Michael Prescott's Blog

Rooting for JREF

I don't often root for the skeptics at the James Randi Educational Foundation, but an email I just received from Winston Wu of SCEPCOP has, for once, put me squarely in the skeptics' corner.

Here's the complete, unedited email:

Upcoming 9/11 team debate on Coast to Coast on July 31, which I'm consulting on

Hi all,

Richard Gage of AE911Truth.org and a team of scientists are scheduled to debate a team of JREF debunkers on the Coast to Coast program. Gage has put me on the mailing list after reading my suggestions to him in how to debate the JREF crowd, as a consultant to his team.

Gage and his team of scientists, which include Kevin Ryan and Neils Harritt, will debate a team from the JREF. All we know is that Dave Thomas will be on the other side. We don't know who else they will have on their team.

The debate is scheduled on Coast to Coast for July 31 at this point. So mark that on your calendar. I think you can listen in either on your AM radio station or the coast to coast website. http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

I talked to Gage for an hour on the phone and gave him some insights and key strategies for exposing the JREFers and their kind, which are outlined on my SCEPCOP site: http://www.debunkingskeptics.com

I've also announced this debate in my SCEPCOP forum, which I will post further updates to:

http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1220

Anyhow, if any of you have any tips or suggestions for Mr. Gage and his team, feel free to post them here, and I will forward them to him.

Should he cover a few strong undebunkable arguments, or try to cover all ten of the features of controlled demolition of the WTC? Which arguments should be emphasized most?

The debate will be primarily about the WTC and Building 7 collapse, not about the other issues surrounding 9/11.

Thanks,

Winston

For the record, I think the 9-11 "Truth" movement is literally insane. Tying this lunacy to the defense of serious parapsychological studies does infinitely more harm than good. 

I'm sure the JREF people will make mincemeat of the clueless conspiracy clowns who peddle this bilge. All of the supposedly "undebunkable" arguments for "controlled demolition" have been dismantled countless times. The best one-stop source for reasoned responses to these arrant claims is the now-famous Popular Mechanics article from 2005. 

Whatever value SCEPCOP might have had as a vehicle for informed criticism of skeptical positions has been nullified by the decision to side publicly with the "Truthers."

Good grief! When is "our side" ever going to stop shooting itself in the foot?

In the dreamtime

Sometime on Saturday morning I had my first lucid dream. I'd read about these things, but never experienced one. However, my reading probably came in handy, because it allowed me to recognize that I was in a dream state.

In the dream, I was expecting the mailman to deliver a package to me. (In reality, I was expecting a package to arrive on Saturday, so this thought was obviously on my mind.) As I went through my home toward the door, I suddenly realized that the foyer was completely different from anything in my actual residence. At this point, realization struck, and I said to myself, This isn't real. It's a dream. I'm having a lucid dream!

As I said, reading about lucid dreams probably played a key role in my ability to become self-aware at this moment. One of the points made in lucid-dream literature is that you should be on the lookout for things that don't match up with reality. If you suddenly notice that there's something wrong with your environment, something that doesn't match your knowledge and recollection of the physical world, then you should say, Maybe this is a dream. And as you can see, that's exactly what happened here.

I was pretty excited to be having a lucid dream, and immediately I started to worry that I would lose it somehow -- that my concentration would fail and I would slip out of the lucid state. I remember touching the wall of the foyer and feeling its solidity and texture while watching my hand against the wall. All of this was intended, of course, to keep me "in the moment" as long as possible.

Now self-aware, I went to the door and opened it. What I found outside was not my actual street, but a breathtakingly beautiful view of a wide expanse of blue water -- possibly the ocean or a vast lake or bay. The weather was bright and clear, and the color of the water was almost painfully lovely.

Excited, I set about exploring the rest of my house. Although the details have faded somewhat, I recall walking through a series of spacious and beautifully appointed rooms, much larger and nicer than my actual home. I think I passed a very large flatscreen TV mounted on a wall (I don't actually own one of these), so evidently there is television in dreamland!

