: The young people we encounter don’t seem to take any notice of professional skeptics or debunkers. They don’t look to Wikipedia for information on afterlife matters. They are cautious, but, on the whole, they are open to being convinced by their own experience.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle to accepting the evidence?

VZ: The distractions of materialism. The majority of people in the West are still overwhelmed with working multiple jobs, shopping, maintaining their stuff and trying to pay rent or mortgage. And now people are dealing with political and economic issues that take up all the airtime.

WZ: I agree that people are time-poor and there are so many distractions. TikTok and Instagram are shortening people’s attention span with 1-2 minute videos. But there are still a lot of people reading and attending classes and trying to find meaning in life.

What have you learned about what attracts people to search for afterlife evidence?

V: It’s mostly that they were stopped in their tracks – an illness or the death of a loved one. Or they suddenly realize that they are going to die one day. Many have rejected religion and want evidence, not beliefs.

WZ: We are also finding a lot of people who have had psychic awareness from childhood. There truly seem to be many awakened souls coming in. As well, we have more and more people having near-death experiences, after-death communications, and experiences of expanded consciousness.

What do you think of the standards of mediums today?

VZ: Apart from the cold readers, we have a lot of mediums who are going public too early and rely on vague statements that could apply to anyone. And of course, it is impossible to find a direct voice medium like Etta Wriedt or Lesley Flint giving private sittings anywhere. But, that said, there are still some brilliant mental mediums, trance mediums and channels who give highly evidential readings.

WZ: We have joined forces with a traditional medium to run a Spiritualist church and have been pleasantly surprised at being able to find excellent local mediums. We are trying to highlight good mediumship by running free Zoom demonstrations with outstanding Spiritualist mediums from the UK, Europe, Canada, USA and Australia twice a month. They have surprised us by being able to work just as well on Zoom as they can in person.

When I last interviewed you in 2013, you had been experiencing a lot of physical mediumship with David Thompson. I understand he moved to another country. Have you observed any interesting phenomena in recent years?

VZ: Yes, we are still fascinated with physical mediumship and were saddened when David Thompson moved to Auckland. He still demonstrates there and in the USA every couple of years. We were very fortunate to sit with him and Scott Milligan in Arizona a couple of times. Our good friend Inge Crosson runs a Centre for physical mediumship in Sydney and we were able to sit with physical mediums there and in England and Germany.

WZ: These days we have been able to connect with mediums and researchers via Zoom. Every Sunday we have meetings with between 40 and 60 mediums, researchers and experiencers and even conduct our own experiments. They have included:

* Jurgen Ziewe is an out-of-body experiencer who has been exploring the afterlife realms in full waking consciousness for more than 45 years. He is also an artist who draws what he sees.  He came onto our program every month for over a year to answer questions about his experiences. The videos of these talks have been put onto his You-Tube account as the Afterlife Answers series which is very popular.

* Last Sunday we had Maddalena Di Leo from Italy who for the last 25 years has been communicating with spirits through direct radio voice. We are planning for her to do a demonstration with other mediums present to see if the same entity can communicate through both radio voice and a different medium.
* My friend and co-host Karyn Jarvie transitioned last June and within 7 hours had contacted three of our regular mediums. She and her daughter have since come through live, channeling three different mediums on one program.

* Two of the mediums, Regina Ochoa and Jeanne Love from the Cosmic Voices Network, have been undertaking a 40-year project communicating with the astronauts from the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia. Some of their sessions over the years have been observed and verified by scientists.

* Two weeks ago Jeanne Love brought through President Jimmy Carter and we have been told that on Sunday 2nd March Estelle Roberts will be coming through with a ‘code blue’ message from the higher world.

* Gordon Phinn is teaching the technique of conscious meditation to connect and assist souls needing help to complete their crossing over following death of the physical body.  Videos of all these meetings are on my You-Tube Channel.

If you were giving a 30-minute talk to a group that knew little about the evidence for survival, is there any particular phenomenon or case in the annals of psychical research that you would focus on.

VZ: I love physical mediumship as we have said. I would tell them about Elizabeth Blake, Etta Wriedt, Leslie Flint, and David Thompson.  With Leslie Flint, I’d talk about the Anni Nanji tapes and with David Thompson I’d talk about the Montague Keen Communications.

WZ:  I’d be a bit reluctant to focus on physical mediumship with beginners. If they were absolute beginners I would focus on things that they can come across in their own friendship group – deathbed visions, after-death contacts and NDEs. This is because once they know what questions to ask, they can get ongoing validation from people they already know and trust.

What has changed in your work since we last talked 12 years ago?

