I don't often do this, but today I'm turning over my blog to Stacy Horn, author of the newly released book Unbelievable:  Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. 

Stacy maintains her own blog. Check it out.

And now ... heeeeeere's Stacy!

==============================

A New Experiment for Telepathy?

I spent a few years researching the work of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, the most famous of which were the ESP cards experiments.  The scientists at the lab developed a deck of cards with pictures of a circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and a star.  Then they conducted experiments to see if people could tell them what symbols were on the cards without seeing them.  The scientists found that they could.  I investigated all the various claims that have been made to dismiss their experiments and found that the claims were not valid.  I summed up my findings with this:

 “In the end, parapsychology’s critics couldn’t come up with convincing evidence to reject the Lab’s work and neither could I.  But I did take away two ideas: There might be an unidentified source of information out there, along with unknown methods of transmission and processing.  Also, we have a lot more to learn about consciousness.”

I’m open to telepathy as an explanation for the results of the Lab’s experiments, but I’m also open to other explanations.  I now keep my eye out for any recent scientific  findings which might also account for the lab’s results.  If nothing else, my research into parapsychology has greatly amplified my interest in science.

I’d read a brief mention about the recent Alex Tsakiris/Skeptiko interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, a neuroscience researcher and professor at Canada’s Laurentian University. Persinger is probably best know for what the media dubbed the “god helmet.”  He developed a helmet that generates very weak magnetic fields that are similar in intensity to those that he measured in areas said to be haunted.  When people put the helmet on in experiments they see things.  Subjects said things like, “I see shadows along my left side ... there is someone touching my left side ... I see a visual ... it’s an apparition.”  One woman who felt a presence said, “I started to cry when I felt it slowly fade away.” 

There are two quotes from the Skeptiko interview which give a good sense of where Persinger is coming from:

“Our research starts on the basic premise that all experience is generated by brain activity. Now, the critical thing is that all experience means your experience of love, or memories, or having a mystical experience, must be associated with specific patterns of brain activity. That brain activity in large part is determined by the brain structure.”

“The ultimate measure is going to be 1) can you reproduce it in the laboratory and 2) can you actually product the same phenomena by experimental techniques?”

I read the Skeptiko interview with interest because in it Persinger claims to have conducted an experiment which provides evidence of telepathy.  From the interview:

“What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”

I looked around and wasn’t surprised to see people immediately denouncing his experiment.  Here’s the thing—until he publishes and someone attempts to replicate this experiment, there is nothing really yet to either accept or condemn. And I’m pretty sure Persinger would agree. Get ready to pounce if you must, but  any declarations at this point are premature.

I should amend that to “carefully replicates” this experiment. Persinger’s helmet experiment has been dismissed too, because someone tried to replicate it and couldn’t. But Persinger pointed out how the researcher hadn’t actually replicated the experiment and listed which parameters weren’t followed. I was surprised the results of the claimed replication were published at all. It was like someone saying, “Hey, I lowered the temperature of the water to 42 degrees and nothing happened. I don’t believe in ice!”

Because of my research into the Duke Parapsychology Lab, I’m now accustomed to this rush to condemn.  But it makes me wonder what else is out there that’s been dismissed or not even examined or explored due to not just a healthy skepticism, but this outright hostility.  I was at a lecture a few months ago and I learned that outside of psychology the science of emotion was not even a valid area of study until recently, but apparent now it’s all the rage.  (Which is great.)  I’ve written many times that had the scientists of Dr. Louisa Rhine’s day paid attention to her papers the recent “discoveries” being made in the area of audio hallucinations—that people hear voices more than we knew, and that it isn’t necessarily a sign of mental illness—would have begun fifty years ago and we would be that much further along in understanding what is happening and why.  (Louisa Rhine was the wife of the director of the Parapsychology Lab and a researcher herself.)

Persinger addresses this same point in the Skeptiko interview:

“Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.

“The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that - and indeed, altered states in general - is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.”

I wanted to end with two more quotes from the Skeptiko interview.

“ ... we’re trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. And of course, consciousness is probably more like an over-inclusive term. It’s probably not consciousness but a variety of complicated processes and we just slam this word on it that are involved with individuals have these unique skills, like the Shawn Haribands and the Ingo Swanns who seem to have access to information that others do not have. So we’re trying to understand the neurophysical basis to it and to try to integrate it in terms of the known energies around us so that someday we can also replicate it. That really is the real test of a hypothesis or an idea. Can you replicate it with an experiment?”

“... the brain, of course,  is a source of all experiences ... it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns ... And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else.  That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.”

I said that there might be an unidentified source of information out there, along with unknown methods of transmission and processing.  Persinger seems to be saying we may be able access information from a distance via some mechanism of the brain.  If this is true, I like it because while it may not be the explanation Rhine went with for their results, it allows that their results could have been real, valid, and not the product of fraud or sloppy experimental controls.

Or, it could be that Persinger’s experiments shed light on a different effect entirely.  There might also be valid objections to Persinger’s explanation for his results as well, but the evidence, whatever the final explanation, is intriguing and worth investigating.

I emailed Dr. Persinger and asked if he was going to publish the results of the experiment he talked about in the Skeptiko interview and he answered, “Our revisions are being reviewed by Neuroscience Letters.”

We often think of the afterlife as consisting of every possible environment. Yet in fact the range of habitats seems to be somewhat limited. If we can judge by reports -- both from near-death experiencers and mediums -- the most common environment, overwhelmingly, is a garden. Meadows and fields are also frequently reported. Houses are usually described as occupying large plots, rather than being built close together. Cities do make an appearance, but they are encountered far less often than rustic environments.

Completely absent, as far as I can tell, is the desert. I know of no NDEs or channeled information suggesting that discarnate souls live in desert conditions -- despite the fact that, on earth, there are many people who love the desert and wouldn't live anywhere else.

Perhaps a more surprising omission is the ocean. Certainly for living people, the ocean exerts an undeniable fascination. Herman Melville took note of this in the famous opening pages of Moby-Dick.

If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs -- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? -- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster -- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand -- miles of them -- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, -- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Many relaxation exercises ask you to imagine yourself lying on a beach and listening to the gentle rhythm of the surf. It's clear that in many people's minds the seashore is closely associated with bliss. Personally, if I were asked to describe an ideal paradise environment, I would think of an unspoiled stretch of tropical shoreline, the kind of spot that might be found in Hawaii or Tahiti.

Yet I know of no NDEs that take place on the beach or near an ocean. The same is true of channeled communications. In fact, in Helen Greaves' channeled book Testimony of Light, the communicator explicitly says at one point that while she has found a variety of delightful locales in the afterlife, she has not seen the sea. At that point her guide allows her to visit the ocean on earth -- which seems to suggest that this particular environment cannot be found in the afterlife. Lakes and streams are not infrequently reported, but as far as I know, the ocean never is.

If the various accounts of the afterlife were purely the product of fantasy, one might reasonably expect some of those fantasies to include the desert or the ocean. As far as I can tell, none of them do. Perhaps this argues that there is an underlying reality to these reports.

This still leaves the question of why the desert and the sea have been omitted from the geography of the next world. The only tentative answer I can suggest is that both environments involve wide open spaces, and perhaps in a world consisting of consensual thought forms, it is simply not possible to have a great deal of open, essentially undeveloped space. Perhaps the natural tendency is for people's imaginative projections to fill up that space with life and activity, so that a vast expanse of sparsely vegetated land or a huge stretch of open water cannot be established, or at least cannot be maintained for long.

Whatever the reason, it's surprising to think that there could be any limitations on environments constructed out of the raw material of thought.

Currently I'm reading Adventures Beyond the Body, by William Buhlman, an interesting look at the author's many out-of-body experiences. With a book like this, you are asked to take the author at his word; he says he has had hundreds of OBEs and has taught other people how to do it. I have no reason to doubt him, but as far as I know, he has not been tested by parapsychologists, so there is no independent confirmation. He maintains a Web site and offers seminars on OBEs.

Reading his book, I was reminded of two experiences of my own that had possible features of an OBE.

Some years ago I tried using a relaxation tape made with Hemi-Sync technology. The tape was very effective; I was aware of being more relaxed than I could ever remember. Suddenly I began to notice this strange vibrating, buzzing feeling throughout my body. Perhaps it was the prelude to an OBE. Many people, including Buhlman, report that an OBE often starts with a humming, buzzing, or vibrating sensation. They also say that if you are alarmed by the sensation, the OBE will stop. In my case, I was sufficiently unnerved by the feeling that I slipped out of my state of relaxation. Nothing further happened, so if an OBE was about to commence, I must have aborted it.

I've listened to the same tape several times since then, but I've never become relaxed to the same degree. Subconsciously, I may be wary of doing so.

On another occasion, also several years ago, I had what might have been an OBE, though it may also have been simply a vivid dream. I had fallen asleep on the sofa in my living room. In the dream (if it was a dream), I floated out of my body, then floated over to the stairs and proceeded to float up the stairway to the second story of my home where, for some reason, I detoured into the walk-in closet in my den. I don't recall if I opened the closet door or simply passed through it.

I remember three things very clearly about this dream: first, my progress up the stairs was very exciting, because I could feel that I wasn't actually touching the steps but was sort of "treading water" in the air; second, there was a continuous electric tingle that I felt all over my body throughout the time when I was floating around; and third, a strange yellowish-golden light seemed to travel with me wherever I went, illuminating my immediate environment. (I also remember being in contact with a spiritual presence who gave me some meaningful personal information, and that the electric tingling sensation increased noticeably during this communication, creating a kind of euphoria or mystical, transcendent feeling, the equivalent of thinking "it suddenly all makes sense.")

Usually I forget my dreams almost immediately, but I've never forgotten this one. Was it a dream, or was it an OBE? I don't know. But from what I've read, an actual OBE can have some of these features.

Of course, the mere fact that I cannot be sure if it was a dream or an OBE points up the difficulty inherent in this subject. Could all OBEs be nothing more than dreams? Conversely, could some so-called dreams actually be OBEs?

Many of the experiences described by Buhlman (and by fellow OBEr Robert Monroe) sound a lot like lucid dreams. Indeed, at one point in his book, Buhlman speculates that lucid dreams might be OBEs. He notes, "Physicist and author Fred Alan Wolfe postulates that lucid dreams are actually visits to parallel universes. He has repeatedly stated that lucid dreams might better be called 'parallel universe adventures.'" (p. 114) But one might just as easily argue that OBEs, or at least some of them, are lucid dreams misinterpreted as metaphysical explorations.  

Perhaps this is an area where the boundary between subjective experience and objective reality blurs or even breaks down altogether. If so, it would hardly be the only realm of psi phenomena to challenge our basic conceptions of how reality works.

Some time ago, I put up a post about Professor Graham Holderness, a Shakespearean scholar who, at a seminar, made a comment that seemed to imply that the Earl of Oxford's biography is reflected in Shakespeare's plays.

Oxfordians like myself made much of this. But today I received an email from Prof. Holderness, which I gather he is circulating to all interested parties, and which he gave me permission to make public. In his statement, he disavows any belief that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.

The statement is long, but in fairness I think I should quote all of it. (Ellipses are in the original.)

=======

The Road to Oxford

Graham Holderness

Nearly twenty years ago I launched, together with my colleague Bryan Loughrey, a series of Shakespeare Quarto texts under the title Shakespearean Originals. The texts were presented in an unusual way, and claims were made for them that seemed, at the time, quite radical. But they were essentially just the same old Quartos that everyone had known about since the 16th century ...

