Hi orlando123 I know a lot about the spirit world from my dad through mediums,he said that he was sitting on this lovely hillside with a friend he had at school when he was a little boy and that they had just been riding there bikes and were just sitting on the hillside and he also said just before he left the medium,that he was just going on a motorbike with my uncle bill ,who had died as well and he said that he could see our planet earth from where he was and hes told me of the parties they have in spirit,hes also mentioned having a garden and that he was amazed that he could communicate through the medium as he was not sure that the spirit world existed but now he knows it does.

Love and God bless     Love juditha

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Thanks Juditha, that must be nice to know. It seems that you must have had enough evidential proof from these mediums for you to be satisfied in your own mind about the proof of the afterlife. I am glad for you and that you have had these happy messages from your dad.

One thing to consider in what Dave just wrote, is one exploring by one's self, or has one made contact with a spirit guide who shows one how things are.  If the later is true, as long as the guide is trustworthy and clear minded, one is liable to see things as they are to a certain extent, or at least ways according to consensus reality.

I say a certain extent,  because perhaps something such as an information center doesn't look like anything in particular. It is simply a place where thought energy is stored, and people can perceive it in different ways.

Even when we look at something in the physical World the interpretation thing goes on.  For example,  I can look at a woman and think, "Wow, she's really beautiful!" However, the image I see in my mind has little to do with what the energy field of her body is all about. Her body is a dance of energy that forms, atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organ systems, and eventually a body.  The standard by which I judge beauty is arbitrary for the benefit of my sex drive. Who she really is has little to do with her body. She isn't even a she.

dave_a_mbs wrote on Aug 7^th, 2007 at 7:13pm:


Most kind Dave  I also find your posts to be interesting and helpful. I might not be sure I agree with or am convinced by everything you say but you have obviously given all this a great deal of thought. Sorry to you and anyone else if I don;t always respond in much depth. I have been feeling a bit tired and stressed lately and spend most of my working day reading and writing on a computer and don't necessarily have the energy to say anything in-depth when I'm on here. I am sure I am learning from the posts here anyway; at very least reading about some new theories which may help things to gel for me more at some point. Also congratulations to people here for it being, as far as I can see, a patient and friendly place where people don;t take offence at honest doubts, for example and are keen to explain their ideas. The only anger I saw seemed to be when a Christian took offence at some barbed remarks about his religion. I guess you have to be sensitive to people's beliefs and avoid gartuitous abuse, but i have also been known to make pretty strong remarks about some common aspects of Christian belief. However I even dabble in trying to be a very liberal Christian myself at times, as it is my background/heritage after all. Sometimes though I wonder if it is worthy the bother of trying to cherry pick what seems to make sense from all the rest of the baggage surrounding it

Berserk-
I take it that you are scolding me for being a New Age idiot who should leave matters to the better trained academc colleagues.  And heaven forbid that I should take it seriously when somebody with whom I've had an exhausting session tells me that they feel better, because, after all, that's just a self-serving statement they make to justfy the cost of the sessions. (I an't cheap.)

You might have a point. However, among my other university teaching positions I taught Graduate Research Methadology, Statistics, and related courses for a while at National University, and I was not especially impressed by the willingness of my colleagues to design and implement meaningful researches in the "airey fairey" areas of past life, or hypnotic regression, or even intrapsychic theory (I also taught Psychopathology from an intrapsychic perspective).

Maybe I should read more of those negative papers that are so easily written because they require neither an intimate knowledge of the topic, nor pragmatic research into its potentialities. These are usually called "armchair psychology", which is how Freud and Jung et allia conjured up their own versions of early analytical psychology. These are often statements by the orthodoxy of what is permitted and what is tobe regarded as junk. And they are written by the highest acedemic ranking and socially popular gurus of each area of science, psychology included. I guess that means that they must be valid to someone. Regrettably, such papers neither predict experimental results, nor explain them in competition with other approaches, nor do they suggest new areas of research or therapeutic modalities. But they must be good for something ... ?

