Michael Prescott's Blog

Book review (part two): The Seth Material

Continuing my look at Jane Roberts's 1970 book The Seth Material, today I'll cover chapters 8 through 13. This takes us about two-thirds of the way through the book.

A good part of this section deals with Jane's ESP abilities, which seem to be legitimate (if we can accept her account at face value – and I think we probably can, given the endorsements provided by some parapsychologists). What I find more interesting is the philosophical material purportedly channeled by Jane, speaking with the voice of Seth, a high-level discarnate entity.

Seth's discussion of reincarnation matches up pretty well with my own speculations on the subject. Essentially he tells us that past, present, and future are concepts that don't apply to the higher self. Accordingly, all incarnations are lived simultaneously, even though, as a matter of convenience, they can be described as past or future lives from our current perspective. He explains:

Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses ... The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists and is gone forever, and the next moment comes and like the one before also disappears.

But everything in the universe exists at one time, simultaneously. The first words ever spoken still ring through the universe, and in your terms, the last words ever spoken have already been said, for there is no beginning. It is only your perception that is limited.

There is no past, present, and future. These only appear to those who exist within three-dimensional reality. Since I am no longer in it, I can perceive what you do not. There is also a part of you that is not imprisoned within physical reality, and that part of you knows that there is only an Eternal Now. The part of you who knows this is the whole self …

Pretend that you have several dreams, and you know that you are dreaming. Within each dream, one hundred earthly years may pass, but to you, the dreamer, no time has passed, for you are free of the dimension in which time exists. The time you seem to spend within the dream – or within each life – is only an illusion, and to the inner self no time has passed because there is no time.…

The various reincarnational selves can be superficially regarded as portions of a crossword puzzle, for they are all portions of the whole, and yet they can exist separately.…

What you have instead [of sequential time] is something like the developments narrated in The Three Faces of Eve. You have dominant egos, all a part of an inner identity, dominant in various existences. But the separate existences exist simultaneously. Only the egos involved make the time distinction. 145 BC, A.D. 145, a thousand years in your past, and a thousand years in your future – all exist now.…

It is interesting that the personalities [in Three Faces of Eve] did alternate‚ and all were in existence at once, so to speak, even though only one was dominant at any given time. In the same way, so-called past personalities are present in you now but not dominant … Since all events occur at once in actuality, there is little to be gained by saying that a past event causes a present one. Past experience does not cause present experience. You are forming past, present, and future – simultaneously. Since events appear to you in sequence, this is difficult to explain.

When it is said that certain characteristics form a past life influence or cause present patterns of behavior, such statements – and I have made some of them – are highly simplified to make certain points clear.

The whole self is aware of all of the experiences of all of its egos, and since one identity forms them, there are bound to be similarities between them and shared characteristics. The material I have given you on reincarnation is quite valid, particularly for working purposes, but it is a simplified version of what actually occurs.

Each incarnated personality represents only the tip of the iceberg of the total personality, which is the sum of all its parts. The higher self chooses when and where to be incarnated but cannot control the course of the incarnated personality's life, which is determined, in large part, by the free will choices of the earthly ego. As a result, some incarnations are more successful than others, in the sense that some people will learn the lessons they were intended to learn, while others will not. In the event that a necessary lesson is not learned, a new incarnation is necessary to get the job done.

Souls are often grouped together and reincarnate collectively, playing different roles in different lifetimes. Karma is not a form of punishment. It "presents the opportunity for development. It enables the individual to enlarge understanding through experience, to fill in gaps of ignorance, to do what should be done. Free will is always involved."

When it comes to Seth's discussions of the past lives of particular people who attended the sessions, the material is pretty standard. Happily, no past lives as celebrities are reported, although in one case a person was said to have been a priest in Atlantis. This was, however, the only reference to Atlantis that Seth came up with, which is probably just as well. (For the record, I'm dubious that there was ever a "lost continent" of Atlantis, although it's possible that the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete formed the basis of the legend, and conceivably this is what is meant by Atlantis in such accounts.)

At any rate, the reincarnation material, though impossible to prove and therefore lacking any evidential value, at least dovetails with many other sources and, for what it's worth, with my own speculations on the subject.

When we get into the nature of physical reality, however, difficulties arise. The basic idea of Seth's teaching in this area is that we are constantly forming the physical universe without knowing it. Jane Roberts, speaking for herself rather than as Seth, summarizes:

We form matter in order to operate in three-dimensional reality, develop our abilities and help others. Physical matter is like plastic that we use and mold to our own desire, not like concrete into which our consciousness has been poured. Without realizing it we project our ideas outward to form physical reality. Our bodies are the materialization of what we think we are. We are all creators, then, and this world is our joint creation …

We are not at the mercy of events. We form the events to which we then react.

How does this actually work? According to Seth, everything in the universe has some degree of consciousness, right down to atoms and even subatomic particles. "Even the lowest particle retains its individuality," he claims. He goes on:

Matter is continually created, but no particular object is in itself continuous. There is not, for example, one physical object that deteriorates with age. There are instead continuous creations of psychic energy into a physical pattern that appears to hold a more or less rigid appearance [which deteriorates as the energy behind it weakens, creating the appearance of age].…

Matter of itself … is no more continuous, no more given to growth or age that is, say, the color yellow …

Each individual creates his own space continuum …

As [one of the attendees] sits in his chair, he is constantly creating his own physical image, using his own psychic energy, and using particular atoms and molecules for the construction of his body.

During the session in which these ideas were expressed, several apparitional materialization's were reported that were, according to Seth, his attempt to dramatize the idea that physical reality can be manipulated by the mind.

In a later session, Seth goes into the mechanics of this process. This is where I think we really get into some trouble. He tells us:

Thoughts and images are formed into physical reality and become physical fact. They are propelled chemically. A thought is energy. It begins to produce itself physically at the moment of its conception.

Mental enzymes are connected with the pineal gland. As you know them, body chemicals are physical, but they are the propellants of this thought-energy, containing all the codified data necessary for translating any thought or image into physical actuality …

Chemicals are released through the skin and pore systems, in an invisible but definite pseudophysical formation. The intensity of a thought or image largely determines the immediacy of its physical materialization. There is no object about you that you have not created. There is nothing about your own physical image that you have not made.

The initial thought or image ... is not yet physical. Then it is sparked into physical materialization by the mental enzymes.

If I'm reading this correctly, we're supposed to believe that our particular physical world – which is distinct from every other observer's physical world, albeit with overlapping features – is generated by the release of "chemicals" through the pores of the skin. (And wouldn't you know that the pineal gland, a favorite of mystics and alchemists down through the centuries, would play a role?)

There are at least two problems with this notion, one empirical and one logical.

The empirical problem is that no one has ever detected the release of any such chemicals, though one would think that a release of any chemical substance sufficient to form our entire subjective environment would not go unnoticed. A related empirical problem is that it's hard to see how the human body could contain enough "chemicals" to produce its environment from moment to moment, especially if that environment consists of some massively large object like the Empire State Building.

The logical problem is that the body itself is supposed to be produced from thoughts. But if so, then the chemicals exuded by the body are themselves nothing more than thought-forms. Can thought-forms produce other thought-forms? Why would this even be necessary? If the mind can produce the chemicals of the body directly, why can it not produce all the other physical features of its environment directly, without the need to exude any chemicals – which are, after all, only illusions anyway?

I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea that each individual, as a subjective observer, creates his own bubble of reality, which overlaps with other people's bubbles. This idea has been explored in some detail by Bernardo Kastrup in his paper "Making Sense of the Mental Universe," and though I have some issues with that paper, which I may get into sometime, it's at least an interesting idea and could be true. But this whole business of exuding chemicals through the skin strikes me as silly and even self-contradictory.

The other major subject tackled by Seth in these chapters is health. Here we have the fairly standard New Age idea that we can maintain our health by thinking the right thoughts. Perhaps this was more of a novelty in 1970 than it is today – I'm not sure. In any event, I'm skeptical of such assertions. For one thing, I think they give far too much power to our thoughts, which can lead us to be afraid of our own thinking. Seth says as much at one point, when addressing a particular sitter who was plagued by poor health:

You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination, for you allow your imagination too full a reign. If you read our early material, you will see that your environment and the conditions of your life in any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. You form physical materializations of these realities within your own mind.

If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health, or desperate loneliness, these will be automatically materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them reality in physical terms. If you would have good health, then you must imagine this as vividly as in fear you imagine the opposite.

You create your own difficulties. This is true for each individual. The inner psychological state is projected outward, gaining physical reality – and this regardless of the nature of the psychological state …

You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see.

There is probably some truth in this. It's hard to deny that our expectations condition, to a certain extent, what we pay attention to in our environment. If we expect bad news, we focus on it. But to draw the larger conclusion that we will materialize anything that we vividly imagine seems unrealistic and unhelpful. Its practical result is to make people feel that they themselves are responsible for their own illness, not necessarily a healthy attitude.

Overall, I continue to find the Seth teachings a very mixed bag. I do think that Jane Roberts had legitimate psychic abilities and was a sincere spiritual seeker. I don't think she was just in it for the money, though undoubtedly she did quite well with her series of books on Seth. But it's one thing to say that she was channeling some kind of information that came, at least in part, from a discarnate source, and another thing to say that the claims made by this source are entirely trustworthy. There may have been errors in transmission, or maybe Seth wasn't all that he was made out to be. Who knows?

