Michael Prescott's Blog

A far country

Currently I'm reading a 1969 book by Jane Sherwood, titled The Country Beyond: The Doctrine of Re-Birth, which I saw mentioned in a recent post on Robert McLuhan's excellent blog Paranormalia. (McLuhan, by the way, is the author of the outstanding book Randi's Prize, reviewed here.) 

The Country Beyond consists of Sherwood's automatic writings, which are said to convey messages from several spirit advisers. As with any “channeled” material of this type, there is no way to verify the claims independently. It is always possible that the ideas are coming from the writer's subconscious mind. This is especially true in the case of somebody like Sherwood who, by her own account, spent a good deal of time investigating Spiritualism, visiting mediums, and reading esoteric literature. In the end, all you can do is read the messages and see if they make sense to you and conform with other, similar communications.

Without attempting to summarize the book–or even the first half of it, which is all I've read so far–I'd like to present a few excerpts that particularly interested me. In the quotes that follow, I've Americanized the spelling and punctuation.

A frequent objection raised against some mediums, especially mediums of the past, is that they describe their spirit guides as rather exotic figures–often Native American chieftains or ancient Egyptian priests. Jane Sherwood encountered a number of such mediums in her early exploration of Spiritualism and was highly skeptical of the idea that such colorful characters would predominate in the spirit world. Later, after developing a facility for automatic writing, she obtained an explanation for this, purportedly from a deceased person who had tried to contact her at one of those séances and who had been described as an Egyptian in a white robe. The communication was as follows:

With all my might I willed myself into her [i.e. the medium's] mind, tried hard to give her a mental picture of myself and implored her to speak of me. Can you place all this? Do you remember the “Egyptian” who offered to guide and help you? This was the fantastic guise in which the medium dressed me and not my doing at all though, funnily enough, there was a foundation in my past history for the thought of the white robe. Her description of my face amused me as she told you, but the whole thing was distorted by her notion of Egyptian local coloring. Hieroglyphics, indeed! [P. 37]

We might dismiss this material as the product of Sherwood's own mind, since she was already skeptical of Egyptian (and other) spirit figures. Still, it's intriguing to consider the possibility that mediums in contact with legitimate but rather “ordinary”spirit guides have interpreted them in a somewhat fantastic light, perhaps in conformity with the popular thinking of the day.

The book also contains an interesting snippet of psychological analysis on the part of a deceased communicator.

“I wonder why some people are so anxious to prove that death is the end?” I [Sherwood] said. “They will go to any lengths to show that survival is impossible and faith in it simply wishful thinking.”

“I also have sinned, don't forget,” said Scott [a communicator]. “Perhaps psychology can help us to understand this tendency. It is surely a kind of masochism, a stoic resolve to punish the wishful thinking one suspects is behind any belief in immortality. It feels very stern, strong and noble to deny the thing one secretly longs for, and so to prove that one is quite able to do without it. It is easy to find arguments to support this denial and see how superior it makes one feel to say “I, at least, do not need to believe in such things”.” [Pp. 48, 49]

Again, it is entirely possible that this message originated in Sherwood's own subconscious, but wherever it came from, it's very neatly stated.

Another book I'm currently reading is Dancing Past the Dark by Nancy Evans Bush, a treatment of negative or “hellish” near-death experiences (this book has also been discussed in Paranormalia, and I plan to review it in an upcoming post). Some of the material in The Country Beyond casts an interesting light on the whole issue of negative afterlife accounts. One of Sherwood's communicators, who died in a car crash and had an initially unpleasant postmortem experience, explains:

I think the experience of death must vary considerably because it is governed by the state of mind in which one passes over. Also, there is a vast difference between a sudden passing and a quiet and prepared one. The shock of an unnatural death sets the invisible being in a mad turmoil and makes adjustment to a new environment impossible for a while. One finds oneself in a fantastic dream world with no continuity of experience. Flashes of vivid awareness burn themselves out into unconsciousness and the chaos of unconnected states of mind have [sic] no proper framework of space and time.

Out of the sleep of death there comes first the mere sense of identity, a point of self-awareness growing out of nothingness. From this I judge that the higher activity of the ego-being is the first to assert itself. One wakes next to a tumult of emotions and hurried, anxious thought. Somewhere in this part of the experience comes the unrolling of memories. Your mind helps me to find a simile; it is like a speeded-up run through of a film shown backwards, a swiftly moving vision of life from end to beginning, flickering rapidly past the mind's eye until it ends in the unconsciousness of one's beginning. More unconsciousness follows and in my case the rest was a phantasmagoria. Glimpses of the world seen, clutched at and blotted out, dreamlike awareness of people and events on earth at which one grasped because of their dear familiarity only to realize that one could not make one's presence known. In the effort to do so the scene would melt and change into another. Then the final fading of earth and a long sojourn in what I think of as Hades, the place of the shade, a dim and formless world which I believe is peopled by the miasma of earth emotions and the unconscious projections of its inhabitants. Finally comes the stabilization of the new body and a growing awareness of the real world again; light, clear outlines and real people moving about in a glorious world.

Much of this earlier nightmare could have been avoided if I had known how to avail myself of the help that is freely offered. But I suppose the adjustment could not have been easy for me. I took over a very difficult make-up full of powerful repressions and tangled complexes all of which caused me much suffering before they were straightened out. My own obstinacy and pride were largely to blame for my plight. This was purgatory, if you like, but unavoidable unless one has done the job beforehand. I think I really had the maximum difficulties: an attitude of blank unbelief in any future life, a repressed and powerful emotional state, and the shock of a violent death. So this was not the normal passing but just a difficult and painful personal experience. I am satisfied that it was a just necessity and that I had made it inevitable by my willful ignorance and skepticism. “Whatsoever a man sows” you know. [Pp. 58, 59]

 One of the most famous nightmarish near-death experiences, discussed in Bush's book and many other places, is the one recounted by Howard Storm. What struck me about Storm's account is how completely secular his outlook on life must have been at the time. Finding himself at the mercy of demonic beings that tormented him in a dark hellish place, and believing himself to be dead, he desperately tried to summon up a prayer, but initially had no idea how to do it. He writes, 

From inside of me I felt a voice, my voice, say: "Pray to God."  My mind responded to that: "I don’t pray. I don’t know how to pray." This is a guy lying on the ground in the darkness surrounded by what appeared to be dozens if not hundreds and hundreds of vicious creatures who had just torn him up. The situation seemed utterly hopeless, and I seemed beyond any possible help whether I believed in God or not. The voice again told me to pray to God. It was a dilemma since I didn’t know how. The voice told me a third time to pray to God.  

I started saying things like: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want ... God bless America ..." and anything else that seemed to have a religious connotation. 

Clearly, Storm was innocent of any religious background or training and had spent no time whatsoever pondering the possibility of a spiritual dimension or an afterlife. He says so himself: "I had absolute certainty that there was nothing beyond this life – because that was how really smart people understood it.... While I was undergoing this stress [of dying], prayer or anything like that never occurred to me. I never once thought about it. If I mentioned God’s name at all it was only as a profanity."

His lack of preparedness, coupled with his own mental state (fear and confusion) and his unexpected and agonizing medical crisis, may account for the “hellish” aspects of his experience, just as Sherwood's communicator suggests.

Incidentally, it's also interesting to notice how reliably the idea of a past-life review comes up in Sherwood's accounts and in many other accounts channeled through mediums. Of course, it's an old cliché that one's life flashes before one's eyes at the moment of death, but I'm not sure the cliché ever involved a life review after one has actually died. It's thought provoking at the very least to notice how one of the key aspects of near-death experiences–a subject not popularized until 1975, six years after Sherwood's book was published–is reflected in these earlier channeled communications.