A couple of journalists got the idea that these texts were hitherto unknown and newly discovered: mouldy books dug up from Shakespeare’s grave perhaps, or crumbling texts located by some Professor Robert Langdon in the Vatican archives. The consequent publicity was both extensive and embarrassing. I remember feeling, as I sat down in front of my Amstrad, ready to put the record straight, a distinct sense of impending deflation. After all, here beckoned celebrity, here was the clarion-call of fame, here was Indiana Jones’s ‘fortune and glory’, just within my grasp. Did it matter that it was all based on inaccurate and unsustainable claims that we’d never even made? You just can’t buy publicity like that ...

So I proceeded to set out the banal truth, that there is nothing new under the sun. I’m not aware that it did me any good, though I certainly learned that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. So what to do when another opportunity for fame, another shot at fortune and glory, presents itself? I was informed by various internet sources that during the ‘Rowe to Shapiro’ conference at Shakespeare’s Globe, a light flashed around me, and I fell to the ground, and blurted out that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was: Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

Headlines can’t lie: ‘Holderness: Shakespeare’s biography is that of the earl of Oxford’, blogs Roger Stritmatter. And here is Julia Cleave of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust:

From an Oxfordian point of view, most startling of all was the declaration made by Professor Graham Holderness, University of Herefordshire (sic).  In the middle of a discussion re the questionable facticity of tales of deer-poaching, calf-killing and horse-holding, he stated baldly - without further comment:

If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes - if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it - it wouldn’t be Rowe’s, it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s.

Clearly the earth moved for somebody. The comments flow thick and fast: ‘The very foundation of Stratfordian biography is on the verge of breaking apart’. The centre cannot hold. ‘The quote from Holderness is a swinging gate through which Oxfordians ought to immediately drive their full coach and horses’. 

One of the great things about conversion narratives is that your pre-conversion life gets revised until it precisely parallels your new one. St Paul was never so zealous a persecutor of Christians as he appeared, retrospectively, to be, after he had became one himself. In the same way, it wasn’t until I blindly stumbled upon the road to Oxford that I became quite so definitively ‘a major Shakespearean scholar’ of ‘considerable reputation and standing’: indeed ‘one of the foremost "orthodox" Shakespeare scholars in the world’.

Now before I was suspected of falling out of the Oxfordian closet, no-one ever called me ‘major’ or ‘foremost’, and certainly not ‘orthodox’. I sort of like it in a way. Could I have this all the time, I think to myself, if I just keep dropping suggestive pericopes into the conversation? Could I really retain this reputation as ‘one of the foremost orthodox Shakespeare scholars in the world’, if I just occasionally blurted out mysterious soundbites on the Shakespeare Authorship Question: ‘I’m an Oxford man, you know’; or ‘I’m only here for de Vere’.

Tempting as it is, I’m going to have to pass. My eyesight is a lot better now, and though in my temporary visual impairment things might have appeared brighter, much more shiny and new, the hard grey light of another common day gives light enough to read the truth by:

‘My name is Graham Holderness, and my position on the Shakespeare Authorship Question is that I am interested in reasonable doubt, but not in alternative certainty’.

I don’t think Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems. I wouldn’t especially care if he did, or if the real author was proven to be a wandering Kentish tinker, or Queen Elizabeth I, or the Pope. I don’t have any strong personal investment in ‘the Stratfordian hypothesis’, but it does seem to me a reasonable one. Of course there are lacunae, and doubts and questions about ‘the man from Stratford’ (who is not in these circles permitted even to enjoy his own name). But they are nothing compared with the lacunae and doubts and questions that would apply to any other candidature. There may well be ‘reasonable doubt’ about Shakespeare. But how much reasonable doubt would one have to countenance to explain that someone else wrote those works? How much historical evidence would we have to dispel, how many conspiracy theories would we have to swallow? 

Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 biography of Shakespeare, whose tercentenary was celebrated at the Globe conference, depicts Shakespeare as a young man from a peasant farming and agricultural trading background; who received little formal education; worked in his father’s business; got into trouble with a local landowner by poaching deer from his estate; fled from Stratford, and turned up outside a theatre in London seeking work as a ‘serviture’. Rowe’s biography has been widely regarded as inaccurate and fanciful, but recent scholarship has offered to revise this view, demonstrating that Rowe’s narrative is historically sourced,  independently corroborated and not in itself improbable. 

Of course this raises issues for Stratfordians, since it depicts a life of some deprivation that seems unlikely to have flourished into that of the world’s greatest dramatist. Biographers of Shakespeare have looked for better explanations, scenarios that put the author of the plays into an environment of literacy and learning, and provide him with access to the cultural and entertainment industries, to the worlds of aristocratic patronage and court favour.

Anti-Stratfordians would rather believe Rowe, since it is their contention that the subject of his biography could not possibly have been the man who wrote the works: quod erat demonstrandum. The more authentic and credible Rowe becomes, the less likely it is that this Stratford man is the true author.

I think, with René Weis and the late Eric Sams, that Rowe should be trusted. His historical sources were sound and verifiable; his claims are corroborated by other early traditions; and most importantly, there is nothing in his account that should seem in any way improbable as a life of the author of the plays of William Shakespeare. A young man from a trading family in a provincial town, who acquired there a rich and varied education in both life and learning, who worked in his father’s business, ran wild and got into trouble, left home and entered the theatre as a menial, became an actor and then a writer. None of that seems incredible to me. To assert, as Oxfordians invariably assert, that only an aristocrat could have mastered such learning, acquired such favour and displayed such genius is surely to underestimate the lower orders, and to overestimate the upper class. Let’s list on our fingers all the great writers produced by the British hereditary aristocracy ... all right, then, just use one hand ...

Now it is true that the facts of the Shakespeare life as depicted in Rowe do not necessarily quite match up with the works. It would be very odd if they did, since the works are dramatic poems in which every word is spoken by a character on stage, and no space at all is provided for confessional material (would the same were true of modern literature). Even the Sonnets are not as clearly autobiographical as they have often been received. But for me the problem lies deeper than this. In this blogging, twittering world we have lost all sense of any relationship between the self and writing that does not invest heavily in autobiographical narcissism and the refraction of personal experience. We have no equipment for tracing the complex and subtle connectivities between the self and more impersonal forms of writing. Shakespeare might have become an actor, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ great story ‘Everyone and No-one’, because he had no sense of identity at all; and he may have written so many lives, because he never felt that he had lived even one.

And so if you tried to infer a life from Shakespeare’s works you might not, it is true, arrive at the man from Stratford. But that is not because he did not write them: but because the relationship between the life and the works is far more complex and devious than you imagine, and may consist in discrepancy and discontinuity rather than in coherence. You might think that some other life-story would fit the works better: the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or the Holy Roman Emperor.  But you would be whistling in the dark, because these works will never give up the identity of their author in anything like so definitive a way.

Insofar as Shakespeare Authorship inquiry is interested in pursuing these profound questions about life and writing, the self and identity, personal expression and impersonal artistry (and I know that some authorship doubters are interested in such matters), then there is common ground for debate. Insofar as such inquiries are obsessively concerned to lobby for alternative candidates, and to discredit ‘the man from Stratford’, there really won’t be all that much to talk about.   

A couple of people emailed me links to Gerald Woerlee's review of Jeffrey Long's new book about near-death experiences, Evidence of the Afterlife. I haven't read Long's book, but the review itself makes interesting reading. It shows clearly how the prison of a particular paradigm can box in a person's thoughts, rendering even the most intelligent critic rather silly.

A prime example is found in Woerlee's analysis of veridical perceptions of NDErs. After noting that NDErs who report out-of-body experiences sometimes give accurate accounts of what people around them were doing, wearing, saying, etc., he writes:

Observers see with physical light waves, and hear with physical sound waves. But the supposedly disembodied consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience is immaterial, and this has major provable consequences.

The immaterial disembodied consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience does not interact with physical matter at all, because it can depart from the body, actually passing through the solid matter of the body, and even pass through solid walls. Accordingly, the disembodied consciousness cannot possibly hear, because it would also have no interaction with sound waves in air...

The disembodied consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience is invisible and has no interaction with physical matter. These things mean it cannot be seen, and cannot be photographed or imaged at any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. Accordingly, the disembodied consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience does not interact with light at all, which means it cannot possibly see anything...

So how can [the] consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience hear and see? The answer is evident. The very fact that people do report observing verifiable things during out of body experiences, means that the apparently disembodied consciousness of a person undergoing an out of body experience sees with physical light waves, and hears with physical sound waves. After all, if this were not the case, these same observations could not be confirmed by observers present near the person at the time of the out of body experience. But an immaterial consciousness cannot see and hear, which means that people undergoing out of body experiences hear with their ears, see with their eyes, and build images of all that occurs within their minds.

This somewhat repetitious passage seems designed to drill one point into our heads: that because NDErs and OBErs report visual and auditory experiences, they must be using their physical senses.

But this merely begs the question. The whole issue is whether some form of consciousness, which includes perception, can operate independent of the physical body (and the physical senses). Nothing Woerlee has written can establish that such perception does not take place, since, clearly, if it does take place, it will function according to some mechanism that is not yet understood.

Woerlee's materialistic outlook leads him to assume that the only possible form of perception is via the physical senses, which collect data from a physical world. But if so, how to explain the many well-documented cases of remote viewing, in which a clairvoyant is able to accurately describe a location many miles - even thousands of miles - away?

Presumably, Woerlee would reject all evidence for remote viewing out of hand, on the basis that (according to his materialistic presumptions) such a phenomenon is impossible. Again, however, this is begging the question.

Far be it from me to explain how remote viewing and NDEs work, but I can offer a suggestion: maybe the physical universe consists ultimately of information. If so, then possibly consciousness, when disembodied, can decode this information directly, translating it into the familiar terms of pictures and sounds. Something like this is implied by Robert Lanza's book Biocentrism and by Brian Whitworth's theory of the universe as a virtual reality environment (PDF).  (I discuss both Lanza and Whitworth here.)

One interesting quirk of remote viewing is that sometimes the target location is accurately described according to its appearance many years ago, or even its appearance at some point in the future (later confirmed), rather than its present appearance. This can happen even when the remote viewer is not consciously attempting to access a different time period. Some remote viewers have even specialized in retrocognition - seeing the past - in order to assist archaeologists in finding new places to dig. Stephan A. Schwartz's books detail his successful experiments in this area.

It would appear that what the remote viewer perceives is a data set connected with that location, but it can be a data set linked to just about any time period. The time period is just one more coordinate, along with the geographical coordinates of the site. If the universe is akin to a virtual reality simulation, then the remote viewer apparently is accessing the data files directly; consciousness itself renders the images out of these data.

I'm not saying that this hypothesis is correct, only that it is one way of looking at it. The simplistic view that the ultimate nature of reality must be physical, and therefore accessible only through the physical senses, is a metaphysical assumption, not a statement of "provable" fact.

In addition to begging the question, Woerlee also engages in rather crude equivocation on the meaning of the words "conscious" and "unconscious." He argues:

An out of body experience is indisputably a conscious experience. After all, an unconscious person has no experiences. An unconscious person hears nothing, sees nothing, and experiences nothing. So even though the physical body of a person undergoing an out of body experience is seemingly unconscious, they are nonetheless very conscious, and only appear unconscious... Accordingly, veridical perceptions of seeing things, people and events, as well as hearing sounds and speech during out of body experiences are due to the apparently unconscious person actually seeing and hearing these things.

Get that? A person who is in cardiac arrest, or in a coma, or clinically dead, is nevertheless conscious if he has an NDE. He must be - because he is having a conscious experience.  QED!

Clearly this argument depends on shifting the meaning of the term "consciousness." No one denies that NDErs are conscious in the sense that their consciousness is still operating. Indeed, this is the whole point of the massive NDE literature. The contention of survivalists, however, is that the NDEr's mind (or spirit) remains conscious even though his body is inert and unconscious. In other words, a distinction is drawn between being physically unconscious (or dead) and being mentally unconscious (or dead).