Anyway, I'll continue to the end – though I have to admit that I'm starting to find the book to be a bit of a long slog.

Book review (part one): The Seth Material

I've read bits and pieces of the writings attributed to Seth, an entity purportedly channeled by Jane Roberts, whose teachings were reproduced in a series of bestselling books, but I haven't made a sustained study of the subject. Recently, since I've been looking into the subject of possession, and Jane Roberts's trance states seem to qualify, I decided to read at least one complete book in the series.

I chose The Seth Material. Originally published in 1970, The Seth Material is Roberts's first book to go into depth about her channeling experiences. I'm finding it something of a mixed bag, and since there's a lot to parse here, I plan to review it in sections as I go along. This review covers the book through Chapter 7.

Seth's basic message is heartening, if not particularly original:

According to what you have been taught, you are composed of physical matter and cannot escape it, and this is not so. The physical matter will disintegrate, but you will not. Though you cannot find me, know that I am here. Your own parents seem to disappear before your eyes and vanish into nothingness forever. I can assure you that they will continue to live. I can assure you that death is another beginning, and that when you are dead, you are not silenced. For is this voice that you hear now, silence? Is this presence that you sense within this room, death?

I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your youth, for I am hardly young. I am here to tell you that your joy is not dependent upon your physical body, for in your terms I have none. I have what I have always had, the identity that is mine. It is never diminished. It grows and develops …

I come here as though I appeared through a hole in space and time. There are walks in space and time through which you can travel, and in dreams you have been where I am. I want you to feel your own vitality. Feel it travel through the universe and know that it is not dependent upon your physical image. In reality you project your own energy out to form the physical world. Therefore, to change your world, it is yourself you must change. You must change what you project.

You always were, you always will be. This is the meaning of existence and joy. The God that is, is within you, for you are a part of all that is.

Jane Roberts's previously unsuspected psychic powers first manifested themselves in a spontaneous experience of "cosmic consciousness" (not her term) in which she perceived the universe as

really tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound … I went plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives…

During that experience I knew that we formed physical matter, not the other way around; that our senses showed us only one three-dimensional reality out of an infinite number that we couldn't ordinarily perceive; that we could trust our senses only so far and only so long as we did not ask questions that were beyond their limited scope of knowledge.

But more: I just didn't know, for example, that everything had its own consciousness. Now I suddenly felt the fantastic vitality present even in things I'd previously considered inanimate. A nail was sticking in the windowsill, and I experienced ever so briefly the consciousness of the atoms and molecules that composed it.

Despite all my previous ideas and common sense, I knew that time wasn't a series of moments one before the other, each one like a clothespin stuck on a line, but that all experience existed in some kind of eternal now.

This is explained as Seth's first attempt at making contact. Soon afterward, he was able to communicate with the pair via a Ouija board and then eventually by using Jane's body as his instrument.

Unless Jane and her husband Rob were consummate actors and highly inventive confabulators – extremely doubtful, given the tests to which Jane subjected herself – their reports of the channeling episodes must be taken seriously. Some kind of paranormal phenomenon was going on. Jane was able to provide accurate information about distant locations and activities via clairvoyance. She appears to have had genuine out-of-body experiences – sometimes extremely vivid ones. Her personality, mannerisms, and voice changed noticeably when she was "possessed" by Seth. The misgivings and skeptical doubts that she describes are believable, and her gradual conversion to the belief that Seth really was a discarnate personality temporarily occupying her body seems entirely plausible to me.

Of course, just because she became convinced doesn't mean she was right. It also doesn't mean that every word spoken by Seth must be accepted at face value.

In fact, much of what Seth tells us is hard to credit, even for those of us already convinced of postmortem survival. Early in the sessions, he informs Jane and Rob that they once witnessed thought-form doubles of themselves in a dance club. Jane remembers the incident:

I noticed an older couple sitting across the room from us. They really frightened me by their uncanny resemblance to Rob and myself. Did we look like that – aloof, bitter – only younger? I couldn't take my eyes off them, and finally I pointed them out to Rob.

Rob looked over at the couple and groaned with another back spasm [a chronic problem at that time]. Then something happened that neither of us had been able to explain. To my complete amazement Rob stood up, grabbed my arm, and insisted that we dance. A minute earlier, he'd hardly been able to walk.

Rob's back problems markedly improved from that point forward. Seth explains:

Looking back, you can say that the effect was therapeutic, but if you had subconsciously accepted the images, it would have marked the beginning of a severe deterioration for you both, personally and creatively. Again, the images marked the critical culmination of your destructive energies …

Your dancing represented the first move away from what those images meant, and violent action was the best thing under the circumstances … A subtle transformation could have taken place in which you and Jane transferred the bulk of your personalities into the fragments you had yourselves created … and from their eyes watched yourselves across the room. In this case your present dominant personalities would no longer be dominant.

He goes on to explain that the so-called "fragments" or thought-forms simply disappeared into the crowd when they were no longer the focus of Jane and Rob's attention.

Now, this sounds pretty far out. We are meant to believe that it's possible to project our own double into the world as a tangible, physical entity, and moreover, under adverse circumstances, to project our consciousness into this double and inhabit it from then on, leaving our previous physical body as a mere shell.

Subsequent questioning of Seth on this point makes it clear that he's not speaking metaphorically or symbolically. Seth says:

[In this incident] aggressive and destructive energies were unconsciously projected outward, given a pseudo-reality and temporary physical validity. The emotional charge provides the pattern and impetus for such creations. According to the extent of physical reality to be achieved, the physical body of the originator transfers or transposes portions of its own chemical structure. Proteins are used, and there is a high carbohydrate loss.

Well … maybe.

I suppose one could compare it to the ectoplasmic manifestations that, according to spiritualists, are built up out of the physical constituents of sitters at a séance. Then again, according to spiritualists, such materializations can occur only in total darkness, while the materialization of thought-forms described by Seth apparently occurred in a pretty well lit environment.

Overall, I'd call this an extremely dubious claim, at best.

Some of Seth's other statements are simply incomprehensible to me, at least at this stage of reading. Perhaps they will make more sense later.

Here's an example. Seth is trying to explain the nature of time:

Time has no meaning without barriers. To put it another way, time has no meaning without the necessity to counteract against other actions. Basically, this is a gem of a description, if I do say so myself.

It may be a gem of a description, but it means zilch to me. Seth, to his credit, admits that Jane and Rob, at their present level of development, can't possibly understand what he's saying. In a series of statements spread over more than one session he tries to clarify the point:

Consider a network of wires, a maze of interlocking wires endlessly constructed so that looking through them there would seem to be no beginning or end. [Later, Seth says this is only a metaphor; there are no actual wires.] Your plane could be likened to a small position between four very spindly wires, and my plane could be likened to the small position in the neighboring wires on the other side.…

To one side, the other is transparent. You cannot see through, but the two planes move through each other constantly …

This is what I mean by fifth dimension ...

Consider that these wires are mobile, constantly trembling, and also alive in that they not only carry the stuff of the universe but are themselves projections of it …

What you call emotion or feeling is the connective tissue between us, and it is the connective that most clearly represents the life force on any plane, under any circumstances. From it is woven all material of your world and mine …

The study of time will teach you much about the nature of [the] fifth dimension also. Our imaginary wires composed of solidified vitality are fluid, I hope you understand this, even while they are solidified. For solidity is an illusion. I have also said that this feeling of vitality – and I prefer that term, vitality [apparently in reference to emotions/feelings/life force?] – is moving and itself a part of the living stuff of the universe. Now as these wires pass seemingly from plane to plane, they actually form the boundaries of each plane and become subject to the particular laws within each. Therefore, they become subject to time within your particular three-dimensional system …

The motion of the apparently solidified vitality gives the illusion of time. The counteraction involved in this case is counteraction within the core of vitality itself … The action and counteraction is the time trigger. On some other planes motion is simultaneous and time unknown.

A lot of words have been spoken here, but I don't find them very illuminating. The counteraction is within the core of vitality? Say what?

Overall, I really don't know what to make of The Seth Material so far. Jane Roberts comes across as a sincere and intelligent person, neither unbalanced nor credulous, who experienced a sudden awakening of psychic powers. Chief among these powers was the ability to channel an entity calling itself Seth, who claimed to speak words of great wisdom, but whose statements strike me as often extremely implausible or simply unintelligible.

So that's where I am now. I'm curious to see if the further explication of Seth's teachings in the rest of the book will make a difference.

Spooks run wild

As my last couple of posts have suggested, I'm certainly open to the idea that discarnate entities – "spirits" – can harass, obsess, or actually possess living persons. But I think the idea has to be treated with caution. It can easily lead in the direction of paranoia. I found this to be a problem in Dr. Edith Fiore's 1987 book The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spirit Possession.

Fiore, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, became interested in addressing her patients' problems via hypnosis, which eventually led to past-life regressions and what she calls "depossessions" – the removal of harassing spirits. She distinguishes depossessions from exorcisms, which involve possession by a nonhuman demonic entity. In the cases she recounts, she believes that the possessing entity is a deceased human being who has become earthbound and attached himself to a living host. She takes pains to say that spirits are only a working hypothesis which she uses because it has proven therapeutically effective, and that she is not sure spirits actually exist. This occasional caveat, though, is undermined by the bulk of the book, especially the later chapters offering advice on personal protection against spirit possession.