VZ: We realized that we are not getting any younger and need to encourage others to develop the skills and confidence to speak out about their own afterlife experiences, share knowledge and collaborate on research. We also realized that people were tending to operate in silos – the near-death experiencers were not talking to the out-of-body experiencers and that would give people personal experience of afterlife contact. Americans did not know what was happening in Europe or Australia and so on. We also felt the need to promote organizations and events

WZ: Seven years ago we set up a series of Zoom groups – all free and run by volunteer facilitators which would be coordinated through the Friday Afterlife Report. We now have 30 groups a month which offer subjects as diverse as mediumship development, shamanism, different styles of meditation, how to conduct spirit rescues, out-of-body experiences, an afterlife book club, and animal communication. We video a lot of the sessions and make them available on YouTube and in the Friday Afterlife Report.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

Posted on 10 February 2025, 8:58

In the January 20 United States presidential inauguration it was stressed, both by President Trump and the clergy members who spoke after him, that there is a need for the country to return to God and to Faith.  One of the clergy was a rabbi who added that we are desperately searching for meaning in our lives. All well and good, no matter what one’s political leaning is, but none of the speakers explained how that return is to take place or what it really means. What exactly is meant by God? What does Faith involve? How are God and Faith to be restored? What kind of “meaning” are we searching for?  I believe we need more than a very murky vision of all that in order to return to it. To begin with, I believe we need new focus, new terminology, and new imagery. 

While pondering on all that, I fantasized that I had returned to the field of public relations, where I started 65 years ago as a Marine Corps public affairs officer, as it is now called, and was asked by a Christian ecumenical council to advise them on how best to have the country return to God and Faith. They had heard of my winning entry for best military PR program in an annual contest sponsored by the American Public Relations Association, and were hoping that my PR experience would carry over to the spiritual. In my whimsical meanderings, I imagined myself as a public relations consultant reporting to the council with the following letter. Subsequent letters were to elaborate on the ideas. However, after this first letter was received, I was informed that my services were no longer needed. I was fired.

Dear Council Members:

Thank you for the opportunity to undertake this most important project. You asked me to offer recommendations on how your participating churches can best bring God and Faith back to the nation. While my recommendations will no doubt raise eyebrows and ruffle feathers, my research, involving much study and many interviews, points to the dire need of revolutionary changes, primarily in the areas of focus, terminology, and imagery.

To begin with, the focus of the churches today appears much the same as it has long been throughout the centuries – worship of God in a manner that resembles the practices of the ancient Egyptians with their deities and godly pharaohs. It is one of praise, petition and thanks. Praise God and He will then provide, protect and reward you with eternal salvation. If you encounter hardships, it is the will of God and you must be patient in awaiting your reward. If the reward doesn’t come in this life, it will definitely come in the next one.

However, many lack that patience and are unable to reconcile this belief with the prevailing materialistic worldview, thus becoming agnostic or atheistic. Moreover, many have apparently assumed that God has the power to stop all wars, wildfires, plane crashes, crimes, homelessness, and other turmoil taking place around the world, and is not doing so. “What good is ‘He’ when prayers of supplication are frequently not answered?” they ask, all the while ignoring the idea that adversity is our best teacher and that free will is not consistent with strict control by a Supreme Being.

Consciousness Survives

My first recommendation may be taken by you to be blasphemous, but such is not the intent, and I am certain that God agrees.  That is, the idea that “consciousness survives death” in a larger life must replace “worship of God” as the primary message, or focus, of the churches. God is simply too abstract and too abstruse for even the most intelligent people to comprehend. As I understand it, the Council of Nicaea, a gathering of 312 bishops representing the Christian faith in Turkey during the year 325 A.D,  understood that when they made Jesus part of the Godhead. They apparently reasoned that it is much easier to picture a human-like figure in that Godhead when praying or giving thanks, than some form of cosmic consciousness. Christians needed a symbol or allegorical being to visualize, not a bunch of atoms vibrating in space. However, such visualization by means of symbols and metaphors was not effectively extended to the larger life. Angels hovering over clouds while strumming harps was about the extent of it. How humdrum and unappealing that appears, especially in today’s world in which Disneyland provides a model world.

While that strategy seemed to work in an uneducated and less technical world, one in which minds were not cluttered with colorful and vibrant images from televisions and computers and therefore more open to spiritual guidance, it no longer works for the masses. Educated people find prayer, meditation, and worship a big turnoff, and for many it suggests an egocentric and wrathful God. The word and the idea of “worship” must be discarded completely if any progress is to be made. 

The ”non-believer” often reacts to the “afterlife” concern by saying he is living for today, not for tomorrow. Carpe Diem! “Seize the Day” is his motto. With a better grasp of the larger life, the “believer” might respond to this by saying he prefers to “live in eternity,” which means living in the past, present, and future all at the same time and thereby better appreciating the moment.  As it is now, my research indicates that most believers, not having more than a one-dimensional image of the larger life, would not understand the meaning of “living in eternity.” 

All that is not to recommend that we should ask God and Jesus to stand down.  Rather, it is to suggest that by moving from the blind faith of religions to true faith, or conviction, we require a better understanding of the idea that consciousness survives death in a larger world. Once we have that understanding, God and Jesus can be better understood and appreciated. In fact, I sense that they are inspiring this letter.

