Astral Memory Loss Versus After-Death Communications

[Berserk]

After-death contacts (ADCs) often do not cohere well with reports of memory loss discovered theough OBEs and astral exploration. As you read the paranormal evidence I discuss, please inject your own evidence and your theories of how the tensions I confront might be resolved. The various stages of my thread will be guided by these 4 questions:

A. Can the channeled material with the most impressive verifications be
best explained as the result of ESP rather than genuine contact with the
dead?

B. If channeling evidence hopelessly contradicts evidence from EVP,
OBEs, and astral exploration, how does this affect our knowledge of
postmortem survival?

C. Do most ADC contacts originate from from earthbound spirits trapped
in the biblical Sheol or what Robert Monroe labels Focus 23 or from
peaceful educational spirit planes and still higher heavens?

D. Some ADC contacts are truly spectacular and involve dead spirits
materializing and teleporting objects, walking around in an earthly
room filled with still living family members, and driving their old truck
(e. g. Jeff, the deceased son of my friend Leonard), So why are such
spectacular and comforting verifications so rare?

Only question A will be addressed in this first post. Mediums routinely put their eager sitters in touch with deceased loved ones, who seem alarmingly available. If these contacts were geniune, one would expect these loved ones to be unavailable because of present commitments and activities much of the time. True, some mediums will protest that they sometimes fail to contact the spirit desired by the sitter. But generally these spirits seem far too available to be credible. The spirits seem incapable of answering a simple question like, “So what have you been doing since I last talked to you through this medium?” To explain away this problem some resort to the desperate expedient of claiming that our deceased loved ones now live in a timeless realm. This solution is refuted by the astral explorations of Emanuel Swedenborg and Robert Bruce who discover that most heavenly planes are stll subject to a sense of time, though time may seem more compressed in certain realms. Consider my answers to these 4 questions:

(1) What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?

(2) What if the spirit control of mediums with impressive verifications can be proven to be a fraud? What conclusion would that warrant about other spirit controls whose self-professed identity cannot be verified?
(3) What if a drop-in communicator could provide amazing verifications even involving precognition of the future, and yet, be later proven a fraud?

(4) What if it can be shown that the attribution of channeled materials to discarnate friends and relatives reflects a culturally conditioned bias?

(1) Leonora Piper is one of the most impressive mediums ever. She had the uncanny ability to channel two entities at the same time, one through automatic writing and the other through entranced speech. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall had a trick up his sleeve when he went for a sitting with her. She was currently using the spirit of Richard Hodgson as her control. Hodgson had formerly investigated her, but had recently died of a massive heart attack. Hall asked Hodgson's spirit to contact Hall’s niece, “Bessie Beals,” so that he might speak with her. Miss Beals was duly introduced and proceeded to communicate with Hall through Mrs. Piper. Actually Bessie Beals did not exist. She was a figment of Hall’s mind. "Hodgson" in embarrassment tried to wriggle out of the situation, saying that he had been mistaken about the name. He said that the person brought was a Jessie Beals, related to another sitter. Dr. Samuel Soal...visualized incidents with an imaginary friend, John Ferguson. He then went for a sitting with the medium, Blanche Cooper. The incidents he visualized came forth as though communicated from beyond death! These cases demonstrate that mediums can unwittingy gain information about the ceased by reading the sitter's mind. They then routinely dramatize this ESP by inventing a phony personal contact. One might expect the telephatic abilities of their spirit controls to detect this sort of ruse. Clearly, the spirit controls were also a fake.

(2) Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent. While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892. The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium. But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced. Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself to be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor. But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemed to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.” It seems doubtful that Hodgson would have changed his mind if he had lived to discover the Gordon Davis case, which I shall now describe.

(3) At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.” Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper. Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I. Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.” Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent. The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”). Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation. He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days. At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him. A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct. But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting! Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients. Only around the time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time. But Davis did not move into the house until a year later. More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance! Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird. Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings! So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177). And this precognition surely casts doubt on the authenticity Gladys Leonard's repeated channeling of many details posted in specific columns of tomorrow's newspaper.