Since I was self-aware, I knew I was seeing an idealized dream-picture of a place to live, and that mundane reality couldn't equal it. While I don't remember climbing any stairs, apparently there was a second floor, because I remember looking out through a rear window and seeing the ocean or lake (dotted with white sails)  in one direction, a large sparkling community swimming pool in another direction, and directly across from me, a meticulously tended greensward dividing the rear of my home from a row of tree-shaded townhouses. I believe there were some (unidentifiable) people on some of the decks and patios.I had the impression that this neighborhood was ideally situated between the beach and a forest.

Incidentally, I felt pretty sure that my home was also a townhouse, not a detached structure. It might seem odd that I would picture a condo as opposed to a single-family home, or see a community swimming pool instead of my own private pool. But I've lived my whole adult life in apartments and condos, so I guess this is what feels most natural to me.

During my inspection of my fancy new digs, I occasionally reached out to touch a wall (one of them had very nice wood paneling) and thereby ground myself in the environment. There was no sense of being disembodied, but the only part of my body that I clearly visualized was my right hand as it touched the walls. I did pay particular attention to my hand, because the lucid-dream literature had advised me to do this in order to maintain focus. As you can see, I was thinking pretty logically, reviewing what I knew about lucid dreams and taking the recommended steps.

The whole experience was highly enjoyable, and I did my best to prolong the event -- but eventually my thoughts started to wonder, and to my regret I found I was slipping out of the lucid state. I don't remember anything afterward, though presumably I continued to dream in the normal way.

When I awoke, I recalled the dream in a fair amount of detail, which is unusual for me; normally I remember only disconnected fragments of dreams. But at no time, either during the dream or when thinking about it afterward, did I ever imagine that it was a "real" experience. I knew it was a dream while I was experiencing it, and I knew it was a dream when I recalled it upon waking. In this respect, at least, the experience was different from many reported near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, which very often are described as being not dreamlike at all, but rather being real -- in fact, "realer than real."

Maybe some lucid dreams have this "realer than real" quality, but mine did not. I would not describe the experience as being real, although it did stir some strong emotions -- mainly of aesthetic appreciation for the décor of my home and the natural beauty surrounding it. Even while I was engaged in the exploration of my dream home, I was quite aware that I was dreaming and that the perfection of my accommodations was wishful thinking on my part. As far as I know, virtually no NDErs feel this way about their experiences, and a great many OBErs also draw a sharp distinction between their out-of-body excursions and even the most vivid dreams. (The closest thing I've had to an OBE was a strangely intense dreamlike experience that I described in an earlier post. I don't know if this was a legitimate OBE or not.)

It would seem to me, then, at least based on this one experience, that there is a qualitative difference between a typical NDE and a lucid dream. That doesn't mean an NDE couldn't be some other kind of hallucination, but whatever it is, I doubt it is of the lucid-dream variety.

Dialing it up to 11

As you've probably heard, the big news in publishing these days is a trilogy of Swedish thrillers by the late Stieg Larsson. The first was titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which Entertainment Weekly calls "the hottest book on the planet," and I guess this is true, at least until the next hot thing comes along.

Curious, I bought one of the books. It happened to be the second one in the series,  The Girl Who Played with Fire, because this was the one available at my local drugstore. Having read about 100 pages of the 700-page book, I have some ideas about why the "girl" of the title, Lisbeth Salander, has become a breakout character.  

But before I proceed, I should warn you that what follows contains some spoilers, not only about the second book, but about the first book also. That's because Played with Fire incorporates some of Dragon Tattoo's plot developments into its background story. So if you plan to read these books and you want to come to them fresh, read no further.

Okay, so why is Salander (she is always identified by her last name) such a runaway success with readers?

First, here is a list of Salander's traits as we know them after 100 pages of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

She is a genius with a photographic memory, who is currently trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. (A mathematician did solve it a few years ago, but she refuses to look at his work because she wants to solve it herself.)

