Michael Prescott's Blog

Touching heaven

Right now I'm reading one of the most interesting books I've encountered in quite some time -- Induced After Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma, by Allan L. Botkin and R. Craig Hogan.

Botkin is a clinical psychologist who specializes in EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming. The EMDR technique involves simulating the rapid eye movement characteristic of deep sleep in order to place the patient in a trancelike state. In this state of altered consciousness, the patient seems to be able to process the memory of traumatic events with extreme speed and efficiency. Frequently patients who have been haunted by the symptoms of post-traumatic stress for years have been cured, or at least significantly helped, by a single application of EMDR.

What Botkin found, quite by accident, was that when the EMDR procedure was modified in a rather minor way, patients would experience a strong sense of connection with a deceased friend or loved one, and that this experience was remarkably effective at healing grief. Although Botkin remains wary of asserting that these experiences are metaphysically real, clearly he believes there's more going on than a mere hallucination. He terms the procedure Induced After Death Communication, or IADC.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the IADC phenomenon is its similarity to near death experiences (NDEs). An example from Botkin's book makes this clear:

After [Pam] finished telling me about her mother, I used core-focused EMD are to go to her sadness and help her start to bring it down. Then I performed the IADC procedure.

After a minute, she opened her eyes and explained what had happened. She said she felt like she was going through a tunnel toward a bright light, but found herself becoming frustrated because she couldn't get to the end of the tunnel. I assured her that the IADC would unfold naturally; she just needed to relax and let it happen.

After some EMDR to relax her and help her move into a receptive stage, she was ready for the IADC experience. This time her mother was there. Pam kept her eyes closed for five minutes, a relatively long IADC. Tears rolled down her face as she sat quietly with her eyes closed. Finally, she opened her eyes and said, excitedly, "I saw my mother very clearly. She looked younger and thinner even though she had put on weight the last ten years of her life. She looked healthy, happy, peaceful, and she had a spark in her eyes that seemed to emanate a glow around her."

Pam laughed and said, "My mother was sitting on a large rock by the beach in one of those old-style bathing suits, but the surroundings were more beautiful than any beach I've ever seen. She communicated to me in a very clear way that she was very proud of what I had accomplished in my life. She said there was no reason for me to feel guilty about anything. I felt a warm connectedness like we used to have. When Mom was alive, there was always a touch of sadness in her smile, but that was gone and she looked genuinely happy."

When she was finished describing the IADC, she said, "I can't believe how peaceful I feel, like there's been a tremendous burden lifted off of me. And I have the sense that she is not gone and will always be with me."

As she was preparing to leave, she said she felt like all her issues related to the death of her mother had completely resolved. She emphasized more than once how unexpected her experience was.

Two months later she reported that she continued to feel much better, and that she could still experience the warm connectedness with her mother.

I should mention that the typical IADC does not involve the sense of moving through a tunnel toward a bright light. Then again, according to some researchers, the majority of NDEs do not feature a tunnel, either.

Botkin, who claims to have had extraordinary success with this technique and to have trained many colleagues in its use with equally good results, provides fascinating case histories that clearly indicate there's something more to the IADC than merely a trick of the mind. In some cases, the patient receives information during his IADC which was unknown to him but which is later verified. In other cases, an observer -- or even the therapist himself -- may simultaneously experience the same IADC that the patient is undergoing. Botkin dubs these instances "shared IADCs." (There may be a parallel here with shared deathbed visions; some people who have been present when a person dies have recounted experiencing the dying person's perceptions of leaving the body and moving into a bright light. This experience is relatively common among hospice and hospital workers who work with the terminally ill.)

The great majority of Botkin's patients, regardless of their views about life after death before the session, have come away from their IADCs with the conviction that they were in actual contact with the deceased. A few diehard skeptics view the experience as hallucinatory, but even they seem to derive considerable emotional relief from the procedure.

Botkin maintains a Web site which provides more information on the procedure as a clinical tool. A related Web site considers IADC from the standpoint of what it may tell us about persistence of consciousness after death.

Years ago, a wealthy inventor named George Meek (now deceased) tried to develop a machine he dubbed Spiricom, which would allow people to get in touch with the deceased at the press of a button. The story is told in detail in John G. Fuller's The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. Although there were some successes with Spiricom, the machine never proved to be reliable enough for general use. But maybe we don't need a machine. Maybe we have the capacity inside ourselves to touch heaven whenever we want.

Botkin's groundbreaking work suggests that in the future the line between life and afterlife maybe crossed almost at will. Somewhere, George Meek must be smiling.

Blogging is for losers

And who should know better than me, right?

But it's true. Or at least it's sometimes true. Blogging is for losers.

Let's face it. There's something about an electronic soapbox that is just not healthy. It promotes narcissism and egocentricism and general idiocy. At least, it certainly has done so in my case.

Before I started blogging, I never thought that anyone cared a fig about my off-the-cuff observations and opinions. And, of course, nobody does. Nor should they. My opinions are no more valuable than anyone else's. Often they are of no value whatsoever. And I knew this.

Then, about nine or ten months ago, I got my very own blogging platform. And slowly but inexorably I began to change. I started to think that my opinions matter. That I am important.

"People," I would say to myself, "NEED to hear MY TAKE on _________ [fill in the blank with any issue] ... and they need to hear it RIGHT NOW!"

Which is just nutty. Who cares what I think about, say, Hurricane Katrina? It's not as if there aren't fifty thousand other people out there with opinions on the matter, and most of them are better informed about the subject than I am.