Another of Sherwood's communicators, who died peacefully and had a much more pleasant passing, discusses his transition:

Where death comes gradually and naturally like this one wakes quietly in the new conditions after an interval of a few days. One is fully through, as we say, and although the newcomer has to be cared for and kept quiet until the new rhythms of his body are fully established, he soon becomes strong and vigorous and ready to begin his new life. The transition, like all natural processes, should not be interfered with by violence or haste. Death is a kind of birth and it should proceed with a quiet inevitableness and not be accompanied by pain or distress. Much of the apparent suffering of a death-bed is not consciously felt by the sufferer. His real life is already half retired from the mortal body and neither experiences nor records its pangs. Shakespeare is very near the literal facts when he speaks of “shuffling off this mortal coil”. Comparison of various accounts of the death-change make it clear that there are at least two stages, separated by intervals of unconsciousness. Actual death is followed by a period of unconsciousness which lasts for some time; this gives way to a kind of awareness but not a consciousness of one's environment. The new senses have not yet begun to function so there is nothing, or at best a misty, unreal setting, fantastic and dreamlike. During this interval, the memory appears to be stimulated so that one lives through a resume of a lifetime just past. Then one sinks into a second period of unconsciousness which should give place to a full awakening in the new world. We might with justice speak of a first and second death because not only the physical body has to be shared but the next body also. [P. 61]

 The reference to the line from Hamlet's soliloquy is interesting. The metaphor is frequently misunderstood; modern readers picture somebody shuffling–dragging his feet–as he walks off stage. The actual image is of a snake shedding its skin. To "shuffle off this mortal coil” is to slough off the coil of snakeskin that the snake leaves behind. Sherwood's communicator is saying that Shakespeare is “very near the literal facts” in describing death as sloughing off an unneeded part of the body, with the body understood as a compound entity of physical, etheric, astral, and spiritual forms.

Asked to elaborate, the communicator begins with the first stage of awareness he described, the one in which there is “a kind of awareness but not a consciousness of one's environment.”

I found myself awake in the transition state of which we have spoken. I thought myself still weak and ill, but I rose from my rest feeling marvelously refreshed and happy and I wandered for a while in the something-nothing surroundings of this queer world and was unable to make any sense of it. The brooding silence drug me into unconsciousness for a long time, because when next I woke my body felt quite different, no longer frail and weak as I had supposed, but vigorous and ready for anything as though I had suddenly stepped back into youth. This delighted me although I was daunted by my condition. There was a feeling of expectation, of waiting for something to happen. I was wide awake, quietly comprehending my state and content to sink into myself. Thought turned inward and it moved at a surprising rate. It raced over the record of a long lifetime which it lit up with a searchlight that spared no blunders, sins or weaknesses, but impartially illumined it all, as one holds up an old, finished garment to the light and notes with dismay its rents and stains. This clear blaze of recollection showed me the honest shape and cut of the thing too. I reviewed it as though I had no longer a special responsibility for it but had to understand clearly in what it had failed and in what succeed. I was saddened enough and humbled by what I saw, and then, with a sigh of acceptance I was able to turn to other thoughts.

My whole religious outlook had to be rethought in the light of this unexpected experience. [Pp. 62, 63]

Later, there is a rather technical discussion of differences between earthly and heavenly perceptions of time and space, which may or may not have any mathematical validity; I have no idea. One thing that interested me was a little digression on human nature, as expressed by one communicator:

You have, of course, to take another dimension into account and it is probably the coefficient of the new dimension which is upsetting your time comparisons. The fourth dimension, i.e. time, has been modified for us by a fifth dimension, that of degree of being. This last must vary as the measurement of frequency alters. It applies to organisms and is the scale by which their development is measured. Its sign is a differing quality of consciousness which runs up the scale from the lowest organism to man. In man each one of the degrees of being is represented because of his possession of all the grades of being from the etheric, which we agreed was the first remove from the physical, to the astral, up to the ego-being which is at present his highest element. But in man on earth, the consciousness that belongs by right to this highest degree cannot function fully because all the higher degrees have to be timed down to the physical and cannot free themselves to work independently until the physical body is shed. That accounts for the perplexing difference in your mode of consciousness and ours, and is one of the clues to this troublesome contradiction between your time and ours. [P. 94]

Leaving aside the issue of extra dimensions or the subjective nature of space-time, I was interested in the idea that a human being's higher consciousness rarely functions on earth because “all the higher degrees have to be timed down to the physical and cannot free themselves to work independently.” This is somewhat consistent with the so-called filter theory, which claims that the brain serves as a filtering mechanism to screen out most input from higher consciousness, allowing us to focus on our “lower” physical needs.

Despite inevitable discrepancies and dissonances, there is an interesting continuity in much of the channeled material from various mediums. This might be explained in terms of all the mediums dipping into the same esoteric sourcebooks or acquiring the same trendy ideas from mentors or clients. On the other hand, one could also see it as evidence of a degree of objectivity in the mediums' messages. This was the approach taken by British researcher Robert Crookall. 

A point in favor of the latter interpretation is that similar ideas crop up across the globe, even in remote societies whose traditions are unlikely to have been influenced by Western spiritualist trends. Almost everywhere, it seems, we find shamans going on vision quests and reporting experiences and observations very much like those described by Jane Sherwood's communicators. It's enough to make some of us think that these messages really do come from a country beyond.

----

Clarification, May 22: Looking more closely at the copyright page, I now see that The Country Beyond is an older book than I'd realized. The edition I'm reading was printed in 1991, but is a reissue of an earlier, 1969 edition. I assumed 1969 was the original publication date. However, I missed some text lower down on the page: "'The Country Beyond' was first published in 1944. The present edition contains the original work together with additional material from an earlier book, 'The Psychic Bridge'." 

So the material in the book cannot be later than 1944, which is 31 years before the publication of Raymond Moody's Life After Life. 

Incidentally, all page numbers cited in this post refer to the 1991 edition put out by The C.W. Daniel Company Limited, a British publisher. 

Link fest

Kopimism, a "religion" for people who like to steal copyrighted material, is already a hit in Sweden. Now it's coming to the USA! 

Here's an interesting account of one bereaved mom's visit to the Afterlife Communication Conference in Phoenix. She came away moved by some of the events and amused by some of the offbeat people she encountered. 

Psi research is often criticized for lack of reproducibility. But even mainstream science suffers from difficulty in replicating its findings. One study in the field of cancer science found that peer-reviewed experimental results could not be reproduced in 47 out of 53 cases. (!) From the article: 

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

"We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure," said Begley. "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning."

Sounds like a file-drawer effect to me. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen in "real" science. 

I'm enjoying Sabrina Feldman's book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, which explores a collection of obscure plays that were credited to Shakespeare (or to "W.S.") during the 16th and 17th centuries, but which are generally dismissed today. The book advances a new authorship theory, but its scholarly treatment of this neglected body of work should also appeal to Shakespeare buffs with no particular interest in the authorship controversy. It's available in both print and Kindle editions. 

My friend and fellow author J. Carson Black's Darkness on the Edge of Town has been optioned by Winkler Films as a possible TV series. The Kindle edition of Darkness is currently selling for only 99 cents. It's a great read, and at that price it's such a steal that even a Kopimist might pay for it. 

Book review: Transcending the Titanic

Michael Tymn, quite possibly today's foremost writer on 19th century and early 20th century Spiritualism, has a new book out called Transcending the Titanic. It's a brief book, only about 90 pages of text, but it covers a lot of ground. 

The book begins by asking why the Titanic tragedy continues to hold our interest when other disasters like the great San Francisco earthquake have been largely forgotten. One answer may be that the ship was something of a microcosm of humanity, bringing together people from all walks of life and all social stations. Another is the variety of responses from the passengers, ranging from panic to disciplined action to calm resignation. Perhaps another is that the slow foundering of the vessel gave the passengers ample time to face the inevitability of their demise.

