Why do you ask if I am a troll? Are you a follower of Sai Baba and I hit a nerve?

Ottawa, thanks for that.  I agree that Sai Baba is immoral and dishonest.  But in the history of witchcraft psychics of dubious character have still been able to display paranormal gifts.  But the real  question is why Robert Bruce must be deemed a liar for claiming to see a vision of Sai Baba.  His vision of Sai Baba might be either the product of a spirit impersonator or a hallucination.  I'm not a big fan of Robert Bruce personally, but I do think he is a astral adept.  So when he independently confirms Swedenborg's discovery that discarnate souls soon find their earth memories dormant and rarely available, I take this seriously as problematic for the chatty ease with which mediums connect seekers with loved ones, who are remarkably adept at retrieving detailed memories.

Berserk, do you believe Sai Baba had any paranormal powers? If so, which ones. Thanks.

Sai Baba used to supposedly materialize one brand of watch.  Then that brand became unavailable and he supposedly started to materialize another brand. Maybe it was a matter of trademark issues.

DocM wrote on Jun 4^th, 2012 at 4:07pm:

OK, enough on Sai Baba already!  What about the general principle that astral explorers (e. g. Robert Bruce, Swedenborg) encounter discarnates who don't seem to recall their earth lives?  Would you concede that that might be a problem for the chatty ease with mediums extract detailed information from discarnates about their earth lives?  Or is it better to see the medium as gleaning information from the lving or deceased minds without that person even being aware of this?  Thus, the proxy sitter at Blanche Cooper's reading received detailed information about Gordon Davis's past and future life without Davis's awareness.  Indeed, Cooper portrayed Davis as deceased and only concerned about his surviving wife and child.  But Davis was alive at the time and on a business trip.  Here's the key: the sitter had been wrongly informed that Davis was dead!

Ah! Come off it Don! As usual you need a springboard to launch your boring Christian based argumentative spiel such as using the recent posts from the 'Depresso Sisters' Judith and Deanna...

I tend to agree with Swedenborg, who noted that when you leave the earth plane, as you are distanced from common earthly sensory experiences, you push some of them back in your memory.  Spiritual senses may be heightened but are, by their very nature different than earthly senses.  There is no earthly "biology" that we know of in heaven, and hence, common day-to-day physical experiences begin to fade, and we may forget certain earth-plane related things.  This is why, it confuses me that mediums often bring up the opposite information, such as the exact date of a birth or death 30 years before. I very much doubt that many elderly people are aware of the dates of their death, yet a medium may come out with June 27, 1976.  Now come on...it makes much more sense that the medium is pulling a number from a source (like what has been described as an akashic record) in those instances.  However, the information is always intriguing.

Communication with those in the mental plane is always a two-way street, and this may, in part explain the fuzziness of some information that is received.  We are assuming that when Robert Bruce or E.S. reported spirits with memory trouble, that they were certain of it.  But what were the connections between these incarnate human beings and the discarnate ones?  Was the communication free and chatty, or were they filtering their "impressions" of the conversation through the interpreter in their physical brains?   Of course this question can not be answered.

However we can take, as an example remote viewing  (RV) as a corollary situation.  In RV, a person opens their mind and tries to examine an object in a distant part of the world based solely on what they are told of its longitude and latitude (and similar information).  The worst remote viewers get caught up in interpreting or misinterpreting the fleeting images they get.  Thus, steel girders from a destroyed building may come across as a bridge crossing over water, because the RViewer's mind interprets the image, even if the interpretation is incorrect.  Our minds tend to try to make order out of things - to see patterns where none may exist. 

The same may be true for communications by mediums and astral explorers.  The mind of the person still living may color the interpretation of factual information. 

Matthew

For me, the greatest single problem for the genuiness of channeling is the deafening silence, the breakthrough insights that we would naturally expect, but never receive.  Must we assume that our deceased loved ones learn nothing new about the purpose of life, the nature of human consiciousness, unknown principles that govern effective prayer and paranormal abilities?  Many astral explorers lead us to believe that there is a Hall of Knowledge in Focus 27 that contains all knowlege, including secrets of the universe.  If channeling is genuine, should we not expect all kinds of unexpected insights about the differences between life here and life there?  Al kinds of unexpected insights about the stages and methods of spiritual progress on the other side?  As it is, what gets channeled (e. g. the Seth books of Jane Roberts) is disconcertingly mundane and deficient in imagination--just the sort of disclosures that one would expect if this is nothing but a projection of our unconsious minds, supplemented by some amazing access to group mind or the collective unconscious to provide that paranormal information under discussion.  Communication with afterlife territories might naturally be expected to provide scientific and other nonoccult breakthroughs for human life on earth.  The deafening silences render the most impressive parnormal "verifications" unconvincing, at least to me.

Don