You might think that no one could make such a poor argument innocently, and that Woerlee is deliberately trying to confuse his readers. But I don't think so. I think he sincerely believes this is a knockdown, slam-dunk argument. From the point of view of strident materialism, there simply cannot be a distinction between mental and physical awareness.

The same attitude surfaces in Woerlee's rejection of other evidence for NDEs. He dismisses Kenneth Ring's investigation of visual experiences in blind NDErs by saying that even the ones who were blind from birth might not have been completely blind, or might have been able to distinguish light and dark. But how could the simple ability to sense light and dark lead to elaborate visual perceptions, including (in one case) the accurate description of the colors and pattern of a necktie? Woerlee says the tie must have been described to the patient, but the patient has no recollection of this, so Woerlee's explanation is pure conjecture. But for Woerlee it has to be true, because the contrary - that the blind patient actually perceived the tie in some nonphysical way - is literally unthinkable for him.

I don't want to leave the impression that Woerlee's review is entirely without interest. As an anesthesiologist, he has extensive experience in the operating room, and provides some interesting perspectives on cases where anesthetized patients report veridical perceptions. Here the million-dollar question is whether the presumably minimal, sketchy, and disorganized level of brain activity possible under anesthesia (or, for that matter, during cardiac arrest, even with heart massage) can adequately explain the vivid perceptions and complex narratives of NDEs. I've been told that Woerlee will be interviewed by Skeptiko in the near future. Hopefully he can expand on this issue in that forum.

Overall, however, it seems that Woerlee is so committed to his materialistic outlook that he honestly cannot imagine any other way of interpreting the evidence. Perhaps he would benefit from taking another look at visual perceptions of NDErs who were blind from birth ... and to keep in mind the old adage, "None so blind as those who will not see."

A question that comes up fairly often in discussions of the history of spiritualism is the attitude of Abraham Lincoln toward the subject. It is known that Lincoln's wife, Mary, hosted séances at the White House, and that Lincoln attended some of them. But did he take the events seriously, or was he merely humoring his wife or having a bit of fun?

In her magisterial biography Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin downplays Lincoln's interest in the occult. As she tells it, he enjoyed the séances as performances, nothing more, and he was eager to uncover the trickery that lay behind the sometimes astonishing effects.

A very different perspective is offered by an 1891 publication titled Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?, which can be read in its entirety on Google Books.  The book, written by medium Nettie Colburn Maynard, recounts Nettie's experiences in mediumship, with an emphasis on her visits to the White House. I find the author's account quite convincing in its detail and generally levelheaded tone, but of course it may be asking too much to take the medium at her word.

Fortunately, the publisher - a certain Rufus C. Hartranft - anticipated the skepticism of his readers. In a prologue, he offers a number of testimonials to Nettie Colburn Maynard's abilities and honesty. What is more interesting is that he also includes statements from people who knew Abraham Lincoln and, in some cases, were present with him at White House séances.

He begins:

In February of this year, the writer had the good fortune to meet a gentleman who related that he knew from personal experience and contact, that Abraham Lincoln was a Spiritualist, and implicitly believed in the guidance and teachings of that science or religion, whichever it may be. He further stated that he attended a séance where the President with several other persons had sat upon a piano, and that the instrument had been bodily lifted from the floor by means of spirit power, while the President and his friends remained seated upon it ! He further stated that he knew from personal knowledge that the President had been instructed and guided by spirits in times of particular stress in affairs of state, and that at a period when the nation's future was uncertain, and while the States were in the midst of the throes of a great civil war. He also stated that he knew of his own personal knowledge and experience, that numerous Spiritualistic séances were held in the White House, and that they were frequented by many of the leading men of the time, who were then located in Washington.

This gentleman's statement, being of such peculiar significance, the writer did not believe it. This recitation, however, caused the writer to become greatly interested in the subject from a purely historical standpoint, and, therefore, he immediately started an investigation regarding the matter ...

The investigation led him to discover Mrs. Maynard and to gather encomiums on her behalf, but it also led to some of Lincoln's associates:

Mrs. Daniel E. Somes, of Washington, wife of the late Hon. Daniel E. Somes, Representative from Maine, in the Thirty-sixth Congress, informs the writer that she attended séances at the White House during the war when Miss Colburn (Maynard) was the medium there, and upon one occasion met Major-General Daniel Sickles, and that the circumstances recorded as to that séance are fully described in this volume. This statement she fully and completely indorses; and further adds that her husband was closely and intimately connected with President Lincoln, and had repeatedly informed her of interesting and remarkable incidents which occurred at the White House at séances as herein described and mentioned. She also states that she knows Miss Colburn did not give séances in the White House for money.

Col. Simon P. Kase, of Philadelphia, states that he was present at a séance with Mr. Lincoln, and that he, with several other gentlemen, the President included, sat upon the piano, while it was lifted bodily from the floor by spirit power, and that Mr. Lincoln was not only interested in this physical phenomenon, but was also intensely interested in the statements which the medium made to President Lincoln while in a trance condition.

Mrs. Elvira M. Depuy, of Washington, stated to the writer: "My husband was a visitor to séances where Mr. Lincoln was present, and he has told me of many interesting occurrences which happened thereat. In the winter of 1862-3 I attended a séance at Mrs. Laurie's, at Georgetown, where Mrs. Lincoln was present. She was accompanied by Mr. Newton, Commissioner of Agriculture. At this séance remarkable statements were made by Miss Colburn (Maynard) which surprised Mrs. Lincoln to such a degree that she asked that a séance might be given to Mr. Lincoln. I have always known from my husband and others that Mr. Lincoln attended circles and séances, and was greatly interested in Spiritualism."

Hartranft also includes a statement from Francis Bicknell Carpenter, the artist who painted the "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation" that is still displayed in the Capitol, and who wrote a biography of Lincoln. According to Wikipedia, "Carpenter resided with President Lincoln at the White House and in 1866 published his one volume memoir Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln."

In his statement, Carpenter vigorously disputes the account of William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, who had depicted Lincoln as lacking any interest in spirituality or religion. This may well have been true of Lincoln in his earlier years, when he was something of a "freethinker," but according to Carpenter, the president's attitude changed late in life. Wrote Carpenter:

"I know that Mr. Herndon knew Mr. Lincoln better than any other man, up to the time of his election in 1861; after his election Mr. Herndon knew but little of him, and absolutely nothing of his mental or spiritual condition before the sickness of his son Willie, nor after Willie's death, and I must say that Mr. Lincoln's mind underwent a vast change after that event. Just what Mr. Lincoln's religious views were, I do not know, but it is a fact that he was known to pray, and his condition was much more in accordance with the statement found in [Carpenter's biography] 'The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln' than that stated by other biographers, and you may quote me, that Herndon's statements have neither weight nor value, after the connection between the two men ceased. I am not prepared to state that Mr. Lincoln was a Spiritualist. I do know that he had faith in spiritual comfort and believed that we were, in a measure, directed by spiritual teachers and guidance."

It should be noted that Carpenter became interested in spiritualism in his later years, so possibly his interpretation of Lincoln's outlook is colored by his own beliefs. Nevertheless it seems clear enough from the various testimonies that Lincoln did have a genuine interest in spiritualism and séances, even if he may have balanced his interest with some healthy skepticism about the details (especially regarding the physical phenomena, as Doris Kearns Goodwin points out).

Those who've read Lincoln's speeches and other writings are usually struck by the increasingly religious or spiritual tone of his later remarks. It is likely that the huge tragedy of the Civil War, combined with the intense grief arising from the death of his young son, opened Lincoln's mind to possibilities that he had dismissed in his earlier days. Séances with Nettie Colburn and others seem to have played a role in his spiritual development also. Indeed, if Mrs. Maynard's account can be trusted, her channeled advice may have helped Lincoln to withstand considerable pressure and publish the Emancipation Proclamation.

Here is how Nettie Colburn Maynard herself described the scene (with the first very long paragraph broken up for easier reading):

Mrs. Lincoln received us graciously, and introduced us to a gentleman and lady present whose names I have forgotten. Mr. Lincoln was not then present. While all were conversing pleasantly on general subjects, Mrs. Miller (Mr. Laurie's daughter) seated herself, under control, at the double grand piano at one side of the room, seemingly awaiting some one. Mrs. Lincoln was talking with us in a pleasant strain when suddenly Mrs. Miller's hands fell upon the keys with a force that betokened a master hand, and the strains of a grand march filled the room. As the measured notes rose and fell we became silent. The heavy end of the piano began rising and falling in perfect time to the music. All at once it ceased, and Mr. Lincoln stood upon the threshold of the room. (He afterwards informed us that the first notes of the music fell upon his ears as he reached the head of the grand staircase to descend, and that he kept step to the music until he reached the doorway).

Mr. and Mrs. Laurie and Mrs. Miller were duly presented. Then I was led forward and presented. He stood before me, tall and kindly, with a smile on his face. Dropping his hand upon my head, he said, in a humorous tone, "So this is our ' little Nettie' is it, that we have heard so much about ?" I could only smile and say, "Yes, sir," like any school-girl; when he kindly led me to an ottoman. Sitting down in a chair, the ottoman at his feet, he began asking me questions in a kindly way about my mediumship; and I think he must have thought me stupid, as my answers were little beyond a "Yes" and "No." His manner, however, was genial and kind, and it was then suggested we form in a circle. He said, "Well, how do you do it ?" looking at me.

Mr. Laurie came to the rescue, and said we had been accustomed to sit in a circle and to join hands; but he did not think it would be necessary in this instance. While he was yet speaking, I lost all consciousness of my surroundings and passed under control.

For more than an hour I was made to talk to him, and I learned from my friends afterward that it was upon matters that he seemed fully to understand, while they comprehended very little until that portion was reached that related to the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. He was charged with the utmost solemnity and force of manner not to abate the terms of its issue, and not to delay its enforcement as a law beyond the opening of the year; and he was assured that it was to be the crowning event of his administration and his life; and that while he was being counseled by strong parties to defer the enforcement of it, hoping to supplant it by other measures and to delay action, he must in no wise heed such counsel, but stand firm to his convictions and fearlessly perform the work and fulfil the mission for which he had been raised up by an overruling Providence.

Those present declared that they lost sight of the timid girl in the majesty of the utterance, the strength and force of the language, and the importance of that which was conveyed, and seemed to realize that some strong masculine spirit force was giving speech to almost divine commands.

I shall never forget the scene around me when I regained consciousness. I was standing in front of Mr. Lincoln, and he was sitting back in his chair, with his arms folded upon his breast, looking intently at me. I stepped back, naturally confused at the situation—not remembering at once where I was; and glancing around the group, where perfect silence reigned. It took me a moment to remember my whereabouts.

A gentleman present then said in a low tone, "Mr. President, did you notice anything peculiar in the method of address?" Mr. Lincoln raised himself, as if shaking off his spell. He glanced quickly at the full-length portrait of Daniel Webster, that hung above the piano, and replied, "Yes, and it is very singular, very!" with a marked emphasis.

Mr. Somes said: "Mr. President, would it be improper for me to inquire whether there has been any pressure brought to bear upon you to defer the enforcement of the Proclamation?" To which the President replied: "Under these circumstances that question is perfectly proper, as we are all friends [smiling upon the company]. It is taking all my nerve and strength to withstand such a pressure." At this point the gentlemen drew around him, and spoke together in low tones, Mr. Lincoln saying least of all. At last he turned to me, and laying his hand upon my head, uttered these words in a manner that I shall never forget: "My child, you possess a very singular gift; but that it is of God, I have no doubt. I thank you for coming here to-night. It is more important than perhaps any one present can understand. I must leave you all now; but I hope I shall see you again." He shook me kindly by the hand, bowed to the rest of the company, and was gone. We remained an hour longer, talking with Mrs. Lincoln and her friends, and then returned to Georgetown. Such was my first interview with Abraham Lincoln, and the memory of it is as clear and vivid as the evening on which it occurred.