She is only 4'11", weighs 90 pounds, has a childlike face, and has many tattoos and some piercings.

Her childhood was spent in foster homes. At one point she was repeatedly raped by her guardian. She took her revenge by immobilizing him and tattooing "I am a sex pervert" (or words to that effect) on his groin. She has been shadowing this guy ever since and making his life hell.

She is an expert hacker and used her skills to drain the accounts of a corrupt financier, acquiring 3 billion kronor ($300 million US) for herself.

Now independently wealthy, she has spent a year traveling to various exotic locales.

She is a martial arts expert who can knock down an opponent twice her size.

She has no close friends and is emotionally underdeveloped.

She was also physically underdeveloped in the chest area until she used some of her newfound wealth to get breast implants.

She helps people who are in trouble.

She has an active but rather impersonal sex life and runs away from commitments.

There may be other things, but those are the highlights.

Now the obvious thing to say is that Salander is an over-the-top character, having many far-out traits. She's not just smart, she's a genius. She's not just well off, she's worth hundreds of millions. She's not just petite, she's positively diminutive.

Moreover, many of her traits are wish-fulfillment exercises. At one time or another, most of us have fantasized about being insanely wealthy, having unlimited leisure time, having kick-ass computer skills, taking revenge on someone who has wronged us, being strong enough to take down any opponent in a fight, or being so super-smart that we can handle the most complex intellectual problems with ease.

So one thing Larsson evidently did was make a list of things he wished he could do or be, and then give Salander many of these qualities.

But these over-the-top assets are balanced by equally dramatic liabilities. Salander didn't just have a bad childhood; she had a nightmarish childhood. She doesn't merely have few friends, she has no friends. She's very very short, very very thin, and (prior to surgical enhancement) very very flat-chested. She doesn't just have one tattoo, she has many. There's something creepy about her. She's sort of like Morticia of the Addams Family, in a way - a strange female with minimal affect and a bizarre appearance. Normal people are uncomfortable around her, the way they are around Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory.

So she's not a exercise in pure wish-fulfillment fantasy like, say, James Bond. All things considered, I don't think most readers would want to be Salander, any more than TV viewers want to be Sheldon or Morticia.

What, then, are we left with? In the old days, by which I mean ten years ago, it was enough to have a "strong female character" - think of Kay Scarpetta in Patricia Cornwell's books. These days, however, strong female characters are a dime a dozen. So now the strong female character has to be almost impossibly skilled in certain areas - not just smart but Albert Einstein-smart; not just self-reliant but capable of kayoing an NFL linebacker. But since this would make her too good to be true, she has to have balancing defects that are just as implausible. She's a kickass math genius ... emotionally scarred by the worst upbringing of all time. She's a nymphomaniac sex bomb ... who's tiny, anorexic, and flat-chested. She's a fabulously wealthy world traveler ... who has no friends.

Everything is dialed up to 11. Both the strengths and the weaknesses are magnified, creating a new kind of balance that seems somehow believable because it's all equally exaggerated. If only the strengths were highlighted, she would be too perfect for our cynical age. If only the weaknesses were highlighted, she would be such a mess that reading about her would be an exercise in despair.

You can see this approach in other popular characters. Take Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme. Upside: He's not just a clever cop, he's a brilliant thinker with Sherlock Holmes levels of insight. Downside: he's handicapped, and not just with a bum leg or a scarred hand; he's a quadriplegic unable to move anything but his head and one finger. Outsized asset balanced by outsized liability.

Or take TV's Dr. House. Not just a good doctor - a great doctor, performing medical miracles every week. And not just a grouchy guy - an antisocial misfit who alienates everyone around him (and is partly crippled and addicted to pain meds). Outsized assets, outsized liabilities.

