This thread will reissue material I have posted in other threads.  But I will add new material and share my latest attempt to rethink the relevant issues.  Creative tension often leads to breakthoughs. So much of the material about After-death contacts  (ADCs) does not cohere well with reports of memory problems discovered theough OBEs and astral exploration.  As you read the paranormal evidence I discuss, please inject your own evidence and your theories of how the tensions I confront might be resolved.    

A. Can the channeled material with the most impressive verifications be best explained as the result of ESP rather than genuine contact with the dead?

B. If channeling evidence hopelessly contradicts evidence from EVP, OBEs, and astral exploration, how does this affect our knowledge of postmortem survival?  

C. Do most ADC contacts originate from from earthbound spirits trapped in the biblical Sheol or what Robert Monroe labels Focus 24 or from peaceful educational spirit planes and still higher heavens?

D. Some ADC contacts are truly spectacular and involve dead spirits materializing and teleporting objects, walking around in an earthly room filled with still living family members, and driving their old truck (e. g. Jeff, the deceased son of my friend Leonard),   So why are such spectacular and comforting verifications so rare?

Only question A will be addressed in this first post.  Mediums routinely put their eager sitters in touch with deceased loved ones, who seem alarmingly available.   If these contacts were geniune, one would expect these loved ones to be unavailable because of present commitments and activities much of the time.  True, some mediums will protest that they sometimes fail to contact the spirit desired by the sitter.   But generally these spirits seem far too available to be credible.  The spirits seem incapable of answering a simple question like, “So what have you been doing since I last talked to you through this medium?”  To explain away this problem some resort to the desperate expedient of claiming that our deceased loved ones now live in a timeless realm.  This solution is refuted by the astral explorations of Emanuel Swedenborg and Robert Bruce who discover that most heavenly planes are stll subject to a sense of time, though time may seem more compressed in certain realms.  Consider my answers to these 4 questions:  

(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?  

(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!  These cases demonstrate that mediums can unwittingy gain information about the ceased by reading the sitter's mind.  They then routinely dramatize this ESP by inventing a phony personal contact.  One might expect the telephatic abilities of their spirit controls to detect this sort of ruse.   Clearly, the spirit controls were also a fake.

(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 seemed 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?

Don

Lights of Love wrote on Dec 27^th, 2006 at 11:10am:


thank you Kathy. good post. Kathy here has just went through a tragic circumstance yet here she is, spreading light and understanding and not even thinking of her problems. you are a blessing far beyond your knowing Kathy.

ESP shows us our connections and effects upon one another. It cannot be denied we effect one another in countless ways and this belies the oneness concept of our spirits.
therefore to disparage channelled material on the basis its just a form of ESP is a moot point; its what you do with the information you get that counts, not the source it comes from.

Kathy, you bring up a point I adhere to which brings me faith and calmness in the days ahead of us. It is the separation we feel from god. Truly, from what I've learned through experience we can believe through judgment we are separate from one another and separate from god yet it is just a belief. we cannot be separate from god unless we created ourselves. I do not remember creating myself and so I must be coming from that which did offer me life. I can call this by the name of god or any term I please. I choose to align with a man who walked here, J, yet if he was a son of god, and he said he was one with the father, he was not just speaking of himself personally, he wished that I follow him, that I too, was one with the father and that as soon as I recognized this faith would be born and I too, could do the miracles that he said would be done by all of us. It is time to do miracles. It is time to realize our oneness with the creator and stop this tomfoolery of talking about devils and dark forces..we have never left that which loves us incredibly and allows us to make a life and learn from that process

whatsover you ask, ask believing, it shall be added unto you and more


love you guys. Kathy, remember when I visited with you obe? I saw you had 2 kittens, you showed me the ill one and how worried you were about it. later we verified our visit and it was so much more than esp could ever be.

the reason I know this was an obe is the deep joy I felt to encounter my friend out there. It made my day. a friend to make, is what I wish to keep as my treasures in heaven, a fellow explorer is the best gift this world can offer, take care of yourselves, we are here only a short time and I will see you all on the other side. love, alysia

Hi Alysia,

I’m trying to keep my promise to you and post more.  This is an interesting subject and I have learned much from Don’s posts. 