As many readers of this blog know, I made my living as a fiction writer for a long time - more than twenty years. But the times, they are a-changing. I haven't sold a book in two years, and am now making plans to do the unthinkable - to self-publish (through IUniverse) one or two of my unsold novels. I don't expect to make much, if any, money by self-publishing, but I hate to leave my work in a desk drawer, or more accurately on a USB memory stick, forever.   These are tough times to be peddling a book to mainstream publishers. The big publishing houses are cutting back on staff, reducing the number of titles they put out, and closing down whole divisions. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble are ailing. The mass-market paperback side of the industry, which had accounted for the bulk of fiction titles, is all but defunct. Where your local supermarket or drugstore used to stock fifty or a hundred paperback titles, now they probably carry a dozen or fewer - or none at all.   (Whenever I make this point, someone invariably comments that their local store still carries as many paperbacks as ever. Maybe so, but I'm looking at industry-wide trends.)   Though some people believe the situation is only temporary and things will turn around, I see it differently. I think that traditional publishing is dying out, and that before long we will live in a brave new world of e-books and print-on-demand books and serialized books online. I think publishing will morph into something more like blogging. And there's not much money in blogging, except for a select few. Increasingly, writing - especially fiction writing - will be a pastime rather than a moneymaking career.   Moreover, even in the increasingly rare event that a book is given a big commercial release, Web piracy will undercut sales substantially. Piracy is already a major problem, and it will only get worse. Before long, it will be ubiquitous. A book is easy to digitize and can be exchanged online at no cost even more easily than bootlegged movies and songs. And there is a whole generation that has grown up believing that all digital information should be available gratis - that "information wants to be free." (Maybe it does, but the producers of the information want to be paid, because they want to eat.)   Though I may seem to be painting a gloomy picture, I can see an upside to the end of the status quo. For one thing, there will be no more idiot publishers forcing writers to churn out vampire books and similar dreck. (Hey, there's an idea for a vampire book - Dreckula.) Even better, there will be no more culturally sequestered Manhattan elites dictating what the rest of the country has to read.   Instead, writers will write what they want to write - what they believe in and feel passionate about. There may not be much money in it, and they may have to settle for a smaller audience, but at least they will be writing from the heart, rather than aiming for a paycheck. That may be a big step forward, in the long run.   One thing, at least, seems clear to me: The present-day model of publishing, which has been in place since the 19th century with only minor modifications, is obsolete and will soon be abandoned. The days of printing 100,000 copies of a book, boxing them up, shipping them thousands of miles, displaying them on shelves for a few weeks, then boxing up the unsold copies (often the majority) and shipping them to a recycling plant ... those days are over. In a digital world, where information can be transmitted instantaneously at no cost, the old model simply makes no economic sense. It has persisted this long only from force of habit, and habits are made to be broken.   And one other thing is clear: People will continue to write, whether or not there's money in it. The impulse of self-expression and the need to share ideas are part of the human condition, and will endure no matter what technological changes take place.

In comments, Tony M recommended Ted Holiday's The Goblin Universe to me as an interesting read. And I did enjoy the book, though I think I appreciated it more on the level of entertainment than actual evidence. As Colin Wilson admits in the introduction, the book would not convince anyone who has a skeptical cast of mind; the data presented are almost entirely anecdotal and can easily be written off as hoaxes or the delusions of gullible eyewitnesses.

The problem [writes Wilson] is that the reader needs to start out with a certain sympathy for these ideas. The Goblin Universe would never convert a single sceptic; in fact, it would probably make him more certain than ever that 'the occult' is a farrago of self-deception and muddled thinking. [pp. 28,29]

Nevertheless, the book does raise provocative and intriguing questions about the nature of reality. Wilson himself was so impressed with The Goblin Universe that he prevailed on the author's family to have it published posthumously, after Ted Holiday himself had chosen to leave it unpublished. Holiday may have been dissatisfied with the book because its conclusions are rather tentative; he sketches out a hypothesis that is at once elaborate and incomplete. Whether there is any merit to this hypothesis remains to be seen.

Before we get to that, let's look at the main subject matter of the book. Though The Goblin Universe covers a wide variety of phenomena, the author's principal concern is with what he calls "the phantom menagerie," the collection of beasties that have always been part of folklore and tabloid newspaper reports. Naturally, Bigfoot and Sasquatch and the yeti are here, as are mysterious big cats that come and go in the night, and the fairy folk, but Holiday's main interest is lake monsters, the most famous of which is the creature said to be inhabiting Loch Ness.

I learned a lot about this marginal area of zoological exploration in Holiday's book. For one thing, Loch Ness is by no means unique. Similar legends surround other lakes in Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere. Moreover, I always pictured the Loch Ness monster as resembling a plesiosaur, a huge marine mammal from the dinosaur age. But on the basis of the reports collected by Holiday, Nessie takes on a less attractive aspect. It is said to resemble a giant worm or slug with a horselike face. In some cases, it is reported to have multiple legs, like a centipede. Holiday speculates that the creature might have its origins as a prehistoric worm that channeled through the sedimentary deposits at the bottom of the lake, surfacing only infrequently.

He does not, however, believe that the present-day Loch Ness monster is an actual organic being. Instead, he regards it as something more akin to a "thought form," an image or idea that temporarily materializes or manifests itself in such a way as to be perceived by especially sensitive observers under just the right conditions. There is, in short, something otherworldly about the Loch Ness monster and, Holiday believes, something evil. He was so convinced of this fact that he engaged a professional exorcist to perform an exorcism of the loch. The aftereffects of this ritual, as described by Holiday, were extremely bizarre and involved the brief appearance of a "man in black," the archetypal figure often cited by ufologists. Indeed, Holiday believes there is a connection between UFOs and the phantom menagerie; UFOs, he thinks, are thought forms too.

And here is where his hypothesis comes in. He points us to the work of Harold Burr, former professor of anatomy at the Yale School of Medicine. For decades Burr investigated what he called "L-fields," short for "life-fields," which he saw as electrodynamic fields that organize all living systems. These fields, measured in millivolts, supposedly determine the structure and health of any living thing.

As Holiday summarizes,

L-fields, in fact, compel atoms and molecules to form appropriate shapes, and to keep the these shapes as individual cells die and need replacing. Instead of trial and error, Burr and his colleagues found perfect order. Every atom carries an electrical charge and is acted on by the field of the organism. A modification takes place between the field and the organism and vice versa, which has the authority of unfailing natural law. [p. 206]

Holiday carries Burr's work considerably further by speculating that the mind itself can directly affect L-fields. If this is so, and if L-fields are responsible for bringing together the constituents of living beings and organizing them into a coherent system, then the mind -- or perhaps we should say Mind -- operating through health fields, can create physical things.

Holiday writes:

But the essential point is that something nonmaterial -- a thought in the mind of the operator or the dying reactions of a small experimental animal -- [is] translated into measurable physical effects by no known means.

Perhaps we are now looking somewhat dimly at the real mechanism of evolution. To talk of the hit-or-this stupidity of chance mutations is as ludicrous as talking about a Creator making animals of clay. A far more subtle and effective method of modifying animals exists and it can be shown to exist -- the effect of mind on matter....

We now see that plants and animals are under electronic control. And this control appears to be subject to further control from a timeless, nonmaterial agency loosely specified as mind, will, soul or spirit. This is not a matter of faith, but of scientific experiment. Evolution by selection does occur; but the selection is rational and intelligent. Far more subtle than any human intelligence, it is therefore extremely difficult to comprehend. Yet it has many attributes humans recognise in themselves. It enjoys the grotesque and even the horrifying. It is both spendthrift and immensely economical. It labors to perfect the seemingly impossible just for fun. Above all, it has an awareness of beauty in form and structure that dazzles the mind. If we try to probe a little deeper into the mystery of being, we find ourselves in the Goblin Universe along with Alice having tea with mad hares in top hats. [pp. 209-212]

In brief, then, the phantom menagerie, in Holiday's view, consists of entities that materialize and dematerialize out of physical constituents organized by L-fields, such fields in turn being directed by some mind or other. It is left unclear whether the mind in question is that of the observer, or God, or discarnate beings of a lower or higher nature, or some other source.

Now what are we to make of all this? Well, never having heard of L-fields before, I did little Googling. All I was able to determine is that the theory has been largely, if not completely, ignored by the scientific community. It has, however, embraced by some people interested in alternative medicine, such as homeopathy. There are even some dubious machines on the market that are said to improve your health by correcting defects in your L- field.

I'm not sure why Burr's work has been so completely neglected. He did, after all, have impressive credentials as a mainstream academic. I can think of two possible reasons. One is that his work verges on vitalism, an idea that is anathema to modern-day biologists. The other is that any phenomenon measurable only in millivolts is open to the objection of experimental error. Maybe the extremely feeble energies Burr measured in his experiments were an artifact of the measuring devices themselves and not part of the living systems he was scrutinizing.

If we assume, for argument's sake, that there really are such things as L-fields and that the mind can affect them, then perhaps we do have a reasonably satisfying, albeit sketchy, explanation for a variety of otherwise baffling phenomena. The idea of L-fields seems to tie in, to a certain extent, with the work of Rupert Sheldrake and his morphic fields. It may well be that some sort of energy field -- whether electromagnetic or otherwise -- lies at the heart of the phenomenon of life and perhaps even at the heart of the physical universe itself. And if the mind can be shown to influence such fields, we would have an answer to the most commonplace objection to dualism -- namely, that an immaterial mind cannot interact with or affect a material reality.

The Goblin Universe raises these questions in a consistently entertaining and even droll way. Not all of the evidence Holiday presents is equally credible, but I suppose that's the nature of this kind of material, which is inherently ambiguous and subjective. The book is certainly worth reading, as is Colin Wilson's extensive introduction, which runs more than 40 pages. At the end, you may find yourself less certain than ever about the line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective, and unlikely ever to go boating on Loch Ness.

A writer friend of mine, M.J. Hawk, has written a terrific thriller called The Shop, which focuses on the mysterious death of rising pop star Brienne Cross. But these days it's not enough just to write a great book. You have to convince publishers to roll the dice by showing them that there's a built-in demand for the story.

For this reason, my friend has put together a series of Web sites devoted to exploring the mystery of Brienne Cross's tragic death. The sites come complete with photos of Brienne and the house in Aspen where she and her reality-show castmates met their doom. Various posts explore all aspects of the crime. If you didn't know it was all a work of fiction, you'd swear it was real.

The point of this exercise is to inspire people to click the Demand It! button on any of the Web sites, thus registering another vote in favor of publishing The Shop.

I have pressed this button and am now on record as Demanding It! Maybe some of you kind souls would like to do the same.

Here's the main site:

http://briennecross.net/

And here are some of the satellite sites:

http://briennecross.com/

http://whokilledbriennecross.com/

http://celebritymurders.net/

As you can see, a lot of work went into this promotional effort, but even more work went into the book itself. It's a complex, crafty, highly original story that takes off in unpredictable directions and builds to a powerful climax.

If that sounds like the kind of book you'd like to read ... Demand It!

Several years ago I saw an episode of Larry King Live featuring a debate about life after death. One of the participants was the medium John Edward. At one point, apparently a bit exasperated by the endless back-and-forth among the other guests about empirical evidence, Edward blurted out that he couldn't quite understand the constant effort to prove the issue scientifically. After all, he said, "it's a belief system."