Next we are treated to an impressive recreation of the event. Unlike the 1997 movie, which presented relatively few heroic characters and concentrated on the chaos and desperate struggle to survive at any cost, Tymn shows us that many of the passengers behaved courageously, even nobly. Many men gallantly escorted their wives to the lifeboats but would not board even when permitted to do so, considering it wrong to leave the ship while any women or children were yet to be rescued. The fact that many of the boats were only half full is also explained in a reasonable, nonjudgmental way: at first, many passengers simply refused to embark on the lifeboats, either because they believed the ship would not really sink or because the boats themselves looked too dangerous. As a result, the crew was forced to drop some of the boats into the water with only a handful of people aboard. 

But the book's real focus is not the tragedy itself but the paranormal, spiritual, or transcendent elements of the story. In later chapters we read of possible premonitions of the sinking; some of these are poorly documented or can be explained by coincidence, while others are more intriguing. And we learn of evidence that a few of the deceased passengers were able to communicate via mediums with the living. Among these communicators, perhaps the most illustrious was William T. Stead, the real hero of Tymn's story.

Stead was a larger-than-life journalist and social activist who was converted to Spiritualism after studying the evidence, and who became a channeler (via automatic writing) himself. Stead, who never did anything halfway, endangered his reputation by championing the cause of Spiritualism and even publishing his channeled scripts under the title Letters from Julia (later retitled After Death: Letters from Julia, and still available in print and ebook form). During the last hours of the doomed voyage, Stead was reported as appearing utterly calm, unfazed by the prospect of death, which he regarded as merely a transition to a better world. 

Very soon after his death, Stead began communicating through mediums, even purportedly materializing in some seances and speaking via direct voice in others. At times Stead apparently brought through other victims of the shipwreck, notably the multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who had conducted himself with dignity and courage during the crisis, but who (if the communication can be trusted) came to regret his earthly materialistic ambitions when immersed in a higher spiritual reality. "Why are not these things taught in the world?" he is said to have cried out through a medium. "Why did no one ever tell me these things?" 

Despite its brevity, Transcending the Titanic is a remarkably complete book that covers the whole story of the doomed liner and the paranormal activity surrounding its destruction. More than just a recital of facts and claims, it's a thoughtful meditation on life and death, and on the modern tendency to deny and avoid the whole subject of mortality unless it is placed in a safely fictional context. It's well worth a read.

Transcending the Titanic can be purchased on Amazon (US) in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

Book review: Paranormal

People had near-death experiences for centuries before Dr. Raymond Moody began to study the phenomenon. But although NDE anecdotes could be found throughout literature, and glimpses of the experience could be seen in works of art like Hieronymus Bosch's Ascent of the Blessed, nobody seems to have identified the NDE as a distinct phenomenon. In fact, nobody had even thought to name the experience.

All of that changed with the publication of Moody's first book, Life After Life, in 1975. Put out by a small publisher who optimistically thought it might sell 10,000 copies, the book became an international sensation. In it, Moody coined the term “near-death experience” and listed the main features of the NDE–features which have become almost too familiar through their subsequent dramatization in movies like Ghost and Flatliners, and in innumerable TV shows. Although Moody's book was more anecdotal than scientific, it paved the way for more rigorous studies conducted by Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Bruce Greyson, and others. Today, although the true meaning and nature of the NDE remain in fierce dispute, nobody denies that the phenomenon is real; hundreds, if not thousands, of cases have been carefully documented, and if public opinion surveys can be trusted, millions more have taken place.

In his new book Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife, co-written with Paul Perry, Moody gives us the background behind his investigations into NDE's and other, even more esoteric phenomena. The book is briskly paced, engagingly written, and remarkably open. 

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that for most of his life Moody has suffered from a serious thyroid condition that can cause severe mood swings, and that, during one period of intense depression when his thyroid had essentially shut down, he attempted suicide and had a brief, preliminary NDE (or at least the prologue to an NDE) of his own.

The suicide attempt is the focus of the book's introduction, where the outcome is left hanging. Several chapters later, the authors return to the subject to tell the rest of the story. (Rather oddly, they choose to recapitulate several pages of the introduction word for word at this point, an unnecessary bit of padding.) Moody observes that he had kept his thyroid problem secret from the general public in part because he did not want it to cast doubt on the validity of his work on NDE's; but at this point, with the reality of the NDE phenomenon acknowledged by all researchers, he felt free to reveal this aspect of his life at last.

Moody recounts an equally dramatic episode from another period of low thyroid activity. At that point he was actively engaged in studying the ancient esoteric practice of mirror gazing, in which people look deeply into a reflective surface and sometimes perceive deceased loved ones in the glass. The effects he obtained in his homemade "psychomanteum," detailed in his book Reunions, were anecdotal but nevertheless impressive; some practitioners even insisted that their deceased loved one stepped right out of the mirror and interacted with them in the room. 

But when Moody — his energy at a low point with his thyroid largely out of commission — discussed this work with his skeptical father, the elder Moody decided his erratic son was having a mental breakdown and promptly had him committed! Trapped in a psychiatric hospital, he was misdiagnosed as bipolar, his every move and statement interpreted as further evidence of his disorder. Luckily, thyroid treatment was able to restore his normal functioning within a few days, while friends and associates who had experienced the psychomanteum for themselves arrived at the hospital to testify on Moody's behalf. As a result, he was finally released – but it seems to have been a close run thing. Just one of the perils of exploring psychic phenomena in a skeptical world …

Another intriguing section of the book deals with Moody's developing interest in past-life memories. Initially he was dismissive of such claims, assuming–as most people do–that such memories typically involve reliving the life of a famous historical figure like Joan of Arc or Napoleon Bonaparte. But when a hypnotist convinced him to try past-life regression for himself, he experienced a succession of quite ordinary lives that were sufficiently vivid and realistic to call his earlier doubts into question. I have to say I was unaware of his interest in this subject, although Moody actually wrote a book about it titled Coming Back.

One of the things that have sometimes frustrated me about Moody is that he can seem stubbornly skeptical or iconoclastic about his own investigations, an attitude epitomized by his rather strange book The Last Laugh, in which he seemingly calls much of his own research into question. For someone with a deep-seated interest in paranormal phenomena, he can also be surprisingly hostile toward parapsychologists, a trait I discussed in an earlier post. Now I wonder if these periods of intensified skepticism may be correlated with periods of diminished thyroid activity, with its concomitant self-doubt and self-destructive tendencies. Could the emotional swings Moody vividly describes in his memoir possibly relate to his occasional, baffling attempts to undermine his own credibility and the credibility of like-minded researchers? Moody himself doesn't say this, and maybe I'm wrong about it, but it might make sense of the somewhat contradictory messages he has put out over the years.

In any case, in Paranormal the good doctor seems to have moved beyond his earlier skepticism. In the conclusion of his book, he makes reference to “what happens to our souls after death," and then comments that this statement

is a big step forward for me. In the beginning, when I first named the near-death experience and started near-death studies, I made it a point to neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of the soul or a place called heaven. I was raised in a family that didn't attend church or believe in God. But aside from that personal history, I felt it was unscientific to conclude that we have a soul or that there is an afterlife. To do so would mean to some people that I wasn't objective in my work, that all of my research was merely aimed at propping up a belief, not at testing one. My goal in this research was to remain a true skeptic in the ancient Greek sense–one who neither believes nor disbelieves but who keeps searching for truth.

After more than four decades of studying death and the possibility of an afterlife, I have come to realize that my opinion is buttressed by thousands of hours of research and deep logical thought of the type that few have devoted to this most important topic. I have concluded that if everyone else has an opinion on the subject of life after death, why shouldn't I? As a result of his conviction, I have become brazen about voicing my viewpoint.

He then reproduces an answer he gave during a TV interview:

What do I think happens when we die? I think we enter into another stage of existence or another state of consciousness that is so extraordinarily different from the reality we have here in the physical world that the language we have is not yet adequate to describe this other state of existence or consciousness. Based on what I have heard from thousands of people, we enter into a realm of joy, light, peace, and love in which we discover that the process of knowledge does not stop when we die. Instead, the process of learning and development goes on for eternity.