To be honest, even I don't care what I think about Katrina. The stuff I wrote about Katrina when the flooding was in progress seems overheated and feverish to me now, all of three weeks later.

The thing is, it's addictive, having an oratorical platform from which to spout opinions to cyberspace. Admittedly, only a few people are actually reading my opinions - but it still feels like I'm "making a difference." With every new post I publish, I'm puffing myself up just a little bit more, inflating my ego, and pretending that my shoot-from-the-lip pontifications are of lasting significance. What would the world do without me? Heck, I'm not just important; I'm indispensable!

You know the story about the fellow driving past the graveyard, who points to the rows of headstones and quips, "There they are - all the indispensable men."

It's good to have a forum to toss out ideas and opinions, as long as I don't abuse the privilege by posting every stray notion that comes into my head. Well-considered, thoughtful commentary is good. Daily preening before the mirror of my laptop's monitor is bad.

An example of how to do it right is Iowahawk. He has a satirical blog site, and he posts his elaborate and trenchant satirical pieces only when he's got something good to offer. As a result, he doesn't post daily. He may not even post weekly. He posts when he's written something that's actually worth posting. What a concept!

I'd like to try this approach. So I am going to exercise a virtue rarely practiced on the Internet - restraint. When I come up with some idea or observation that seems genuinely worth sharing, I'll put it here. But the vast majority of the harebrained, half-assed opinions tumbleweeding through the arid corners of my mind don't fall into that category. They will be relegated to the unpublished obscurity they deserve.

In other words, the format of this blog is changing. Following the lead of the old communist who excused the Soviet show trials and purges by saying they would result in "fewer, but better Russians," my new motto for this site is: fewer, but better posts.

Quality over quantity. Less is more. That's the idea, anyway.

Who knows? Maybe I can start a trend.

Killing babies (and why we shouldn't)

Some time ago I wrote a post called "The Irrational Rationalist," complaining that some of the more ardent advocates of rationalism and scientism have gone overboard and become fanatics. In the ensuing discussion I mentioned the example of Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer. Recently, while reading Bernard Goldberg's new book (discussed in my previous post), I came across a chapter on Singer. It reminded me that there was another point I'd wanted to make about Singer's ethical arguments, which, for lack of space and time, I didn't bring up before.

Singer is known for his defense of infanticide. He has written, "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

A reader named Marcus, who has his own blog, Non Plus Ultra, argued that Singer's ethical position is well reasoned and worthy of serious consideration. Saying that my characterization of Singer as a fanatic was a misrepresentation, Marcus wrote:

Singer's actual position, as outlined in his collection "Writings on an Ethical Life", is less easily dismissed.

He then proceeded to synopsize Singer's argument, which includes this key example:

For instance, imagine a poor couple somewhere in the third world, whose second child is born with a severe, painful, and non-correctable disability (e.g. a severe case a spina bifida). The child itself faces a life of constant and intractable pain. If their parents try to raise the child, they face the real possibility that their first child might die, because of the resources they would have to expend on the second. In such a case, the parents might be justified in killing their second child immediately upon birth.

Summing up Singer's position, Marcus writes: "In some cases, infanticide is justified."

Now in order to look at this, let's do what is called a thought experiment. Ordinarily, thought experiments make use of far-fetched hypotheticals. In this case, however, we can use three convenient real-life examples.

Example No. 1. A jetliner crashes in the Andes. To ward off starvation, the survivors cannibalize the dead. No one blames them for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, cannibalism is morally okay.

Example No. 2. A major U.S. city is flooded. To ward off starvation and thirst, the survivors break into an abandoned grocery store and steal food and potable water. No one blames them for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, stealing is morally okay.

Example No. 3. A coastal strip of towns is flattened by a hurricane. To prevent widespread looting, the governor of the state empowers law-enforcement agencies to shoot suspected looters on sight. No one blames him for it. Conclusion: society should adopt the principle that, in some cases, shooting suspected criminals on sight is morally okay.

Does something seemed amiss? It should. The conclusions do not follow. The reason is simple. A course of action that may be perfectly understandable and justifiable in an emergency is not necessarily a course of action that can be encouraged or even permitted under normal circumstances. In a life-and-death crisis, people may have to take extraordinary actions, break the rules, and use violence or other desperate measures just to survive. But there's a difference between a temporary life-and-death crisis and everyday life. It is the difference, in fact, between anarchy and civilization.

If our daily lives were defined by the anything-goes, survival-of-the-fittest approach suitable in an emergency, then there would be no civilization to speak of. We would all be cannibalizing corpses, stealing necessities, and shooting anyone who looked at us cross-eyed, while incurring no penalty for any of it.

We don't want to live that way. That's why we agree to abide by social rules and customs in the first place. We recognize that in extraordinary circumstances these rules and customs must be temporarily put aside, but that doesn't mean we are willing to throw them overboard on a permanent basis. To do so would be to throw our whole civilization overboard and revert to the law of the jungle.

With this in mind, take another look at Singer's example, as synopsized by Marcus. Here we have a heart-wrenching situation involving a family on the edge of starvation-level poverty, faced with the prospect of sacrificing their first child in order to care for their second child. There are apparently no government relief agencies to care for the disabled child, nor any private charities offering help, nor any extended family members who might take in the child, nor any other options all. The choice is literally one of life and death, and the family makes the choice to kill the disabled infant. Most likely, no one would blame them for it. But to generalize from this emergency situation to a general social policy would be the same kind of category error that we saw in the above three examples.