I think these characters work because they allow people to indulge in wish fulfillment ("wouldn't it be cool to be a lifesaving doc like House?") while also allowing people to stand back and feel superior ("wow, that House is one messed-up dude"). On the one hand, they give us the opportunity to fantasize about having nearly superhuman abilities, while on the other hand they allow us to feel better about who we actually are. Plus, the roughly balanced positive and negative traits somehow create an impression of "realism," even though these characters are not the least bit realistic.

As a fiction writer myself (albeit one whose career is in abeyance these days), would I want to write this kind of character? Probably not. I wouldn't know how to do it and probably wouldn't believe in it if I tried.

But this does seem to be the trend. And if Stieg Larsson had lived to see his books in print, he would have been a very wealthy man.

Sunday fun day

A scintillating smorgasbord of toothsome tidbits for your enjoyment and edification ...

I'm thrilled that teenage sailor Abby Sunderland has been rescued at sea. But she and her family need to brush up on their PR skills. Abby's first comment was that she wants to attempt her near-fatal solo circumnavigation stunt again. There's a fine line between courage and foolhardiness ... Meanwhile her dad responded to criticism of the venture by declaring that his family are "adventurers," not "accountants." However this was intended, it has the ring of: We want to have our fun, and we don't care who foots the bill. Not the way to win friends and influence people.

Rolling Stone has a lengthy, well-researched article on the oil spill and seems to assign blame pretty fairly. By the way, why don't we have a catchy name for this crisis yet? I nominate "Godspilla."

Less than two years into his term, President Barack Obama has already played more golf than George W. Bush did in his entire presidency. Maybe Obama would have visited the oil spill sooner if someone had told him it was in the Golf of Mexico. Ba-da-boom!

Speaking of golf, Tiger Woods' game is now officially in the toilet, which only makes my magnificent poem "Tigerwoodsias" more timely and meaningful than ever.

Still on sports, the L.A. Dodgers reportedly hired a Russian psychic to beam energy at the team and improve their performance. For his services they forked over a six-figure salary. This sounds flaky even to me.

You want flaky? Alvin Greene is the strangest political story of the year. He had no money, no organization, no advertising, no name recognition, and apparently did no campaigning. He is currently unemployed after leaving the military under a cloud, doesn't own a car, lives with his elderly father in the house where he grew up, is facing a felony charge that carries a prison sentence, and seems painfully inarticulate in media interviews. How the heck did this guy win the Democratic Party nomination for US Senator -- and with 60% of the vote, no less? Does it really come down to the fact that his name was first on the ballot? ... "There is something genuinely mysterious about this whole thing," says former DNC chair Don Fowler. I've got to agree.  

Legendary illustrator Frank Frazetta died in May. Growing up, I was fascinated by his evocative cover art for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar books and Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Along with special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, who celebrates his 90th birthday later this month, Frazetta helped usher in the current era of eye-popping visual design in movies and videogames.

A movie version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was scheduled to commence filming last Friday. It's actually the first in a series of four, count 'em four, movies to be based on the epic novel. The producer is an exercise equipment tycoon with no movie experience. The director is a newbie. The screenwriter has two ten-minute shorts and an unreleased low-budget horror movie to his credit. And the cast? Well, as of two weeks ago they still didn't have a cast ... Again, there's a fine line between courage and foolhardiness. In this case, I'm thinking we may be looking at the next Titanic. I don't mean the movie Titanic, I mean the actual ship.

The wheat and the chaff

When you read a lot of material about the paranormal, you encounter all kinds of claims. Sometimes it becomes difficult to separate the strong cases from the weaker ones. It can even be confusing and discouraging, as the weaker cases start to overwhelm the stronger ones in your mind.

A possible approach to this problem is to ask yourself, "If this were the only evidence I had for a particular claim, would I believe it?" In this way, you can separate lines of investigation that otherwise might run together in your thoughts.

Admittedly, this method is somewhat subjective, since it depends on what you personally would accept as adequate evidence for any given claim. But at least it provides you with a method, however rough, for discriminating among the various strands of evidence that present themselves to you.