As Moody points out, he “answered the question from the heart.” It is this heartfelt quality of self-revelation and emotional honesty that is perhaps the most striking feature of this fascinating and worthwhile book.

Book review: Consulting Spirit

I don't have a whole lot to add to my brief review, posted earlier, of Ian Rubenstein's book Consulting Spirit. As I said earlier, I enjoyed the book for its sensible, matter-of-fact approach to paranormal phenomena and Spiritualism, and for the author's wry sense of humor about himself and the strange people and events he encountered.

Rubenstein is a British medical doctor who developed an interest in clairvoyance and after-death communication, and gradually cultivated his own previously unsuspected talents as a medium. In the process he discovered the surprisingly active world of British Spiritualism, populated with colorful characters, and found himself opening up to new interpretations of life and death. Throughout it all, he remained at least somewhat skeptical, and even at the end of the book, he refrains from drawing any monumental conclusions. I have to say that if I'd had some of the experiences he recounts, I would probably be a little less skeptical and a little more convinced!

To me, books like this are in some ways more valuable than scientific studies involving control groups, double-blind test conditions, and statistical analysis. I'm not sure that any amount of laboratory data will persuade people of the reality of mediumship, but a sober, common-sense account like Dr. Rubenstein's may succeed where tables, charts, and graphs are likely to fail. Reading his story, I couldn't help feeling that if I were in his shoes, I would have had many of the same questions and considered many of the same non-paranormal explanations. Nothing in his book struck me as exaggerated or embellished; if anything, the author's tendency seems to be to play down the more dramatic elements of his story.

His sense of humor keeps him–and the reader–firmly grounded, no matter how apparently outlandish some of the developments in his narrative may seem. Here he is, talking on the phone to an eccentric medium he has never met. Rubenstein asks:

“Do you honestly think my patient can see spirits?” 

“Oh, yes. Why not? I see spirit all the time. There’s a whole unseen universe out there. Once you tune in, you realize just what you’ve been missing. I’ve even got an alien living in my apartment. He’s quite shy, but I know he’s there.”

Was this how it ended, in an apartment somewhere looking for aliens? I made a neutral “uh-huh” remark, just to let him know I was listening and that, well, you know, who doesn’t have an alien living in their apartment nowadays! 

Rubenstein notes how easy it is for the mind to fail to process anomalies such as paranormal phenomena. This is something I've noticed myself. I may experience a remarkable synchronicity or premonition, but unless I very firmly make a mental note of it or–better yet–write it down, I will probably forget it within an hour or so. Later, all I will remember is that something really interesting happened, but for the life of me I cannot recall what it was. As Rubenstein comments,

Work, raising a family, and generally muddling through life tends to keep our thoughts focused on normal, everyday things. When something strange occurs, it’s very hard to know what to do with it. The effort of trying to understand how unusual experiences fit into our lives is just too great. So we simply don’t bother. If we ever recall what happened, maybe when something jogs our memory, then perhaps we mention it as an interesting story. Otherwise we ignore it and get stuck back into our everyday, normal lives. 

The author makes another point that dovetails with my own observations: I have more of these synchronicities and premonitions (and more powerful and meaningful ones) when I'm in a negative state of mind–depressed, upset, confused. It's as if the lowering of my emotional energy opens me up to more outside influences. Or maybe it's just that in times of difficulty, I'm in greater need of such influences. Rubenstein writes,

I rather enjoyed these [synchronistic] coincidences. I began to see a pattern to them. When I was calm and happy, nothing unusual seemed to happen. I wasn’t certain, but they seemed to occur when I was stressed, confused, or looking for direction.  

Although the main focus of the book is on Rubenstein's personal journey to become a medium, there are interesting tidbits of metaphysical speculation scattered along the way. At one point he gets into a conversation with a Spiritualist about the nature of spiritual energy.

“Ian. Think of the caduceus.”

“You mean the medical symbol? The two snakes intertwined around a staff?”

“That’s right.” Dave took a pen out of his jacket pocket.... With his pen he drew a rough picture of the caduceus: a single upright staff with a pair of wings projecting from its top end and two snakes sinuously winding up the staff from bottom to top. The snakes crossed over each other several times and their heads met at the top of the staff, just below the wings....

“The caduceus was supposedly the staff of the Ancient Greek god Hermes,” he said. “The single unifying theme in all modern psychic work is energy. It’s even crept into Spiritualist jargon replacing the term ‘vibrations’ or ‘spirit power.’ The idea goes like this: a flow of universal subtle energy regulates the whole of existence. There is only one type of energy but it has two directions of flow: from spirit to physical, and then back from physical to spirit. You can think of Man, who has both a physical and a spiritual body, as acting as a link, or conduit, between the two. In fact, you can think of all life as acting in this way. The physical form of the energy is at a lower frequency than the spirit form. As it flows from spirit to physical, its frequency is lowered. As it flows from physical to spirit, its frequency is raised.”

I thought about this.

“So, living beings would be what? Transformers? Transducers?”

“Yes,” agreed Dave. “In transforming this energy, living beings do work, and the work they do is what we term life.”

“Okay. That makes sense to me.”

“Good, because it’s very important. Let’s consider the symbol of the caduceus further. You have two currents of energy, symbolized by the snakes, forming a circuit. Notice how the snakes cross over each other several times.” Dave tapped on his drawing with his pen to indicate the crossing points. “You can think of the points where they cross as centers of psychic energy.”

“You mean chakras?”

“Yes. Chakra is a Sanskrit term which means wheel. Each chakra represents a crossing point of energy. Where they cross, the two opposing currents set up a rotating vortex of energy. So the word ‘chakra’ is quite descriptive. Traditionally, there are seven major chakras and these need to open up in order to do any form of psychic work. In order to do this you require a free flow of energy, which means you need a strong link to spirit and also to be well-grounded...”

“...in order to complete the circuit.”

“Yes, in order to complete the circuit.” 

Rubenstein also recounts a conversation with parapsychologist Maurice Grosse, who investigated the famous Enfield poltergeist.

“So, what do you think is going on in these poltergeist cases?” I asked him.

Maurice sat back in his chair, his fingers steepled in thought. He paused for a moment, carefully considering his position.

“Some people feel it’s all down to spirit influence in these cases; in effect the focus, the person at the center of the disturbance, is a haunted individual. If you like, ghosts haunt places, while poltergeists haunt individuals. Others say it’s just down to telekinesis, mind over matter, on the part of the focus, the person around whom these events tend to occur. These people would say that it’s all just a manifestation of unexplained mental abilities and would deny the involvement or even the existence of spirits. Of course, other people just blame it all on trickery....

“My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the focus certainly provides energy. In some cases the focus can even use this energy to affect the environment. At the same time, any passing entity can also pick up this energy and play with it, too. Think of a kid kicking around a football in the park. Then a couple of other kids come around and start playing with it as well. It’s like a sort of ‘energy football.’ Think of the emotional energy children generate when they reach puberty. That’s why they’re so often the focus of such cases.”

This made sense to me and seemed to tie in with what I was learning in my psychic development circle. In order to manifest in the physical world, discarnate entities such as spirits required some form of physical energy supplied by a living person.

“So, in this case the girls provided the energy and a spirit came along and used it to move objects and communicate,” I summed up. “That’s a very interesting theory.” 

Elsewhere, he presents the somewhat familiar image of a diamond as a symbol of the group soul. Although this image is not original with the author (as he freely acknowledges), I found his explanation very clear and straightforward.

I’d been thinking about this one day when I had a realization, which came to me seemingly out of the blue. I experienced the mental image of a huge, multi-faceted diamond. Light was shining through the diamond. I could see that the diamond represented a human soul. Each facet of the diamond represented one lifetime. I realized that time as we experience it on Earth is merely an illusion due to our current perspective. The diamond exists, has existed, and will always exist in a sort of timeless state.

I could see that the purpose of life was to polish each facet. We say life grinds us down. A diamond in a jewelry workshop could make the same complaint. In fact, the grinding polishes our facets, to add beauty and harmony to the whole gem.