Singer, remember, is not prescribing ethics for starvation-ravaged Third World countries. He is prescribing ethics for the industrialized Western world, where he lives and teaches. It is only the Western world that reads his books and pays any attention to what he has to say. And on this issue, what he has to say is entirely irrelevant in the context of the normal, ordinary, everyday lives of our citizens. Even if an impoverished family in the U.S. were to bring a severely disabled infant into the world, their situation would not resemble Singer's example. They would have access to medical care, charity, and a variety of supportive institutions to ease their burden. This is not to say that raising a disabled child would be easy -- but it would not entail the dire Hobson's choice implicit in Singer's example.

The difference between Singer's example and the world we live in is the same difference between trying to survive on a snowcapped mountain peak ... and earning a living in New York City. Or between trying to find food and drinkable water in flooded New Orleans ... and stopping at the 7-11 on the way home from work. Or between shooting looters to prevent a total breakdown of law and order in a disaster area ... and calling the police when you hear a prowler on your porch.

If we want to live in a civilized society, we have to recognize that certain rules are fundamental and can be abrogated only under the most desperate circumstances. One of those rules is that killing babies is bad.

Let me repeat this with emphasis: killing babies is bad.

It shouldn't take an ethicist to tell us this. It only takes common sense -- a quality Peter Singer evidently lacks. Which is why he is indeed a dangerous fanatic and an irrational rationalist. And not someone I would recommend as a babysitter, either.

Not even in a pinch.

No matter? Never mind ...

One of the more obvious things about Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is that it is essentially a materialistic system. Most critics of Objectivism take this for granted. Yet Rand herself denied this fact, claiming that her approach transcended the artificial dichotomy of materialism and spiritualism. She derided materialists as "mystics of muscle," epitomized by Attila the Hun. To this day, her followers indignantly reject the label of materialists.

The trouble is, Rand was able to make this case only by using a highly tendentious definition of the word materialism. Creative redefinition of familiar words was a standard Randian tactic; her definition of altruism, for instance, bears no resemblance to the ordinary usage of that term. The same could be said of such basic terms as sacrifice and selfishness. It's not really a surprise that materialism came in for the same kind of treatment.

According to Rand, materialism is a philosophic system that denies the existence of consciousness. Now, there have been a few materialists to whom this definition would apply. The behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner comes to mind. But because this position entails such obvious logical contradictions -- an intellectual theory that denies the reality of the intellect itself -- very few thinkers have embraced it.

The great majority of materialists have taken a more subtle and sophisticated position, namely, that consciousness exists but that it is ultimately reducible to physical processes. The mind, in other words, is ultimately only an expression of the brain. Consciousness is a product of the nervous system and nothing more.

This brand of materialism is extremely common today, so common that it could be described as the conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world. And it is a view that Ayn Rand unquestionably shared. She did not believe in any supernatural soul or in personal immortality. ("No supernatural dimension exists," she wrote bluntly in her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead.) Physical death, she believed, meant the end of consciousness. Thus, in her system, consciousness is an offshoot -- an epiphenomenon -- of material antecedents. She was a materialist, according to the the correct definition of the term, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

And so are most people today, or at least most Western intellectuals. The idea that the mind, the self, the personality, or the soul -- call it what you like -- could be independent of the nervous system strikes contemporary intellectuals as counterintuitive. After all, there is a great deal of evidence showing that certain mental states correspond to certain brain states. Damage to the brain, whether caused by illness or injury, is correlated with impaired thinking. Chemicals that affect the brain can directly affect mental and emotional states -- inducing or preventing depression, anxiety, hallucinations, etc.

With all of this evidence at our disposal, it seems natural to assume that the mind is directly dependent upon the brain and constitutes only an expression of the chemical and electrical processes of the brain and nervous system. But before we wholeheartedly embrace the materialist paradigm, we might want to consider some contrary data. There is, in fact, a great deal of evidence suggesting that the mind is not inextricably linked to the physical brain.

For instance,  there are so-called out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, in which a person is able to perceive the world around him while he is physically unconscious or even clinically dead. There are well-documented studies of mental telepathy, in which a test subject is able to pick up the thoughts of a person in another room. There are cases of small children who spontaneously recall what they take to be a past life, complete with accurate and verifiable details unknown to them by any normal means. There is surprisingly good evidence for the survival of consciousness after death -- so much of it that even David Fontana's recent 500 page book on the subject is barely able to cover the main lines of research, let alone all the details.

None of this is explicable according to the materialist paradigm, which is why it is generally ignored or ridiculed. It doesn't fit what we already "know" to be true, so it can't be real. Or can it? Is there a way of reconciling the obviously close correlation between mind and brain on the one hand and the evidence for supernatural or paranormal phenomena on the other? I think there is, and it is as simple as the nearest television set.

If someone who knew nothing about the technology of TV were to sit down in front of a television set, he would probably assume that the pictures and sound originate inside the magic box before him. And he would have a good deal of evidence to back up this assumption. If he turns off the TV, the pictures and sound go away. If he drops the TV and damages it, the pictures and sound will be impaired -- the picture may be fuzzy, the sound distorted. If he smashes the TV to pieces, then there will be no picture and sound coming from it ever again.

In all these respects, the TV is quite similar to the human brain. But in fact the pictures and sound on the TV set do not originate inside the TV at all. They originate as a signal that is received by the television and translated into pictures and sound by the circuitry inside the TV set. The signal is quite independent of the TV itself. Turn off the TV, damage the TV, destroy the TV -- and the signal will continue, unimpaired and uninterrupted.