Her accounts and partial transcripts of some of her sessions match up well with similar case histories presented in Carl Wickland's famous 1924 study Thirty Years Among the Dead, as well as more recent spirit release narratives. This continuity across many decades was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book. 

Here are a couple of examples. (In the quoted material, I've converted Fiore's narrative to the style of a transcript for easier reading.)

One of Fiore's patients, Peter, had a serious drinking problem that sometimes got him into barroom brawls. Though of upper-middle-class background, he frequented "the rougher sorts of establishments" favored by workingmen. A hypnosis session apparently summoned up a spirit who'd been a construction worker. Even when asked to leave, this spirit hung on, leading to this dialogue in a subsequent session:

Fiore: You're still here. What's your name?

Patient: Lou, I think.

Fiore: But why are you still here with Peter?

Patient: He lets me drink. He can be fun, and I can get him to go to my kind of places.

Fiore: What kind of places?

Patient: You know, a place that's got real men in it who know how to drink – not a bunch of stuffed shirts.

Further discussion reveals that his last memory of his previous life was an accident in which a Caterpillar tractor rolled over him.

Fiore: You were killed in that accident.

Patient: I was?

Fiore: What happened after that?

Patient: I saw a small boy playing in a backyard. He seemed pleasant enough and friendly. And I felt lonely – and lost. So I went towards him.

Fiore explained to the confused Lou that he had taken possession of Peter at that point. She persuaded him to leave. After this session, Peter no longer had problems with alcohol. For readers of Wickland, the parallels are unmistakable. 

Another patient, Paolo, came to Fiore already believing in the spirit world and intrigued with the idea that he might be possessed. During the first hypnosis session, he started speaking in a different voice. "The voice," Fiore writes, "was booming and thick-tongued, as though he were drunk."

Patient: I'm not going anywhere!

Fiore: Who are you?

Patient: George. But don't tell Paolo, that asshole!

Fiore asked if he saw anyone around him whom he knew. George saw someone named Pete, whom he knew to be dead. Even so, he resisted the idea that he himself was deceased. He continued to speak in bombastic and crude terms, saying of Paolo's wife, "I can't stand that broad! All she does is nag poor Paolo, that jerk!" He said his efforts to keep Paolo from going home were often successful (Paolo had taken to spending some nights in a motel for reasons he couldn't explain). "If I never see her again, I'd be happy. But that shit goes home when he feels bad enough. I can't stop him all the time."

Once Paolo was out of his hypnotic trance, he said, "I know that guy! That's me when I've been drinking. But it's not me!" After sharing the tape recording of the session with his wife, he told Fiore: "Kathy says she's talked to that spirit a lot. When I've been drinking, she says she sees him coming out in me. Not really seeing, but the way I act. It's George!"

After much discussion, George was apparently persuaded to leave Paolo and go into the Light.

Fiore: All right. Here's somebody to help you leave.

Patient: I don't know him. (Frantic and crying.)

Fiore: Yes, you do.

Patient: Uncle Jim.

Fiore: What does he say to you?

Patient: He asked me to go. But I don't wanna go! (Crying.) They're all dead. How can I go with dead people? (Crying hard.)

Fiore: Listen to me! Listen to me!, Yourself!

Patient: Awwww ... fuck it!

Fiore: Just calm yourself. Would you like me to explain to you everything that's happened?

Patient: Uh-huh.

At that point Fiore believed she was able to persuade the very reluctant George to go with his Uncle Jim, his mother, and his friend Pete – the "dead people" who'd come to escort him. Paolo reported happily that, "The drive to drink is nonexistent. Lots more positive feelings toward Kathy. I even like going home at night."

But the persistent George had not actually gone into the Light, after all! He was discovered to still be hanging around. It took another session to convince him to go.

Patient: A lot of people are holding their hands out to me.

Fiore: Take someone's hand.

Patient: I want to, but I just can't. Can't. (Desperately.)

Once George finally did leave, Paolo blurted out, "He's gone!" Asked how he felt, he first said (rather surprisingly), "Upset!" Then, crying, he added, "I feel free! Oh, God!… that voice I always hear is gone!… Oh, God! Oh, I wasted so much time! So much of my life, God! I've got so much to do!" (The possession had lasted from age fifteen to age fifty.) 

After more sessions, Paolo reported that his desire to drink was gone, he was going home every night, and his marital relationship was back on track. He'd dropped eight pounds without dieting and finally felt he was in charge of his own life.

All this is all interesting enough. And I'm willing to believe that the patients in the case histories Fiore highlights may well have had some problem with an overshadowing or obsessing spirit.

For me, the trouble arises in Fiore's claim (or working hypothesis?) that spirit possession is remarkably common, even ubiquitous. To help the reader determine if he is harboring an unwanted spirit (or spirits), she provides a list of signs and symptoms indicative of possession. Unfortunately, most of these feelings and behaviors are experienced by all of us at one time or another. The danger signs include:

• a persistent low energy level
• mood swings
• inner dialogues
• use of drugs and alcohol
• impulsiveness (e.g., occasional shopping sprees)
• forgetfulness (e.g. walking into a room and not remembering why you are there)
• problems with concentration ("Do you feel like you're in a fog at times? Perhaps you have a drugged entity or an elderly spirit with you.")
• anxiety or depression that comes out of the blue or stays in the background most of the time
• difficulty recuperating from illness
• difficulty reading and processing Fiore's book ("If you found it hard to read, could not finish certain cases or sections because of anxiety or any other emotional response, then you probably are resonating to possessing spirits.")

She does note that it's the overall picture, not just one or two symptoms, that really counts. Nevertheless, these are all pretty common symptoms, issues, and behaviors. It's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't say yes to many of the things on this list.

Not surprisingly, Fiore believes that possession is not hard to come by. In fact, it can come about as a result of almost any moment of weakness. At various points we are told that

The vibrations of your aura vary constantly.... Being upset, depressed, fearful, jealous, or envious are all poisons that change the color of your aura to murky, unpleasant ones – and slow it down. The stronger the negative emotions, the weaker your protection! ... Spirits can enter a weakened aura as easily as someone can walk through an open door.

An excellent way to protect yourself is to avoid using "recreational" drugs and alcohol. The amount that weakens the aura varies from person to person and also depends on the energy level. Some of my patients have lowered their resistance with only two glasses of wine. Even getting "stoned" or drunk once can result in a possession that can last a lifetime!…

Possessions can occur after surgery or during hospitalizations.…

At funerals, and at all the events associated with them, you need extra protection around yourself.[Pages 138 – 140]

Substance abuse is often a big element in possession. If you abuse drugs and/or alcohol, you can be sure you are possessed. [Page 121]

I believe that most of my patients who were possessed by many spirits, and who frequently picked up new ones in between therapy sessions, were "uncontrolled" mediums or "sensitives." This was especially the case when they had not abused drugs and alcohol. The slightest things weakened their auras: eating a meal with MSG or taking one tablet of pain medication. Even driving by a cemetery or visiting a friend in the hospital resulted in a new possession. [Page 116]

As you can see, in Fiore's view, possession is an ever-present threat. It can happen for almost any reason – because you had a second glass of wine, or a single aspirin, or ate the wrong food, or drove past a graveyard, or underwent surgery, or even visited someone in the hospital. Elsewhere she says that using a Ouija board, attending a séance, visiting a psychic or medium, practicing automatic writing, or trying to get in touch with deceased loved ones or spirit guides can also invite possession. Moreover, children are frequently prone to possession even when they have no obvious risk factors. Apparently a child's aura is often weak enough to allow spirits to get in whenever they wish. She also believes that so-called imaginary friends in childhood are actual spirits, whose close proximity to the child naturally increases the chance of possession.

The only protection against this chronic danger is constantly invoking White Light as a shield around yourself, and also using it to cleanse your home, which can become a repository for wandering spirits. Fiore says she cleanses every room of her home on a daily basis and practices the White Light exercise whenever she feels under stress. 

Frankly, it all sounds pretty paranoid. I'm not sure that anyone really can or should live this way. If spirit possession is this easy, then most people must be possessed, at least at certain times in their lives. This is, in fact, Fiore's opinion. Not surprisingly, in her practice, she has found countless cases of possession, including cases where a given patient was possessed by dozens of spirits. She writes:

Since I became aware of this phenomenon, I found that at least seventy percent of my patients were possessed and it was this condition that caused their dis-ease [sic]. Most of these people were relieved – through depossession techniques – of more than one entity. Occasional patients were unwitting hosts to as many as fifty or more! [Page 3]

Seventy percent! Either spirit harassment is a much bigger problem than almost anyone thinks ... or Fiore's own assumptions are being imposed on her patients through the mechanism of hypnosis, which allows direct communication with the highly suggestible subconscious mind. In 1987, when her book was published, the problem of confabulation under hypnosis may not have been as well understood as it is today. Back then, it was still common for hypnotherapists to assist their patients in recovering suppressed memories of childhood abuse – memories that later turned out, in many cases, to be completely false. Families were torn apart by the complicated feelings and painful accusations resulting from these therapeutic techniques.

From what we know today, the subconscious mind is extremely eager to please, and it will follow the lead of the hypnotist in imagining a scenario consistent with the hypnotist's suggestions. This is provably true in many instances of recovered memory syndrome, and very likely true in many cases of past-life regression and spirit possession, as well.