Perhaps “I” as I experienced myself in each life, am merely one aspect of the whole diamond, and a very limited aspect at that. As a mere facet I am flat compared with the three-dimensional nature of the whole diamond. The whole diamond would be my “higher self.” Then suppose each diamond was stacked together with others. Perhaps each whole diamond in its own way represented a single facet of an even greater diamond, a huge structure, which kept on stacking up until what? God? 

I don't know if there's anything really new in Consulting Spirit, and I wish the author had been a little more willing to overcome his skepticism and carry his thinking a little further, but overall I enjoyed the book quite a lot. In some ways, it's almost a throwback to accounts that were common in the early part of the 20th century when Spiritualism was more widely accepted. Rubenstein presents an array of supernatural phenomena in a calm, sober voice, laced with humor and occasional self-doubt. I found his story very appealing, and I think you will too. 

"Shakespeare" By Another Name

Back in 2005, I ran a post on Mark Anderson's book "Shakespeare" By Another Name, which impressed me greatly. Now the book has been released in a new, updated edition, in both print and ebook form.

The book's homepage is here. Also check out Mark's excellent blog. 

Since I'm too lazy to write anything new, I'm reposting my '05 piece below. Think of it as recycling. It's good for the environment, you know.

The only thing I would change about the post if I were writing it today is that I'm no longer so sure the case for Oxford will carry the day. I think I underestimated the enormous resistance from academe and from the general public, who are much enamored of the Stratford lad's "poor boy makes good" story. The strangely hostile response to the recent movie Anonymous (which I admit I haven't seen yet) seems to bear this out. People react as if questioning the plays' authorship is tantamount to an assault on democracy itself. The Stratford man is such an iconic figure that he is almost sacred in people's minds -- a symbol of the hidden genius of Everyman. I'm not sure any scholarly analysis can defeat such a deeply held and passionately felt conviction. 

Still, whether or not the Oxfordian thesis is ever generally accepted, I've found that it's increased my appreciation of Shakespeare's works and gives me a sense of personal connection with the author that I never had before. And that's good enough for me. 

========

For a couple of years now, I've doubted the official story of William Shakespeare - the not-very-well-educated farmboy, William of Stratford (hereafter simply William), who migrated from the provinces to the big city and promptly established himself as the most eloquent writer of his age, and indeed of any age. Over the past century or more, a number of arguments have been advanced to suggest that this story, however endearing it may be, is simply not very probable. In particular, it is argued:

- that Shakespeare has a detailed personal knowledge of locations throughout the continent of Europe, but there is no evidence that William ever left England.

- that Shakespeare derived some of his material from sources that were available only in Italian, French, Spanish, or Greek, but there is no evidence that William knew how to read any of these languages.

- that Shakespeare is intimately acquainted with aristocratic pursuits, such as falconry, which were off-limits to commoners like William.

- that Shakespeare sympathizes with the aristocracy, makes in-joke references to the Elizabethan court, and seems to have personally experienced the life of a courtier, all of which is inexplicable if William wrote the plays.

- that Shakespeare had access to a considerable (and vastly expensive) library, which William probably did not.

- that Shakespeare has firsthand knowledge of traveling by sea, but there is no evidence that William ever set foot on a sailing vessel.

- that Shakespeare has firsthand knowledge of combat, but there is no evidence that William ever served in the military.

- that Shakespeare knows the ins and outs of the law and sprinkles legal terms throughout his writings, but there is no evidence that William was ever trained in the law.

- that Shakespeare views commoners, individually, as clowns and oafs, and, collectively, as dangerous mobs, a view that would come naturally to an aristocrat but not to a provincial farmboy like William.

- that Shakespeare weaves subtle political overtones into this plays and poetry that would probably have gotten William thrown in jail, as the commoner Ben Jonson was jailed for his "seditious" play The Isle of Dogs.

- that Shakespeare identifies himself in his sonnets as old, lame, and publicly disgraced, a description that does not fit William, a prosperous young man on the rise.

- that Shakespeare offers advice and, sometimes, warnings to the aristocratic recipient of the sonnets, something that a commoner like William would not have dared to do.

There are other arguments, but these give you the flavor of the case. But if William was not the "real" Shakespeare, then who was?

The favorite candidate today is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford. I've read several books arguing the "Oxfordian" position. Online I found the complete text of "Shakespeare" Identified, by the first person to nominate de Vere for the role, J. Thomas Looney. (I pause for the inevitable chuckle at his funny name.) From there I proceeded to the more recent and more comprehensive book The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn, and Ogburn's much briefer introductory book on the subject, The Man Who Was Shakespeare. Along the way I encountered Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare and several other interesting books, not to mention a wide variety of Web sites. (For a bibliography, see my online essay "Shakespeare vs. Shakespeare.")

Over time I became more and more persuaded that the "Stratfordian" case was weak and that William was probably a front man for some aristocrat reluctant to publish his works under his real name because of the considerable social stigma attached to writing for the common stage - and perhaps for other reasons. Still, I was not sure de Vere was the man.

I am now.

What changed my mind? A new biography of de Vere by Mark Anderson, titled "Shakespeare" By Another Name. Anderson, relying on a huge number of sources, fleshes out the earl of Oxford's life in more detail than I have previously seen - and draws explicit parallels between Oxford's life and times and the characters and plot lines of Shakespeare's works. The resulting portrait is so clear and compelling that I can only say that if Edward de Vere was not Shakespeare, he surely should have been.

Again and again Anderson shows how otherwise obscure passages from Shakespeare's plays can be understood as topical allusions to palace intrigues and matters of state that took place long before William of Stratford had ever appeared in London.

A single example must suffice. It involves Anderson's hypothesis that an early draft of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was the same play described by an antiquarian (who once had the manuscript in his possession) as "a pleasant conceit of Vere, earl of Oxford ... circa 1580." In 1580 William of Stratford was only 16 years old. Could Twelfth Night have been written so early - not by William, but by Edward de Vere? Here, much abbreviated, is Anderson's argument:

De Vere and [the courtier Christopher] Hatton were notorious rivals circa 1580, and Twelfth Night mocks Hatton relentlessly: Twelfth Night's self-infatuated clod Malvolio is a barely concealed caricature of [Hatton] ... Malvolio happens upon a prank letter designed to make him look like an ass in front of the entire household. The letter is signed "The Fortunate Unhappy" - an English reversal of the Latin pen name (Felix Infortunatus; "the happy unfortunate") that Hatton used ...

The Jesuit priest Edmund Campion ... had spent much of the 1570s preaching his message abroad, primarily in Prague ... He was arrested in 1581 and tortured. His treason trial was a farce ... Campion was given all of two hours to work on his courtroom defense. He was even denied use of pen, ink, or paper to compose his thoughts ...

In perhaps the most enigmatic scene in Twelfth Night (Act 4, Scene 2), Malvolio is thrown into a mock prison and denied pen, ink, and paper. The fool Feste cross-examines Malvolio with his characteristically witty doublespeak, tossing off an aside about a "hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink."...

[Finally] Twelfth Night captures the mood of a brief moment on the international stage between 1578 and '80 ... when King Sebastian of Portugal turned up missing in action [and presumed drowned] ...

King Sebastian of Portugal had left no heir or clear line of succession, and to make matters worse, no one was even certain that Sebastian had died in 1578. On January 31, 1580, King Philip of Spain prevailed [in the struggle for control of Portugal]. The Portuguese kingdom and military were now to be under Spain's command ...

Yet, if Sebastian washed ashore someday, he could rightfully seize the crown back from Spain and cripple the Spanish menace. Rumors persisted ... that Sebastian was still alive and preparing to make his triumphant return. Many in Elizabeth's courts had also championed the cause of Antonio, a pretender to the Portuguese throne ...

The story of Twelfth Night is in part the story of two friends, Antonio and Sebastian, who are reunited when the latter washes ashore and into the action of drama. Sebastian is widely believed to have perished at sea ...