The TV, in other words, is only a receiver, which, when tuned to the correct frequency, will pick up the signal and translate it into the pictures and sound that we perceive. If the receiver is rendered inoperative, then it will not, of course, pick up the signal or decode it into pictures and sound anymore. But nothing that happens to the TV will have the slightest effect on the signal itself.

Although, like any analogy, this comparison is oversimplified, it may be essentially correct to say that our brain is a receiver and our consciousness is the signal. When the receiver is operating, then the signal is picked up and translated into the appropriate physical terms. We think about moving our hand, and our nervous system picks up this thought and translates it into physical action. If the receiver (our brain) is not operating because we are in a deep trance, in a coma, or dead, then our consciousness continues, but it is no longer filtered through the nervous system and exists, in effect, outside our body -- just as out-of-body experiences would suggest.

Is this analogy a valid explanation of the relationship between mind and brain? Well, it has the advantage of reconciling what we know about the nervous system with what we know about parapsychological phenomena. It incorporates both sets of data -- unlike the materialist paradigm which has room for some of the data but not for the rest.

By the way, this analogy is not original with me. The pioneering psychological theorist, philosopher, and psychical researcher William James suggested this idea way back in the 19th century. He called it the "transmission theory" of consciousness. Nothing that has been learned in the intervening decades has disproved his hypothesis. If anything, the evidence is stronger now than it has ever been.

As I said at the outset, Ayn Rand liked to think she had resolved the dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism. Really, however, all she did was define her terms in such away as to make the dichotomy artificially disappear. William James' transmission theory, by contrast, actually does hold out the promise of resolving this dichotomy, by allowing us to see mind and brain as intimately interconnected and yet distinct.

I guess that makes William James a better philosopher than Ayn Rand. But you already knew that.

Katrina

In the wake of the Katrina disaster, I found myself feeling cynical and skeptical about the spiritual truths I have gradually been coming to accept. It seemed to me that if such a gigantic catastrophe could occur in such an arbitrary and pointless way, then maybe the materialists were right in saying that the universe is just a big accident with no meaning or higher purpose. I now think, however, that I was wrong to adopt this negative viewpoint. In fact, I may have gotten things exactly backward.

Why? Because there is no religious or spiritual tradition that regards the world as a place where only good things happen. Every religious and spiritual tradition is grounded in the profound acknowledgment of the pain and suffering that are all too often part of life on earth. Different religions offer different explanations for pain and grief, but none of them denies the reality of these things. No religious tradition is utopian, at least as far as earthly life is concerned.

Utopianism is a feature of materialistic philosophy. It was the materialist Karl Marx who claimed that the right social system, communism, could produce utopia on earth. It was the materialist Ayn Rand who claimed that the right philosophy, Objectivism, could produce utopia on earth. It is the materialist technocrats who claim that the right scientific advancements will produce utopia on earth. Utopia is a dream of materialists, not spiritualists. This is the way it must be, because materialism is rooted in egoism, and the ego, being altogether too sure of itself, is always trying to achieve perfection and always thinks that perfection can be reached if only everybody else will follow its own rules.

So the fact that a horrendous disaster has taken place does not invalidate a spiritual outlook in any way. If there is a common core to all major religious traditions, it is that this world is a vale of tears, a testing ground or, as parapsychologist Charles Tart has put it, a boot camp. We are not here primarily to be happy. We are here primarily to learn and grow -- and we learn by suffering. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus knew this 2500 years ago when he wrote these lines in Agamemnon:

God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

The translation is by Edith Hamilton.

If we look back on our own lives, I think we will see that the periods when we had the greatest opportunity for personal growth were the difficult periods, the times that tested us. The easy, carefree times were more fun, but we probably learned very little from them. We were too busy enjoying ourselves. When things are going well, our natural tendency is to relax and just go with the flow and not challenge ourselves too much. It's when things go wrong that we find out what we are made of. Utopia is not only impossible but undesirable. A world without problems would be a world without growth.

If we're looking for a bright side in Katrina, we can find one. I don't mean to be Pollyannish or to deny the terrible cost that the hurricane inflicted all along the Gulf Coast. Still, there are positives. For one thing, the death toll appears to be much lower than originally feared. Predictions of 10,000 deaths or even more seem to have been wildly exaggerated. Actual fatalities may be number in the hundreds, not the thousands or tens of thousands. The hurricane's last-minute weakening and its slight wobble to the east spared New Orleans a direct hit, which would have overtopped the levees and flooded the city more quickly and to a greater depth, while buffeting the city with high winds. In that scenario the death toll would have been immensely higher. As it was, the levees failed only after the hurricane had passed, New Orleans flooded more slowly, and many people were able to escape to higher ground or at least to their rooftops.

The disaster has also served to bring our nation together. Yes, there is a political divide between those who blame the Bush administration and those who blame state and local authorities. (Personally I think there's enough blame to go around.) But in a larger sense our country has been unified by a shared response to the tragedy. Vast amounts of money have been donated to relief organizations. People all over the country are taking refugees into their homes. Good Samaritans nationwide have volunteered to help in the rescue and rebuilding efforts. This newfound unity is not limited to our domestic population. A surprisingly long list of countries around the world have made generous donations. Kuwait, showing gratitude for their liberation from Iraq in 1991, has donated $500 million. Qatar, another small Middle Eastern nation, has donated $100 million. Those are just the highlights of international relief effort that is truly gratifying to see.