Here are some examples of my personal evaluations of different kinds of claims.

If the reports of people taking hallucinogenic drugs like DMT were the only evidence for the existence of other planes of reality, would I believe in those other planes? I would not. I would assume that the elaborate scenarios visualized by users of psychedelic drugs are woven out of the material of the unconscious mind.

If Robert Monroe's reports of his out-of-body experiences were the only evidence for such experiences, would I believe in OBEs? I would not. As I've written elsewhere, Monroe's accounts are frequently so bizarre that they sound more like dreams or hallucinations than real experiences.

If past-life hypnotic regression were the only evidence for reincarnation, would I believe in reincarnation? I would not. Hypnosis is not necessarily reliable as a method of obtaining factual information. Hypnotized subjects may confabulate to please the hypnotist, and may draw on long-buried memories of books and movies from years ago in order to fill out their narratives with convincing details. D. Scott Rogo's excellent book The Search for Yesterday offers a detailed examination of past-life memories obtained through hypnosis, and provides serious grounds for doubting their validity in at least some instances.

If the investigations of Ian Stevenson, and like-minded researchers such as Jim Tucker and Carol Bowman, were the only evidence for reincarnation, would I believe in reincarnation? Possibly, yes. At the very least, these studies strongly indicate that something paranormal -- something that cannot be explained by any "normal" means -- is going on. Whether it is reincarnation or some form of spirit obsession/possession or some other phenomenon, I don't know. But a lot of this evidence seems very good to me.

If the only evidence for psychokinesis were the reported phenomena of Uri Geller, would I believe in PK? Probably not. Too many questions have been raised about some of Geller's more bizarre claims -- for instance, being in telepathic contact with extraterrestrials. Plus, there is Geller's undeniable gift for showmanship, which at the very least blurs the line between genuine phenomena and stage magic.

If the only evidence for psychokinesis were the reported phenomena of Eusapia Palladino, would I believe in PK? Probably, yes. Though Palladino was unquestionably capable of cheating, she also seems to have produced genuine phenomena in circumstances that preclude fraud. The 1908 Naples sittings are the prime example. I think it is highly unlikely that a team of very experienced investigators, who among them had debunked more than 100 physical mediums, and who observed Palladino in adequate light, taking strenuous precautions, would be completely fooled over a long series of sittings.

If the only evidence for apparitions consisted of the so-called "crisis apparition" cases collected by the Society for Psychical Research in the late 19th century, would I believe in apparitions? Yes, I would. The sheer quantity of cases accumulated by Edmund Gurney and FWH Myers, and the high quality of the better-documented ones, convinces me that crisis apparitions are a real phenomenon.

If the only evidence for mediumship consisted of the sittings of Edgar Cayce, would I believe in mediumship? No, I wouldn't. Most of Cayce's channeled information consisted of nostrums intended to cure various ailments. No systematic effort was made to determine if the cures were successful, and most of the remedies seem dubious at best. Cayce's predictions have sometimes proved incorrect, and his reconstructions of the past are also open to serious challenge by archaeologists and historians.

If the only evidence for mediumship consisted of the performances of contemporary TV mediums like John Edward and George Anderson, would I believe in mediumship? Probably not. Although watching John Edward on TV got me interested in mediumship in the first place, I could never rule out the possibility -- however unlikely -- that he was faking it in some incredibly clever way. After all, he controlled the venue, and most of his appearances were edited. While I think Edward is probably for real, I base this opinion on my knowledge of other mediums rather than Edward alone.

If the only evidence for mediumship consisted of the investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard, would I believe in mediumship? Yes, I would. Both of those ladies were extensively examined by highly capable researchers over a period of 20 years. They remain the most thoroughly tested in mediums in history, and I cannot see any remotely plausible non-paranormal explanation for their accomplishments.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, obviously. But perhaps it gives some idea of how I would try to distinguish between relatively strong and relatively weak evidence. Once having accepted the stronger evidence, I probably do have a tendency to be more accepting of some of the weaker cases as well. For instance, since I think PK is possible, I'm more inclined to think Uri Geller can actually do it. But Geller's evidence on its own would not convince me.  