These clear parallels illuminate the action of the play and set it in a recognizable historical context. They clarify what is otherwise obscure - such as Malvolio's bizarre imprisonment.

One set of parallels is hardly conclusive, but Anderson offers similar treatments of most of Shakespeare's works, showing again and again how the political battles, social controversies, and marital discord of de Vere's own life are reflected in the plots and characters of Hamlet, As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, and the rest.

Brick by brick, over the course of 380 pages, not to mention 30 pages of appendices and 145 pages of endnotes, Anderson builds an overwhelming circumstantial case for the Oxfordian position. As he admits, there is no smoking gun, no single piece of evidence that provides absolute proof - but the sum total of the evidence he submits ought to be dispositive to any open-minded reader.

I don't expect the walls of academe to come tumbling down just because Mark Anderson has blown his trumpet. The Stratfordians, stubborn defenders of orthodoxy, will resist the inescapable conclusions prompted by this book, just as they have resisted, dismissed, and laughed off the arguments of Looney, Ogburn, and others. But I now think that theirs is a rearguard action and a losing cause. The case has been made, and eventually it will carry the day.

Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. And sooner or later, everyone will know it.

 

The Search for an Eternal Norm: excerpt (part one)

Recently, while reading The Search for an Eternal Norm, by Louis J. Halle, I was struck by a long passage about Hamlet, which delves into the deeper issues of the play and, in so doing, explores some basic issues of life itself. Because the excerpt is lengthy, I'm dividing it into two posts. 

Although Halle doesn't mention it, his ruminations can be profitably compared to Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy. 

The first part of the passage, excerpted below, is relevant to the never-ending battle between outsiders and the defenders of orthodoxy in any field, including the militant skeptics who guard the halls of Science. 

The second part, to be excerpted in my next post, deals with the issue of death, as it presents itself to a mind like Hamlet's — that is, to any sensitive, introspective nature. 

Incidentally, Halle's British spelling has been Americanized by my voice-recognition program (I dictated the passage using Dragon Dictate for Mac, which works well). 

=======

Hamlet lives in the world we all know, the world of corruption satirized in Voltaire's Candide, the world epitomized in Hans Christian Andersen's story, The Emperor's New Clothes. The corruption consists of the pretenses of those who constitute society, whether at a Renaissance court or in the fashionable circles of our cities today.

Especially in the competitive upper ranges of society, the positions that people take on the issues that confront them, the attitudes they strike, are based, not on a concern for what is true, but on the objective of gaining credit for “right thinking.” In an elementary form this can be observed among young intellectuals in the lobbies of any concert-hall after a symphonic performance. Each in his comment tries to give an impression of critical appreciation, using a fashionable vocabulary to show that he is one of the initiated.…

I recall how shocked I was, when myself still a child, to read in Edward Bok's autobiography that, as drama critic for a New York newspaper, he sometimes did not bother to attend the performances of which he wrote his criticisms, relying on his native ingenuity to carry off the bluff. Most book-reviewers rarely do more than sample the books they review. They depend on a kind of bluff that becomes second nature to them, adopting the style of magisterial authority and indulging in little tricks of allusion and citation to suggest their mastery of the book's subject.

This universal pretense is no less prevalent in the councils of government, where the current fashion in right thinking quite overrides truth.…

In this corrupt world, anyone who seeks to emulate the child of the Anderson tale, and to make his career on that basis, will find himself facing barriers that are all but insurmountable. He will find himself intellectually isolated, standing in opposition to the common mind that governs the society in which he is trying to make his career. He will find that he has aroused, among the insiders who represent the common mind, the same atavistic instinct of hostility toward the outsider that is in evidence on any school playground.

The first barrier that he must face is that of confidence in his own faculties; for few of us have the self-assurance to believe even in the simple testimony of our own eyes when everyone around us is admiring the Emperor's new clothes. Many of us who have sat at the council-tables of government have had the experience of not daring to speak up when everyone else agreed on what appeared to be plainly untrue, fearing that we had missed some essential point in the argument or overlooked some factor evident to all the others–fearing that we would show ourselves unfit for our jobs.

The second barrier is in the power of those who represent the common mind to deny the outsider advancement in his career and opportunities for publication, or to discredit his work if it appears as a book for review. Where the standards of book-reviewing are pragmatic rather than principled, the first question to present itself to a reviewer is whether the author is “one of us,” and on the basis of the answer he decides whether the author should be honored or discredited.…

Again, if the man who thinks for himself wants a university appointment or hopes for promotion he is likely to find the way barred by those who represent the common academic mind.…

The pretenses to which I have referred are related to the process of forming the collective mind. The individual, as one member of a group that has to formulate its collective opinions on the issues to which it addresses itself, is involved in the politics of negotiation and compromise at the level of the common mind, which is never high. In these circumstances, the question is never one of truth but of what attitudes to strike; and the question of what attitudes to strike is a question of what will best promote the group's power in society, a power with which its members have identified themselves. This is what comes to constitute right thinking.

We take this kind of thing for granted in the behavior of political parties, but it has hardly been less true of French painters for generations past.…

Literary intellectuals, for their part, have belonged to categorically defined and recognized ideological groupings.…

The same inescapable corruption pervades and all pervades all professional and vocational circles. We take for granted the shoe-manufacturer's conviction that the general interests of society require a protective tariff against foreign shoes. But Plato, himself, was sure that philosophers should be kings. Anyone who suggests to a gathering of physical scientists that the world might not be better off if it were run only by people with their training and discipline will get a cold reception. Anyone who suggests to political scientists that they are not qualified, as such, to take over the decision-making functions of government will find that they regard him as unsound. There will be pursed lips and a shaking of heads.…

In all academic communities a distinction may be made between what everyone says and what is true. The former is, in a word, “correct.” Students at examinations, or in the papers they submit, may be well advised to aim at “correct” answers. The training they are undergoing is primarily in the orthodoxy that such answers represent. Again, wherever an ideological establishment rules the only question that arises is that of what is “correct,” and the very word “truth” disappears. So a sort of scholastic formalism develops the corrupts the intellectual enterprise of mankind. It has been so in all ages, in our own no less than in Galileo's.

The barriers to survival, in his career, of an individual who thinks for himself are not necessarily insurmountable. In exceptional circumstances, involving luck or the special providence referred to by Hamlet, he may at least be able to keep going for the normal duration of his career. But the barriers are so formidable and intimidating that, in all but extraordinary cases, there can be no question of not respecting them.

Every society is in constant danger of being finally overcome by the corruption I have described. That is why every society needs, in addition to the orthodox establishments that give it stability, a Socrates or a Voltaire for its constant purgation. I am not sure, however, that a Socrates or a Voltaire would have much chance of surviving in the highly organized mass-societies of our day, unless briefly and by virtue of an exceptional combination of circumstances. In a simpler age, Socrates did not need a publisher, a lecture-platform, an academic stipend, funds to support his studies; and although the difficulties and dangers that confronted Voltaire were in some respects even greater than those that would confront him today, they are different difficulties and dangers.…

What I have attempted to show above is the corruption that prevails at all the levels of power and influence in our world today, as in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Medieval and in Renaissance Europe, in ancient Persia, in Byzantium, in Confucian and in communist China. This corruption is always tending to engulf us, to become total. The saving grace, time and again, is that of the incorruptible individual who thinks for himself, is under an inner compulsion to utter what he thinks, and still survives long enough to be heard.…

Hamlet stands alone in opposition to his environment, unable to adjust himself to the existential world of corruption, unable to make the convenient thinking of others his own. His mind is dominated by a normative model of the world, a conception of what it was intended to be.…

The paradox of Hamlet's position was that, to realize the normative world in action, he would have had to embrace all the sordid devices of the existential world. He would have had to practice corruption to overcome corruption. He would have had to adopt a pragmatic means of conspiracy: secrecy, double dealing, hypocrisy, and violence. He would have had to give himself entirely to the struggle for personal power, thereby corrupting himself….