At the time I didn't quite know what to make of this since, back then, I was interested in trying to obtain scientific proof of life after death myself. In the years since, however, my position has changed somewhat, and I now think Edward was on to something. The reality is that spiritualism -- or any sort of belief in a spirit world -- is a belief system and cannot be otherwise. It's not the kind of thing that can be definitively proven, in the same way that we might prove that water boils at 100°C at sea level or that smoking increases the risk of certain cancers. I would say that a belief in life after death is justifiable but not provable. Justifiable, because there is evidence to support it and there is a larger, reasonably coherent worldview in which an afterlife would make sense. But not provable, because an afterlife lies beyond our present range of experience.

With that in mind, here's how I would sketch out my personal worldview.

1. I think there is clear evidence that the cosmos was fine-tuned to be complex, orderly, and habitable. It is now reasonably well known that if any of the cosmological constants or laws of physics varied even to a small degree, the universe either would have collapsed back on itself immediately after the Big Bang or would have developed in such a way that any imaginable kind of life would be impossible. The extremely narrow parameters in which life can exist argue strongly for some kind of master plan that lies behind the universe. Chance coincidence is an explanation only if we posit the existence of a virtual infinitude of parallel or sequential universes, each with different initial conditions. But there is no empirical evidence for this so-called "multiverse" and no apparent way for such evidence to be acquired, since by definition these alternate universes would be completely outside the scope of our reality. To my mind, at least, the most parsimonious and satisfying explanation is not that there is an infinite number of universes, but rather that there is one universe which, to paraphrase astronomer Sir James Jeans, is more like a great thought than a great machine.

2. If the universe is improbable, so is life. Many mathematicians have pointed out the extreme statistical improbability that even a single protein could be assembled by chance. A living cell requires many proteins. There does not appear to have been enough time in the entire history of the universe, let alone in the comparatively brief history of the earth, for these proteins to develop at random.

3. Moreover, proteins alone are not enough for life. Life requires encoded information, which is found in either DNA or RNA. This information consists of the instructions necessary to make proteins and do all the work of the living cell, including the all-important job of replication. The only information that appears to arise spontaneously via natural processes is of a very limited type, like the repetitive structure of a crystal, which consists of the same simple pattern repeated over and over. The information encoded in DNA is not of this kind. Information theorists call it "specified complexity," meaning that the bits of data are arranged in a specific, unpredictable, nonrepetitive pattern like the letters of the alphabet in a written communication. To me it seems most unlikely that a natural process could bring about the origin of information of this type, any more than a purely natural process could somehow produce the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Indeed, it may even be logically impossible for information to arise in this way.

4. There is yet another difficulty for a purely naturalistic theory of the origin of life -- namely, the chicken-and-egg problem of which came first, the proteins or the DNA. DNA is useless without proteins to carry out its instructions. But proteins don't exist in the absence of DNA, which tells the cell how to make them. Perhaps there is some way out of this conundrum, but for now the problem appears insoluble.

5. The fine-tuning of the universe, coupled with the apparent intelligent organization of the living cell at its deepest level, strongly suggests that the random concatenation of subatomic particles cannot explain the origin and nature of either the cosmos or life. Another explanation appears to be required. Nor should this be surprising when we consider that there is obviously more to the universe than just physical matter and energy. There is also consciousness. It is pretty rare for anyone to argue that consciousness is a physical thing, like a brick. Some people do liken it to an energy field, but this kind of argument leaves unexplained the subjective properties of consciousness -- the so-called "qualia" and sense of self. It seems clear enough, at least to me, that consciousness is simply a different kind of thing -- not different quantitatively but qualitatively -- from the physical constituents of the universe.

6. If this is true, then at least at a certain level of analysis, we are led inexorably to dualism. Dualism is the view that reality consists of physical things on the one hand and nonphysical consciousness or spirit on the other. It is of course possible that at a deeper level this dualistic dichotomy could resolve into a single source; the technical name for such a view is neutral monism, which holds that both consciousness and the physical world spring from the same ground of being. Regardless of the ultimate source, we at least perceive the world dualistically. There is matter and energy on the one hand, and there is consciousness on the other. How exactly they interact or interrelate, and which (if either) comes first, are difficult questions to which I don't pretend to have the answers. It's enough for me to know that this dualistic property is part of the universe as I understand it.

7. Dualism naturally implies a dichotomy between matter and spirit. It means that naturalism, materialism, or physicalism cannot be a complete explanation of reality, even if these approaches may be extremely productive in more narrowly circumscribed areas. It also means that there is no reason to rule out of bounds phenomena that run contrary to materialistic assumptions, by which I mean paranormal phenomena, such as out-of-body experiences, ESP, and even miracles. Indeed, I've spent a good deal of time on this blog providing evidence for such things, and I believe that we are more than justified in accepting the reality of such events in some cases. The evidence for remote viewing, for instance, is particularly good, as is the evidence for telepathy as gathered in the ganzfeld experiments. This body of evidence strongly suggests that consciousness operates through the brain but is not necessarily restricted to the brain in all circumstances.

8. If consciousness is not inextricably tied to the brain, then it might reasonably be expected to survive the death of the brain. This is where life after death comes in. Again, I've spent a lot of time on this blog talking about the evidence for life after death, which includes apparitions, deathbed visions, near-death experiences, mediumship, reincarnation, and possession, among other things. Naturally some cases are stronger than others. No doubt some superficially strong cases can be debunked. No doubt there has been a fair amount of fraud, error, and delusion. Nonetheless, when I look at the strongest cases in each of these categories, I'm convinced of their genuineness.

9. Moreover, the great majority of people throughout history have also been convinced of the reality of the spirit world. Undoubtedly this remains true today, even in an age of triumphalist materialism. Nor has this belief been relegated to the margins of society. It has been the central, organizing belief behind most cultures. The earliest works of art and architecture were inspired by religious motives. Prehistoric cave paintings, the ziggurats, the pyramids, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the writings of the ancient Hebrews, the earliest law codes like the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi, and the other signal achievements of the primordial civilizations were grounded in spiritistic beliefs. The complete rejection of such beliefs is the hallmark of a comparatively small minority of intellectuals in the modern Western world. Naturally they believe themselves to be the vanguard of a rationalist future. But, to my way of thinking, it is more likely that they will prove to be an aberration, perfectly understandable given the circumstances of our age, but an intellectual and cultural dead end nevertheless.

10. If there is a spirit world, and if the physical world was created according to some kind of overarching plan, then we would reasonably expect to find some purpose in this world. And in fact generations of sages, seers, mystics, prophets, mediums, channelers, and other spiritual seekers have generally agreed that we come here to learn lessons, to overcome hardships, and to grow spiritually. There are, of course, innumerable differences of doctrinal detail, but the broad consensus is sufficiently clear. It has been labeled "the perennial philosophy."

11. When we ask specifically what it means to grow spiritually, we are told in almost all traditions that it means to learn to love as much of creation as possible, and in doing so, to achieve what mystics know as unity consciousness -- also called cosmic consciousness -- a sense of oneness with the universe, with all other living beings, and with God. In the mystical traditions that I'm aware of, this kind of consciousness is the highest goal.

12. The reward, or least the concomitant, of this universal consciousness is awareness of being reunited with the Source of all that exists. In effect, we start out in exile from the Source and then make our way back toward it. We're like raindrops, born in evaporation from ocean waters, which then rain down on the ocean and become one with it again. In some paradoxical way, we may not lose our individuality even when we achieve total union with the divine. At least this is what some traditions teach, though others teach that at the end of our journey individuality is extinguished -- but only at the point when we are more than ready to give it up.

Now, this is a fairly comprehensive scheme that tries to answer the basic questions: Why are we here? What we meant to do? What's it all about?

But it is not a testable scientific theory. Parts of it may be testable, like the reliability of certain mediums. But the overall system is not testable and cannot be confirmed or falsified by any scientific method.

Moreover, every part of this scheme can be challenged. Point 1, for instance, can be challenged on the basis of the multiverse theory. The points about biology can be criticized as a "God of the gaps" argument. (I don't think that this criticism is correct, and for a reply I refer the reader to God's Undertaker by John C. Lennox, which also covers points 1-5 in considerable detail. Still, the debate is far from settled.) Obviously claims about the reality of paranormal phenomena can be vigorously questioned. And so on.

At the end of the day, what we have here is a map of the world that makes sense to me, but does not compel the acquiescence of anyone else. Reasonable people can disagree. I can only say that, for me personally, this outlook on life is more satisfying than the skeptical, rationalistic outlook that I previously held. I have found it useful to me in my own personal development and growth, and in dealing with personal difficulties. I take some comfort and reassurance from it, and I think it is more likely to be true, at least in broad outline, than to be false. It is not written in stone, and it's not the final word, and there are many gray areas and lacunae, but it is the best worldview that I've been able to come up with so far in my nearly fifty years on this planet.

In other words, it's a belief system. And it's one that I'm pretty happy with.

Believe it or not, this is my 1000th post on this blog. If anyone had told me, back when I started, that I would do 1000 posts, I would have been appalled. But here we are.

The 1000th post seems to call for a big topic, and what can be bigger than God?

I'm currently reading God's Undertaker by John C. Lennox, a book that poses a series of arguments against materialism. (The book was recommended in a comments thread by Zetetic Chick.) I was familiar with most of these arguments from prior reading, but it's still worthwhile to see them assembled in one place and presented so ably. The book got me thinking about the nature of God and his -- or its -- relationship with the cosmos.

On the one hand, as Lennox makes clear, there is a great deal of prima facie evidence for conscious intelligent intention in the design of the universe and the origin of life. On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that this universe is "the best of all possible worlds," as Dr. Pangloss liked to say. There are obvious imperfections in earthly life. There are congenital diseases, birth defects, flesh-eating bacteria, the Ebola virus, and plenty of other nasty things that we would not expect to find in a world that was meticulously designed in every detail by a benevolent creator.

How do we square this circle? It seems to me that if are going to assume that God -- whatever exactly we mean by that term -- lies behind the universe, we also have to assume that God does not directly control every outcome. I think we have to make room for what I would think of as creative exploration of the universe's possibilities -- all its possibilities, for better or worse. A creative process, by its nature, is spontaneous -- unplanned and unpredictable. If every outcome could be known in detail before exploration even began, there would be no point in exploring at all. Exploration makes sense only when the outcome is unknown and will come as a surprise.

In other words, I'm suggesting that it's not just girls who wanna have fun. God wants to have fun too. Spontaneous creative exploration of every possibility implicit in the cosmos is God's way of having fun.

I can think of a couple of analogies that might help clarify this point. First let's think of a fiction writer. He starts off by coming up with the idea for a novel and working out the general outline of the plot, including the dramatic highlights and resolution, the main characters and their motivations and conflicts, etc. But when he actually starts to write the book, he may find that it goes in directions he hadn't anticipated. The characters may say things that surprise him. The plot may veer off at an unexpected angle. In some cases these spontaneous developments may constitute an improvement on his original plan. In other cases they may turn out to be dramatic dead ends, requiring him to backtrack and make corrections. In still other cases, the value of the new approach may not be immediately apparent and he may have to pursue it for a while in a process of creative exploration to see where it leads. In short, the novel is both a preplanned and a spontaneous product, a mixture of logical planning and intuitive playfulness. The logical planning gives it the shape and form and structure necessary for dramatic unity; the intuitive playfulness is the spark of life that makes the process fun.

Or let's consider another analogy. Suppose you set up a model railroad. You carefully arrange the tracks and the crossings and switches, and when it's all ready, you turn it on and stand back and watch. At that point your pleasure is simply watching the train go around the track, through the tunnels and over the bridges and past your little villages. You don't feel the need to interfere that point, unless the train goes off the tracks. Then you have to set it back on the rails and start it up again. Your role in the process is partly that of designer and partly that of spectator. This dual role is what makes the hobby fun.

