Matthew,

In his book, "The Sacred and the Psychic," John Heaney surveys the major theories invoked by parapsychologists to account for telepathy and clairvoyance.   He identifies one theory as the most popular because it is the most consistent with the research and anedotal data.  He summarizes this theory thus: Telepathy and clairvoyance are "an unknown form of energy which does not cross space but which reaches inward to the essential psychic center of a person.  At this center a transpersonal mode is reached where all humans and perhaps all reality are united.  This is similar to the Collective Unconscious of Carl Jung  (p. 20)." 

Even if channeling connects the living and the deceased, it involves telepathy.  I summarize Eleanor Sidgwick's theory of how this might occur in reply#12.   What divides parapsychologists is the question of whether even the best of channeling can be dismissed as JUST telepathy and, therefore, as irrelevant to the question of survival.  In my analysis of case studies, I am trying to make the case that at least some cases represent genuine contact with the deceased.

Don

AN EXAMPLE OF A PROXY SITTING

Edgar Vandy and his friend NJ wanted to go swimming in an outdoor pool on a country estate. Both changed into their swimsuits in bushes 200 yards from the pool.  Edgar, a poor swimmer, walked to the pool about 3 minutes before NJ.  When NJ arrived, Edgar was face down in the pool, drowning.  Edgar slipped from NJ's grasp and began to sink.  NJ went for help and returned too late.  The inquest concluded from the bruises on Edgar's chin, right shoulder, and left side that he dove off the board and hit his chin hard on the bottom.   The Vandy brothers were sure that Edgar didn't know how to dive; they thought he slipped while trying to exit the pool and hit his head on the edge.  They hoped mediums could clear this up.

Proxy sittings are held to eliminate the possibility of the medium gaining information by cold reading or by reading the sitter's mind.  Drayton Thomas was asked in a letter to serve as a proxy sitter by the Vandy brothers to determine how their brother died.  Thomas knew no names or other details.  Before he agreed, he arranged a sitting with Gladys Leonard to contact his own deceased family members, not to contact the dead brother.  Her spirit control, Feda, suddenly mentioned the initials  H and M which fit the intials of Edgar's brother Harold and his recently deceased sister, Minnie.  Feda then added: "This may be a proxy case about someone who went out through falling..."

The rest of Feda's material is strikingly on target.  I will append clarifying comments in paretheses:

Feda added: "The person concerned was not a boy but not old [Edgar was 38] and had met with a tragic accident involving a fall...No one was at fault.  He had a funny feeling in his head, which he had had before...He realized the importance of air...At the dragging something was...wrong interpretations given to certain proceedings
[The murky pool had to be dragged to recover the body.]."

As Fontana observes: "Taken independently, these comments may not be very impressive.  But in the context that the Vandy brothers subsequently had with..other mediums..., they contribute importantly to the case (191)."  For example, Edgar's brother, George, later had a sitting with Miss Campbell who was told nothing about Edgar or his death.  Yet she revealed several details about Edgar's life and family.  She addressed the question of how Edgar died [My clarifying comments are in parentheses.]:

"You have a brother in the spirit world who died as a result of an accident...His death was quite sudden.  He disagrees with the verdict...No one saw him fall.  He shows me water.  Was there water in connection with his death?  He was dressed in a short swimming suit [Yes, he had borrowed the swimsuit of NJ's sister!] His clothes were at some distance from where he was [Yes. 200 yards].  He struggled to get his breath.  The body was in the water for some time before it was found (Yes, at least 2 or 3 minutes]."

Edgar's other brother, Harold, arranged a sitting with Miss Bacon who informed him:

"The one you want has only recently passed out.  You are not sure of the way he did so...It was an accident.  I feel as if I had been drowned...A private kind of pool, like a swimming pool.   Had a blow to the head before he passed over ...not diving...catching his foot on the bottom...drawn under...He remembers going under and feeling a distinct blow to the head.  [True, there were bruises on his chin and his tongue was bitten through] The water should have been transparent  and bottom not bricked in, grass at the bottom." [True, the pool was fed by an underground stream.  The bottom was slimy and the water was cloudy]... someone swimming there at the time." [NJ only swam there while Edgar was drowning.]

Two other mediums produced similarly impressive results.  The channeled material of all 4 mediums contacted are consistent with the confusion shown by the drowning man himself.  Some commentators deem this one of the most impressively evidential cases for survival of all time.

Don

Great verifications, Don.

Brings up interesting questions for me.  I have heard it said that the more spiritually advanced the soul, the less earthly issues matter to them.  If someone is in a heaven, or a "focus 27" are they really going to be attempting to help read tomorrows's newspapers?  It makes me think that only more earthbound spirits or those still caught up in the material world can do such verifications.  Of course, I could be wrong on this.

I wonder if some mediums can only see spirits of a certain vibration; recently deceased souls who haven't moved on.  Of course, if there is no time after we die, then we could communicate at any point after death.  Why don't we here more from Moses, or others of thousands of years ago?  They may have no current earthly ties left and that could play into it. 

The verifications are certainly food for thought. 