It is a standard dilemma of the world that has followed the expulsion from Paradise that one can hold to one's ideals, avoiding their betrayal in practice, only by withdrawal, by refusal to participate. Hamlet, moved by a revulsion against the corruption of the existential world, was consequently inhibited from embracing its devices even in the name of ushering in the ideal world.

Was this weakness?

Surely it was. I myself, living in a pragmatic post-paradisial world, have had to discipline myself all my life to acknowledge what is required to keep the world going, to maintain its essential function from year to year, from generation to generation–what is required simply to ward off chaos. I have had to discipline myself to reject the idealist's contempt for workability (for what he sometimes calls “expediency”), which he can maintain only so long as he, himself, remains aloof from direct responsibility for keeping the world going.… I can recognize Hamlet's misfortune in being born to such responsibility, but I cannot quite allow myself to commend him for his refusal to accept it. On the face of it, such a refusal is indeed weakness….

If, however, the question is not one of approval but of sympathy, then I must acknowledge myself on Hamlet's side. I, myself, have been increasingly free, as he was not, to follow Polonius's precept ["to thine own self be true"], and I have never had the slightest compunction at withdrawing, in the second half of my life, just as far as circumstances allowed me to.…

I question, moreover, whether the pure man of action represents the highest type of mankind. To me, the glory of our species is the human mind at the extremes of self-conscious awareness represented by a Socrates, a Montaigne, a Pascal, a Shakespeare–or Hamlet. To me Voltaire represents a higher type than Napoleon, and much as I admire Pericles I would set Thucydides above him. This is to say that I set Hamlet above Fortinbras, although it would have been better if Fortinbras have been born Prince of Denmark. It is not that mankind does not depend alike on its Fortinbras and its Hamlets; but it depends on the former for its present salvation, on the latter for its ultimate salvation. We must save the world from day to day, and for that we need our Fortinbras; but if we are ever to emerge from the tragic dilemmas of this post-paradisial age it will only be by that constant enlargement of our understanding for which we depend on the few thoughtful, introspective, and incorruptible minds that are able to work in something approaching the ideal of academic detachment. Hamlet's personal tragedy was that this, his true vocation, was denied him by inescapable circumstances.

[from The Search for an Eternal Norm, Louis J. Halle, 1981]

Backwards and forwards

I've now read more than half of Nanci L. Danison's book Backwards - enough to make a few provisional comments about it. I've also read parts of her blog, which is quite interesting. 

I can't evaluate the biographical details of her book. I don't know what the facts surrounding her near-death experience might be. All I can do is assess her claims on a subjective basis - namely, do they make sense to me? Do they help to explain things that are otherwise inexplicable? Do they cohere with other accounts that I find basically reliable?

There's nothing particularly "scientific" about these criteria. I'm not sure that metaphysical speculation about the nature and purpose of reality fits within the confines of science or of the scientific method. Answering these questions is a personal journey that each of us undertakes on our own.

Danison's main point is that, while we think of ourselves as human beings who have a soul, we would be more correct in viewing ourselves as souls who temporarily inhabit human bodies. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it turns out to be pretty important. What it means is that there are two loci of consciousness in each of us - the limited, reflexive, instinctual, not especially reflective or self-aware consciousness of a human being, and the larger, more comprehensive, nonjudgmental, unconditionally loving consciousness of the "Light Being" that inhabits its human "host." What we think of as the soul is a complex interplay or blending of these two levels of consciousness, with one or the other predominating in any given situation. 

Personally, I find this idea useful in explaining humanity's dualistic nature. Most of us have probably had the experience of feeling primitive, raw, violent emotions at one time or another, and may have been a little shocked at ourselves for exhibiting this animalistic quality. And there is no doubt that the human organism can behave much like an animal; the fight-or-flight response, for instance, is not controlled by the reasoning mind, but originates in a more primitive part of the brain. A great deal of human experience seems to be the product of biology, and yet purely biological explanations are hard-pressed to deal with the higher accomplishments of the human species. It's hard to see how there could be any Darwinian survival value in the ability to compose a symphony or perform Fourier analysis. To all appearances, it really does seem as though we are composed of two parts: our biological, animal nature, which is mechanistic, limited, and oriented toward survival and reproduction; and our higher spiritual self, which cannot be explained by reductionism and is not necessarily "practical" in terms of everyday earthly existence.

If you think about it, I suspect you will find many examples in your own life, and in history, of the tug-of-war between the animal side of human nature and the spiritual side. This is not to say that the animal side is "bad." Danison takes pains to explain that, as a living organism, the human being is naturally motivated to defend its own interests and secure its own safety, to compete with other humans for scarce resources, and to favor close biological relatives or sexual partners over strangers from different tribes. Without the instincts for self-preservation and reproduction, without the sometimes cruel qualities required for survival in the wild, human beings would have faced extinction long ago. Just as we would not regard a pack of wolves as "bad" because they don't adhere to "civilized" standards of conduct, we shouldn't regard natural human behavior as bad simply because it fails to live up to the more advanced, but (in earthly terms) sometimes impractical, standards of the Light Beings.

In this respect, it's worth pointing out that the greatest messengers of spiritual truth often counsel us to do things that seem quite impractical. Jesus' admonitions to turn the other cheek, "resist not evil," and leave our livelihood to Providence ("the lilies of the field ...") are beautifully expressed, but probably could not be carried out as an actual design for living - at least not for very long. Perhaps a few advanced individuals could live that way, but most of us would probably end up as victims of more aggressive persons or at the mercy of nature. The advice, in other words, seems to relate to another sphere of existence, in which ordinary human concerns over self-preservation and practical planning are irrelevant. The sphere of the Light Beings, perhaps.

The idea that there are two levels of consciousness in each of us may be hard to accept (though personally I find it quite plausible); but Danison goes further, explaining that there are many more levels of consciousness. She writes,

During my beyond-death experience I was astonished to experience a transition from the "self" I had known in the body through higher and higher levels of consciousness, each of which I remembered having lived before. Each one felt like the "real" me, only with far greater mental capacity, memory, and abilities as I progressed through the process. I understood at last that what we really are is a compilation of multiple levels of consciousness, each of which perceives itself to be a singular, unique person. Each has its own method of origin, lifespan, and innate nature.

In other words, each Light Being undergoes many incarnations, experiencing an almost infinite variety of situations. But why? The answer, according to Danison, is deceptively simple: God, which she dubs Source, has split itself into countless Light Beings for the purpose of experiencing everything that can be experienced. Although in our human incarnation we may long for a feeling of oneness with the universe,

... the human experience is about separateness. Individuality. We are here precisely to experience that feeling. 

In Danison's view, there can be no bad experiences when viewed from the perspective of the Being of Light. The most miserable, wretched earthly life will still yield a trove of sensations, perceptions, insights, and memories treasured by our higher self. In fact, the whole idea of good and bad is a strictly human perspective; and while necessary to bring order to human society, it's not part of a higher plan. The higher plan is simply to maximize experiences of all kinds, whether "good" or "bad."

This viewpoint reminds me of Gnosticism, which similarly holds that God wishes to have a broad variety of experiences and is not interested in traveling a narrow, moralistically defined path. The early Christian Gnostics were classed as heretics by more conventional Christians in part because they did not believe that any behavior was actually good or evil when viewed from a higher perspective.

But why would anyone choose to incarnate if the life in question will be one of misery and pain? Danison suggests that the experience could compared to watching a horror movie or reading a depressing novel. Many of us seek out these experiences because we know that the movie or book is only a  fantasy, and it takes up only a little of our time without any lasting negative effects. From the point of view of a Light Being, Danison says, earthly life is not quite real, but more like a dream, and a lifetime of pain and deprivation is only a passing, momentary event. 