The bottom line, as I see it, is that Fiore may well have hit upon a valid technique for dealing with certain patients who actually do suffer from spirit harassment, but she has probably taken it too far, seeing examples of the problem everywhere she looks and inculcating a hypervigilant attitude that doesn't seem conducive to inner peace or mental health.

Her book points up the possible danger of spirit contact — but also the dangers of surrendering to a worldview that may do us more harm than good.

Final ventures

Here is a last series of excerpts from A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy. See the previous two posts for other excerpts.

In trance [the medium] Albert Best spoke to me. "Ann is here again, she is saying something about Sauchie. (This is a village in Clackmannanshire.)  I replied that yesterday I had officiated at a wedding where the bride came from Sauchie. He continued, "The groom was another Kennedy, not you, Iain." I agreed that the name of the groom was Iain Kennedy. Next followed, "What did you do to the best man? … Ann says that you did something discourteous but not intentional to the best man!" This was absolutely true. I absent-mindedly closed the official reception without giving the best man the customary opportunity of replying to the toast to the bridesmaid.…

"Ann says you must attend to your socks and buy a few more pairs. You had a hole in one that you wore at the wedding." Again true. To my horror I discovered at the function that a hole was showing above the heel of my shoe. "There is something wrong with your shoe which you are wearing. Take it off." I took off my shoe and discovered that the sole was separating from the upper part on one shoe. This was totally invisible and could only be seen by probing at the joint of upper and sole with a pencil. Still more remarkable facts were to come. Albert, in trance, continued: "Ann is saying that there is something wrong with a light". Now as it happened the bulb in my study burned out the previous night when I was about to finish work and go to bed. I had made a mental note to buy a new 250 watt bulb but had not yet done so. I told Albert Best that my study lamp had gone out. Now this coincidence was a perfectly good explanation of what he claimed Ann had said, "Something wrong with a light". There was a pause and silence for almost half a minute. "No. This is not the light she is talking about. She says that the light could be dangerous." Another pause, then, "Would you please," she says, "check the lights on your car when you leave here. There is something wrong with one of them and that could be dangerous." Immediately after the session I went outside to where my car was parked and tested the lights. I found that my near-side side lamp was out. I also found that the wire behind the side light assembly was hot after the lights had been on for a few minutes.

Here was a source of danger, both of fire and the obvious danger of driving at night without a front side-light. There was no conceivable way in which Albert Best could have been aware of this defect in my car. He had not even seen my car for weeks and in any case it was mid-summer and I would not have my lights on. In addition, there was the heating of the wire behind the light assembly. I am particularly impressed by this piece of evidence from Ann. It could not be known to any human agency, of this I am convinced. This is an example of something which is quite outside any kind of telepathic explanation. It is simple and yet it fulfills all the requirements of a non-telepathic condition....

It appears to be possible for helpers and loved ones on the other side to be aware of sources of potential danger and to try to give warning. This kind of evidence is very difficult to explain except on the survival hypothesis. [pp. 124-126]

In a first-time meeting with another medium, Mrs. Constable, some very good evidence was obtained.

She began, "You are working on a book just now but I feel that you have got stuck. Leave it aside for the moment and tonight just try to relax and scribble down any ideas that come to you, for half an hour or so." Suddenly she stopped, as though interrupted by someone whom she could hear, but who was not audible to me. "What's that you say? It's a lady speaking, she says, 'Tell him not tonight because he has to go out tonight'." I replied that I had an afternoon appointment but that I was free this evening and intended to be at home. "Oh no!" was the reply. "She says you are going to get a telephone call which will change your arrangements in the next few hours."

Mrs. Constable continued, "There is a lady here comes – the lady who spoke just now – a lovely lady – very beautiful – especially her hair. She says, 'Tell him it was my teeth.' She had trouble with her teeth. She is very quiet – shy. She does this to her mouth (here Mrs. Constable put her hand over her mouth) as though she used to hide her mouth or her teeth with her hand."

I must emphasize how completely accurate this description is of my wife. She had a shallow palate and gums. For years of her life, until she died, she was plagued by the problem of finding dentures which were comfortable and even wearable. All together she had four sets of dentures at the time of her death. We used to have a private joke between us. She would say to me, "If I ever come back to you after I die, I'll just put my hand over my mouth and say, "Remember my teeth'."…

At 12 noon, a few minutes after I arrived home, I received a telephone call from the [people I had an afternoon appointment with]. The call was to ask me if I would mind coming out in the evening instead of the afternoon....

This knowledge on Anna's part of the course of the next few hours and the fact that I would be involved all evening might be brushed off as coincidence; a guess on the part of the medium. Yet if it were so, it was a detailed guess because it also mentioned a telephone call changing my plans. The chances of my plans for an entire evening being changed by something of this nature are very, very slender. It has happened to me once in the last two years. I regard this as a significant type of evidence of a non-telepathic nature. [pp. 141-142]

From a session with Albert Best:

Finally, Albert Best continued, "Ann is very light-hearted and as she goes off she says again to you, 'Enjoy yourself, you need relaxation' and smiling broadly she says, 'Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.' You'll hear about that later she says.…"

On the veridical nature of the statements, my first comment is that as I write this twenty-four hours later, I have just been handed a present of a bottle of Jamaica Rum by a member of my congregation who has returned from holiday. [p. 152] 

Refreshingly, Kennedy acknowledges his own biases; and he includes some trenchant remarks about belief and disbelief:

This is a tendentious book. It begins with a theoretical belief in survival and communication and proceeds to show what happened in one particular instance when one's theories become existential problems. I believe that to acquire this amount of evidence of survival in so short a time would probably not be possible for most people. I was fortunate in so far as my wife and I shared a knowledge of psychical research over twenty-five years and latterly came to accept that evidence as strong enough to say that we both believed in survival. We were therefore agreed that when death parted us we would, whichever of us went first, and it seemed likely to be Ann, try to produce for the other one on this side the best evidence possible.

My part in this was to make this possible by having fairly frequent sittings with mediums of known quality. The fortuitous part which figures so largely is the fact that I knew Albert Best, one of Britain's finest mediums.…

At the same time it is fair to warn the reader that I have been pleading a case. I believed in survival and I hoped strongly that after Ann died I would receive evidence. I am not objective in this; but because I am aware of my desire to find myself in contact with Ann I have tried to guard against hearing what I desire to hear. All my sittings with mediums which were prearranged were tape-recorded and I am satisfied that I did not convey information.

I have experienced sittings with mediums which were unsatisfactory in the sense that the messages were vague and could have applied to anyone. This happened on three or four occasions during the six months since Ann died… One becomes able to recognize easily the medium who is simply filling in. Sometimes I have been convinced the filling in was conscious and fraudulent. At other times I felt that the hotch-potch of unrecognized names and allusions was not consciously fraudulent. Nevertheless, sterile and abortive sittings of this nature do take place and while I have not written down the details, it is fair to warn the reader that looking for evidence of survival has its setbacks too....

I do not claim that any one incident described in this book should stand on its own. I do claim that at least in the view of any fair-minded person a strong "prima facie" case for Ann's survival is established by the totality of the evidence presented. Human beings cannot leave existential questions in the vacuum of suspended judgment. They either make the leap from probability to belief or withdraw into disbelief. This may well depend on emotional factors in each of us. [pp. 156-159, 165]

Further ventures

More excerpts from A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy. I'm finding this book very worthwhile. Yes, it's true, as Amos Oliver Doyle pointed out in the previous comments thread, that all these stories tend to blur together after a while. But it's also true, as Art observed in the same thread, that if we don't remind ourselves of the uncanny accuracy and specificity of these narratives from time to time, they will lose their persuasive power.

Anyway, here are more reported after-death communications from David Kennedy's wife, Ann.

While Kennedy was riding on a train with the medium Albert Best, there was this spontaneous communication:

Albert put down his book and in his excited typical stammer which I had come to recognize as the indication that he was getting something, he said, "Ann is just behind me, she asked me to tell you about the slipper". I said nothing and Albert paused for a few seconds as he often does while getting a message right. Then in more confident tone and slower and louder voice, "When your wife's personal effects were brought back from hospital were there blue slippers. No wait. There was only one blue slipper, the other was missing."

He continued in his confident tone as he seemed to see things more clearly, "Your wife is giving this as evidence, you understand? In your wife's toilet bag she says there were three complete sets of dentures which came back from hospital. She is also saying, Teresa. The same toilet bag had a blue container of talcum powder and a triangular small bottle of toilet water." Albert continued, "Your wife was with you this morning when you took out a large silk handkerchief and used it to wrap something in. This morning before you left the house". "Now," said Albert, "she is singing a song which you should recognize. She is singing 'C'est si bon'. She is going now but says as she goes she knows about the Royal Stuart tartan."

Here indeed is concentrated evidence. Nothing vague but precise facts, one after another. First the blue slipper. This evidence was completely accurate. One blue slipper only came back in Ann's effects from hospital, the other was missing.

There were precisely three complete sets of dentures in Ann's toilet bag returned from hospital.… I should also say I was completely unaware of how many sets of dentures she took to hospital or how many were in her plastic toilet bag.… [Kennedy had to check in order to confirm the report. He had been understandably reluctant to go through his late wife's personal effects.] 