While the disaster displayed the ineptitude of federal, state, and local officials, it also placed a spotlight on the heroism of people on the ground -- the Coast Guard rescuers who airlifted people from rooftops, the doctors and nurses who remained in flooded hospitals to care for the sick even while looters fired shots at them from outside, the firefighters who continue to work in a devastated city, the police officers who remained on duty and tried to maintain order, the National Guardsmen who patrolled the city, the relief workers who brought in supplies, the reporters who risked their own safety to bring the story to us, and the ordinary people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast towns who saved themselves and their neighbors.

It is also worth noting that the disaster was, to some extent, a product of human stupidity and shortsightedness. The wetlands that served as a buffer between New Orleans and coastal storms had been allowed to erode significantly over the decades, leaving the city more vulnerable than ever before. The levee system had been built to withstand only a Category 3 storm, even though hurricanes of Category 4 and 5 are not uncommon in that region. People were warned to evacuate, and most did; while some of those who remained were unable to leave, a good number of them deliberately chose to "ride out the storm," a bad decision for which they paid the price.

Some people might ask what kind of benevolent God would allow massive hurricanes to wreak devastation in the first place. But it's worth remembering that hurricanes play a vital role in maintaining the ecosystem of tropical areas. Hurricanes dump enormous amounts of water, which serves to renew the fragile marshlands and prevent drought. When Florida went through a long dry spell, the Everglades dried out and became a tinderbox, and the result was a series of catastrophic fires. The problem was solved only when hurricanes began dousing the Everglades with rainwater. Hurricanes, however destructive they may be, are part of nature's balance.

In short, I don't think spiritualism stands indicted by the Katrina tragedy. In contrast to the utopian dreams of materialists, spiritualism has always seen this world as a place of challenge and trade-offs, where nothing is certain and happiness is never guaranteed.

As the Irish say, "In the end, this world will always break your heart."

More on Moses

I've been reading a book recommended to me by one of the readers of this blog - Spiritualism in the Old Testament by Rev. G. Maurice Elliott. (The whole book is online here.) Written in1937, the book argues that the miracles and prophesies of the Hebrew Bible may be best understood in terms of Spiritualism - i.e., mediumship and psychic phenomena.

Elliott, a Spiritualist minister, does not insist that all the Bible stories are literally true - only that they originated in a culture that took psychic phenomena for granted. Today this context has been lost, and so the stories seem bewildering, paradoxical, or simply impossible.

He makes many interesting points. Below are some representative excerpts.

With his shepherd-life began [Moses']  psychic development and, one day, after leading his flock to the sacred mountain of Horeb, "the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a thorn-bush, yet the bush was not consumed."

Spiritualists will find no difficulty in understanding this, for they are familiar with psychic lights which appear as "flames of fire" but do not burn anything.

And they know that these flames herald the appearance of messengers from the unseen.

----

They tell us that the Bible is an Eastern book, full of poetic imagery, hyperbole and oriental symbolism. They try, by every manner of means, to give naturalistic interpretations to what are really psychic phenomena. Many parts of the Bible are mistranslated simply because the scholars, in ignorance of psychic science, are unable to make any sense out of the original.

For example, the writer of Judges vi. 34, wrote "A spirit from the Lord put on Gideon," i.e., wore Gideon as a garment, clothed himself in Gideon, or, as we should say, "controlled" Gideon.

The scholars translate as follows, "The spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon." That sentence may have a "religious" note in it, but what does it mean? How and in what form did the spirit come upon Gideon?

Was the spirit God? What does "come upon" mean? Does a spirit of God himself come upon men to-day? If so, are they aware of it? Or must we regard the words of the verse as an attempt on the part of the narrator to give expression to Gideon's "mental communings" with God?

The truth is that the writer of the verse was a Spiritualist, that he wrote about a Spiritualist, and that this and all other Spiritualist narratives can only be understood and rightly translated by Spiritualists.

----

Moses was to speak and act under direct inspiration from God, while Aaron was to be a mere mouthpiece. "See," said Yahweh, "I have made thee as a god to Pharaoh, too."

Now, how are we going to account for this promotion of Moses by Yahweh to a pinnacle of solitary grandeur?

It cannot have been a concession to Moses's fear and distrust, nor can it have been a reward for his trust.

How came it that at one moment "the anger of the Lord" was kindled against Moses and at the next moment the Lord raised him to a position high above other men to be "as God" to Aaron and to Pharaoh?

There seems to be only one sufficient explanation. Moses was one of the greatest mediums the world has ever known. The Lord needed him. He was, as it were, indispensable to Yahweh for the great task of delivering the Israelites from the tyranny of Pharaoh.

Yahweh was determined to use him in spite of all his doubts and fears and polite refusals. It was not a question of merit, it was a question of faith, i.e., of psychic faculty.

Moses was "elected" by the Lord, but it was an election to responsibility and obedience, not to salvation. His promotion was due to the greatness of his gift, not to the greatness of his merit.

----

In her book, Ancient Lights, Mrs. St. Clair Stobart tells us that the whole episode of the Ten Plagues is a parable, and what she says is so excellently put that I quote it in full:

"Pharaoh represents the sceptical world that over and over again hardens its heart and demands from the psychics ever fresh proofs of the divine mandate: the magicians are our Maskelynes, our physicists, our pseudo-scientists, who can manipulate matter but who cannot see beyond the length of their conjurer's wands or the limits of the four walls of their laboratories, and who deny the possibility of an extension of the scientific world outside the limits of that small portion of the universe with which they are familiar.

"And Moses and Aaron represent the ever-growing band of brave psychic researchers, who, though diffident of their powers, are ready to risk ridicule and the loss of that which is more precious than life itself--scientific reputation--for the sake of delivering the world from the bondage of materialism and guiding it to the promised land.