Why is channeling not discredited in this way more often? Well, ask yourself how often you are mistakenly informed that your friend has died. Was the medium able to exploit Soal’s mistaken faith in Davis’ death as an aid in the process of reconstructing Davis’ personality and future by precognitive telepathy? Or were the medium (Blanche Cooper) and sitter (Sam Soal) duped by an impersonating spirit?

(4) Shamans understand their mediumship to put them in contact with spirits and demons as well as with deceased people. In earlier centuries Neoplatonists also practiced trance mediumship, but attributed it to the agency of gods or demons rather than to discarnate humans. Likewise, witches from the 17th and 18th centuries ascribed their channeled material to demons. Perhaps the modern attempt to identify spirit controls with deceased personalities reflects the wishful thinking of modern cultural prejudice. Why is Leonora Piper’s spirit control (Phinuit) lying about his true identity? Why did Sam Soal’s alleged brother lie about bringing Gordon Davis’ spirit through? Or were these people simply deceived?

Deadworm

[Berserk]

I will now shiift my focus to the the potential relevance of postmortem memory loss to New Age claims based on ADCs, channeling, and soul retrievals performed by "higher" discarnate humans. Most of us imagine that, after dying, we would try to contact and reassure our surviving loved ones several times and in as convincing a manner as possible. Yet truly spectacular ADCs are very rare. Why?

Psychiatrist George Ritchie experienced the most influential and one of the most in depth NDEs ever recorded. It is his NDE experienced as a young solider during World War II that inspired Raymond Moody to research NDEs for his influential book “Life After Life.” Together with Howard Storm’s “My Descent into Death,” Ritchie’s book “Return from Tomorrow” ranks as my favorite NDE book and certainly the best written. This post picks up his story after Christ has appeared to him as a blazing Being of Light and taken him on a tour of the locales of various earthbound spirits. Christ then takes hiim to a hvgher, more peaceful educational plane. Let me quote a few snippets from Ritchie’s enthralling description of that plane:

“We entered a studio where music of a complexity I couldn’t begin to follow was being composed and performed. There were complicated rhythms, tones not on any scale I knew. . .Now we walked through a library the size of the whole University of Richmond. I gazed into rooms lined floor to floor with documents on parchment, clay, leather, metal, paper. `Here,’ the thought occurred to me, `are assembled all the important books of the universe.’...Then abruptly, at the door of one of the smaller rooms, almost an annex: `Here is the central thought of this earth [70-71].’”

“I could not tell if they were men or women, old or young, for all were vovered from head to toe in loose-flowing hooded cloaks which made me think vaguely of monks. But the atmosphere was not at all as I imagined a monastery. It was more like some tremendous study center, humming with the excitement of great discovery. Everyone we passed in the wide halls and on the curving stair cases seemed caught up in some all-engrossing activity; not many words were exchanged among them. And yet I sensed no unfriendliness between these beings, rather an aloofness of total concentration.”

“WHATEVER ELSE THESE PEOPLE MIGHT BE, THEY APPEARED UTTERLY AND SUPREMELY SELF-FORGETFUL--ABSORBED IN SOME VAST PURPOSE BEYOND THEMSELVES. Through open doors I glimpsed enormous rooms filled with complex equipment. In several of the rooms hooded figures bent over intricate charts and diagrams, or sat at the controls of elaborate consoles flickering with lights....I felt that some vast experiment was being pursued, perhaps dozens and dozens of such experiments [69-70] .”

Ritche's NDE description seems incompatible with the chatty ease with which mediums interrupt the lives of discarnates and seek confirmation from their memories of their earthly lives. His description hints at the insight thst the inhabitants of this educational plane have an altered state of consciousness that cuts them off from their normal earthly memories. His reports cohere nicely with Robert Bruce’s OBE insights into memory problems created by shifts in focus from one astral plane to another. Robert reports on the problems he encounters when trying to extract memory information from spirit visitors to astral hospitals:

“Memories of their earthly life also seem vague, much like how a half-forgotten dream is remembered by a living person. Many spirits only seem to be aware of their present reality, that of being in the hospital scenario for an indeterminate length of time. Some spirits, however, do have vague memories of their earthly life, and of coming from other dimensional areas; but have so far given me only very sketchy details....The most common response I get from asking spirits what it’s like where they come from is: `It’s really lovely there and everyone is so nice. I don’t understand this. I’m very sorry. I know it well, and can picture it in my head, but I just can’t describe it to you.’”