The name, Teresa, is Anna's mother's baptized Christian name. She has never used his name since she was married.…

The blue container of talcum and triangular bottle of toilet water was [sic]  in the bag as described.

At nine o'clock that same morning, in my home alone, I took out the only silk handkerchief I possess, a large white silk handkerchief and used it to wrap the microphone of my pocket tape recorder to protect it when I placed it in my traveling case. Albert had never seen this handkerchief at any time. "C'est si bon" was one of Anne's favorite songs which she used to hum. Finally, a week earlier Ann's mother and sister had brought had bought a Royal Stuart tartan large traveling rug as a cover for the sofa.

Kennedy is at pains to point out that he is "not on close personal terms" with Albert Best. "During the last six weeks I have only spoken to Albert Best by telephone and then only when he telephoned me. In many of these telephone calls Albert Best asked me for information or advice, particularly in relation to orthodox churches. [Kennedy was a minister.] ... Although Albert Best telephoned me, I very rarely telephoned him, unless it was for the purpose of trying to arrange a private sitting for someone. From the very beginning I made a point of guarding against the danger of being on familiar chatting terms with Mr. Best because I was always conscious of the over-riding necessity of reducing to a minimum the possibility of conveying information to him. After over twenty-five years experience of psychical research, I am at least aware of the danger of saying in someone's company such remarks as 'Anne and I loved that tune' or 'We had a wonderful holiday there, once'. It may sound calculating, but I have throughout this period and before it, always been aware that the unique mediumship of Albert Best would be the keystone of much of the evidence of survival which I hoped to make available to others. Thus the necessity of keeping myself aloof from this gifted medium, not to cloud the value of the evidence."

While Best was performing a healing procedure on someone else, he spoke to Kennedy, who happened to be in the room:

Once again, in trance and while healing, Albert Best said, "Who is Mrs. Murray, East Kilbride," addressing me. I replied, "That is my wife's sister". "Ah, yes!" replied Albert Best. "Your wife was talking about her. She says that she was with you when you posted a postcard to her sister when you were in London. You posted two postcards at the same time, on Monday of this week. She also says that she was with her sister when she got your postcard."

After a short pause, "You had fish before you came out here, sole, and it wasn't Dover sole. Your wife says you cooked it in a pot and you didn't clean the pot properly. Clean it again when you go home, will you?"

All of this was accurate, including the poorly cleaned pot, which still had traces of fish clinging to it. His wife had been a stickler for cleaning the dishes.

Here is a possible example of EVP, electronic voice phenomena. It comes up in a sitting with another medium, Mrs. Findlater, who says: 

"When you bought that new recorder," (I had bought a new cassette pocket recorder a few weeks previously) "you relaxed and spoke into it. Your guide was there and when you played it back you heard a word spoken twice which startled you because you didn't remember saying that word. The word was OM – OM or God." This again is startling. I did speak a little poetry and some nonsense into my recorder and thought it curious that I had spoken the word OM twice. I concluded that I must have said this word out of my subconscious without being aware of saying it. Yet the voice did seem strange. Yet here almost a month later a woman, Mrs. Findlater, claims that my wife is speaking to me and that a group of those on the other side were responsible for this word which startled me on playing back what I had spoken into my recorder. No living soul knew of this except myself.

Kennedy remarks on "a curious piece of evidence in this series of communications…. This is, in the case of the mediumship of Albert Best the lapse of two months before the first sporadic messages from Ann begin to come through. I would describe Albert Best as pathetically eager to be able to bring me the comfort of a solid reassuring item of evidence from Ann in the two months following her passing and yet he was perfectly honest with me. 'I simply get nothing at all, not even a sense of her presence.'… Now if the telepathy hypothesis is a valid one, or if the more elaborate and speculative theory that somehow a gifted medium has access to the forgotten memories of anyone who ever had any contact with Ann [i.e., super-psi], be correct, the question arises, why should this extended telepathy or access to a universal pool of knowledge not operate from the moment of Ann's death? Why should there be eight blank weeks following Ann's death, when there is complete silence on the part of this gifted medium?… On the telepathic hypothesis this delay is unaccountable. On the other hand in terms of descriptions given by our loved ones and others from the other side, this delay is understandable and consistent."

The delay, as he goes on to say, is normally explained by spiritualists as the time necessary for the recently deceased person to adjust to afterlife conditions and recover from the trauma of dying, as well as from any lingering medical conditions that may obsess the mind. In Ann's case, she apparently continued to feel a shortness of breath – a condition that plagued her in her final months on earth – even though, in her postmortem existence, it was all in her mind.

Though I'm quoting some (but not all) of the best evidence in this book, I'm not able to include the author's extended ruminations on the relationship between spiritualism and the Christian church, his analysis of philosophers like Kant and Heidegger, and many other interesting subjects. The book, though sadly out of print, is worth seeking out.

Get me to the church on time

A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy, is a 1973 memoir about a series of after-death communications from the author's wife. The book is out of print and available only from used booksellers. I'd never heard of it until it came up on Michael Sudduth's Facebook timeline; Dr. Sudduth seems to have a good opinion of the book, so I decided to track it down. I'm now about 60 pages into it, and I agree that it's well worth reading. 

David Kennedy was an engineer who, in middle age, became a minister. He and his wife Ann were intelligent, well-educated people whose idea of an enjoyable evening was to read passages from Plato to each other. They regarded each other as soulmates, and their happiness persisted despite Ann's chronic health problems, stemming from an incurable heart condition. After Ann passed away, David was understandably grief stricken, but before long he began to receive some remarkably evidential messages via mediums.

What makes the book so worthwhile, beyond the author's obvious intelligence and sincerity, is that both he and his wife had a longtime interest in psychic phenomena and life after death. They were thoroughly familiar with the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research and had plowed through back issues of the SPR's journal from 1906 forward. As a result, Kennedy is in a good position to evaluate the evidence that comes through, distinguishing between solid hits and more neutral statements that might apply to any number of people. He is also open to the hypothesis that mediums rely on telepathy and clairvoyance rather than communication with the dead, and he is always on the lookout for communications that would strain the ESP hypothesis to the breaking point.

Here are two interconnected episodes found early in the book that especially impressed me.

Sunday, 15 March was my Communion Sunday and in the Church of Scotland Communion or the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is only celebrated twice or three times a year in most churches. It can mean two long and exhausting services, each lasting for 1 1⁄2 hours with interviews between each service and a hasty snack in the church. One may arrive at the church at 10 a.m. and return home at 4 p.m. literally exhausted and depleted of nervous energy.

Normally, when my wife was alive, I would stretch out on the sofa and sleep deeply in total exhaustion for about an hour and a half. Then at about 5:30 p.m. Ann would come through from the bedroom and awaken me in preparation for going out at 6 p.m. for my evening service.

On this particular Sunday, March 15, I came home as usual at 4 p.m. exhausted. Rather foolishly I lay down on the sofa and in minutes I was deeply asleep. So deeply asleep that I am certain I would have slept for hours blissfully removed from the prospect of an evening congregation assembled and no minister arriving to conduct the service. I was deeply asleep. Gradually I became aware of the intrusion of a bell continuing to ring. The ringing continued and I slowly awakened to the fact that the telephone was ringing.

I staggered from the sofa, still half-sleep, picked up the telephone and heard a woman's voice say, "Is that the Reverend David Kennedy? My name is Mrs. Lexie Findlater. I am telephoning from Grangemouth (a town 40 miles away). Your wife is impressing me so strongly that I have to telephone you now. I have tried to write a letter and put off this feeling but I am being told that I must telephone you now, now, she is so insistent, yet I have no idea why. Your wife is simply saying, 'Get out now and use the old notes'. I don't know what it means but I had to do this."

Now Mrs. Findlater, it will be remembered, was the medium whom I had met in the two private interviews described earlier, the first one two weeks after my wife's death. She only knew my name and not my address. She had to find my address and telephone number from directory enquiry. It took amazing confidence and courage to telephone a person who was almost a total stranger and then say that she did not know why she was telephoning except that my wife was impressing her that she had to do this.

I thanked Mrs. Findlater for telephoning and explained to her that if she had not telephoned me at this moment I would have slept right through the time of my evening service – it was 6 p.m. when she telephoned. I just had time to grab the notes of an old sermon, rush into my car and arrive at the church, get into my robes and 'make it' for the 6:30 p.m. evening service.

Now here is a case where my wife claimed that she saw me sleeping deeply, likely to miss my evening service. It was her habit to awaken me. There was only one way to get me to my church in time. She could not herself impress me, so she impressed strongly a more sensitive person, this woman 40 miles away, and got the thought across that she must telephone me. In other words, Ann managed to do for me what she had always done, awaken me on this particular Sunday. I had always relied on her to do this. If there is a better example of loving concern and intervention from our dear ones on the other side, it would be difficult to find.

Yet this is not the end. Three days later Albert Best [another medium, who, unlike Mrs. Findlater, was a personal friend of the author – MP] telephoned me and after an amazing message from my wife, concluded by saying "And Ann says, 'For heaven's sake get an alarm clock and don't sleep in again at the end of the week'."

Now comes the amazing evidence of that telephone call from Albert Best. Before the telephone rang I was in the middle of the kind of job a man has to learn to do for himself when he is living alone. I decided that my yellow pullover was in need of washing. I knew the general rules about washing woollens carefully and gently in warm water and soap flakes. I'm afraid I was overindulgent with the soap flakes. Anyhow, in a short time I had the basin overflowing with soap suds in a rich lather while I squeezed away at my yellow pullover.

