Michael Prescott's Blog

For some reason I didn't get around to seeing the Clint Eastwood movie Hereafter until just today. Though the subject matter would seem to be right up my alley, I was a little turned off by negative reviews and an assumption that I'd seen it all before.

When I finally did watch the movie, though, I liked it better than I'd expected. It has weaknesses, and is certainly not a masterwork on the level of Eastwood's Unforgiven or Gran Torino, but overall it's an intelligent, low-key, serious movie about life and death.

For me, the first hour was a bit problematic. After a powerful opening that showcases a blockbuster action sequence, the film settled into a rather slow-paced exploration of the three major characters in three different locales. Eastwood's films typically incline toward a fairly sluggish pace, which can be effective, but in this case, the slam-bang beginning made it tough for me to adjust to the much different tone and pace that followed.

Things picked up markedly in the second hour, as the characters' stories gradually converged to produce a satisfying, albeit not especially dramatic, resolution.

The film's insistence on avoiding sensationalism is praiseworthy -- this is probably the most level-headed movie about the afterlife ever made. If anything, Hereafter is a little too quiet and sensible for its own good. More high drama might have made for a more compelling story.

The brief flashes of contact with the afterlife are not especially memorable, but work well enough in context. The movie's best feature is Matt Damon's outstanding performance as a reluctant medium who delivers his readings in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact style. It's probably the least off-putting depiction of a medium I've seen in a movie.

The film also has some fun with fake or deluded mediums, showing us an obvious cold reader, a hammy channeler, and a credulous mirror-gazer in quick succession. The point is briskly made that organized religions demand obedience to a particular dogma rather than open-minded investigation. The idea that convincing evidence for an afterlife has been suppressed by "a conspiracy of silence" is advanced, though not fleshed out. Considering its subject matter, the film is not preachy or self-important, and it doesn't strain too hard to be uplifting.

While Hereafter isn't Eastwood's best movie, it is surely one of the better movies about life after death, and its sober, reflective tone is rather refreshing. I think readers of this blog would like it. I also imagine that most of you have already seen it!

There's some monkey business in the news. A blogger, hoping to prove the old adage that an infinite number of monkeys banging away at typewriters would eventually reproduce the works off Shakespeare, is using an array of servers processing millions of bits of information to "randomly" accomplish the same end. The experiment has already yielded "A Lover's Complaint."

http://tinyurl.com/3ze38st

So why did I put the word "randomly" in quotes? Because, as even the (above-linked) news story points out, the program works by identifying the desired words and checking them off the list. So while each single word is indeed produced randomly, the accumulation of words into coherent strings of text is actually guided by the design of the program.

It is not surprising that a random process can yield individual words, but that's a far cry from establishing that randomness can generate really complex systems. This point is neatly made in a comment by "Alina.Bolero" appended to the linked article:

"I know infinite probability is awfully hard to grasp, but when you start multiplying infinite improbabilities, things really do become that [much] more improbable.

"While I get the feeling that the intent of this experiment was to show that complex order can come from chaos, if you wait long enough, it has actually done a much better job of showing that the best way to create order from randomness is to apply intelligence to the system in order to create the desired outcome."

The rainbow bridge

Going through some family papers, I came across a pamphlet provided by a crematorium that disposed of the remains of my parents' dog about ten years ago. What interested me about the pamphlet was how strongly it showed the influence of Spiritualism, a religious movement often regarded as almost totally extinct.

Though Spiritualism clearly was a stronger cultural force a hundred years ago than it is now, it does seem to have made a lasting impression in some quarters. Possibly NDEs also factor in to the viewpoint presented in this pamphlet. Much of the material is quite consistent with channeled communications from the heyday of trance mediumship, and with NDEs that include a description of a heavenly realm. 

The only element that doesn't seem grounded in such reports is the "rainbow bridge" itself, which as far as I know has not been described by either mediums or NDErs. 

Here's the pamphlet in its entirety: 

The Rainbow Bridge

Because of its many colors, the bridge connecting Heaven and Earth has come to be known as the Rainbow Bridge.

Just this side of the Bridge, there is a land of meadows, hills and lush green valleys. When a beloved pet dies, this wonderful place serves as their new home. There is always an abundance of food and water and warm sunshine. Old and frail animals are young again, and those who have been maimed are made whole. They make new friends and play all day. 

There is one thing missing from these carefree surroundings, though - the companionship of their loving masters. Time passes and soon another day comes when one of them is distracted by a familiar scent. With nose twitching, ears at attention and eyes staring in delight, this one runs from the group …

YOU have been seen!

As you embrace, your face is kissed again and again and again, and once more you look into the eyes of your loyal companion.

You cross the Rainbow Bridge together, never again to be separated.

We Can Only Hope …

 

Today I happened to catch the last few minutes of The Five, a news-talk show on the Fox News Channel. The panelists mentioned that the famed 1984 comedy Ghostbusters is going to be rereleased to theaters. This prompted one of the panelists, liberal Bob Beckel, to declare in all seriousness that ghosts are real and he knows because he has seen them.