“The surreal and dreamlike quality of memory of spirits I have encountered in these astral hospital areas may be caused by their being too far away from their natural, base-level of consciousness at the time. Astral R & R hospital-like areas may be somewhere in between [spirit worlds and the physical dimension]. It seems that any shift away from the natural base level of consciousness, either for a spirit being or a human being, causes them to have a surreal experience and memory translation problems. This...accounts...for the many difficulties and vagaries common in spirit communications and channeling in general.”

The educational realm witnessed by Ritchie seems reminiscent of some desciptions of Focus 27 in the Monroe-Moen scheme of “astral geography.” But Ritchie detects that its inhabitants are still incapable of perceiving Christ’s exalted presence and that even this peaceful realm does not yet qualify as Heaven. Monroe implies that Focus 27 contains the Healing Center that helps new arrivals adjust to their new discarnate life. But R. Bruce implies that the loved one’s of this Center’s patients must “descend” from higher planes with impaired memories to visit their hospitalized loved ones. Thus, both Ritchie and R. Bruce imply that Focus 27 is not Heaven itself, but a training ground for the higher Heavens. So the Monroe model should probably revised in term of, say, Focus 28, 29, etc. to account for such distinctions.

The astral insights of Ritchie and R. Bruce might have profound implications for deceased souls from higher planes who might otherwise want to retrieve their loved ones who are "stuck" in lower or hellish planes. To what extent do they even remember these “trapped” loved ones, let alone their loved ones who are still alive on the earth?

In my initial post, I challenged claims that channeling at its best can put us in touch with our deceased loved ones. But assume for the sake of argument that I am mistaken. The best of classical channeling agrees with R. Bruce’s insights about the formidable barriers to successful retrievals from hellish planes: Advanced souls may find it very difficult to cope with the spiritual vibration of lower spiritual planes through which they must pass to reach the earth plane.

Consider, for example, what Paul Beard reports in his enthralling book, "Living On: How Consciousness Continues and Evolves After Death:"

“To enter these areas fills rescuers with a deep sense of distress; these helpers, sensitive men and women, can themselves become affected and drawn into some of the purblind emotions they seek to lift from others, and it they remain too long in this area they declare they can, to some extent, be temporarily overcome by them. For the price to be paid in order to reach these minds is to lower their own consciousness and concepts to a level acceptable to, and capable of being understood by, those they hope to rescue. Evil is powerful at its own level, and clearly a rescuer needs sterner qualities than those of the self-congratulatory do-gooder (88-89).”

One of the most memorable posters on another board devoted to astral travel was a fellow who had just mastered the OBE state. He was reluctant to continue his exploration because of terrifying experiences he had when he descended to the lower planes. He said he was overwhelmed by the toxic atmosphere and could barely resist succumbing to its hypnotic pressure to perform evil acts consistent with the defining purpose of those particular planes. His negative experiences independently corroborate the revelations of the mediums reported by Paul Beard.

Advanced souls in the heavens may have other good reasons for their reluctance to try to contact earthly loved ones. For example, they may be well aware of the cunning role of spirit impersonators from lower planes and the potential dangers they represent to surviving loved ones. Advanced souls may not want to encourage their earthly loved ones to open their naive spirits to such deceptive spirit contamination and its dangers.

Astral adept, Emanuel Swedenborg, would agree with Ritchie and R. Bruce against the Monroe concept of Focus 27 that these educational planes and the Healing Center do not exist in the Heavens. As in typical Swedenborgian fashion, ES explores astral memory problems in greater depth than either Ritchie or R. Bruce. Here is a sampling os some ES quotes about the status of memory in “the World of Spirits,” a realm “below” the Heavens:

“We have two memories, an inner and an outer, or a natural one and a spiritual one. We are not aware that we have this inner memory. How much better the inner memory is than the outer one! The contents of our outer memory are in the world’s light, while the contents of our inner memory are in heaven’s light. It is because of our inner memory that we can think and talk intelligently and rationally. Absolutely everything we have thought, said, done, seen, and heard is inscribed on our inner memory....Things that have become second nature to us and part of our life and therefore have been erased from our outer memory are in our inner memory (463, note b)."