Yes I do remember our meeting during an obe experience and the ways in which this was verified.  I also agree that this meeting was much more than ESP.  To me it was as real as the chair I’m sitting on right now.  But there were other times where I think you and I interacted where ESP was probably involved.  Remember when we were doing group PE’s and I knew immediately the song you were going to sing?  Mr. Postman I think it was.  In that case I think ESP was involved, which for me lends credibility for ESP as a modality.  We use our energy fields to sense the world around us in both physical and higher frequencies.  Besides our physical senses we also have ‘higher’ senses that are similar to the physical ones such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, intuition, etc.  I group all of these senses under the label of ESP.

I think when we discuss these things nothing is really clear-cut, because of the interactions of our personal consciousness with our brain.  Getting into a discussion about this might be off-topic for this thread, yet I think it may be relevant in explaining some of the things Don brings up.  For example, we are always telling ourselves little stories about how things could be.  The stories or thoughts we have may or may not be true, it’s simply the way we try to make sense of something we don’t fully understand or know.  I don’t think we can accurately say that a medium was deceived or was influenced by a lower realm entity and so forth without taking into consideration the nature of how our brains work.  Sometimes we tend to imply conscious deception when this deception is merely one of the stories we tell ourselves to give an event some coherence within our own mind.  We all do this all the time.  And the thoughts we conjure up may or may not be the truth to anyone except our self. 

Love, Kathy

Quote:


Excellent point here.  First of all, since we are essentially connected to everything and everyone at the highest level of consiousness, there is no difference between becoming aware of a connection between a mind who is currently in the physical world and one in the afterlife.  Secondly, it is also true that labeling something "ESP" does not make the reasons for the connection, or the way the connection was made, any clearer.  After all, ESP is a very broad term, which includes abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and remote viewing, just to name a few.  One might even say that Astral Projection is a form of ESP, for ESP is essentially perception independent of our five physical senses.  Astral Projection is sure as hell beyond MY five physical senses.  So with this fact out in the open, how is it that skeptics can discredit  Astral Projection or other "new age" abilities by saying that it was just "ESP", when Astral Projection technically IS ESP.  Or maybe the question is, when will these people realise that all of these abilities are attributed in absolutely no way to the physical body, whether it is telepathy, astral projection, or clairaudience, and that the simple fact that these abilities are not of the physical is proof enough of that we exist after death, that there is an essence in all of us much greater than what we can see(and sometimes percieve) that is totally independent of anything physical.

I will now shiift my focus to the next two questions of my thread's agenda:

B. If channeling evidence hopelessly contradicts evidence from EVP, OBEs, and
astral projection, how does this affect one's knowledge of postmortem survival?
C. Do most ADC contacts originate from earthbound spirits trapped in the biblical Sheol or what Robert Monroe lebels Focus 24 or rather from peaceful educational spirit planes and still higher heavens?

I will leave the issue of ADC contacts with earthound spirits for a later post.
In this post, I want to solicit your research and theories on the problems of coherence arising from various forms of contact with the deceased.

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 hvgher, 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 vovered 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] .”

Ritche's NDE description seems incompatible with the chatty ease with which mediums interrupt the lives of discarnates and seek confirmation from their memories of their earthly lives.  His description hints at the insight thst the inhabitants of this educational plane have an altered state of consciousness that cuts them off from their normal earthly memories.  His reports cohere nicely with Robert Bruce’s OBE insights into memory problems created by shifts in focus from one astral plane to another.   Robert reports on the problems he encounters when trying to extract memory information from spirit visitors to astral hospitals:

“Memories of their earthly life also seem vague, much like how a half-forgotten dream is remembered by a living person.  Many spirits only seem to be aware of their present reality, that of being in the hospital scenario for an indeterminate length of time.  Some spirits, however, do have vague memories of their earthly life, and of coming from other dimensional areas; but have so far given me only very sketchy details....The most common response I get from asking spirits what it’s like where they come from is: `It’s really lovely there and everyone is so nice.  I don’t understand this.  I’m very sorry.  I know it well, and can picture it in my head, but I just can’t describe it to you.’”