"And, as of old, the faculties of the heaven-inspired psychics triumphed over the art of the earth-bound sorcerers of Pharaoh's court, so to-day will spiritual truth prevail over materialism, if it is but bravely championed.

"We have no reason to suppose that God is less willing to reveal Himself to twentieth-century mankind than to those who lived in the centuries B.C.; all that is lacking is a Moses who can see the signs and interpret them for us--a Moses who will not only inquire of the Lord, but will have the courage to obey the commands received from the spirit world."

---

The Ten Commandments were given to Moses in the "direct voice" and were then psychically written down by Yahweh on two tablets of stone. These phenomena are quite well known to Spiritualists.

I have myself been present at more than one "meeting for investigation" (that is the real meaning of the word "seance") when spirit communicators have spoken in the "direct voice" and have written messages upon paper or slates without any visible aid.

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And what of the "thick darkness"? We are told that "Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where Yahweh was." The Commandments were given in thick darkness by a voice through a trumpet. What have the anti-Spiritualist orthodox Churches to say to that?

Why do they not hurl their invectives against Moses and Yahweh for countenancing so "dark" a procedure? How can they permit this spirit communication, received in the dark, to occupy a prominent place in Church liturgies?"

Why do they not argue here, as they do on all other occasions, that if "darkness" was needed "fraud" must have been present?

Well, whether the Traditionalists or the Modernists like it or not, the fact remains that Yahweh generally communicated with Moses in a "thick cloud" or in darkness. In this connexion, it is interesting to note that at the completion of Solomon's temple "the priests brought in the ark of the covenant unto its place, into the oracle of the house, the most holy place," which was in thick darkness.

"Then spake Solomon, The Lord hath said that He would dwell in the thick darkness."

A higher critic comments thus: "The dark inner shrine was a suitable place for the Being who had chosen to shroud Himself in thick darkness." What a complete misunderstanding!

Yahweh had not chosen to "shroud" himself in thick darkness. He had chosen thick darkness as the medium through which he could best and easiest "manifest" himself.

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The Ark was more than a box. It was endowed with power to give effect to Yahweh's will. And the mere fact that Yahweh constantly manifested himself to Moses "from between the two cherubim which were upon the Ark" would cause the Ark to become saturated and impregnated with psychic power.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the "Inner Shrine" which housed the Ark was a sacred seance room called the "Holy of Holies," which was darkened by curtains and screened off from the rest of the building.

Here was the appointed place where the appointed prophets could communicate direct with Yahweh and, in one way or another by the "direct voice," by clairaudience, by automatic writing, by symbols, or by Urim and Thummim receive instruction and guidance for themselves and for the people.

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Moses had a tent and he called it "the tent of meeting." What was this "tent of meeting"? It was not, as one might imagine, a large tent in which meetings were held. It was not a primitive church where men met together to worship God. It was a simple nomad's tent which Moses and Joshua could carry and pitch.

"Now, Moses used to take the tent and to pitch it outside the camp, some distance from it, and he called it 'the tent of meeting.' And it came to pass that every one who sought the Lord went out unto the tent."

Why? Because Moses, their great leader and medium, was there in this sacred seance room.

Yes, the "tent of meeting" was a small but sacred seance room. It was the "house of God" to the people, the house to which men went to meet with God, to tell him about their difficulties and to ask Him questions, and to receive from Him instruction and guidance through His chosen medium Moses.

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In contrast to the magnanimity of Moses, we have the petty jealousies of his sister Miriam and his brother Aaron who "spake against Moses and said, 'Hath the Lord spoken to Moses alone? Hath he not also spoken to us?'"

They were jealous of his gifts and unique relationship with Yahweh. That was despicable enough, but they must needs find fault with him for having dared to marry an Ethiopian woman without first asking their consent. I think Miriam was jealous of her; she certainly had to bear the blame.

Yahweh was determined to put a stop to this family feud, so he intervened in order to vindicate Moses unique position as his prophet, and "spake suddenly to Moses and Aaron and Miriam summoning them to come to the tent of meeting."

Yahweh stood at the door of the tent, calling Aaron and Miriam to come forward.

"Hear now my words," he said, "if there be a prophet among you I make myself known to him by visions, I talk to him in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses. I speak to him directly and he sees my very form."

Could anything be clearer?

Moses was a "direct voice" medium, a "materializing" medium, a clairvoyant and a clairaudient. Yahweh made it clear to Aaron and Miriam that Moses, unlike them, was his chosen spokesman, his mouthpiece, "I speak to him mouth to mouth and face to face."

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We now come to the story of the twelve men who were sent to "spy out the land of Canaan." It is too well known to need re-telling. But a brief glance at the story shows that Moses regards Yahweh as his guide and not as the eternal God. Consequently he does not always agree with Yahweh's judgments, but points out to him where he thinks his judgment is unwise or his memory at fault.

Had Moses thought for one moment that Yahweh was the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God, he would not have dared to question his words. But listen to this: "Yahweh said to Moses, How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, for all the signs and wonders which I have wrought among them? I will destroy them with pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a nation greater and mightier than they."

Moses thought that was a most unwise step to take, and he told Yahweh so in these words:

"If thou destroyest the people, the Egyptians will hear of it, and the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak saying, Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land which he had sworn to give them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness."

So Moses suggests a much better course, "Display thy power, I pray thee, but let it be displayed in carrying out thy promise that the Lord is slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and who will by no means clear the guilty."

Yahweh sees that Moses's way is the better way, and says to him, "I have pardoned them "according to thy word."