After death, adult memory “stays fixed and then goes dormant; but it still serves their thinking after death as an outmost plane because their thought flows into it. This is why the nature of this plane and the way their rational activity answers to its contents determines the nature of the individual after death (#345)."

".All that remain are the rational abilities that now serve as a basis for thinking and talking. We actually take with us our entire natural memory, but its contents are not open to our inspection and do not enter into our thought as when we were living in this world...To the extent that our spirit has become rational by means of our insights and learning in this world, we are rational afterour departure from the body (#355).”

“The reason our outer memory goes dormant as far as material things are concerned is that they cannot be recreated. Spirits and angels [= discarnate people] actually talk from the affections and consequent thoughts of their minds, so they cannot utter anything that does not square with these...I have talked with any number of people who were regarded as learned in the world because of their knowledge of such ancient languages as Hebrew and Greek and Latin, but had not developed their rational functioning by means of the things that were written in thos languages. Some of them seemed as simple as people who did not know anything about those languages; some of them seemed dense, though there still remained a pride as though they were wiser than other people (#464).”

“I have also talked with some people who had believed in the world that wisdom depends on how much we have in our memory and who have therefore filled their memories to bursting. They talked almost exclusively from those items, which meant that they were not talking for themselves, but for others; and they had not developed any rational functioning by means of these matters of memory. Some of them were dense, some silly, with no grasp of truth whatever (#464).”

“Our rational faculty is like a garden or flower bed, like newly tilled land. Our memory is the soil, information and experiential learning are the seeds, while heaven’s light and warmth make them productive...There is no germination unless heaven’s light, which is divine truth, and heaven’s warmth, which is divine love, are let in. They are the only source of rationality (#464).”

“One particular spirit lamented the fact that he could not remember much of what he had known during his physical life. He was grieving over the pleasure he had lost because it had been his chief delight. He was told, though, that he had not lost anything at all and that he knew absolutely everything. In the world where he was now living, he was not allowed to retrieve things like that. It should satisfy him that he could now think and talk much better and more perfectly without immersing his rational functioning in dense clouds, in material and physical concerns, the way he had before, in concerns that were useless in the kingdom he had now reached (#465).”

“Since the natural objects that reside in our memory cannot be reproduced in a spiritual world, they become dormant the way they do when we are not thinking about them. Even so, they can be reproduced when it so pleases the Lord (#461).”

This last comment might be a key to understanding how our deceased loved ones can just occasionally contact us and even offer stunning verifications, despite the memory problems that might otherwise inhibit such communications.

Deadworm

[Aunt Clair]

A. Can the channeled material with the most impressive verifications be best explained as the result of ESP rather than genuine contact with the dead?
Imho ,
Channeled messages are distinct from messages given off by platform mediums or clairvoyants reading a sitter. ESP is used to contact deceased spirits . ESP is any extra sensory perception which includes all of the clairient senses .

B. If channeling evidence hopelessly contradicts evidence from EVP,
The adjective 'hopelessly' is not objective .

...OBEs, and astral exploration, how does this affect our knowledge of postmortem survival?
Please offer some example of what EVP you feel contradicts spirit messages recieved through mediumship , thanks .

C. Do most ADC contacts originate from from earthbound spirits trapped in the biblical Sheol or what Robert Monroe labels Focus 24 or from peaceful educational spirit planes and still higher heavens?
Earthbound is not Sheol , imho . Sheol is in lower planes not the physical realm . Earthbound implies those negative energy spirits who are trapped on Earth not below it . Imho , most spirits reside in heavens of hels ie the homes of deceased spirits. But these spirits can and do travel back and forth to Earth . Around each sitter are spirits . There are more spirits roaming on this planet than live humans . Most of the spirits I read with sitters are visiting and return to the homes of the deceased spirits . I have been to Sheol/Hels , those humans can not visit Earth but can lift their vibration to get to Heaven and then come here . Earthbound spirits I have communicated with at disaster scenes when they do not realise they are dead and at hauntings of homes . A haunting can be distinguished from
normal spirit presence but I believe each home is full of spirit .
D. Some ADC contacts are truly spectacular and involve dead spirits
materializing and teleporting objects, walking around in an earthly
room filled with still living family members, and driving their old truck
(e. g. Jeff, the deceased son of my friend Leonard), So why are such
spectacular and comforting verifications so rare?
Most spirits cannot move the physical . Just as most humans could but do not develop clairient sense , most spirit could but do not develop abilities to apparate or levitate. Materialising so that an unaware can see them or hear them takes a higher vibration and more energy output . It drains spirit .