Perhaps when theologians talk about God being both transcendent and immanent, they are getting at something like this. Here's an explanation of these terms from a Web site devoted to religious tolerance:

"The term 'transcendence' derives from a Latin word meaning 'to go beyond'." It refers to deity as existing above, outside of, or beyond creation. It is generally a different and higher order of being than are humans and other living entities. For example, the ancient Hebrews viewed God as seated on a throne in Heaven above the firmament, where he could smell the delicious fragrance of meat cooking on temple altars below.

"Immanence" is also derived "from Latin, but conveys the polar opposite sense of 'indwelling' or the quality of 'within-ness'." Deity is seen as being within the universe, perhaps an "...inner presence and Power that permeates, saturates, or infuses the universe and everything in it..." For example, Taoists believe that the Tao [is] a formless, unchanging and self-sufficient form of energy, which was present before the universe existed, and continues to be present in all things.

In my understanding, the transcendent God is the God who preplans the universe. The immanent God is the one who operates through natural, ongoing earthly processes. The transcendent God is the writer who develops the plot outline. The immanent God is the writer who allows the story to tell itself, within limits. The transcendent God is the hobbyist who sets up the train set. The immanent God is the hobbyist who lets the train set run, interfering only when there is a problem.

The transcendent God encoded the instructions in DNA and got the process of life started with messenger RNA to conduct those instructions and specialized proteins to carry out their orders. The immanent God sustains the process of biological evolution, allowing species to ramify into new forms and new ecological niches -- allowing living things to "be fruitful and multiply" and explore all possible variations, lifeways, and habitats.

The transcendent God set the parameters of our cosmos to allow for a stable, habitable environment. The immanent God operates within those parameters, playing out the intricate relationships between the observer and the observed on a minute-by-minute basis.

Another way of looking at it is to see the universe as a thought in the mind of God. From this perspective also, God can be seen as either transcendent or immanent. He is transcendent, i.e. outside the universe, in the sense that the thinker is not the thought. Alternatively, he is immanent, i.e. part of the universe, in the sense that the universe is his thought, his subjective reality.

If I think of a unicorn, I am not the unicorn. The thinker is not the thought. On the other hand, the unicorn exists as part of my particular subjective awareness. In that sense, I am identified with the unicorn. So the unicorn is both distinct from me and part of me, depending on which viewpoint I take.

Of course, this leads to the question of our own personal relationship to God. If the universe is a thought in the mind of God, then so are we. This means that we are both distinct from God and identified with God. In his transcendent aspect, God is separate from us, just as a fiction writer's characters are not the writer himself. And yet the characters spring from the writer's mind and deepest impulses, and are, in a sense, inseparable from him. Likewise, in his immanent aspect, God is connected to us, inseparable from us; we might even say God is us.

It all depends on how you look at it.

A hodgepodge of items, in no particular order ...

------

I just read two Skeptiko interviews with Dr. Jeffrey Long and Dr. Kevin Nelson. Interesting to see how two experts can look at the same data and arrive at totally different conclusions.

Dr. Long is convinced that NDEs provide "proof" of life after death and has written a book promoting this viewpoint. Dr. Nelson believes that NDEs can be explained by standard neuroscience.

I have some problems with Dr. Long's position. He seems to have acquired his database from stories submitted to a Web site. I don't know how much (if any) checking and verification he performed.

He also insists that the veridical parts of NDEs are almost always accurate, but I have read a fair number of NDE accounts in which the veridical part was inaccurate in some respects. As one example, in his book The Truth in the Light, Peter Fenwick includes a case in which a man hovered over his body but did not see his companions near him. When he returned to his body, he found that one of his companions was actually lying on top of him (dead) - something he certainly should have seen from an elevated vantage point.

Of course, I have my doubts about Dr. Nelson's position too. His case is basically that the brain continues to function for 10-20 seconds after cardiac arrest, thus accounting for any veridical details in the NDE. But this seems unsatisfactory on a number of levels. For one thing, NDErs do not report confused, disconnected impressions, but coherent, vivid, structured narratives that are inconsistent with a feebly flickering consciousness. For another, some NDEs involve perceptions of thing totally outside the patient's normal range of awareness - a shoe on a ledge, for instance. Some veridical accounts involve visual details that could only be perceived by some form of sight (such as the unusual color of a hospital worker's blouse), yet the patient's eyes were closed. Etc.

Dr. Nelson also claims that science understands a lot about how the brain produces consciousness. I don't think this is correct. It would be correct to say that science has learned a lot about brain states and how they correlate with mental states (although the correlation is not always as clear as popular articles suggest), but the "hard problem" of how subjective consciousness emerges from electrochemical operations in the brain remains unanswered.

As leading neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has said, when it comes to brain research, "We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road." (Quoted in There Is Life After Death, by Roy Abraham Varghese.)

Naturally, the same could be said for research into life after death.

------

Cyrus posted an interesting comment that may have been overlooked, so I'm putting it here:

As usual I'm jumping into this conversation very late, but I found Zetetic Chick's points about the "third way" to be very interesting.

I generally feel disdain around both materialism (objectivism, reductionism, other god-awful philosophies) and religiosity which are the two prevailing mind-sets for most people in the West. As somebody who follows spiritual research I generally consider myself as belonging to some undefined third-world view.

Those who made the most headway in trying to define this world-view in concrete terms were probably the Spiritualists. This didn't work out very well because Spiritualism is / was an "ism" that came forth in an age of cults and public weariness towards new movements and ideas.

But what you'll find is public perception of things like communication with the deceased is rapidly increasing. I dare to say it's more commonly accepted and discussed in 2010 than ever in history (except perhaps.. ancient Egypt?). So, in an undefined way, it's slipping through the cracks.

The bane of its existence may very well be the "new age" movement, otherwise known as the worst attempt yet to define an organizational movement around not only communication with the departed, but a million whack-ideas, ranging from 2012 nonsense, to healing crystals, Plaedian aliens, and other bunk topics which completely invalidate the legitimate phenomena.

In essence, a world where life after death is recognized as legitimate is an entirely separate culture, far removed from the religious or materialist philosophies humans have grown up with. This would be a culture with an entirely new and unique set of philosophies and issues.

Flash-forward 100 or 200 years to a world where communication with the deceased has become technologically advanced and accepted by society:

On the plus side, I do think that in such a world there would be a higher appreciation about life. More people would take chances and dare to really "live" versus being afraid of boogeymen and staying inside their homes their whole lives. There would certainly be less materialism, which would mean the possessive, covetous, and selfish nature of many would diminish. And with less attachment to organized religion there would be more emphasis on individuality and self-expression.

The down-side: with an entire new system of philosophies, there would be many strange and alien philosophies and movements.

There would be assemblies of people who take Earth-life completely for granted. Imagine highly suicidal people prone to extreme levels of risk-taking or public displays of death.

This world would see followers of "Chaotic philosophies", perhaps in rebellion to the perceived order in the universe. These people would herald the importance of conflict and would be prone to terrorist attacks and blowing up buildings simply for the purpose of undoing other people's work.

And communication with afterlife entities could seduce entire countries. Imagine a third-world country ruled by the whims of a council of mediums who believe they are taking orders from far superior intelligences, which are in reality disruptive or dark entities.

So, as you can imagine, this would be an entirely different world. When you think about it this way, perhaps it's easy to understand why people are so weary of the supernatural, because some people just like the world for as it is right now.

However, when I look at the direction we're heading, this theoretical society may come around sooner than we think. Perhaps not our generation, but in a couple of hundred years.

------

And Ben posted a poem of his that deserves to be lifted out of the comments thread:

Wising Up

So how did honeybees evolve,
To do business as they fly;
To navigate
By the sun’s position in the sky?

From eggs laid by a queen,
Most hatch as worker clones;
Some are guards; others scouts;
There are nurses; even drones.

They co-operate in colonies
Fifty thousand strong;
Single-mindedly, determinedly,
All summer long.

They’ve arranged a special symbiosis
With the flower;
In exchange for pollination:
Nectar-power!

Whenever scouts discover
Blossoms at their best,
They fly back home
And dance directions to the rest.

With big bulbous eyes
And ultraviolet sight,
They can see patterns on petals
Which guide them to alight.

By use of two pairs of wings
Which hook up in flight,
They can pitch up and down;
Or yaw left and right.

Inside the nest, by alchemy,
The nectar (gathered crude)
Is refined to golden honey,
Transcendental food.

The honey store does more
Than just permit bees to survive;
By sipping it, they somehow milk
The wisdom of the hive.

I know our brains to theirs
Are twenty thousand times the size;
But fifty thousand honeybees
Add up to ‘very wise’.

Here's a guy who has let the song "Rocket Man" go to his head.

My favorite line in the article:

He donned a plastic garbage bag as a cape. 

I would have liked to see that.

Okay, after a brief experiment with comments moderation, I am turning moderation off. The reason, frankly, is that it's too much of a pain to log on to TypePad several times a day and approve various comments. 

For the record, I did not refuse to publish any comments during this period, so if your comment did not show up, blame a TypePad glitch, not me. 

I am sure everyone now understands the polite, respectful, non-combative tone that I hope for with this blog. I'm not a fan of the modern culture of angry shouting epitomized by cable news shows. I like quiet, courteous discourse that treats all opinions* with respect. 

(*Well, maybe not all opinions. Someone once commented that Adolf Hitler was a great hero who should be fondly remembered. I ridiculed his comment and banned him without a second thought. Let's say virtually all opinions ... )

I apologize for being impolite myself in some of my comments on the last thread. In particular, I apologize to Julio Siqueira, who felt the brunt of my pique through no real fault of his own. 

In other news, I'm currently rereading Peter Fenwick's The Truth in the Light, a very enjoyable overview of NDEs. Most of the cases he cites are anecdotal, having been reported some time -- even decades -- after the fact, but they are still of considerable interest.

Last year Stephen Braude sent me a link to a YouTube video in which he is interviewed about his paranormal investigations and writings. Unfortunately, because I was about to take a trip at the time, I never looked at the video and forgot about it until now.

Today I rediscovered the email and watched the interview, which is really quite interesting. I found Braude's discussion of a table-tipping event particularly enjoyable.

The video runs about fifteen minutes and can be viewed here.

In the comments thread of the last post, Kris put up a link to a Time magazine story from 2007.  It was published on January 19, three years ago almost to the day.

Yes, it's anecdotal, but it's part of a growing body of anecdotes of this sort. Ronald Reagan, in the last stages of Alzheimer's, is said to have had a similar, though less dramatic, moment of lucidity immediately before he passed on.

"At the last moment when his breathing told us this was it, he opened his eyes and looked straight at my mother. Eyes that had not opened for days did, and they weren't chalky or vague," Reagan's daughter Patti Davis wrote. "They were clear and blue and full of life. If a death can be lovely, his was....

"In his last moment he taught me that there is nothing stronger than love between two people, two souls. It was the last thing he could do to show my mother how entwined their souls are and it was everything."

Anyway, the Time essay is a wonderful story, and if anyone hasn't read it yet, please do.

-----

The comments thread accompanying the article about Ronald Reagan contains many interesting stories. At the very least, these unsolicited comments give some idea of how common this phenomenon is. Most people probably don't talk about it, for fear of ridicule, but if they feel safe, they will open up:

My Father-in-law also had Alzheimer's and just before he died knew where he was and who his wife was. Perfectly lucid.

Both my parents had such a clear-eyed episode, and it feels incredible to the living. It's unmistakable. The hospice people ( angels in the flesh) told us this happens often at the very end.

My father too. You're right.

Reminds me of when my dad died. A similar thing happened.

I saw something very similar when my mother-in-law died 9 years ago, and when my wife died 7 years ago. Both died from cancer, at home, under hospice care rather than in the hospital.