It's probably natural to become less skeptical about certain areas of evidence when you have overcome your initial skepticism in related areas. But I do think it's useful to occasionally review all the evidence as dispassionately as possible, and to separate the wheat from the chaff.

　

Separated at death?

I've just started reading an interesting book by Peter Novak, The Lost Secret of Death: Our Divided Souls and the Afterlife. As the title indicates, the book claims to have found a common theme of ancient religions: namely, that the human soul is "bipartite," consisting of the personality on one hand and a kind of life force on the other, and that, after death, the two halves typically separate, pursuing different destinies. Novak believes that this "lost secret" can reconcile the apparent contradictions between different spiritual teachings; for instance, one part of the soul undergoes reincarnation while the other part remains in an eternal heavenly environment.

I'm rather skeptical of this theory, though I have yet to read very far in the book. It seems to me that many of these ancient traditions can be explained equally well by the idea that the soul sheds its "astral body" (or "etheric body," "soul body," etc.) after death. The so-called "second death," which Novak takes to mean the separation of the two halves of the bipartite soul, could perhaps refer simply to the sloughing off of the astral body. A Spiritualist interpretation of the "second death" is offered by Michael Tymn here (the link is to a page in Google's cache because the original page no longer exists; you may need to scroll down for the text).

In any event, Novak's theory is at least interesting and worth considering. One passage that I found particularly notable was his description of Hinduism and its attitudes toward the two parts, or aspects, of the human soul. I felt that this brief discussion very neatly summed up the age-old controversy between two opposing mystical camps: those who believe that the one "true" soul is an impersonal witness, and those who believe that the one "true" soul is largely indistinguishable from the personality.

The relevant excerpt from The Lost Secret of Death follows.

--------

Modern Hinduism still teaches that two different entities coexist in the human body, the atman and the jiva. Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most well-known apologist for Hinduism today, writes "many people might wonder why the soul has to be divided in this way ... the distinction between them is absolutely necessary." During life these two are integrated deeply together, but after death they divide, after which the jiva, or astral-emotional body, is thought to deteriorate.

The atman, or inner witness, is the objective conscious self, the part of one's inner being that is eternally unchanging and observant. The jiva, on the other hand, is the more familiar, personal, subjective self which is always changing, but may or may not be eternal. Atman is to jiva as substance is to form. These two are intimate partners in life, and just as Egypt's ka was associated with form, so too the atman needs the jiva in order to take on form and definition, and thereby experience life on Earth. The jiva gives the inner witness the sense or experience of having a subjective self with personal limitations and boundaries; it defines our sense of personal identity, telling us where we stop and the rest of the universe begins. Often thought of as a mirror that reflects the atman back to itself, the jiva is sometimes said to be an illusion, that all one is seeing or experiencing is a partial, limited reflection of the atman itself.

Strongly associated in Hindu thought with subjective awareness, the jiva provides all personal psychological experiences such as feelings, desires, likes, dislikes, and memories, as well as all subjective impressions, perceptions, and interpretations. The atman, on the other hand, is closely associated with an objective perspective; even the empirical subject himself is perceived as an object from the point of view of the atman, which sees everything, even itself, through dispassionate, unattached, objective eyes. When viewed from the perspective of the atman, the jiva seems to be a fraud, nothing more than an impermanent, haphazardly built structure of mental and emotional habits. Similarly, however, the detached, emotionless, disassociated perspective of the atman also seems to be a lie from the personal, subjective, deeply involved, connected-to-everything perspective of the jiva. Each seems false from the perspective of the other, yet each needs the other to experience anything at all. [pp. 15-16]

Change of address

I've been meaning to post this info for a while, but I keep forgetting.