If Moses had thought that Yahweh was in any sense the one eternal God the story does not make sense. To Moses Yahweh was a guide, his guide, Israel's guide and, as such, Moses could talk to him as a man speaks to his friend.

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A few comments. Slate writing in darkened seance rooms is often fraudulent; it can be accomplished via a fairly simple magic trick. However, there have been some cases of slate writing that appear to be genuine.

Although darkness is certainly conducive to fraud, it also appears to be a real prerequisite for certain types of psychic phenomena, especially those involving physical manifestations.

If Elliott's overall interpretation is on the mark, then it would appear that seances, automatic writing, clairvoyance, clairaudience (in which a spirit voice is heard subjectively), "direct voice" (in which a spirit voice is heard objectively), materializations, precognition, and other psychic phenomena date back to the earliest days of civilization - and perhaps even earlier than that.

Moses, monotheism, and mediumship

Recently I came across some interesting ideas in a book called Seances with God by Dr. Jackie Jones-Hunt.

The thesis of Seances with God is that many historical reports of miraculous communications from the divine may actually be somewhat garbled or misremembered accounts of mediumship. It's a highly intriguing idea, although, unfortunately, the book itself is not very well written. Dr. Jones-Hunt is not a professional author, and she could have greatly benefited from the assistance of a good copy editor or ghostwriter. Her syntax is scrambled, her punctuation arbitrary, her writing style unwieldy and repetitive. Nevertheless, for those who persevere through the tangled thicket of her prose, there are rewards in store.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book involves the author's interpretation of Biblical texts. I realize that this is a controversial area, and that some people -- in fact, a great many people -- take these ancient writings quite literally. My own view is that the historical parts of the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament, were compiled from long-held oral traditions -- stories passed down by word-of-mouth from one generation to another. Such stories are often grounded in real historical events and may retain some factual details, but they tend to be embellished and reinterpreted over time, producing a mix of authentic history, legendary accretions, and mythological overlays. In some cases the original context and meaning of the story are lost by the time it is finally written down, and a new understanding is imposed on the narrative.

Something like this may have happened with the story of Moses. There may well have been a real historical figure named Moses, although there is no record of any such person outside the Bible. And he may have led a rebellion of oppressed Hebrew slaves against the Egyptian Pharaoh -- though, again, there is no extra-Biblical record of any mass exodus of slaves from Egypt.

Whatever the facts were, there does seem to be a kernel of historical truth to the story -- but as Jones-Hunt observes, this historical truth may be somewhat different from the later, more orthodox interpretation placed on it by the final redactors of the book of Exodus.

To put it bluntly, it is possible that Moses was a medium -- someone with the psychic gift of communicating with the spirits of the dead or with other incorporeal beings.

The story, after all, makes it abundantly clear that Moses was chosen not for his public speaking abilities, nor for his courage, nor for his prestige, but because he could so clearly hear the divine voice. What set Moses apart from other men, it appears, was an unusually advanced ability to commune with supernatural agents and even to manifest them in physical form under the right conditions.What may be preserved in his story is a memory of genuine psychic and mediumistic practices.

Now, I realize that the Bible depicts Moses speaking with God himself and not merely with some departed human soul. And yet the issue is not quite so clearcut. As Jones-Hunt points out, the term "God" is often used interchangeably with the term "angel" (literally "messenger") in the Hebrew Bible. This is apparent, for instance, in the famous scene where Moses first encounters the Lord in a burning bush.

The angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a flame blazing from the middle of a bush.... God called to him from the middle of the bush. "Moses, Moses!" he said. "Here I am," he answered. (Exodus 3:2, 4:2; all quotations are from the New Jerusalem Bible)

Here the manifestation is described first as an "angel of Yahweh" and then as God (Yahweh) himself. Other examples could be cited. It appears that the distinction between the Lord and an angel of the Lord was not carefully maintained in these ancient stories.

It is at least arguable, then, that while Moses' visions have been interpreted by later redactors as direct visions of God, they were originally experienced as visions of some lesser but still exalted supernatural being(s). In other words, the voice that Moses clairvoyantly heard calling his name may have been the same kind of voice that mediumistically gifted people hear today.

In this context, it may be worth noting that many mediums learn to enter a trance state by gazing at a flickering flame. Is it possible that some dim historical memory of this practice lies behind the fact that Moses' vision takes place in a burning bush?

Moses initially resists the call he hears, saying he is not an adequate spokesman for God. At this point the voice advises him to rely on his brother Aaron to speak for him.

He will speak to the people in your place; he will be your mouthpiece, and you will be as the god inspiring him. (Exodus 4:10 -- 16)

Similarly, Exodus 7:1-2 has God tell Moses:

"Look, I have made you as a god for Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron is to be your prophet. You must say whatever I command you, and your brother Aaron will report to Pharaoh that he is to let the Israelites leave his city."

These interesting passages raise the question: Is the voice Moses hears actually the voice of God, or is it the voice of one who "as a god" inspires him to be a prophet? Remember that in the ancient world there was a long tradition, in many different cultures, of people entering a trance and receiving inspiration from a godlike being. Persons who had this ability were highly regarded, whether they were oracles, Magi, or shamans. There may not have been a clear distinction in ancient times between communication from God or a god and communication from the spirit of a departed ancestor. The practice of ancestor worship in some cultures suggests that the line between ancestors and gods could be easily blurred.