Thanks Don

M

I began this thread by quoting Bruce’s reply to one of my earlier posts on channeling:
“The historical evidence you cite with other mediums during other times really has no bearing on the hypothesized contact between this medium and Deanna's Grandad.  We could each cite historical examples to support real contact or false contact by mediums in the past to support our own hypothesis."
______________

I have just described some of the best verified channelings of all time and I’d wager that at least some of these cases involve genuine contact with deceased loved ones.  I agree with Bruce that more "well-designed experiments” are needed to test the claims of channeling.   But I don’t believe the distinction between “real contact” and “false contact” is as clear-cut as Bruce seems to feel.  In my view, the answers to the ensuing 5 questions casts a pall of suspicion over ALL channeling:

(1) What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?                

(2) What if the spirit control of mediums with impressive verifications can be proven to be a fraud?   What conclusion would that warrant about other spirit controls whose self-professed identity cannot be verified?                                                  

(3) What if a drop-in communicator could provide amazing verifications even involving precognition of the future, and yet, be later proven a fraud?            

(4) What if it can be shown that the attribution of channeled materials to discarnate friends and relatives reflects a culturally conditioned bias?  

(5) What if mediums who try to abandon the channeling profession to become a conventional Christian are viciously attacked by spirits they formerly believed to be benign and very helpful?  As I will now illustrate, channeling can be significantly called into question on all 5 grounds.

(1) As already mentioned, Leonore Piper is one of the most impressive mediums ever.   She had the uncanny ability to channel two entities at the same time, one through automatic writing and the other through entranced speech.   Psychologist G. Stanley Hall had a trick up his sleeve when he went for a sitting with her. She was currently using the spirit of Richard Hodgson as her control.   Hodgson had formerly investigated her, but had recently died of a massive heart attack.  Hall asked Hodgson's spirit to contact Hall’s niece, “Bessie Beals,” so that he might speak with her.  Miss Beals was duly introduced and proceeded to communicate with Hall through Mrs. Piper.  Actually Bessie Beals did not exist.  She was a figment of Hall’s mind.  “Hodgson,” in embarrassment tried to wriggle out of the situation, saying that he had been mistaken about the name.  He said that the person brought was a Jessie Beals, related to another sitter.  Dr. Samuel Soal...visualized incidents with an imaginary friend, John Ferguson.  He then went for a sitting with the medium, Blanche Cooper.  The incidents he visualized came forth as though communicated from beyond death!  

(2) Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent.  While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892.  The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium.  But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced.  Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself to be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor.   But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemd to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.”  It seems doubtful that Hodgson would have changed his mind if he had lived to discover the Gordon Davis case, which I shall now describe.

(3) At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.”  Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper.  Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I.  Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.”  Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent.  The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech  (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”).  Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation.  He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days.  At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.  

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him.  A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct.  But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting!  Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients.  Only around the  time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time.   But Davis did not move into the house until a year later.  More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance!  Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird.  Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings!  So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177).  And this precognition surely casts doubt on the authenticity Gladys Leonard's repeated channeling of many details posted in specific columns of tomorrow's newspaper.

Why is channeling not discredited in this way more often?  Well, ask yourself how often you are mistakenly informed that your friend has died.   Was the medium able to exploit Soal’s mistaken faith in Davis’ death as an aid in the process of reconstructing Davis’ personality and future by precognitive telepathy?  Or were the medium (Blanche Cooper) and sitter (Sam Soal) duped by an impersonating spirit?

(4) Shamans understand their mediumship to put them in contact with spirits and demons as well as with deceased people.  In earlier centuries Neoplatonists also practiced trance mediumship, but attributed it to the agency of gods or demons rather than to discarnate humans.   Likewise, witches from the 17th and 18th centuries ascribed their channeled material to demons.  Perhaps the modern attempt to identify spirit controls with deceased personalities reflects the wishful thinking of modern cultural prejudice.  Why is Leonora Piper’s spirit control (Phinuit) lying about his true identity?  Why did Sam Soal’s alleged brother lie about bringing Gordon Davis’ spirit through?   Or were these people simply deceived?

The length of this post makes it seem advisable to answer question #5 in my next planned post.

Don

Human beings are complex, with both good and evil tendencies.  It is rare that a seemingly virtuous man does not have their shortcomings or that a seemingly evil wretched man has no virtues.  Why should a spirit be any different? 

The idea that channeled readings must originate from evil spirits who will disappear magically if the medium becomes a true believer seems a bit bizzarre.  I believe that much information may come from a less than divine source from the afterlife - but less than divine does not necessarily mean pure evil.  If there is a field that our subconscious connects to of "everything," if remote viewing taps into this field, perhaps spirits who have passed over may access it more freely.  Perhaps in doing so, they can give verifiable information and possibly, predict things.
     Would Jesus/the christian God necessarily be against this?  No more than he would be against the Monroe institute, Bruce's imagination method, Kundalini or other manners of exploration. 
     If one's attempt is to heal others, comfort others, and verifiable information is received, does it matter if the source may be a confused spirit or an angel?
     Don, some of what you acknowledge to be true on this website would smack of heresy and blasphemy to a bible thumping evangelist - you know that as well as I.  I think from your posts that you believe in much of what is posted on this site: about thought and belief creating reality, about our connection with the divine, about free will. 
     Still, your examples are interesting, well written and entertaining - I'll give you that.  I still wouldn't discount mediums based on Raphael's experiences alone.
     Also, as I noted before, if a medium channeled a living person, I would wonder whether it wasn't misdirected perception - almost like remote viewing mistaken for contact with a dead person.

