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 chapâ€Â; “confab†instead of “meetingâ€Â). 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?
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