My mother, who after suffering with cancer for 3 months and didn't recognize any of us for weeks, opened her eyes right before she died, looked at her 3 daughters who were sitting bedside, she looked each one of us in the eye, smiled, and went to be with God. 

I was present with the family when my father in law died a few years ago. His cancer was at such an advanced state that he was nearly catatonic before he passed. In the last few minutes of his life, as his labored breathing got worse, his eyes opened fully and focused on each of us standing by his bed. They then focused on the door and he tried to speak. I remember looking behind me several times to see what was there and, of course, could not. I will forever believe that he said goodbye to all of us and greeted his "escort". I will one day have to ask him.

My paternal grandfather died in October 2002 at the age of 93. Other than arthritis, he was healthy until 24 hours before his passing. His kidneys stopped working suddenly and his blood pressure dropped to the point where he was virtually unconscious. Just before he died, my dad says he became alert and said "take me Lord Jesus, take me."

It reminds me of when my dad died too; so I believe this.

My mother was dying of cancer in December of 1988 and had been unconscious after surgery for two days. As she was gasping her last breaths, I held her hand and told her "Mom its Dan, I'm here with you." She never opened her eyes but to my amazement she said my name aloud and then took her last couple of breaths.

I have heard of people who even after being in a coma, rose up on their beds and exclaimed the beauty of something, some place, that only they could see. People have called out in greeting to loved ones, long dead. The mother of a friend of mine, dying of cancer, described seeing Jesus, that He was on a field of grass with a crowd of others, and was calling her to come dance with Him.

My dad was dying of cancer and heavily medicated. I was stationed in the Azores (a long way from California) when my mom's neighbor called and said I had to get home as my dad was terminal with cancer and didn't have long to live.... It took me 5 days to get to the hospital. All my siblings were already there and my mom was with my dad. My mom woke dad, he looked at her very groggily, then I took his hand, he looked at me and became very lucid and had a look of great surprise and then it seemed like he was looking over my shoulder and went back to sleep. He died about 30 minutes later. Mom said he was waiting for me to get home.

My sister's gramma-in-law actually came back to her senses and recognized everyone just before she passed, after years of suffering from Alzheimer's.

My mother experienced something similar with her husband at the moment he died. No question in my mind there was a moment of lucidity just before he passed into eternity.

When my grandmother was dying after suffering from years of Alzheimer's, she opened her eyes and was as lucid as any person without the disease. Before she took her last breath she looked me in the eyes and said, "I see Wesley and he is so handsome. I see Jesus." Then she smiled a beautiful smile and breathed her last. Only the nurse and I were there with her and we both rejoiced at her release. Wesley was my father who had passed prior to her passing. My grandmother had not spoken for over a year and the only sounds she had made were grunts and such. When my father was dying of cancer 4 years prior to my grandmother's passing he was was comatose for the last week of his life. When we knew the end was near we called my brother in. My mom, my brother and I were around his bed praying and singing hymns. At one point I leaned down and whispered to him, "Daddy, you can go now. We will be alright. We will take care of mama." He opened his eyes and looked at me and moved his lips as if to say "thank you" and with that he was gone.

My grandma passed away last February, I wasn't at her bedside when she passed, but she had a heart attack stabilized briefly and was pending surgery. She was very afraid to have surgery, then took a sudden turn towards death. My cousin was at her bedside and said at the very end My grandma opened her eyes wide, held up her right hand and said " Oh dear Lord, I'm Going " then passed.

I entered the ICU room where my father was held after an unsuccessful surgery. He was talking to "someone" in the empty chair next to him. He was describing buying seed at the Feed Store - mustard seed. My dad loved turnip greens, but couldn't stand mustards, but mustard seed has a clear meaning in our faith. Soon he was laughing and waving at "friends" peeking through a window he pointed to the very middle of the room. The nurse just brushed this off as ICU narcosis, but I knew he was seeing spirits. It was actually a comfort to know he was going Home.

My mom died of cancer almost 19 years ago (still can't believe it) In the month before she died, the cancer was affecting her brain & she no longer recognized my father, me or her beloved grandsons. But when the ambulance came to transport her to Hospice, she turned to my father and in a lucid moment told him "I talked to Ya-Ya (my grandmother, her mother) last night and everything is going to be okay." My father knew at that moment that she was very near the end. She died about 28 hours later.

My grandmother said she saw an angel coming for her hours before she died. A week before he passed away, my father told us he grasped a baby's hand that reached out to take him home but he had not seen all of his kids yet and waited to die until he had. (The family always believed the baby that reached out for him was the child who was miscarried by one of my sisters.) One of my uncles who died at home surrounded by his family had been in a near-coma but awoke and smiled at all of them moments before he took his last breath.

My father collected antiques and historical memorabilia. He had about 10 antique clocks (that used to chime and bong just a few seconds apart and admittedly was sometimes very annoying). We returned home from the hospital after he died and discovered that 3 of his clocks had stopped at 9:38PM...listed as Time of Death on his death certificate.

In my last post I reviewed the new book by Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is Life After Death: Compelling Reports from Those Who Have Glimpsed the After-Life.

As I mentioned in that post, the book features a Foreword and Afterword by Raymond Moody, famed author of the 1975 classic Life After Life, which first popularized NDEs. In the years since that book's appearance, Moody has taken an equivocal and sometimes puzzling stance on the subject of NDEs. This ambivalence continues in the material he contributed to Varghese's book.

The Foreword presents a clear overview of the NDE phenomenon, couched in terms that strongly suggest that the experience is what it appears to be: a preview of the actual dying process.

But what Moody giveth with one hand, he taketh away with the other. In his Afterword, he tells us that NDEs may not be evidence of anything. Having traced the "narrative structure" of NDEs in the Foreword, he now says that this structure merely "creates the illusion that near-death experiences could be 'evidence' or even 'rational proof of an afterlife.'" (My emphasis.) In case there is any doubt about his position, he concludes, "I remain unconvinced that there is life after death or that reason can prove it."

Now, if he means merely that life after death may not be provable by the scientific method, I'm inclined to agree, as I've previously argued. But he seems to mean more than this. He apparently thinks that reason and logic as such -- at least as they are conventionally understood -- cannot encompass an afterlife, even in principle.

He adds, however, that he is working on new "supplementary rational principles" that will "activate untapped capacities of the mind" and perhaps shed light on the question. "The new approach," he says, "may even entail that parapsychological kinds of reasoning about life after death are intrinsically incoherent." As one example of why ordinary logic precludes life after death, Moody says, "Remember that 'There is life after death' is patently self-contradictory. And logic rules out self-contradictions."

This is mere verbalistic cleverness. "There is biological life after biological death" would certainly be a contradiction, but that's not what anyone means by "life after death." What is meant, obviously, is that there is a continuation of consciousness after biological death. This claim is certainly debatable, but it is not self-contradictory unless one begs the question by assuming that consciousness cannot operate in the absence of biological life. So I can't say I'm very impressed with Moody's reasoning, or very interested in the "supplemental rational principles" he's mapping out.

I'm also a bit perplexed by Moody's antipathy toward the "paranormal" in general. Moody complains about "pseudo-scientists and true believers [who] foster their defective reasoning on emotionally vulnerable, anxious, or grief-stricken people." By "pseudo-scientists" he presumably means parapsychologists, the people whose reasoning (as quoted above) may be "intrinsically incoherent." Elsewhere he refers to "self-deluded pseudo-scientists and 'parapsychologists'," putting the word parapsychologists in quotes. These people are contrasted with "serious scholars." Whoever these serious scholars are, it's clear that, in Moody's view, they are not working in the field of parapsychology.

I don't know which parapsychologists Moody's been reading, but I see nothing incoherent in the reasoning of Charles Tart, Dean Radin, Charles Honorton, and J.B. Rhine (among many others), and I would regard all of them as serious scholars.

Moody's distaste for the paranormal strikes me as more of a visceral reaction than the product of careful thought. He seems to see the subject matter of this field as simply beyond the pale of sober, serious research. His disdain is palpable when he complains about "one well-known organization devoted to the study" of NDEs that has occasionally made room for paranormal phenomena. "At times," he writes, "there has even been a tinge of New Age beliefs or an overlapping interest in mediumship!" (Exclamation point his.)

I'm hard pressed to see why Moody should lodge this objection. This is a man, after all, who built a psychomanteum in his house and then wrote a book about it called Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones. Someone who sets up a mystical sanctum designed to let people enter an altered state of consciousness and commune with their deceased friends and relatives hardly seems to be in a position to criticize an interest in mediumship! (Exclamation point mine.)

All told, I find Moody's comments rather strange and a little sad. He seems uncomfortable with the series of events that led him to be connected with afterlife research. Perhaps he never imagined Life After Life would prove so popular, and now he feels trapped in a role that doesn't suit him.

Personally, I think Moody will be remembered as a breakthrough figure in afterlife studies. I only wish he would embrace that legacy, rather than distancing himself from it.

Roy Abraham Varghese is a Christian writer perhaps best known for having helped persuade philosopher Antony Flew to discard atheism in favor of theism. In cooperation with Flew, Varghese then wrote a book called There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Now he's back with a new book, There Is Life after Death, in which he argues that human beings are "transphysical" beings -- a union of physical body and nonphysical soul -- and that the soul continues to exist after bodily death. In support of this view, Varghese relies primarily on near-death experiences and what he calls "After-Life Visitations" (ALVs). The latter include Marian apparitions and what are usually referred to as "crisis apparitions" (though Varghese does not use this term). One of the most interesting ALVs involves the appearance of C.S. Lewis in the home of a severely depressed friend, biblical scholar J.B. Phillips. Looking "rosily radiant," the recently deceased Lewis said simply, "J.B., it's not as hard as you think." This statement -- and the accompanying manifestation -- worked wonders for Phillips, who recovered his will to live. Amusingly, when Phillips shared the story with a bishop, the cleric replied breezily, "My dear J___, this sort of thing is happening all the time." (Pp. 158-159)

Varghese makes many good selections in the NDE and ALV evidence he presents, though his choices are clearly influenced by his Christian beliefs. He includes the full story of Howard Storm's NDE, with its hellish elements and eventual salvation, brought about by Storm's desperate prayer to Jesus -- a life-changing event for Storm, who was an atheist at the time of his NDE and afterward became a minister.  (Incidentally, anyone who insists that European health care is invariably superior to America's might ponder Storm's harrowing ordeal in a Paris hospital, where he was left unattended, in agony, without benefit of painkillers or any other treatment, for more than eight hours, no doctors being on call and no surgeons being available to operate on his perforated intestine. The hospital staff appeared quite content to let him die. But I digress.)

There Is Life after Death pulls no punches in critiquing "physicalist" theories that claim that consciousness can be reduced to brain chemistry. Varghese cites leading neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga as saying that, as far as brain research is concerned, "We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road." Writes Varghese:

Gazzaniga notes that theorists like E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett "know about as much on the human brain as a second-year graduate student in neuropsychology." He notes that the area is simply not their field. He acknowledges that Wilson is a great zoologist and then adds, "Dawkins, I'm afraid, is now just a PR man for evolution. He's kind of like John the Baptist -- he goes around announcing the imminent arrival. Dennett, of course, is a philosopher and doesn't pretend to know anything about the brain. I think it has distorted the whole discussion." [p. 190]

For Varghese, the "first-person" nature of consciousness is not amenable to physicalist explanations or even to scientific methodologies as such. It is not tangible, quantifiable, or physical. As he writes in the second paragraph of the Prologue, "... the I, the center of our consciousness and unifier of our experiences, makes us see things from a first-person perspective unlike anything else in the physical world." (p. 19) Part Two of the book, which runs about sixty-five pages, is largely devoted to making this argument.