Michael Tymn's excellent blog has moved to a new location:

http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/

Mike specializes in afterlife investigations that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lot of fascinating evidence from this era might be overlooked if not for his ongoing efforts.

Readers of this blog would be sure to enjoy Mike's book The Articulate Dead, probably the best overview of early research into life after death that I've read.

Past and future lives

In 1986 psychotherapist Joel Whitton and author Joe Fisher published Life Between Life, a book recounting Whitton's experiments in hypnotic past-life regression. Actually "past-life" is something of a misnomer, because while Whitton did explore his patients' alleged past lives, he was primarily interested in what he called the "interlife," the timeless and spaceless period between incarnations.

The first half of the book consists mainly of a general overview of the subject of reincarnation. Here, I think the authors are sometimes too eager to push the view that belief in reincarnation is nearly universal. For instance, there seems to be some conflation of two distinct beliefs: that the soul preexists its earthly incarnation, and that the soul is repeatedly incarnated. Cicero is quoted as saying that young children's facility for learning is "a strong proof of man knowing most things before birth." But Cicero was not maintaining that the soul undergoes multiple incarnations, merely that it exists on the spiritual plane before taking on a physical body. The church father Origen held essentially the same view, which is misrepresented in Life Between Life as an advocacy of reincarnation.

In the second half of the book, we get into the real meat of the subject: Whitton's hypnotic regressions. Unfortunately his database is rather small, consisting of only 30 clients. He explains that the extremely deep level of hypnotic trance necessary to access the interlife can be achieved by only a small segment of the population. Moreover, although he says he has made some efforts to verify the factual details of specific past lives, none of these verifying investigations are described (with one exception, to be discussed later).

Perhaps a bigger stumbling block to accepting Whitton's results is the melodramatic nature of many of the past lives he uncovered. In one case, the previous personality was a virtuoso musician, a woman who had a torrid love affair that ended in tragedy when the car carrying her lover and herself plunged off a cliff; the man died, and the woman, horribly scarred and unable to play the piano because she had lost the use of her hands, lived in isolation and eventually drowned herself by walking into the sea. I'm not saying this couldn't happen, but it does contain a lot of elements of Hollywood melodrama; the tragic denouement is right out of the classic soaper A Star Is Born.

Another case involved a previous personality who lived in the Wild West -- the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, who became the target of an equally familiar stereotype, the firebreathing fundamentalist preacher. When the evil preacher tries to take custody of the prostitute's newborn baby, the desperate woman accidentally fires a shotgun that kills the infant. She is then handed over to the not-so-tender mercies of a vigilante band of cowboys, who rape and torture her before skinning her alive.

Now, it's true that the people who sought out Whitton's services were suffering from severe psychological (and sometimes physical) problems, so perhaps it's not surprising that they should have especially traumatic memories. And the book makes the point that these patients have experienced dozens of lives, some of which were quite prosaic; for therapeutic purposes, the focus of the sessions was on the most dramatic lives, the ones that left them emotionally scarred in their present incarnation. Still, the Harlequin Romance/Hollywood melodrama aspects of some of these tales make me uneasy.

Like other past-life therapists, Whitton claims significant success in curing longstanding problems that had defied more conventional treatment. It does seem as if past-life therapy can sometimes resolve painful, even crippling emotional disturbances in a relatively short time. This alone makes the therapy valuable, whether or not the purported past lives are genuine.

Interestingly, the patients' accounts of the dying process are quite similar to near-death experiences, typically including an out-of-body experience, a passage through a tunnel into a bright light, and a life review. But unlike most NDEs, the life review is usually supervised by a trio of sages, and is often accompanied by an in-depth interview.

As Whitton's patients describe it, the interlife involves grasping the mistakes that one has made in one's most recent incarnation, seeing where one has fallen short of one's goals, and then -- in cooperation with a more advanced guide -- designing the plan for one's next life. Occasionally a particularly impatient or reckless subject will reincarnate without a plan, a policy that is strongly discouraged by the powers that be.