In making “consciousness beyond death” your primary focus, you should objectively examine the overwhelming evidence coming to us from psychical research and near-death studies over the past 170 years, not to mention modern quantum theory. While some church authorities have had little difficulty in reconciling the findings of the researchers in those fields with church dogma and doctrine, the governing bodies of the churches chose to condemn it all as demonic, since a small part of is interpreted as conflicting with teachings of the churches. They refused to recognize that so much of recorded history has been subjected to misinterpretations and mistranslations, often resulting from the biases of the interpreters, as well the inability of the authorities to admit they had been teaching false doctrine. 

We were constantly told that the Spiritualism epidemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to awaken us to reality of a multi-leveled spirit world, including the drab and dreary levels, what religions have called Hell, not to offer a new religion. It would seem that spirits provided as much evidence as they could and then retreated because they had reached the point of diminishing returns and so many good people were being disparaged.  If the early psychical research and credible mediumistic writings are examined with an objective eye, you will find that the so-called afterlife, i.e., the larger world, is made up of many realms, “many mansions,” as the interpreters have Jesus putting it, not just the dichotomous Heaven and Hell taught by so many of your churches.  The Catholic Church had Purgatory between them, which was to a small extent consistent with the findings of the psychical researchers and Spiritualists, but that state was not well understood and was dismissed by Martin Luther in the Protestant Reformation. The result has been a very black and white afterlife, one not consistent with the many degrees of morality we have in the physical realm. In the end, we are judged as either “righteous” or “wicked” even though nearly all of humanity seems to be at varying degrees between those two absolute states.  Even the Catholic Church has swept Purgatory under the rug and otherwise avoids discussing the after-death realities.

The Larger Life

If your churches come to agree with all I have recommended so far, they will have to give some consideration to other new terminology and verbiage.  Heaven and Hell are too antiquated for those today who see themselves as too “sophisticated” for such folly.  Your educators should replace Heaven and Hell with “the larger life,” “the greater consciousness,” or some such terminology.  Just as the people living at the time of the Council of Nicaea needed imagery they could visualize in their minds, the current generations needs terminology that is more closely aligned with science.  Heaven and Hell simply do not work for educated minds. 

It is much easier for modern minds with various degrees of “mixed morality” to understand equivalent realms in the larger life than to believe that such mixed morality is somehow converted to either total bliss or total torment after death.  Surely, such a judgment system in our physical life would not be sanctioned. To respond to that by saying God’s ways are not always man’s way, as so many defenders of the status quo do,  is simply to invite more rejection and loss of faith.

Consideration should be given to the likelihood that in the last book of the New Testament (Rev. 22: 18-19), John has been misinterpreted in saying that the book of revelation was closed with his words. Certainly, it can be read otherwise and is in conflict with other passages from the Bible, especially that saying to “test the spirits as to whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1).  In 1 Corinthians 12:7-10, we are instructed to “discern” the messages from spirits.  How are we to “test” and “discern” if we don’t listen to what they have to say?  Consider John 16:12-14, which says there is much more to learn and that we will be guided into all truth;  and Joel 2:28-29, which says “your sons and daughters will prophesy” as well as the one telling us to “test them all and hold on to what is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) 

The word “medium” has clearly taken on a negative connotation.  The churches and the Hollywood media have stereotyped mediums as fortune-telling charlatans.  Yes, indications are that some of what was recorded as coming from “spirits” of the dead came from low-level or even devious earthbound spirits, but discernment is apparently a big part of the challenges we came into the physical to learn. If nothing else, the earthbound spirits, as devious as they might be, offer evidence that consciousness survives, even if it means that many don’t initially survive in the blissful Heaven of orthodoxy.  Again, Thessalonians tells us to test them and hold on to what is good.  The renowned physicist and psychical researcher Sir William Barrett preferred the word “sensitive” to mediums, and that word might very well be more acceptable to those who dislike the word “medium.”

As stated above, the psychical research of yesteryear – that which took place between 1850 and 1935 – and the near-death studies that began in 1975 and continues today have produced overwhelming evidence that consciousness continues after death. It is evidence that leads from the blind faith of religion to true faith, or conviction while giving meaning to this life, thereby supporting high moral and ethical standards and giving hopefulness and optimism to those who embrace it.  The opposition of the churches to all of this evidence has significantly obstructed its acceptance and has been a deterrence to the God and Faith you look to restore.  Somehow religion has to find a way to understand and accept the best of all this research while changing its focus and adopting new focus, terminology and imagery. 

I believe that Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher, hit the nail squarely on the head when he wrote that men first feel necessity, then look for utility, followed by comfort, then pleasure, and finally luxury, after which they finally go mad – when “each man is thinking of his own private interests.”  In that pursuit of pleasure and luxury, there is, according to Vico, a certain social disconnection, which involves moral, intellectual, and spiritual decline.  It seems to me that we have reached that final stage – where people are going mad, when each is thinking of his own private interest.  Some revolutionary action is required, especially by the churches.

Those, dear council members, are my preliminary thoughts.  Please let me know if I should continue with my research and recommendations.
Sincerely,

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.