If there is no good and evil from a spiritual perspective, then how can we explain persistence in the belief in eternal punishment, which finds some support in nightmarish or hellish NDEs? Danison writes, 

Some year-death experiencers (NDErs) report trips to hell after they leave their bodies. My understanding of our nature as Light Beings leads me to believe that those NDErs may not have gone far enough through the transition from human to Being of Light to lose their combined human/soul personalities. So they manifested events born of human fear, as though they were still in the body.

Alternatively, these NDErs may consider the life review, with its associated emotions, to be a form of punishment expected only in hell.... Yet it is temporary. All hellish or unpleasant events experienced after permanently leaving the body after its death are temporary, and last only so long as it takes you to come to terms with the end of your human adventure and make emotional peace with yourself.

Presumably, so-called earthbound spirits who remain attached to the earth plane or who wander in limbo also have not completed "the transition from human being to Being of Light." Since time is a quality of the earth plane but not of the spiritual world, they may remain lost and confused for what seems like a considerable amount of time by earthly standards. (This is my interpretation; so far I haven't come across anything in Danison's book that addresses this issue.)

Overall I find Backwards intriguing and helpful in resolving certain questions about dualism, morality, and the purpose of life. That's not to say I agree with everything the author says. One area where I differ involves her assertion that we all manifest our own reality. She writes,

Tomorrow morning, when you awake, you will manifest into reality precisely what you went to bed believing about your world. You do it from memory. From habit. If you are not sure about this, remember that for centuries Europeans lived on a flat Earth. They experienced our planet as flat, saw it ending at the horizon, and therefore believed Earth to be a plate. Reality stayed that way until Christopher Columbus and others disproved human perception by sailing past the horizon without falling off.

I have some problems with this. To begin with, educated Europeans of Columbus's day did not believe that the Earth was flat. They knew it was round; their disagreement with Columbus was that they believed the circumference of the globe was too great for a voyage from Europe to India to be practical. Columbus disagreed, thinking the Earth was small enough to allow a direct westward voyage. In fact, the authorities were correct, and Columbus was wrong. Columbus's voyage would have ended in failure if he hadn't come across the Americas, which he mistakenly believed to be India. 

Leaving aside this historical issue, I don't believe that anyone has ever "lived on a flat Earth." Certainly many people have believed the earth was flat, but I don't buy the idea that their belief changed physical reality. External reality on spiritual planes does appear to be a direct projection of consciousness, but I don't think the physical world is equally malleable. Indeed, I think this is one of the key differences between the Earth plane and spiritual planes.

For that reason, I'm skeptical of the idea that we can change material reality by adjusting our thoughts and expectations, by saying affirmations, or by meditating intently. I'm not saying these practices have no effect, but I'm not convinced they can yield tangible benefits in most cases - though in some remarkable (one might say "miraculous") cases, they do.

Another thing I don't particularly like about Danison's book is the title. I realize this is petty, but I just don't think Backwards is a very good name for the book. I understand that the author is telling us that we've got it all backwards, starting with the idea that we are human beings with souls rather than souls (or more correctly, Light Beings) enjoying a symbiotic relationship with human organisms. Nevertheless, if I'd published the book, I would've called it something else.

So that's my two cents about the fifty percent of the book I've read so far. I know that one or two commenters are reading it, and others have looked at Danison's blog. What do you think?

Book review: The Afterlife Revealed

I really enjoyed Michael Tymn's last book about life after death, The Articulate Dead, and have been very much looking forward to his newest effort, The Afterlife Revealed. It did not disappoint.

Tymn sets the stage in the preface, when he notes that at age 75, with some health worries, he is aware of his own mortality. But, he writes, "I think I can honestly say I do not significantly fear the idea of death itself. In fact, I find it somewhat exciting." While happy to live in the present, he sees knowledge of the afterlife as a way of simultaneously "living in eternity." He quotes philosopher Alice Bailey:

We can live in the consciousness of immortality, and it will give an added coloring and beauty to life. We can foster the awareness of our future transition, and live with the expectation of its wonder. Death thus faced, and regarded as a prelude to further living experience, takes on a different meaning.

Meanwhile, Tymn observes, "today's hedonistic materialism is a result of a loss of spiritual values, especially a lack of belief in the survival of consciousness after death." I think there's a lot of truth in this, although the sheer abundance of material goods available in our world is another large factor. It's perhaps inevitable that people with access to unprecedented luxuries would become somewhat hedonistic, even if they happened to retain a belief in a spiritual dimension.

Of course, the big question is whether there is good evidence for an afterlife. As Tymn observes in a brief overview of conventional religious beliefs, acceptance of an afterlife on faith isn't very comforting to the modern mind, especially when the afterlife is envisioned as either "a humdrum Heaven or a horrific Hell." And why are revelations in ancient books considered sacrosanct, while more recent revelations of a similar character are dismissed as fraudulent, delusional, or demonic?

This, by the way, is my main objection to Christian writers like Dinesh D'Sousa and Roy AbrahamVarghese, who defend the afterlife on the basis of Judeo-Christian scripture and a highly selective reading of contemporary evidence, limited mainly to near-death experiences. Why are mediumship, reincarnation memories, hauntings, etc. disregarded by these authors? Whatever their rationalizations, the real reason seems to be that such phenomena contradict Biblical teachings or are prohibited by Biblical injunctions. But an open-minded investigator would look at all the evidence, and not be bound by ancient taboos.

Tymn begins the main part of The Afterlife Revealed with a brief history of Spiritualism, which includes famous cases like the Fox sisters and Emanuel Swedenborg, as well as such less familiar names as George T. Dexter, Grace Rosher, and John Scott. Part of the book's appeal is the presentation of cases that even many aficionados may not have read about. Tymn's encyclopedic knowledge of afterlife research allows him to draw on material that more casual researchers have never heard of.

The book proceeds to examine the dying process and its aftermath in step-by-step, chronological fashion -- from deathbed visions (including the remarkably detailed report of Sir Auckland Geddes in 1937), the moment of separation from the physical body, the early stages of postmortem existence, the life review, and the soul's gravitation to the appropriate sphere or plane.

Summing up in a chapter titled "Making Sense of the Afterlife," Tymn considers how best to understand this larger world. "Another perspective on this," he writes,

is to view the earth life like a movie, an illusory life, being viewed by the real self -- the soul. During a movie, we occasionally remind ourselves that we are separated from the movie action, but we then again become absorbed by the action and feel much of the emotion being experienced by the actors. After a very emotionally-charged movie ends, it sometimes affects us for the rest of the day or evening. And so it seems to be with the soul that has a hard time shaking off the earth experiences.

The lingering effects of earthly life account for some of the difficulties in making the transition to the next life, and for the diverse levels of consciousness among the deceased, as revealed by mediumship. 

The book offers four appendices covering premonitions of death, the possibility of reincarnation, the issue of suicide, and capsule biographies of noted researchers and mediums. There is an extensive bibliography which runs the gamut from modern books like James E. Beichler's To Die For to older, obscure titles like Stanley De Brath's 1925 Psychical Research, Science and Religion. The breadth of Tymn's sources is truly impressive, and I was left thinking I should make a list of the interesting titles in his bibliography that I haven't yet read. There are quite a few.

The Afterlife Revealed clocks in at a speedy 192 pages, densely packed with information and insights. It's a fine book, a labor of love aimed at lightening the burden of all those who seek a larger meaning in our predominantly materialistic age, and I hope it finds the intelligent, discriminating readership it deserves.

The Afterlife Revealed

I've been meaning to review Michael Tymn's terrific new book, The Afterlife Revealed, but personal things have gotten in the way. I did read an advance copy and liked it very much, and I will have a review up ASAP; but in the meantime I wanted to let readers know that the book is now out in both print and ebook editions, and is sure to be of interest to anyone who follows this blog. 

For more info, you can go to the print edition's Web page, or the ebook edition's page. Both pages contain links to the Amazon and Amazon UK sales pages. The ebook can also be purchased through iTunes. 

While you're at it, check out Robert McLuhan's excellent review of the book on Paranormalia.