Karma plays a large role in all this, but instead of being seen as a strictly mechanical process of cause and effect or action and reaction, it seems to be understood more as choosing the life circumstances that are most likely to teach the required lessons.

One interesting case involved apparent psychokinetic manifestations that began with the unexplained appearance of blood on the wall of the patient's home. The symbolic blood was eventually traced to past-life traumas, but I couldn't help thinking that if the mind is able to materialize blood out of thin air in order to spotlight a person's psychological problems, it might be capable of creating a convincing simulation of a previous persona.

The one instance in which we are told of efforts to verify the patient's claims was a case of xenoglossy -- i.e., speaking a language that should be unknown to the speaker. Actually, there were two languages -- Old Norse and an ancient Mesopotamian tongue. The authors write,

When Harold was reexperiencing his life as Thor (a Viking), Dr. Whitton instructed him to write down, phonetically, the vocal exchanges that were taking place. Harold responded by writing twenty-two words and phrases, none of which he understood. Working independently, linguistic authorities who spoke Icelandic and Norwegian subsequently identified and translated ten of these words as being Old Norse, the language of the Vikings and the precursor of modern Icelandic. Several other words seemed to have Russian, Serbian, or Slavic derivation and these were also identified. Most of the words relate to the sea -- precisely the type of verbal communication that could be expected from a Viking warrior.

Doctor Thor Jakobsson, a research scientist with Canada's Department of the Environment and an expert on the Icelandic language, studied the transcripts produced by Harold and concluded that many of the words -- including those for "storm," "heart," and "iceberg" -- were "definitely of Icelandic origin." That some of the words had their origins in other languages only added to the authenticity of the script, said Dr. Jakobsson, because the restless, warlike Vikings roamed to the far corners of Europe.

In recalling Harold's purported life in Mesopotamia, Whitton asked him to write down the words for common concepts, such as "brother," "house," and "clothing." The authors continue:

Holding the pencil very lightly, Harold carefully created a mysterious, Arabic-style script in a spidery, childlike hand....

Unsuccessful in matching his patient's supposed calligraphy with ancient scripts in library books, [Whitton] eventually submitted the pencil markings to Dr. Ibrahim Pourhadi, an expert in ancient Persian and Iranian languages at the Near Eastern Section of Washington's Library of Congress. After close examination of the samples, Dr. Pourhadi maintained that [they] were an authentic representation of the long-extinct language called Sassanid Pahlavi, which was used in Mesopotamia between A.D 226 and 651 and bears no relation to modern Iranian. [pp. 154-156]

I've quoted these excerpts at some length because they are the book's only report of an attempt to verify the accuracy of a patient's past-life recollections. As Whitton says in his Introduction,

In this book we do not review the evidence. That is worth a book in itself and has been done before. Instead, we proceed from the assumption that reincarnation is true. We do not assume, however, that every report of a past-life memory obtained under hypnosis, or claim of a spontaneously remembered past life, is what it purports to be. The issue of proof is not simple. There are important hidden assumptions in the theory of reincarnation as well as complex psychological issues in a memory of a past life. We do not articulate these issues in this book, but believe we have addressed them and have included only those cases wherein the hypothesis of past lives is the only valid one.

In the end, I don't know for sure if Whitton's cases establish reincarnation or not. Certainly his work provides much food for thought. The view of multiple rebirths, with each new life designed to resolve a specific problem and advance spiritual development by one more step, is intriguing and makes a certain amount of sense. But the melodramatic stories and general lack of verification provide grounds for doubt.

What the book does demonstrate is the incredible power of the mind. Whether the mind is seen as cooperating with other intelligences to design myriad lifetimes, or as confabulating these things in order to effect emotional and physical healing, it's still a powerful force. Add PK for physical manifestations and some kind of cryptomnesia or super-psi to explain the xenoglossy, and the mind becomes a much greater thing than we ordinarily realize.

Perhaps this insight is the real takeaway of Life Between Life.