Part One is more concerned with building an empirical case for life after death on the basis of NDEs, ALVs, and the nearly universal belief in an afterlife. To develop the latter argument, Varghese engages in a quick survey of world religions. Here his commitment to Christianity is most obvious, as he devotes a scant ten pages to all other faiths, then spends thirty pages on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, he seems to assess other religions largely in terms of their compatibility with Christianity. Hence, Buddhism and modern Hinduism are dismissed as relatively late developments of the original Vedic Hinduism, which Varghese sees as more authentic. Why? Apparently because Vedic Hinduism does not include reincarnation -- and since reincarnation is not part of Christianity, Varghese is eager to discredit it. In a later chapter, Varghese goes out of his way to debunk Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research, making use of nitpicking skeptical arguments that he would surely reject if they were applied to NDEs or to the Bible.

This same approach -- evaluating the evidence in terms of Christian teachings -- surfaces in Varghese's attitude toward other kinds of afterlife evidence, such as mediumship. He simply dismisses this evidence out of hand, refusing to consider it. His rationale is that only "spontaneous" phenomena are free from suspicion of fraud; therefore "induced" phenomena like mediumship must be ruled out of bounds.

There are obvious problems with this approach. First, not all mediumship is induced; there have been spontaneous cases. Second, stringent precautions against fraud have been taken in the investigation of some mediums. Third, a good deal of Varghese's own religious tradition is clearly grounded in mediumship. What were the Hebrew prophets if not channelers, entering a trance state to convey messages from the spirit world? Though Varghese would be scandalized by the notion, it can be argued that Jesus himself was one of the world's great mediums. Was not the Transfiguration an "induced" event?

At any rate, I don't think Varghese is really rejecting mediumship because it is "induced." I think he rejects it because the Bible warns against communing with spirits, and because some of the messages conveyed by mediums contradict Biblical teachings.

Perhaps even more oddly, Varghese rejects paranormal phenomena in general, claiming that even ESP remains dubious and unproven. This is a strange position to take, given the author's  belief in NDEs, the intercession of the saints, apparitions of Mary, visitations by deceased persons, and the resurrection of Jesus, all of which surely qualify as paranormal events.

Speaking of resurrection, Varghese maintains that actual bodily resurrection will eventually follow a period of existence in the spirit world. He claims that this view is found in most other world religions, but his survey of those traditions is too brief to make the point convincingly. My own impression is that bodily resurrection is a feature of the Abrahamic religions (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but not of most other faiths.

There's also the question of Hell. Varghese is keen on defending the reality of Hell as a state of everlasting separation from God, with no possibility of redemption. No doubt this is one reason why he disdains mediumship and Spiritualism, which often teach that punishment in the afterlife is temporary, and that everyone will eventually progress to an exalted, heavenly state.

When it comes to Heaven, Varghese can offer little besides vague assurances of eternal bliss. Having rejected mediumistic communications, he cannot rely on descriptions of the afterlife environment provided by generations of mediums, so he is reduced to saying, "Heaven is indescribable in  terrestrial terms ... [S]peculation about Heaven in purely human terms is pointless  because, by its very nature, the immediate knowledge and love of God is something man cannot enjoy in this life and hence cannot  describe or grasp ... Heaven is a union with the Creator of this immense universe, with the Author of all the love, joy, and goodness around him, with the One in Whom all these are found in perfection." He adds, "It may seem here that we are slowly backing into abstractions leaving in our wake a trail of tortuous verbiage."

Why, yes. Yes, it does.

Overall, I found There Is Life after Death a mixed bag. A good deal of interesting and informative material is to be found here, and it is presented in a lively and engaging style. I learned some new things and enjoyed large parts of the book. At the same time, I felt that the book not infrequently descended into Christian polemics, and I found the author's disparagement of parapsychology annoying and often uninformed. In a postscript to this review, I'll quote some of his statements so you can judge them for yourself.

Another feature of interest in the book is Raymond Moody's contribution of a Foreword and Afterword. Moody says some rather provocative and, to my mind, peculiar things. But I'll cover this in a separate post.

------------

P.S. Here are some selected quotes from There Is Life after Death, illustrating the author's disdain for various categories of afterlife evidence that don't appear to fit his Christian worldview.

We have to assemble all the claims concerning the after-life that have spontaneously emerged in the course of history. I emphasize "spontaneous" because claims involving mediums, ouija boards, channeling, hypnotic regression to past lives, and the like are "artificial" and hence, in my view, inadmissible. They are induced from "this world" and can well be accused of being "manufactured" or manipulated. [P. 31]

---

Only those phenomena that emerge spontaneously can be considered free of obvious taint. [P. 37]

---

And here we have to address the New Age reincarnationists. Although they profess open-minded intolerance, the reincarnationists dogmatically deny the possibility of the human person being able to continue as the same person after physical death. In their view, at the point of death, what was you in this life morphs into another person, a process that continues in successive lives until you "dissolve" into the Universal Spirit." [P. 39]

---

On the other end of the spectrum [from conservative religionists] are the New Age/Gnostic liberals who do not believe that our choices here can have consequences in the hereafter and that there is such a thing as evil. Any report that involves divine displeasure with human evil or the possibility of freely chosen endless separation from God ... is suppressed or simply dismissed. [p. 56]

---

It is true that, for lack of a conceptual home, NDEs have been appropriated by the New Age carnival of psi, channeling, energies, crystals, astral bodies, OBEs, and the like. [P. 57]

---

It should be pointed out also that we are not arguing for the ideas of an astral body or ethereal energies and auras. Such claims, in any case, are quasi-scientific in nature because they concern a physical reality. As such, they should be tested scientifically, and science tells us that there is no evidence for their existence. [P. 59]

---

What is remarkable about NDE research is the number of highly specialized doctors and distinguished scientists that have (a) conducted research on the phenomenon and (b) come away convinced that we are dealing with a non-physical phenomenon. This stands in contrast to the rarity of high-caliber researchers working on reincarnation and other New Age predilections. [p. 60]

---

... there is no necessary link between NDEs and alleged paranormal phenomena. Whether or not paranormal or parapsychological phenomena take place is a different question from whether or not NDEs are legitimate after-life experiences. In other words, our acceptance of the validity of NDEs does not mean that we are simultaneously accepting any claim of the paranormal. Likewise, we are not bound to accept any of the claims of spiritualists and mediums and others who claim to have esoteric knowledge of "the other side." These latter claims are highly suspect for various reasons not least of which is the fact that they are not spontaneous in the same fashion as NDEs.

The debate on whether paranormal phenomena such as telepathy take place is a legitimate one. But the jury is still out on this question as it was a hundred years ago." [Pp. 79-80]

---

Some of the [overly] elaborate NDE accounts seem very much like contemporary versions of the historically worthless private revelations of Gnostics and seers. [P.  81.]

---

The renowned philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper rejected belief in life after death while noting that the accounts of mediums and spiritualists are positively unattractive. [Quoting Popper:] "Most terrible of all prospects appears to be the prospect which the people who believe in psychical research and spiritualism seem to offer. That is to say, a kind of ghostly semi-existence after death, and one which is not only ghostly, but which seems to be intellectually on a particularly low level -- on a lower level than the normal level of human affairs. This form of semi-survival is probably the most unpleasant form which has so far been conceived. I do think that if there is anything in the idea of survival, then it would have to be different from anything we can imagine in order to be tolerable." [P. 112]

With regard to the Popper quote, I would point out that a consistent claim in mediumistic communications is that the communicating spirits must "lower their vibrations" and enter a trancelike state in order to convey messages through the medium. Thus the poor quality of many (but not all) such communications reflects the difficulties inherent in the process, not any permanent loss of mental function. Indeed, some communicators display a high level of intelligence and alertness, and nearly all of them insist that, when not in contact with the earth, their mental powers are far superior to any they manifested while physically embodied.

A communication ostensibly from the discarnate F.W.H. Myers, via the medium Alice Fleming ("Mrs. Holland"), put it this way: "... the nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message – is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass – which blurs sight and deadens sound – dictating feebly – to a reluctant and very obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me – I am so powerless to tell what means so much – I cannot get into communications with those who would understand and believe me."

Boy, was I wrong about Avatar's box office performance. I never thought a CG epic about big blue aliens would garner such huge grosses. The film is now on track to be at least the #2 commercial hit of all time (although if the numbers were adjusted for inflation, it would rank much lower).

I still haven't seen it, and really don't care much about it, but today I came across an interesting news story with a possible NDE connection. It seems that some fans of the film become deeply depressed after seeing it, because they long to return to the immersive, beauteous world of Pandora.

From the article:

"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy ," [a Web site administrator] said. "But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

A post by a user called Elequin expresses an almost obsessive relationship with the film.

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie," Elequin posted.

A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and that everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality.

Sound familiar? It reminds me of the emotions often reported by near-death experiencers, who find themselves longing for a beautiful, ethereal world that puts Earth to shame, while feeling disconnected from their everyday lives.

Of course, all this says nothing about the veridicality of such experiences. Avatar is a fantasy, after all. One might argue that its powerful emotional impact on viewers shows that the NDE, for all its emotional effect, is only a fantasy, as well.

Alternatively, one might argue that the film deeply touches some people precisely because it reminds them of "the other side," recalling memories of a blissful, ecstatic experience that had previously been suppressed.

The article includes more quotes about the intense effect the movie has on some people. Check it out.

It's an interesting phenomenon, even for those of us who wouldn't know a Na'vi from a Wookie.

Zerdini, who sometimes comments here, recently pointed me to an article he wrote about a 1933 séance involving direct-voice medium William Cartheuser.

I haven't researched this event on my own -- actually I'd never heard of Cartheuser until now -- but the story certainly makes interesting reading and, on the face of it, sounds like remarkably good evidence.

However, in Googling "William Cartheuser," I found that some people who accepted other mediums as genuine nevertheless apparently regarded Cartheuser as a fraud. One was Hereward Carrington, and another was Nandor Fodor.

A balanced view of the subject is provided in this excerpt from The Case for Life after Death, by Elizabeth E. McAdams and Raymond Bayless, which is online here:

Bayless sat a number of times with William Cartheuser, a physical medium who gained considerable notoriety in his day. He apparently produced phenomena by trickery as often as he could. He used a flashlight equipped with a pinhole for "spirit lights"; he squirted water about with a water pistol; he picked up his trumpets and whirled them about with masterly skill; he calmly reached about, creating "spirit touches"; and he even walked about the séance room producing phenomena. But in spite of these habits he possessed genuine telepathic ability and in all probability had some authentic ability as a physical medium as well. Additional discussion of Cartheuser can be found in Hereward Carrington's The Invisible World. [p. 54]

Luckily, Carrington's book is online, and although it is only a "limited preview," the entire section on Cartheuser -- pages 68-93 -- is available. Carrington clearly had very good grounds to be suspicious of Cartheuser, yet he did conclude that "a small residuum" of the phenomena were worthy of further study. This residuum included uncannily accurate touches (by the trumpet) in a pitch-dark room; a few instances of overlapping voices produced by the medium; isolated bits of information from Cartheuser that seemed impossible for him to have known by any normal means; and one test in which a light was rigged to go off if Cartheuser left his chair. In this test, the light stayed on throughout the séance, yet "touches and other phenomena occurred nevertheless at considerable distances" from the chair.

These indications of genuine mediumship are balanced by very obvious signs of deception on many occasions, as recounted in Carrington's book.

At the end of the day, I don't have enough information to evaluate Cartheuser. My impression is that he might be similar to Eusapia Palladino (a comparison also made in the McAdams-Bayless book): someone with genuine abilities but a tricksterish personality, who freely used deception when possible.

In any event, I enjoyed reading about the "séance of the century" and thought others might, also.