He said he once lived on a farm or a ranch–I didn't get all the details–where, on a regular basis, he saw the ghosts of people wearing historical costumes. He described them as “images” of the people in life. A second panelist, whose name I didn't catch, later chimed in that her New York apartment building is haunted and that she has seen the ghost of a woman there.

But what interested me was the reaction of the other three panelists, who, without waiting for any details from Beckel, immediately started hooting him down, laughing hysterically, and making jokes about drug-induced hallucinations. Beckel apparently did do some drugs in his younger days, or so he says, but he insisted that he was clean and sober when he saw these particular manifestations. His serious comments, however, elicited only more derision.

The whole thing made me realize how much of a taboo society places on any serious discussion of the paranormal, even today. It's fine to make light of the subject in movies like Ghostbusters, but to suggest that there could be any reality to these phenomena provokes knee-jerk laughter and ridicule.

It's rather odd, really. Millions of people report these experiences, and yet the official position, rigidly enforced by media gatekeepers, is that their accounts are good for a laugh but can never, ever be taken seriously.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … super-psi!

Most people who look at mediumship and related phenomena in depth and with an open mind eventually reach the conclusion that non-paranormal explanations simply don’t cover all the evidence. Fraud and mistaken observation do account for some of the cases, but not for the strongest ones. 

 Nevertheless, the hypothesis of survival after death is not the only one that has been put forward to explain the data. A rival hypothesis is that of so-called “super-psi,” the idea that the medium’s unconscious mind is able to extract information from a variety of sources, integrate it into a consistent whole, and present it in the guise of the appropriate discarnate personality. The idea has been dubbed super-psi because, while relatively straightforward instances of telepathy and clairvoyance have been demonstrated repeatedly in the laboratory, nothing so elaborate and far-reaching has been proven to exist. 

If the super-psi hypothesis is correct, then the unconscious minds of at least certain gifted individuals have extraordinary capabilities; and there is probably no reason to think that the same capabilities are not latent or dormant in the rest of us. Our unconscious, then, would have the ability (actually or potentially) to reach at will into other minds, regardless of how widely scattered they might be, and even if the minds in question belong to total strangers, people of whose existence we were and are consciously unaware. Moreover, our unconscious would have the ability to perceive, through clairvoyance, information unknown to any living person, peeking into hidden places without restriction and virtually instantaneously, on demand. It has even been hypothesized that the unconscious could peer back in time—retrocognition—or gaze into the future—precognition—in order to obtain additional information. And all of this extraordinary power would be deployed in the service of a charade–the illusion of communication with a specific deceased personality that has, in reality, ceased to exist. Even the medium herself would have not the slightest idea that her unconscious mind was carrying on this amazing deception on a colossal scale. 

What would be the motivation of the unconscious to undertake such a feat? It has been argued that the natural, all-too-human fear of death is so deep-seated that the unconscious will go to any lengths to suppress it, even to the extent of conducting a remarkably elaborate ruse. 

Now, if all this is true, then the unconscious mind is an almost infinitely greater thing than the conscious mind. Unlike the conscious mind, the unconscious would not be bound by material limits and would be able to interact with all other unconscious minds, as well as with the material world, deriving nuggets of information from a vast array of sources, past, present, and future. In effect, all the unconscious minds of the living would function very much like one giant unconscious that is constantly interacting with itself—a global mind spanning the species, which our ordinary waking minds would remain completely unaware of. 

Yet, if this were the case, it’s hard to understand why the deception would continue, or would ever have been necessary in the first place. Yes, apparent conversations with the deceased may provide some comfort and allay the fear of death—but wouldn’t it be far more comforting, persuasive, and useful for the unconscious simply to reveal the full range of its powers? Not only would this be of immense practical value in our earthly life, assisting us with all sorts ofd mundane difficulties and vastly enhancing our survival chances, but it would seem to hold out a reasonable probability of some kind of afterlife. As has often been observed, if the mind has such phenomenal power and scope, and is not subject to material constraints, then there seems to be no good reason why it could not survive the death of the body. The nearly limitless potential of the unconscious hypothesized by the super-psi idea—a mind that transcends time and space—ought to be far more reassuring and empowering than merely exchanging reminiscences, often of a trivial nature, with the shades of our departed loved ones. 

Why, then, would this global mind of ours be so secretive and duplicitous? Why would it use its enormous powers to dupe us into believing a childish lie? Why would it keep our own potential concealed from us, babying us with fantasies when the truth is so much greater?

Frankly, I just don’t see it. To me, the super-psi theory is fatally flawed. 

But if we accept the best mediumistic evidence and reject super-psi, we seem to be left with postmortem survival as the only alternative. At least, I can’t think of another option. Survival appears to be the only explanation that accounts for all the known facts; and it has the additional advantages of being the most parsimonious theory and the one that mediums themselves—who after all might be expected to have some idea of what they are doing—are most prone to believe. 

FYI, in an attempt to reduce comment spam, I've changed this blog's settings to require commenters to type out a randomly generated string of alphanumeric characters. It's an experiment. If it proves to be too much of a nuisance, I'll go back to the way things were, or implement a sign-in method.