Don,

Your argument only could apply for mediums who claim to hear a deceased person talking "word for word."  Many mediums say that get visual symbols, letters, dates - as the information is transmitted.  Scientific breakthroughs would be nigh on impossible with these indirect bursts of communication. 

A channeling, as personified by Seth is a different story.  It would stand to reason that a channeled entity should be able to "bring over" more useful information. 

There does seem to be a deliberate game going on here in earth-life.  We willingly (or not) enter into an incarnate organism, and separate ourselves out from everything else.  There is a sense that if communication with the otherside were a free exchange, that we might "spoil the purpose" (ruin the punchline) of incarnating in the first place.  If there are divine rules about this sort of things, we should know about it. 

Matthew

Concrete quotations from George Ritchie's NDE and Swedenborg's astral research might make our discussion of postmotem memory issues clearer.

Psychiatrist George Ritchie experienced the most influential and one of the most in depth NDEs ever recorded.   It is his NDE experienced as a young solider during World War II that inspired Raymond Moody to research NDEs for his influential book “Life After Life.”  Together with Howard Storm’s “My Descent into Death,” 

Ritchie’s book “Return from Tomorrow” ranks as my favorite NDE book and certainly the best written.  This post picks up his story after Christ has appeared to him as a blazing Being of Light and taken him on a tour of the locales of various earthbound spirits. Christ then takes hiim to a higher, more peaceful educational plane.  Let me quote a few snippets from Ritchie’s enthralling description of that plane:

“We entered a studio where music of a complexity I couldn’t begin to follow was being composed and performed.  There were complicated rhythms, tones not on any scale I knew. . .Now we walked through a library the size of the whole University of Richmond.  I gazed into rooms lined floor to floor with documents on parchment, clay, leather, metal, paper.  `Here,’ the thought occurred to me, `are assembled all the important books of the universe.’...Then abruptly, at the door of one of the smaller rooms, almost an annex: `Here is the central  thought of this earth [70-71].’”

“I could not tell if they were men or women, old or young, for all were covered from head to toe in loose-flowing hooded cloaks which made me think vaguely of monks.  But the atmosphere was not at all as I imagined a monastery.  It was more like some tremendous study center, humming with the excitement of great discovery.  Everyone we passed in the wide halls and on  the curving stair cases seemed caught up in some all-engrossing activity; not many words were exchanged among them.  And yet I sensed no unfriendliness between these beings, rather an aloofness of total concentration.”

“WHATEVER ELSE THESE PEOPLE MIGHT BE, THEY APPEARED UTTERLY AND
SUPREMELY SELF-FORGETFUL--ABSORBED IN SOME VAST PURPOSE BEYOND
THEMSELVES.  Through open doors I glimpsed enormous rooms filled with complex equipment.  In several of the rooms hooded figures bent over intricate charts and diagrams, or sat at the controls of elaborate consoles flickering with lights....I felt that some vast experiment was being pursued, perhaps dozens and dozens of such experiments [69-70] .”

The educational realm witnessed by Ritchie seems reminiscent of some descriptions of Focus 27 in the Monroe-Moen scheme of “astral geography.”  But Ritchie detects that its inhabitants are still incapable of perceiving Christ’s exalted presence and that even this peaceful realm does not yet qualify as Heaven.

The astral insights of Ritchie and R. Bruce might have profound implications for deceased souls from higher planes who might otherwise want to retrieve their loved ones who are "stuck" in lower or hellish planes. To what extent do they even remember these “trapped” loved ones, let alone their loved ones who are still alive on the earth?

Swedenborg explores astral memory problems in greater depth than either Ritchie or R. Bruce.   Here is a sampling of some ES quotes about the status of memory in “the World of Spirits,” a realm “below” the Heavens:

“We have two memories, an inner and an outer, or a natural one and a spiritual one. We are not aware that we have this inner memory.  How much better the inner memory is than the outer one! The contents of our outer memory are in the world’s light, while the contents of our inner memory are in heaven’s light.  It is because of our inner memory that we can think and talk intelligently and rationally.  Absolutely everything we have thought, said, done, seen, and heard is inscribed on our inner memory....Things that have become second nature to us and part of our life and therefore have been erased from our outer memory are in our inner memory (463, note b)."

After death, adult memory “stays fixed and then goes dormant; but it still serves their thinking after death as an outmost plane because their thought flows into it.  This is why the nature of this plane and the way their rational activity answers to its contents determines the nature of the individual after death (#345)."

".All that remain are the rational abilities that now serve as a basis for thinking and talking.   We actually take with us our entire natural memory, but its contents are not open to our inspection and do not enter into our thought as when we were living in this world...To the extent that our spirit has become rational by means of our insights and learning in this world, we are rational after
our departure from the body (#355).”
   
“The reason our outer memory goes dormant as far as material things are concerned is that they cannot be recreated.  Spirits and angels [= discarnate people] actually talk from the affections and consequent thoughts of their minds, so they cannot utter anything that does not square with these...I have talked with any number of people who were regarded as learned in the world because of their knowledge of such ancient languages as Hebrew and Greek and Latin, but had not developed their rational functioning by means of the things that were written in thos  languages. Some of them seemed as simple as people who did not know anything about those languages; some of them seemed dense, though there still remained a pride as though they were wiser than other people (#464).”