Just then the telephone rang. Albert Best on the other end. "Are you shampooing, I mean not your hair, something woollen? I see lather, suds overflowing and something woollen in the basin. Your wife is saying that she was watching you doing this." I told Albert that I was actually washing a pullover in soap suds when he interrupted me. He replied, "Well, your wife is saying, 'Put in the black pullover while you're at it, the one with the egg stains on it, it needs washing badly'." Then followed the remark about getting an alarm clock which I have already referred to. Needless to say there was a black pullover, with egg stains, which I had forgotten about and which badly needed washing.

What does one make of this? Is it a fantastic form of telepathy in which an ordinary ex-postman has powers which would make him a fortune on stage or television? In which he knows not only exactly what I am doing, but the contents of my linen cupboard? Or is it the more reasonable explanation that my wife, who was always fussy about my dress and appearance and also insisted on doing these washing jobs right to the end, is still close and still aware and still concerned and because of the unique situation of my being in touch with a gifted medium, is able to show that same concern from beyond the barrier of death? [Pages 44-46, 1987  trade paperback edition]

A case of cosmic consciousness

Lately, at bedtime, I've been reading bits and pieces of Richard Maurice Bucke's famous 1901 study Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. The book is a compilation of accounts featuring persons both notable and unknown who underwent mystical experiences that uplifted their thought and character –  essentially what psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences" and what Hindu tradition calls "kundalini experiences."

Some of these accounts are more interesting and persuasive than others. Many of the best are those provided at first hand by Bucke's contemporaries – otherwise ordinary people whose lives were changed by a transcendent sense of oneness with the cosmos lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. One of the most intriguing of these reports is related in Chapter 29 of Part V and involves a woman identified only as C.M.C.

What follows is an abridged version of her story.

---

I was born in the year 1844. I have been told  that as a child I never seemed young – that is, that along with my youth there was an air of thoughtfulness that belongs to more advanced years. I cannot remember a time when I did not think and wonder about God. The beauty and sublimity of nature have always, from early childhood, impressed me deeply.…

The vastness and grandeur of the God which I felt in nature I could never reconcile with the God in the Bible, try as I would, and of course I felt myself a wicked skeptic in consequence. So it went on and though to all appearance I was happy and full of life like other girls, there was always that undercurrent – a vein of sadness deep down, out of sight.…

At twenty-two I was married. Ten years later a change of place broke up the old routine of my life, giving me new associates and new interests. I was thrown into relation with people of more liberal tendencies… From that time, without my going very deeply into the subject, a general idea of evolution was gained, and gradually the old conceptions gave place to more rational ones…. My attitude was that of an agnostic.

There I rested, not altogether content, it is true. Something in life had been missed which it seemed ought to be there; depths in my own nature which had never been sounded; heights I could see, which had not been reached.… An illness, combining extreme bodily prostration with the equally extreme mental and emotional disturbance, revealed to me the depths in my own nature. After some months my strength was restored and my mental condition to some extent improved, but the deep unrest remained. With the power to suffer came the power of sympathy with all suffering. What I had hitherto known or realized of life was as the prick of a pin to the thrust of a dagger. I had been living on the surface; now I was going down into the depths, and as I went deeper and deeper the barriers which had separated me from my fellow men were broken down, the sense of kinship with every living creature had deepened, so that I was oppressed with a double burden. Was I never to no rest or peace again?…

Passing over the interval between this time in September, 1893, as unimportant, except for the constant struggle within me, I proceed to describe, as well as may be, the supreme event of my life, which undoubtedly is related to all else, and is the outcome of those years of passionate search.

I had come to see that my need was greater even than I had thought. The pain and tension deep in the core and center of my being was so great that I felt as might some creature which had outgrown its shell, and yet could not escape. What it was I knew not, except that it was a great yearning – for freedom, for larger life, – for deeper love. There seemed to be no response in nature to that infinite need. The great tide swept on uncaring, pitiless, and strength gone, every resource exhausted, nothing remained but submission. So I said: There must be a reason for it, a purpose in it, even if I cannot grasp it. The Power in whose hands I am may do with me as it will!…

At last, subdued, with a curious, growing strength in my weakness, I let go of myself! In a short time, to my surprise, I began to feel a sense of physical comfort, of rest, as if some strain or tension was removed. Never before had I experienced such a feeling of perfect health. I wondered at it. And how bright and beautiful the day! I looked out at the sky, the hills and the river, amazed that I had never before realized how divinely beautiful the world was! The sense of lightness and expansion kept increasing, the wrinkles smoothed out of everything, there was nothing in all the world that seemed out of place….

The light and color glowed, the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me. Perfect rest and peace and joy were everywhere, and, more strange than all, there came to me a sense of some serene, magnetic presence – grand and all pervading. The life and joy within me were becoming so intense that by evening I became restless and wandered about the rooms, scarcely knowing what to do with myself. Retiring early that I might be alone, soon all objective phenomena were shut out. I was seeing and comprehending the sublime meaning of things, the reasons for all that had before been hidden and dark. The great truth that life is a spiritual evolution, that this life is but a passing phase in the soul's progression, burst upon my astonished vision with overwhelming grandeur. Oh, I thought, if this is what it means, if this is the outcome, then pain is sublime! Welcome centuries, eons, of suffering if it brings us to this! And still the splendor increased….

I felt myself going, losing myself. Then I was terrified, but with a sweet terror. I was losing my consciousness, my identity, but was powerless to hold myself. Now came a period of rapture, so intense that the universe stood still, as if amazed at the unalterable majesty of the spectacle! Only one in all the infinite universe! The All-loving, the Perfect One! The Perfect Wisdom, truth, love and purity! And with the rapture came the insight. In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss, came illumination. I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed – I know not whether material or spiritual – rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain – not a link left out – everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole. Universal life, synonymous with universal love!… How long the vision lasted I cannot tell. In the morning I awoke with a slight headache, but with the spiritual sense so strong that what we call the actual, material things surrounding me seemed shadowy or a shadowy and unreal. My point of view was entirely changed. Old things had passed away and all had become new. The ideal had become real, the old real had lost its former reality and had become shadowy. This shadowy unreality of external things did not last many days. Every longing of the heart was satisfied, every question answered, the "pent-up, aching rivers" had reached the ocean – I loved infinitely and was infinitely loved!…

How foolish, how childish, now seemed petulance of discontent in presence of that serene majesty! I had learned the grand lesson, that suffering is the price which must be paid for all that is worth having; that in some mysterious way we are refined and sensitized, doubtless largely by it, so that we are made susceptible to nature's higher and finer influences – this, if true of one, is true of all. And feeling and knowing this, I do not now rave as once I did, but am "silent" "as I sit and look out upon all the sorrow of the world" – "upon all the meanness and agony without end." That sweet eternal smile on nature's face! There is nothing in the universe to compare with it – such joyous repose and sweet unconcern – saying to us, with tenderest love: All is well, always has been and always will be.…

The consciousness of completeness and permanence in myself is one with that of the completeness and permanence of nature. This feeling is quite distinct from any that I had before illumination and has sprung from that. I often ponder on it and wonder what has happened – what change can have taken place in me to so poise and individualize me. My feeling is as if I were as distinct and separate from all other beings and things as is the moon in space and at the same time indissolubly one with all nature.

Out of this experience was born an unfaltering trust. Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand – an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding."

---

The piece probably doesn't require much comment, but I will note that a major part of C.M.C.'s "illumination" consisted of seeing the order of things:

I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed – I know not whether material or spiritual – rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain – not a link left out – everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole.

Though I don't mean to reduce C.M.C.'s highly emotional and life-changing experience to cold, impersonal, quasi-scientfic terms, I can't help noting that this passage possibly relates to an idea we have often considered on this blog – namely, that the universe ultimately consists of information and information processing, and that this informational content is constantly changing as part of a vast, interconnected system. Passing "from order to order" is actually a very precise and concise way of describing the visible changes in such a system – for instance, the constant change from one ordered pattern to another in the animated graphics on a computer screen that occurs every time the screen refreshes.  

I would add that the "atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed ... whether material or spiritual" could be interpreted as bits of data in this information processing system, which would be neither material nor spiritual, but would occupy some other ontological status as pure information; or, to make a related argument, they could be interpreted as Leibniz's monads (see Matt Rouge's guest post on that subject).

Of course, C.M.C. immediately links the above revelation to the following:

Universal life, synonymous with universal love!

The universal love is, perhaps, the attention bestowed by consciousness on the system, which brings it to life – breathing fire into the equations, to borrow the words of Stephen Hawking's famous question. Consciousness, in this view, observes and interacts with this system, perhaps by choosing a given pathway to actualize out of many possible alternatives. This is not to say that consciousness cannot love the objects of its attention; indeed, bringing a world to life out of cold, abstract algorithms could be seen as not only the ultimate act of creation but also the ultimate act of love. It is just possible that some intimation of this reality-actualizing power of consciousness underlies the consistent view of God across cultures as the creator of life and order, the generative principle that makes all things possible, and without which nothing could exist.  