Mediums routinely put their eager sitters in touch with deceased loved ones, who seem alarmingly available. Why do you use the term "alarmingly". When you die , you might think otherwise and find that visiting relatatives on Earth is quite pleasant .

If these contacts were geniune, one would expect these loved ones to be unavailable because of present commitments and activities much of the time. Why ? First , they do watch over us and enjoy our antics just as we enjoy watching TV or movies . If they are there , I read them . If I call or evoke with the link from a loved one , it is a humble invitation and much like answering a phone , they can choose to communicate or not .

True, some mediums will protest that they sometimes fail to contact the spirit desired by the sitter.
Most platform mediums just read the spirit who has appeared and do not call desired ones . In a reading most mediums do the same . To profess to evoke a spirit is generally done in a seance . I feel that calling a desired spirit is best done by the sitter who can link on an emotional cord to the spirit or thru the monad . Once they are present , I read them .

But generally these spirits seem far too available to be credible. The spirits seem incapable of answering a simple question like, “So what have you been doing since I last talked to you through this medium?”
Most mediums see the spirit and can describe them to you and tell you what they are showing but clairvoyance in not clairaudience . There are several constraints on the quality of the communication mostly involving the vibration of the sitter , the spirit and the medium . A good medium working with a new spirit and a sitter with a low vibration will not do as well as a poor but lucky medium who reads a person of a high vibration .

(1) What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?
Again , it is not a channeling . It is a communication , a spirit message . A channeling can mean a form of trance mediumship or invocation or giving off a message from a mahatma but it is not the appropriate term to employ in this case ,imho . But I have done the same . I have been asked to call in a faked relative . They are looking for a young male , I see a young male next to them and I read that one not knowing if it is the named faked one or not . Then later these charlatan skeptics have on occasion confessed and said I was making up that name but you have described my dead cousin . Gigo , garbage in , garbage out , I offer readings for free only and I really hate to be toyed with by such immature unaware minds . I do not and can not promise that I all get will be correct , I just do the best I can . If you want to prove this , learn to develop clairvoyance , anyone with a little dedication and discipline can learn . "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness ". So rather than wasting energy trying to disprove life after death , try to be aware and learn to see and hear spirit yourself . It is open and free for everyone to attain .


(2) What if the spirit control of mediums with impressive verifications can be proven to be a fraud? What conclusion would that warrant about other spirit controls whose self-professed identity cannot be verified?
...Logically unrelated
(3) What if a drop-in communicator could provide amazing verifications even involving precognition of the future, and yet, be later proven a fraud? So what ? Would you give up sex because you had one bad affair ?
"One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch girl "
(4) What if it can be shown that the attribution of channeled materials to discarnate friends and relatives reflects a culturally conditioned bias?
so what ? , who cares ?

(1) As already mentioned, Leonore Piper
did you mention that in this post ?

is one of the most impressive mediums ever...[quote:2h82co35]etc etc ..as above ...[/quote:2h82co35]
(2) Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent. While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892. The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium. But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced. Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself to be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor. But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemed to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.” It seems doubtful that Hodgson would have changed his mind if he had lived to discover the Gordon Davis case, which I shall now describe.


(3) At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.” Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper. Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I. Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.” Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent. The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”). Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation. He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days. At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him. A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct. But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting! Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients. Only around the time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time. But Davis did not move into the house until a year later. More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance! Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird. Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings! So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177). And this precognition surely casts doubt on the authenticity Gladys Leonard's repeated channeling of many details posted in specific columns of
tomorrow's newspaper.
Why ? The fact that the medium contacted the spirit of a live person who was deceased in the future and accurately described a home that was not theirs yet is psychic not clairvoyant and it is still amazing in any case and does not prove fraud .


etc .