Matthew

Don-

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe those who become possessed are somehow unwittingly inviting such possession.  Maybe it takes two to tango so to speak.

The reason I say this is because, if possession is truly a one sided thing initiated by an evil entity, you would think we would hear of many thousands, even millions, of such cases.  A small child would be an inviting and highly vulnerable target, yet verified cases involving children are far and few between (thank goodness).

You might argue that a young child (or a rational adult for that matter) cannot possibly give his or her consent.  That's true to the extent we understand consent, but maybe it's far more complex than we know.  Otherwise the number of victims would be astronomical.

R

A SECOND NEGATIVE CHANNELING CASE

Like Raphael Gasson, Johanna Michaelsen initially believed in her blossoming mediumistic gift.  She was a Yoga teacher who was heavily involved in the New Age movement.   She recalls: "During meditation vivid scenes of at least 15 different incarnations had filled my mind..., giving me a deep understanding... of what I needed to suffer in order to achieve perfect unity with God (138).” She shares her story of how she was deceived and liberated in her gripping book, “The Beautiful Side of Evil.”  

For over 14 months, Johanna works with a celebrated Mexican Indian shaman named Pachita and her spirit control Hermanito.  Hermanito identifies himself as an ancient healer who was killed by the Spaniards (123).  Johanna offers this plausible enough rationalization for her work with Hermanito: “Was there not a crucifix on the altar and a picture of Jesus?...We were constantly told to elevate our thoughts to God and to say the Lord’s Prayer.  Besides, what purpose would Satan have in healing and doing good works (102)?" Hermanito performed major surgery without anaesthesia and dumfounded Western doctors who saw "him" in action.  Johanna reports: "I had washed the blood of over 200 operations from my hands. I had seen anything from the removal of brain tumors to the replacement of vertebrae and lung transplants (131).”

But Johanna was an honest spiritual seeker who revered the Christian God in her New Age way. Before the psychic surgery, she would pray like this: “Almighty God,...help me now to become an instrument of your hand....Guide us now in this work.  Help us discern what is false and of our imagination from what is of You.  Protect us from any evil being who would hinder this work (95).”  

She would not have to wait long before her prayer was answered: “I was praying intensely as Hermanito cut open a woman’s abdomen when suddenly he looked up and pointed to me: ‘Hurry, get her out of here...It is just a precaution; she has a most powerful spirit protecting her.’  He looked up as he said this, and for a moment I was paralyzed by the hatred I saw in his face (104).”

On her sister Kim’s advice, Johanna goes to a Christian retreat center in L’Abri, Switzerland, where she bonds with a female counselor named Birdie.  One night there, Johanna prays: “I’m willing to give up yoga and Pachita and all the rest if I’m wrong.  But if not, then I’m putting all this nonsense aside and going on with it at Pachita's.  God, let me see the truth!’  I had no idea how literally God would answer that prayer (146).”

“The night of November 15, 1972, ...I walked alone on the slippery path to Birdie’s chalet...A dense black fog was forming all around me, blotting out the path.  Within seconds I could see nothing.  The dark mist was swirling, alive, filled with the presence of something more monstrous than anything I had ever before encountered.  Voices began whispering, hissing incoherent words and laughter in my right ear.  An ice-cold breath touched the back of my neck under my hair.  `Hermanito, help me!’  I gasped.  The voices shrieked in hideous laughter.  `We’re going to kill you!"

"I panicked and broke into a run.  Something like a giant fist slammed into my back between my shoulders.  I pitched forward in the thick darkness and instinctively reached out to break my fall.  My fingers found the branch of a small bush and clung to it.  I tried to scream out `Jesus!’ but an iron hand closed upon my throat choking off the word.  All  I could do was scream in my mind, `Jesus, Jesus, help me!’ `He can’t help you!’ the voices shrieked.  `He can’t help you!’"

“Birdie hurried me into her little prayer room and closed the door.  She took my hands in hers and began praying....The room seemed to have been taken up in a giant slow-motion whirlwind... Outside [the window] I could see the faces of countless demons, contorted, twisted in indescribable rage....[Birdie:] `Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I command you to be gone!  I forbid your presence here.  I claim the protection of the blood of Jesus upon us...’ Instantly, the faces vanished.  The room stopped spinning was filled with a peace beyond all my understanding.  They were gone (146-148).”  

Johanna has now renounced her former New Age beliefs, including reincarnation, and has become a devout Christian.  I myself have nothing against yoga.  I do believe that channeling at its best can mediate genuine contact with the dead and have documented some of the best evidence on this thread.  But I consider most channeling bogus, not necessarily evil.  Still, negative experiences like Raphael's and Johanna's prompt me to discourage any who ask my advice from sitting with mediums.

Don