Anyone who practices mediumship knows there is a risk in contacting and channeling otherworldly spirits. The danger is that sometimes a malevolent or destructive spirit may attempt to take possession of the medium while he or she is entranced. An excellent and disturbing book on this subject is The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, by Joe Fisher. Fisher recounts his own acquaintance with a medium who became the channel for malicious entities, and the damaging consequences for the medium herself and those around her. Fisher himself became convinced that he had been targeted by these "hungry ghosts," and tragically he committed suicide in 2001.

With this in mind, we may be able to make sense of an otherwise baffling passage in which Yahweh suddenly attacks Moses.

On the journey, when he had halted for the night, Yahweh encountered him and try to kill him. Then Zipporah, taking up a flint, cut off her son' s foreskin and with it touched his feet and said, "You are my blood-bridegroom!" So he let him go. She said, "Blood-bridegroom" then, with reference to the circumcision. (Exodus 4:24-26).

Obviously this passage, in its present form, is seen as explaining the origin of circumcision, though what exactly that explanation consists of is far from clear. The episode's strangeness and ambiguity suggest an underlying historical memory that has been transmitted over many generations, its original meaning lost and a new meaning somewhat shakily imposed. Do we have here the imperfectly preserved recollection of a medium's struggle against an unwanted, invading spirit -- a "hungry ghost"?

It is well-known that mediums require the right atmosphere in which to operate. They need privacy, quiet, and -- especially when physical manifestations are attempted -- very dim light or darkness and a confined space, known as a "cabinet," in which they can concentrate their energies. All of these purposes were served by the Tent of Meeting, a portable sanctum suited for a people on the move, living a nomadic lifestyle in the desert -- a lifestyle later mythologized as forty years of enforced wandering.

Moses used to take the Tent and pitch it outside the camp, far away from the camp. He called it the Tent of Meeting. Anyone who wanted to consult Yahweh would go out to the Tent of Meeting, outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the Tent, the people would all stand up and every man would stand at the door of his tent and watch Moses until he went into the Tent. And whenever Moses went into the Tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and station itself at the entrance to the Tent, while Yahweh spoke with Moses. The people could all see the pillar of cloud stationed at the entrance to the Tent and the people would all stand up and bow low, each at the door of his tent. Yahweh would talk to Moses face to face, as a man talks to his friend, and afterwards he would come back to the camp, but the young man who was his servant, Joshua son of Nun, never left the inside of the Tent. (Exodus 33:7-11)

Here we have some of the standard elements of mediumship -- a secluded spot, a darkened interior, a manifestation of mist or fog (and in other passages, fire; for instance, Exodus 40:38), and the experience of speaking with a supernatural entity "face to face." The Bible is quite insistent in saying that Moses was the last man ever to speak with God on such intimate terms. "Since then, there has never been such a prophet in Israel as Moses, the man whom Yahweh knew face to face." (Deuteronomy 34:10)

If this wording is to be taken literally, it suggests the physical manifestation of a spirit being. So-called physical phenomena of this type have, in fact, been reported in mediumistic demonstrations throughout the last 150 years. These phenomena can involve mist, glowing balls of light ("fire"), audible voices, and partial or complete materializations of human figures. Although many of these demonstrations have turned out to be fraudulent, some continue to defy any "normal" explanation.

In another passage we learn that the Tent of Meeting had an inner chamber protected by a curtain:

On the first day of the first month, you will erect the Dwelling, the Tent of Meeting, and place the ark of the Testimony in it and screen the ark with the curtain. (Exodus 40:2-3)

It was in this inner chamber that the supernatural manifestations occurred -- just as the more overt physical phenomena originate in the screened off cabinet of the seance room.

The need for an enclosed, darkened space in which the medium's powers can be fully concentrated may explain another Biblical passage involving Moses -- this one in the New Testament. I'm talking about the famous scene of the Transfiguration, in which Jesus leads three of his disciples to a mountaintop and there encounters both Moses and the prophet Elijah.

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain on their own by themselves. There in their presence he was transfigured: his clothes became brilliantly white, whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them. Elijah appeared to them with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus. Then Peter spoke to Jesus, "Rabbi," he said, "it is wonderful for us to be here; so let us make three shelters, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say; they were so frightened. (Mark 9:2-6)

Commentators have wondered ever since why Peter would suggest building three shelters. Even the author of Mark's gospel does not seem to understand the reference, justifying it with the words "He did not know what to say." It is possible, however, that Peter was not merely babbling in fright. The word which is here translated "shelters" is the Greek word "tabernacles," which can also designate shrines, tents, booths, or dwellings. In fact, the Tent of Meeting was a tabernacle itself. And just as the Tent of Meeting may have served as a seance room for Moses' mediumship, in which supernatural manifestations took physical form, so the shelters suggested by Peter may have been intended to aid in the manifestation of Moses or Elijah in the Transfiguration. (I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that Arthur Conan Doyle, a devotee of psychic phenomena, made this suggestion a century ago.)

All of this is not to suggest that Jesus was "only" a medium, or that Moses was, either. But it is at least possible that what we would today call psychic or mediumistic gifts played a role in the inspiration of these spiritual masters and in their miraculous deeds.

Was Moses a medium? He heard a supernatural voice (clairaudience). He was inspired by a supernatural message (channeling). He was associated with manifestations of clouds and fire and perhaps with more elaborate physical phenomena. And he brought an enlightened, spiritually advanced message to his people, just as some channelers claim to do today.

Of course, there are many other elements in the story of Moses, and this hypothesis certainly cannot cover them all. It may, however, help to make sense of parts of the story -- especially those parts that often seem most remote and bewildering. And, when viewed in this way, the story of Moses takes its place alongside the spiritualistic practices of other cultures, in the ancient world and even in our own.