Naturally, I don't suggest that this interpretation is the only possible one, or necessarily the correct one. An experience as profound as C.M.C.'s can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. 

Miscellaneous musings of meager merit

A grab-bag of brief items ...

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In an email to me, Michael Tymn, who wrote an introduction to Pierre Emile Cornillier's The Survival of the Soul (discussed here), noted my concern about the emphasis on suffering in the book's mediumistic communications. He said,

What you call "suffering" I would call overcoming adversity. I see that as the key to spiritual evolution.

Actually, I think this is a good way of looking at it. If there is no adversity to overcome, there can presumably be no progress. And perpetual existence without challenges — without "adversity" — would probably be both pointless and boring.

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Brian Whitworth reports that Chapter V of his project on "quantum realism" is now complete. The first five chapters of this work-in-progress are an in-depth application of the rules of computer processing to the observations and paradoxes of quantum physics. On his website, he explains:

In physical realism the physical world is real in itself while in quantum realism it is the output of quantum processing, i.e. virtual.

The material is pretty technical, but I've found it of great interest.

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On a related note, Marcus Arvan has posted two essays speculating that "the physical universe is a timelessly existing array of information comprising a vast, possibly infinite variety of branching 'time-lines,'" and that free will is possible because consciousness chooses which timelines to experience. He writes,

The joint choices of all conscious observers "collapse" possible paths through the multiverse at every given instant to a single, intersubjectively experienced (or "actualized") reality....

[This theory] takes the most plausible aspect of the Everett [many-worlds] interpretation – its assertion of numerous physical universes, to account for quantum indeterminacy – while denying its most implausible feature: its implication that all universes in the multiverse are equally “actualized.” [The theory] accomplishes this by assigning to consciousness the role of “universe actualizer.”

He analogizes the situation to a peer-to-peer networked computer simulation such as certain online multiplayer games, in which

each game console contains and plays a game DVD. Each game DVD 
consists of an array of information containing a vast range of possible “pasts, presents, and futures” within the game.... Each player’s choices on their own game console are processed by the network so that the joint choices of each player – choices not causally determined by any “physical law” within the simulation – lead each game console hooked up to the system to read complementary lines of code on the DVD to ensure that the physical laws of the simulation are not broken. This allows each player on the network to experience the same virtual environment from different points of view.

His essays "A New Theory of Free Will" and "A Unified Explanation of Quantum Phenomena?" are worth a look. They were brought my attention by our commenter "doubter" in the comment thread on this post.

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I've now read Mary Rose Barrington's article on Geraldine Cummins in the June 1966 issue of The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and I think it was somewhat misrepresented by a commenter who said it "debunked" Cummins. Barrington does suggest ways in which Cummins might have known or guessed some of the material she "channeled"; some of these suggestions are more plausible than others, and a few seem like a stretch. But in the end, she is impressed by the sheer wealth of detail related about Cummins' subject, Mrs. Winifred Coombe-Tennant. She writes,

How has the very convincing, three-dimensional Winifred been built up from glimpses of newspapers and reference books, and from casual gossip? Quantity must surely count for something, and the sheer amount of fact, the effortless flow of background knowledge, and the apparent consistency of characterization must make one pause and wonder how much of Miss Cummins's life could have been spent in listening to idle talk about Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, in whom she had no particular interest. Assuming any normal source of information, how could Miss Cummins have come to know that when she was young Winifred 'used to think the prayer in our prayer-book to deliver us from sudden death an odd and mistaken supplication. It was one in which I never joined'. Has Miss Cummins read this somewhere in a newspaper or magazine? Or has some friend happened to say to her 'Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, who's a friend of mine (but not of yours) once told me that until the death of her daughter she never used to join in the prayer for delivery from sudden death etc. etc.' If unamusing anecdotes of this sort were told about Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, she must have been one of England's most thoroughly talked about women.

Barrington concludes with a more general caution against hyper-skepticism, or (as we like to call it) Skepticism:

Frequent references to improbability and unlikelihood in the last few pages prompt a short consideration of what meaning can reasonably be attributed to such words in the context of psychical research. On one view, anything is more likely than survival (or indeed any other paranormal process), and it matters little whether the event taken into comparison amounts to fraud by men thought to be honest, stupidity by men thought to be clever, malobservation by experienced observers, unaccountable results obtained using reliable apparatus and materials, multiple coincidence, gross misreporting, or all these improbabilities occurring together. On this view we should be bound to reject the evidence of several dozen reputable scientists who all declared that jointly and severally they had seen apples falling upwards; so long as the phenomenon remained unpredictable and unrepeatable, their observations would always have to be deemed delusions, conspiracies, jokes, or whatever, because these natural eccentricities were more probable than behavior contrary to the known laws of gravitation.

It seems to me that the flaw in this way of thinking is the attempt to assess the likelihood of paranormal states and events, and I would argue that a classification in terms of likelihood is meaningless except when applied to familiar situations. ... To say that however improbable the ways and means, survival must be considered even more improbable is not meaningful.

I would not call this a debunking, even though some of the details channeled by Geraldine Cummins have been challenged. As Barrington says:

This does not, however, dispose of 'Swan on a Black Sea'. There remain the personality of Winifred, the mass of background knowledge, and a handful of details some of which are noted here; others may well occur to other readers.

Unfortunately I don't think this article is available online. 

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Finally, I was struck by a particular dialogue exchange in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. The narrator and his companion witness a monk confess to horrendous crimes committed in his younger days:

"And we burned and looted because we had proclaimed poverty the universal law, and we had the right to appropriate the illegitimate riches of others, and we wanted to strike at the heart of the network of greed that extended from parish to parish.… We killed to punish, to purify the impure through blood.… We had to kill the innocent as well, in order to kill all of you more quickly. We wanted a better world, of peace and sweetness and happiness for all.… We had to shed a little blood.… The fact is that it did not take much, the hastening, and it was worth turning the waters of the Carnasco red.… We had to hasten the course of events.…"

His whole body trembling, he rubbed his hands over his habit as if he wanted to cleanse them of the blood he was recalling. "The glutton has become pure again," William said to me.

“But is this purity?" I asked, horrified.

"There must be some other kind as well," William said, "but, however it is, it always frightens me."

"What terrifies you most in purity?" I asked.

"Haste," William answered.

Book Review: The Survival of the Soul

White Crow Books recently released a new edition of a 1921 study of mediumship called The Survival of the Soul and Its Evolution after Death, by French artist Pierre Emile Cornillier, focusing on his seances with a young model named Reine. After Cornillier mentioned his interest in table-tipping experiments, Reine wanted to try it for herself. On their first attempt the table spelled out a message advising Cornillier to hypnotize Reine. This unexpected order was obeyed, and Reine began channeling purported spirits. Eventually a high-level spirit named Vettellini took primary control, directing Reine's development as a medium and answering many questions posed by Cornillier.

The book, which runs more than 400 pages, is a record of 107 such seances. All the sittings were witnessed by Cornillier's wife (perhaps in part to rule out the salacious rumors that dogged other psychic investigators, like William Crookes), and some were witnessed by other persons, as well.  

An introduction by Michael Tymn points out that respected paranormal writer Robert Crookall named this book as his personal favorite among paranormal titles. Even so, The Survival of the Soul has been largely forgotten until now. 

I found the book consistently interesting, though not without flaws. On the plus side , there seems to be no doubt that Reine did manifest clairvoyant abilities. Assuming that Cornillier has reported the seances honestly — and I have no reason to think otherwise — Reine quickly developed the ability to observe distant locations and report on them with accuracy. So many specific examples are supplied that no other explanation presents itself except outright fraud on Cornillier's part. (Deception on the part of Reine would not explain her ability to describe people and events unknown to her, or to correctly divine the contents of sealed boxes.)

As a record of psi abilities manifested under hypnosis, Survival is a valuable text. It makes me wish that more such work was being done today. Putting mediums under hypnosis could be a way of reviving the nearly lost art of full-trance mediumship without the lengthy training period normally required for the development of this skill.

When we come to the communications from the spirits themselves, things get more complicated and more ambiguous. Many of these communications have a ring of truth, and yet there are errors and confusions that make it hard to know what’s really going on.

Reine tells us that the spirits she sees are differentiated by color. The lower spirits are reddish, the higher ones bluish , and the highest of all (at least of those known) are white. Interestingly, this color scheme corresponds to the ancient system of chakras, which associates the red end of the spectrum with the lower part of the body and the blue end with the higher faculties, while, in some variants, pure white represents a still higher level of development. Neither Cornillier nor Reine gives any indication of prior knowledge of chakras.

Asked if there are signs that reveal the evolutionary level of an incarnated spirit, Vettellini replies that there are one or two. "First, bonté [kindness, benevolence]. But bonté that understands: that is to say, an indulgence for others proceeding from a deep knowledge of the human soul. This bonté is intelligent and recognizes the necessity of sanction and severity. Bonté severite [benevolence and strictness] is, then, one sign to remember. Second: interest in the humble, the unimportant, the weak – an interest which is necessarily accompanied by indifference to social success, honors and position. And, finally, all inclination for philosophical speculations, all preoccupation in the mystery of the Au-Delà [the Beyond], and all effort to penetrate that mystery, – this is evolution itself!"

Naturally it would be nice to believe this last point, since it means that readers of this blog are already spiritually advanced. 