“The surreal and dreamlike quality of memory of spirits I have encountered in these astral hospital areas may be caused by their being too far away from their natural, base-level of consciousness at the time.  Astral R & R hospital-like areas may be somewhere in between [spirit worlds and the physical dimension].  It seems that any shift away from the natural base level of consciousness, either for a spirit being or a human being, causes them to have a surreal experience and memory translation problems.  This...accounts...for the many difficulties and vagaries common in spirit communications and channeling in general.”

The educational realm witnessed by Ritchie seems reminiscent of some desciptions 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.  Monroe implies that Focus 27 contains the Healing Center that helps new arrivals adjust to their new discarnate life.  But R. Bruce implies that the loved one’s of this Center’s patients must “descend” from higher planes with impaired memories to visit their hospitalized loved ones.   Thus, both Ritchie and R. Bruce imply that Focus 27 is not Heaven itself, but a training ground for the higher Heavens.  So the Monroe model should probably revised in term of, say, Focus 28, 29, etc. to account for such distinctions.    

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?

In my initial post, I challenged claims that channeling at its best can put us in touch with our deceased loved ones.  But assume for the sake of argument that I am mistaken.  The best of classical channeling agrees with R. Bruce’s insights about the formidable barriers to successful retrievals from hellish planes:  Advanced souls may find it very difficult to cope with the spiritual vibration of lower spiritual planes through which they must pass to reach the earth plane.  

Consider, for example, what Paul Beard reports in his enthralling  book, "Living On: How Consciousness Continues and Evolves After Death:"

“To enter these areas fills rescuers with a deep sense of distress; these helpers, sensitive men and women, can themselves become affected and drawn into some of the purblind emotions they seek to lift from others, and it they remain too long in this area they declare they can, to some extent, be temporarily overcome by them.  For the price to be paid in order to reach these minds is to lower their own consciousness and concepts to a level acceptable to, and capable of being understood by, those they hope to rescue.  Evil is powerful at its own level, and clearly a rescuer needs sterner qualities than those of the self-congratulatory do-gooder (88-89).”

One of the most memorable posters on this AK board was a fellow who had just mastered the OBE state.  He was reluctant to continue his exploration because of terrifying experiences he had when he descended to the lower planes.   He said he was overwhelmed by the toxic atmosphere and could barely resist succumbing to its hypnotic pressure to perform evil acts consistent with the defining purpose of those particular planes.  His negative experiences independently corroborate the revelations of the mediums reported by Paul Beard.

Advanced souls in the heavens may have other good reasons for their reluctance to try to contact earthly loved ones.  For example, they may be well aware of the cunning role of spirit impersonators from lower planes and the potential dangers they represent to surviving loved ones.  Advanced souls may not want to encourage their earthly loved ones to open their naive spirits to such deceptive spirit contamination and its dangers.

Swedenborg would agree with Ritchie and R. Bruce against the Monroe concept of Focus 27 that these educational planes and the Healing Center do not exist in the Heavens.  As in typical Swedenborgian fashion, ES explores astral memory problems in greater depth than either Ritchie or R. Bruce.   Here is a sampling os 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).”  

This last comment might be a key to understanding how our deceased loved ones can just occasionally contact us and even offer stunning verifications, despite the memory problems that might otherwise inhibit such communications.  

Don

[recoverer:] "As long as a person's overall conditioning moves he or she in the direction of coming to "certain" types of conclusions, he or she won't be able to consider other sources of information objectively, even if they take the time do so."
__________________________________________________________________

You seem to be describing your own bias here.  Dr. Ritchie had one of the most impressive and influential NDEs ever and his inisghts cohere neatly with the discoveries of two of the most gifted astral explorers, Robert Bruce and Emanuel Swedenborg. 