“I have also talked with some people who had believed in the world that wisdom depends on how much we have in our memory and who have therefore filled their memories to bursting.  They talked almost exclusively from those items, which meant that they were not talking for themselves, but for others; and they had not developed any rational functioning by means of these matters of memory.   Some of them were dense, some silly, with no grasp of truth whatever (#464).”

“Our rational faculty is like a garden or flower bed, like newly tilled land.  Our memory is the soil, information and experiential learning are the seeds, while heaven’s light and warmth make them productive...There is no germination unless heaven’s light, which is divine truth, and heaven’s warmth, which is divine love, are let in.  They are the only source of rationality (#464).”   

“One particular spirit lamented the fact that he could not remember much of what he had known during his physical life.  He was grieving over the pleasure he had lost because it had been his chief delight.  He was told, though, that he had not lost anything at all and that he knew absolutely everything.  In the world where he was now living, he was not allowed to retrieve things like that.  It should satisfy him that he could now think and talk much better and more perfectly without immersing his rational functioning in dense clouds, in material and physical concerns, the way he had before, in concerns that were useless in the kingdom he had now reached (#465).”

“Since the natural objects that reside in our memory cannot be reproduced in a spiritual world, they become dormant the way they do when we are not thinking about them.  Even so, they can be reproduced when it so pleases the Lord (#461).”

Don

Quote:


Yes I always come to this thought, when I can't put it all together, that there seems to be some missing part. Some who report NDE's say that the thinking process works differently "over there" because the cultural constraints and the directionality of time no longer rule. Maybe the punchline is only clear when these constraints are not in play.

I have been posting on the Shroud of Turin thread not because I believe in its authenticity but because (1) the creation of the shroud is still scientificially inexplicable and (2) its autnenticity is in principle falsifiable, given better dating techniques, one of which will soon be applied to the shroud.  Similarly, channeling is a mystery, in which many have personal and ego investment as a matter of faith.  So any attempt to coerce belief or rejection is likely to provoke resistance, even resentment.  Therefore, the most constructive approach is to explore all the barriers to its credibility to place paranormal claims in a more comprehensive theoretical context.  But IMO the argument that there are just some things we are not meant to know is a cop-out designed to undermine the falsifiability of channeling claims.

Quote:

Don, I agree.  Exploring all possibilities is the best way to develop our theories.  As far as I can tell it is rare for a medium to be in contact with an actual deceased loved one.  It is possible of course, just unlikely in my opinion.  More likely is being in contact with another spiritual being that has the ability to access memory in a "database" if the medium doesn't have the ability to access it themselves.   

As far as things we are not meant to know being cop-out I feel, based on my experience, that is an accurate statement.  It isn't that we are not meant to know, but that we do not always have the capability to access the information because of the limitations of ELS as well as our own limitations.  And of course one's own interpretation comes into play many times distorting the information accessed.

Post mortem memory loss seems natural, especially if we consider the only moment we truly appear to exist in is the present moment.  We may be able to recall past events, yet many times even the way in which we remember them is clouded by the passing of time.  Sometimes we think that after death we will know more than what we are able to know while alive.  I'm not so sure about that.  I think we can only know what we have experienced and how we interpreted the meaning of those experiences. Is this the case after death?  I don't know, but I do think it is something to consider.

Kathy

Quote:


No
not some things you are not meant to know

but
some things you have to learn by your self that cannot be fit into words. Something inexpressable in words.

The presence of a shared consciousness, universal consciousness or Super Psi, is, by our current definition, proof of the existence of a process outside of our knowledge of physical reality or the physical plane.  Because of this, I am always amused when I see arguments that no afterlife contact was made since a medium was simply tapping into a universal mind. 

Western science doesn't quite have a place for thought or mind.  It is more considered a curiousity of neurochemical origin.  But as far as modern science goes, the idea of a true "mind" be it single or group, is not a tangible physical reality (or one reproducible or reliably manipulated by surgery or predictable). 

If one postulates a universal mind that one connects to outside of the physical world, then one is mostly at a destination in the afterlife or mental plane of consciousness.  It seems straight forward to me, but the distinction isn't as clear as people assume. 

So we have to do better than to write off real contact with a deceased person as mining information from some ghostly Dewey Decimal system, since there is no evidence of the existence of this mental plane in the physical world. 

Once we prove that we are more than our physical bodies, then we have crossed a line to a realm of consciousness independent of biological processes, and more suited to the concept of survival/afterlife in a mental plane.

M

Matthew

DocM wrote on Jun 7^th, 2012 at 6:48am:


I agree Mathew. It seems strange to me to offer up a mutually exclusive medium real contact or super-ESP duality when there is no rationale to differentiate or test between them ! You hit the nail on the head; when the causal link between consciousness and biological process is broken, the Rubicon has been crossed.