Certain statements attributed to Vettellini seem consistent with the results of more recent parapsychology research. For instance, Vettellini informs Cornillier that in some table-tipping exercises, no spirit is present , and the illusion of spirit contact is produced by the combined subconscious energies of the sitters. This is reminiscent of the famous Philip experiments, in which a wholly fictional spirit was made to engage in conversations (via raps) with the sitters.

Vettellini tells us that more highly developed spirits can choose to forego another incarnation and continue their evolution on the astral plane, though this is "more difficult" even than "the slow ordeal of incarnation." He explains the divergent messages from the spirit world on reincarnation and other topics by saying that spirits at different levels of development have different levels of knowledge. His vision of the spirit world seems more consistent with the between-lives regression studies of Michael Newton (also involving hypnosis) than with the channeled texts of Anthony Borgia or the direct-voice mediumship of Leslie Flint. There is no mention of gardens and cottages, of small homely details and ordinary life. Instead Vettellini's "Au-Delà" is an ethereal realm of shapeless spirits who can recall all their incarnations and in some cases assist in planning their next sojourn in the physical world.

The most complete explanation of the discrepancy between Vettellini's messages and those conveyed elsewhere  is offered late in the book: "By their fixed and persistent ideas Spirits, unconsciously, produce images around them – illusions of which they themselves are the first dupes and which also mislead the disincarnated souls in their environment. … And this is a … source of errors in communications that are quite sincere but which, as information, are no more dependable than is any other hallucination. ... In astral life Spirits of slight evolution seem as a rule to perceive only these image illusions."

This explanation is consistent with thoughts posted on this blog, and with channeled statements attributed to F.W.H. Myers in Geraldine Cummins' book The Road to Immortality, statements that characterize the so-called Summerland as a "plane of illusion." (It is also broadly consistent with the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which warns against being taken in by exteriorized thought-forms.)

Throughout Cornillier's book there is much talk of fluids and vibrations, which seems to suggest that reality consists ultimately of waves in a conducting medium. This may simply reflect standard spiritualist language or the physics of the day, which understood subatomic particles to be waves in "the ether." Even so, it's interesting to note that the idea of reality as essentially wave patterns is not inconsistent with the more modern "holographic universe-information matrix" idea. If each person consists of a point of consciousness bound to a nexus of information, and if this information affects the informational patterns around it in a manner reminiscent of the interaction of waves, then some sense can perhaps be made of Reine s search for a given person 's unique "fluid" (informational pattern) and of the idea that some "fluid" remains in items that a person has handled or created. There may also be some deeper meaning in the image, conveyed by Reine, of the high-level spirits making strange wavelike motions in an attempt to reconfigure the patterns of future history — as if seeking (in modern terms) to modify informational currents that exist only as probability distributions until they are actualized.

Vettellini's communications stress the importance of the interaction between soul and body. The life, talents, and capabilities of the incarnated human being are, we are told, determined not exclusively by the soul's level of development but by the innate qualities of the biological organism. A first-class brain can be paired with a relatively undeveloped soul. As Vettellini puts it, in a quote deemed memorable enough to grace the new edition's back cover, “The brilliant ones, even those who have great intellectuality, are often no more advanced in evolution [than the lowest souls]. They have had the luck to incarnate in an organism so perfect, so supple, that it is the organism which does all the work — a well-trained mount gives an air of skill to the most ignorant horseman.“ Ouch!

A tad biting, perhaps, but this viewpoint jibes with speculations on this blog about the symbiotic relationship between soul and body. It is not so much that the brain is a receiver of consciousness; it’s that the brain, like the Mars Rover, receives instructions from afar but also enjoys a degree of autonomy, and, in sending back data to Mission Control, can directly influence the next set of instructions it receives. (This analogy is taken from The Biology of Belief, by Bruce Lipton, as I recall.) 

The value of all these esoteric claims has to be judged by the accuracy and plausibility of other statements made by Vettellini that are susceptible of verification or falsification. Unfortunately, his track record in this respect is far from perfect.

For one thing, he insists that cremation ordinarily cuts all ties between the spirit and the earth, making it impossible for the discarnate spirit to communicate, because the astral (or "fluidic") body has lost its anchor to the physical world. Of course, in the 21st century cremation is quite common, and it does not seem to have impeded after-death communications, so this claim seems doubtful at best.

Another more-than-questionable claim involves the birth of twins. Vettellini says that "two or more Spirits cannot be captured (incarnated) at the same moment. One single coition can give birth to only one child. This is absolute. It is only by repetition — the period of receptivity may extend over several days — that a second Spirit may be captured by a new penetration of a spermatozoon into the ovule." This strong claim directly contradicts what is known about sexual reproduction today. Yes, fraternal twins are the result of two separate sperm cells penetrating two ova (though this usually happens in a single coition), but identical twins are the result of one sperm cell penetrating one ovum, which later splits in two.

Vettellini's record as a prognosticator is not much better. He is able to predict small details with accuracy, such as the timing of an unplanned trip. But when it comes to the big picture, there are problems. His most earthshaking prediction concerns a world war that is soon to erupt — but this is not either of the world wars we are know. This one will involve a general uprising in the European colonies, which will destabilize the world and precipitate Europe's invasion by China and Japan. In the ensuing chaos, European civilization will be utterly destroyed. We are told that high-level spirits are attempting to derail this catastrophic chain of events by altering the future so that the war, though disastrous, will not mean the end of civilization. 

Late in the book, Cornillier calls out Vettellini on this missed prediction, but Vettellini sticks to his guns, insisting that the war between Europe and Asia is inevitable and has only been temporarily postponed. "It was true at the time, and it is still true now. ... WHAT REINE SAW, WILL BE. Let these visions stand as they were written in your notes, FOR THEY WILL BE REALISED — though at what moment I cannot say." (The capitalization is in the original.) Still later, Vettellini changes his tune, saying the catastrophe has been averted: "Reine made no mistake. It was to be. But we have driven it back." 

How about the other spirits that speak through Reine? One identifies himself as a composer who went by the name of Nicolo, and who gives his dates of birth and death as 1775 and 1808. He says that he moved to Paris in his 20s and enjoyed great success there, before dying at age 43. “All was exact — facts and dates,“ Cornillier tells us after checking the historical record. Not quite. First, there must have been a mistake somewhere, since someone with those dates of birth and death would have been 33, not 43, when he died. In any event, modern sources say Nicolo was born in 1773 and died in 1818. 

On another occasion Vettellini refers to Nicolo as "Isouard," confusing both the medium and the author until Vettellini explains that Isouard was Nicolo's real name (true) and that he disliked using it (a detail Cornillier says he was able to verify).

A second composer who comes through is Méhul. In this case, dates and other information are correct. Cornillier made an effort to confirm some of Méhul's more obscure claims and found evidence supporting some of them.

Another spirit, personally unknown to anyone at the séance, gives many details about herself, including the great secret of her life: that she took a priest as a lover. Remarkably enough, Cornillier was able to confirm all of these details, including "the existence of a priest in the intimate life of this woman." This point was verified by somebody who knew her well and confided in the author's wife.

For me, the book conveys a slightly gloomy impression. We are told repeatedly that suffering and struggle are part of our evolution, and that we must suffer through many earthly incarnations and many astral planes, apparently with no relief in sight, no matter how high we rise. (Oddly, although this theme is repeated throughout the communiques, it never occurs to Cornillier to ask just why suffering is necessary in order to make progress.) We are also told that much of life is determined by an impersonal Fate, over which we have no control, while other aspects can be adjusted and modified by our own will or by the desperate improvisations of high-level spirits, as in the case of the impending war. The implication is of a rather chaotic universe, whose events are partly preordained and partly ad hoc, and of a reality that remains largely mysterious, with even the highest (known) spirits ignorant of their ultimate purpose.

The depressing nature of some of the communications is reinforced by the sad travails of little Reine, who, besides being desperately poor and wholly uneducated, is chronically ill with fever, bronchitis, rheumatism, neuralgia, etc. In probably the majority of sittings she is suffering from some malady. 

The mood brightens in later chapters, with Vettellini stating, "Amongst the average Spirits many are happy. In death, as in life, there are the anxious, and the happy-go-lucky. To sum it up: when lucidity is once recovered [after the usual period of disorientation following death], the soul capable of spiritual interests and joys is happy; the soul whose happiness depends upon material pleasures, regrets [leaving] the earth. It is logical."

Overall, Cornillier's book is something of a mixed bag. I don’t doubt the author's sincerity, and I do think that genuine paranormal phenomena were taking place, as evidenced by Reine's verified descriptions of distant places and her correct predictions of upcoming events in her (or Cornillier's) life. Moreover, many of the spirit communications ring true and cast new light on much-debated questions. Offsetting these positives are the incorrect predictions and inaccurate scientific pronouncements. Of course these inaccuracies could be attributed to garbled communications, the interference of low-level spirits, and so forth, but such explanations are not terribly persuasive. Cornillier himself was clearly troubled by some of these issues, even complaining to Vettellini that a prediction that's subject to change is no prediction at all! 

Whatever its faults, The Survival of the Soul is an engrossing record of an unusual experiment in mental mediumship, and White Crow Books and Michael Tymn both deserve credit for bringing it to the attention of a new audience. I recommend it as an important historical record in the serious study of the Au-Delà. 

Apropos of nothing ...

In honor of Halloween, some paranormal books I'd like to see ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Halloween!