[recoverer:] "Contrary to the sources you've quoted, there are sources of information which state that it is possible for light beings to travel to lower realms in order to help confused spirits."
_______________________________________________________________

I am sympathetic with the claims of some astral explorers that higher spirits might retrieve trapped spirits that are ready to "ascend."  But on what basis are you justified in ignoring the astral insights of adepts with the best verifications? On what basis do they entitle you to dismiss the combined insights of Ritchie, R. Bruce, ES, and Classical Channeling?   You are glossing over serious coherence problems.  Unless these problems can be reconciled without begging the question, the skeptic can justifiable challenge alleged astral evidence as too contradictory to warrant confident claims.

[] [recoverer:] "The idea that spirits lose their memory as they ascend doesn't make sense at all."
___________________________________________________________________
No that is precisely why contrary claims of the best astral adepts are all the more credible.  The predictable claims of doctrinaire New Age explorers already suggest that they are victims of their own imagination.  Besides, this memory loss at least makes some sense of the failure of our loved ones to reassure us from beyond the grave in a truly spectacular fashion.  Otherwise, New Agers are prone to feeble rationalizations that merely make their positions unfalsifiable in pricnciple and hence epistemologically meaningless.

[recoverer:] "Even George Ritchie's NDE shows that spirits can travel to lower realms without being a lower realm being, because he and Jesus did so. Jesus was also able to travel to a hell like realm during Howard Storm's NDE."
____________________________________________________________

During his NDE, Ritchie is still living and is under the protection and guidance of divinity.  What this post address is the memory problems of dicarnate spirits now in higher planes.  In any case, it is presumptuous to assume that Christ's capabilities are not anything unique or special, especially in viow of the memory problems His tours reveal.

[recoverer: ] "Another factor is that light beings aren't required to transport their entire being to the realm in which they do retrievels. Rather, they send just some of their energy to such a realm."
________________________________________________________________

This claim may hold some promise, but must be reconciled with the evidence of memory suppression on the higher planes. I will address this issue in another post.

Don

Lights of Love wrote on Dec 27^th, 2006 at 4:38pm:

thanks Kathy for posting. I do miss you when you aren't here. you bring up fond memories of our PE and Mr Postman. I did hope someone in our group would pick up that song. I had been mentally practicing it for y'all a few days. I wish to add something to your thoughts about emotional content in obes, dreams and esp or even effecting probability happenings as Doc mentioned. briefly I support Doc's comments that setting an intention before sleep works most of the time if i have a problem or a retrieval to do, yet I may have to work on the intention a few days before I see any results.
the emotions behind the intention will be more of a powerful affirmation for good to happen in a life. a specific good, such as settling a problem with an unruly neighbor for example. if i sleep on the intention the next day, or few days, I too will see the problem relieved. the emotion in this case might be a yearning for peace, the intention would be more mental, like a decision, or bending the little finger exercise as Bruce puts it. this is cause for celebration if we understand we are all one on these other levels where understanding can occur.
I think we are in agreement that psychics or mediums are measured in their abilities, none having attained 100% accuracy due to the interpretative process and their level of evolvement of spiritual matters.
we are all continuing to learn as we go. I am thankful for any hits I perceive, and grateful to all who venture to learn and share their findings.

pardona moi I think I have to get off this board and go eat something...

Recoverer,

It's a shame that you reject astral explorations of adepts with impressive verifications simply because they conflict with your preconceived notions.  I don't like the prospect of dormant memory any more than you do.  But intellectual honesty requires me to respect (1) the claim's potential value in explaining why there are so few unequivocally impressive ADCs and (2) the independent reinforcement of this memory loss from a variety of astral adepts and NDEs.  I prefer to acknowledge the apparent disconnect and probe for the reasons why both sides might express part of the truth.  I had compiled a mountain of astral insights that might just achieve such a breakthrough.   But in view of the usual eruption of New Age bigotry and ad hominem attacks, I will abrupty end my thread and deprive you of my new evidence.  This site, with all its PUL pretensions is one of the best arguments AGAINST postmortem survival.

Goodbye again,
Don