[CFTraveler]

Deadworm's article was very informative, but I have two questions:
1) In this interesting expose, was there a question in there?
2) Did you write this yourself, or did you copy and paste this from another source. If so, please cite the source with permission to copy, or delete the posts and provide the link, with actual questions or invitations for comment.
Thanks, Mod.

[Berserk]

Treveler,
No, this is my own formulation of the issues and research. Among other sources, I derive most of these case studies from David F0ntana, "Is There an Afterlife? A Comprehensive Overview of the Evidence" and John Heaney, The Sacred and The Psychic: Parapychology and Christian Theology." Fontana's objective tone is admirable, but Heaney's analysis is more astute and provides negative cases overlooked by Fontana. Still, if you could only read one book , I'd recommend Fontana because of the shere breadth of the channeling evidence he considers. I say this despite the fact that I more often agree with Heaney!

Claire, I'm not convinced by your nuanced distinctions, but these in any case transcend my thread's purpose. That theory is to be preferred which bst accounts for all the evidence. Dr. Hall's expose proves that mediums can accurately recreate a personality who never existed, or rather, who exists only in the sitter's imagination. Therefore, verifiable information channeled by mediums is not evidentially decisive for postmortem survival. If it were genuine, mediumship would of course be facilitated by ESP. But my point is that mediumship does not provide solid evidence of survival.

You seem to miss the point about the Gordon Dacis case. True, the Davis persona revealed unknown information from the future, but this persona falsely portrayed itself as having recently died. I do not claim that Blanche Cooper was trying to deceive, only that she was deluded. If real spirit communication was involved, then that spirit perpetuated a fraud, captalizing on the sitter's false belief that Davis had been killed. Precognition may originate from the so-called Akashic records or universal mind in such a way as to create a false impression of survival!

My most important point is this: some channeling may still be geniune. But if forced to choose between channeled material and material derived from NDEers and OBE adepts with impressive verifications, I would favor the latter sources. Still, I'm not even insisting that we are forced to choose. At this point, I am merely exposing some of the issues arising from the overlooked incoherence between various occult claims about tahe problem of memory loss vs. the genuineness of ADCs. OBE adepts too often immerse themselves in their own solipsistic worlds and ignore the astral insights of competing explorers. For this reason, this field still deserves the "cultic" label. I want to look beneath this problem in quest of a new synthesis. Prolonged tolerance of incoherent evidence often leads to creative resolutions. So stay tuned.

Deadworm

P.S. Claire, "hopelessly" is appropriate to the frustration implied by a hyphtetical.




[
A. Can the channeled material with the most impressive verifications be best explained as the result of ESP rather than genuine contact with the dead?[/quote]
Imho ,
Channeled messages are distinct from messages given off by platform mediums or clairvoyants reading a sitter. ESP is used to contact deceased spirits . ESP is any extra sensory perception which includes all of the clairient senses .

B. If channeling evidence hopelessly contradicts evidence from EVP,
The adjective 'hopelessly' is not objective .

...OBEs, and astral exploration, how does this affect our knowledge of postmortem survival?
Please offer some example of what EVP you feel contradicts spirit messages recieved through mediumship , thanks .

C. Do most ADC contacts originate from from earthbound spirits trapped in the biblical Sheol or what Robert Monroe labels Focus 24 or from peaceful educational spirit planes and still higher heavens?
Earthbound is not Sheol , imho . Sheol is in lower planes not the physical realm . Earthbound implies those negative energy spirits who are trapped on Earth not below it . Imho , most spirits reside in heavens of hels ie the homes of deceased spirits. But these spirits can and do travel back and forth to Earth . Around each sitter are spirits . There are more spirits roaming on this planet than live humans . Most of the spirits I read with sitters are visiting and return to the homes of the deceased spirits . I have been to Sheol/Hels , those humans can not visit Earth but can lift their vibration to get to Heaven and then come here . Earthbound spirits I have communicated with at disaster scenes when they do not realise they are dead and at hauntings of homes . A haunting can be distinguished from
normal spirit presence but I believe each home is full of spirit .
D. Some ADC contacts are truly spectacular and involve dead spirits
materializing and teleporting objects, walking around in an earthly
room filled with still living family members, and driving their old truck
(e. g. Jeff, the deceased son of my friend Leonard), So why are such
spectacular and comforting verifications so rare?
Most spirits cannot move the physical . Just as most humans could but do not develop clairient sense , most spirit could but do not develop abilities to apparate or levitate. Materialising so that an unaware can see them or hear them takes a higher vibration and more energy output . It drains spirit .

Mediums routinely put their eager sitters in touch with deceased loved ones, who seem alarmingly available. Why do you use the term "alarmingly". When you die , you might think otherwise and find that visiting relatatives on Earth is quite pleasant .

If these contacts were geniune, one would expect these loved ones to be unavailable because of present commitments and activities much of the time. Why ? First , they do watch over us and enjoy our antics just as we enjoy watching TV or movies . If they are there , I read them . If I call or evoke with the link from a loved one , it is a humble invitation and much like answering a phone , they can choose to communicate or not .

True, some mediums will protest that they sometimes fail to contact the spirit desired by the sitter.
Most platform mediums just read the spirit who has appeared and do not call desired ones . In a reading most mediums do the same . To profess to evoke a spirit is generally done in a seance . I feel that calling a desired spirit is best done by the sitter who can link on an emotional cord to the spirit or thru the monad . Once they are present , I read them .

But generally these spirits seem far too available to be credible. The spirits seem incapable of answering a simple question like, “So what have you been doing since I last talked to you through this medium?”
Most mediums see the spirit and can describe them to you and tell you what they are showing but clairvoyance in not clairaudience . There are several constraints on the quality of the communication mostly involving the vibration of the sitter , the spirit and the medium . A good medium working with a new spirit and a sitter with a low vibration will not do as well as a poor but lucky medium who reads a person of a high vibration .

(1) What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?
Again , it is not a channeling . It is a communication , a spirit message . A channeling can mean a form of trance mediumship or invocation or giving off a message from a mahatma but it is not the appropriate term to employ in this case ,imho . But I have done the same . I have been asked to call in a faked relative . They are looking for a young male , I see a young male next to them and I read that one not knowing if it is the named faked one or not . Then later these charlatan skeptics have on occasion confessed and said I was making up that name but you have described my dead cousin . Gigo , garbage in , garbage out , I offer readings for free only and I really hate to be toyed with by such immature unaware minds . I do not and can not promise that I all get will be correct , I just do the best I can . If you want to prove this , learn to develop clairvoyance , anyone with a little dedication and discipline can learn . "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness ". So rather than wasting energy trying to disprove life after death , try to be aware and learn to see and hear spirit yourself . It is open and free for everyone to attain .


(2) What if the spirit control of mediums with impressive verifications can be proven to be a fraud? What conclusion would that warrant about other spirit controls whose self-professed identity cannot be verified?
...Logically unrelated
(3) What if a drop-in communicator could provide amazing verifications even involving precognition of the future, and yet, be later proven a fraud? So what ? Would you give up sex because you had one bad affair ?
"One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch girl "
(4) What if it can be shown that the attribution of channeled materials to discarnate friends and relatives reflects a culturally conditioned bias?
so what ? , who cares ?

(1) As already mentioned, Leonore Piper
did you mention that in this post ?

is one of the most impressive mediums ever...[quote:38g7v0na]etc etc ..as above ...[/quote:38g7v0na]
(2) Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent. While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892. The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium. But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced. Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself to be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor. But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemed to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.” It seems doubtful that Hodgson would have changed his mind if he had lived to discover the Gordon Davis case, which I shall now describe.


(3) At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.” Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper. Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I. Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.” Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent. The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”). Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation. He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days. At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him. A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct. But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting! Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients. Only around the time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time. But Davis did not move into the house until a year later. More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance! Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird. Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings! So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177). And this precognition surely casts doubt on the authenticity Gladys Leonard's repeated channeling of many details posted in specific columns of
tomorrow's newspaper.
Why ? The fact that the medium contacted the spirit of a live person who was deceased in the future and accurately described a home that was not theirs yet is psychic not clairvoyant and it is still amazing in any case and doe