As for me, I'm just a therapist who spent 7 years in orthodox intership, suffered under a "trainig therapist" for about 200 hours, and then gave the shaft to the HMO insurance plans as I set up my own clinic and began work in analytic hypnotherapy on a cash basis. After 20 years shrinking heads, somehow people keep on with that inane claim that they actually feel better after we work. How gullible we therapists must be!

I admit that I tend to believe them when I actually listen to the nonsensical statements of my patients telling me that they feel better, that their lives are running better, and that they now feel grounded and confident as a result of therapy, I admit that I all too often forget that this is merely "self serving" blather. In fact, by following the leads of what works in one case and generalizing it to other cases, I've discovered that I get even more self-serving remarks. I suppose that I should keep in mind that all I'm doing is to increase the amount of positive reinforcers I'm getting, and that the putative fact that these poor souls are actually shrivelling up and dying is being hidden from me. Worse yet, I have several hundred hours of videotaped sessions in which everybody seems to be putting on the same act of pretending that they are being benefitted. Wow! The whole world's involved! 

Perhaps I ought to also be careful of the fact that I have been using field research to support my claims.  (Armentrout, D (1987). An Attributive Systems Model of the Generation of Knowledge. Ann Arbor: UNiversity Microfilms, Access # LD01227) I presented this study at the Univ of Pittsburgh. The simple fact that I am evidently the only researcher in this specific field could have stood out as a total negation of its value, except that it is predictive, useful in therapy, especially with respect to drug and criminal recidivism, and also useful in past life and related areas. How strange. Perhaps I have fallen into a pit of disinformation. ;-?

Or could it be that there are those who fail to see that there is more than meets the casual eye, and who must protect a prior idea about life because they don't know how to live with ideas like total personal responsibility. So they object to whatever they fail to initially understand, and they write polemics against new insights because they are fearful of their own awareness. After all, when faced with a problem, denial is the first choice of weapons to combat it.

Whatever the case, some of those academic, better qualified, more understanding people who are out there doing their research on the material world and writing about it were my students, and they're doing it well because I taught them well. Ye Gods! A Paradox - how to resolve it all?

I admit to being arrogant, opinionated, pretty much full of myself, socially alienated, abstract by nature, obscure in interests and expression, and totally fascinated with the whole afterlife field of inquiry and its therapeutic potentialities, which often leads me to change my very vocal and opinionated statements as I learn a little more about this and that fact. Plus, I'm only marginally literate without a keyboard.  So on that basis, mea culpa.

It's a darn good thing that Bruce is here to rescue me after I die and maybe get stuck in a BST.

dave

Donald,

With a stroke of your pen (keyboard), you tell us what the prevailing academic consensus is, as if it were so very obvious and certain.  However, the entire field of the study of consciousness before and after death is so short of carefully researched controlled studies, that you can not hope to prove, through the anti-hypnotherpy-past life publications that ALL regressions are hogwash.  Dave freely admits the problems in the field, cites his own significant academic publications, ideas and references, and states over and over a point that you would not address; that patients seem to improve with performing the regression and going through the process.

How would you feel, Don if upon your demise you learned that reincarnation were real and that many chose it - that you had chosen it many times before?  Would these prevailing naysayers you cited mean a rat's *?$$ at that point?  This is not to say that past life regression is proven, but what would your answer be?

I myself am uncertain as to the truth behind pure reincarnation.  The idea that the "me" part of my ego will keep coming back intact, with memory wiped out again and again, has me a bit baffled.  I've said on this board many times that the "Matthew" I am now, simply would not be me without my memories, my experiences, my learning.  If my spirit somehow is separate from my cognitive self, and if spirit is full of feeling and emotion and tendencies to act in a certain way or "potential states" of being, perhaps this amorphous spirit could reincarnate, but I don't think it as simple as those who imagine dying, waking up in heaven and then saying, "that was fun, now let's go back for a new ride in a new body!"

We can all agree that, as in many areas of afterlife research, not enough controlled studies have been done to prove the validity of hypnoregression.  Until these studies are done, one can however admit the fact that no matter the arguments pro and con, hypnoregression either does or does not show evidence of prior lives.  Well designed studies are needed.

There was a thread that I would have hoped you would respond to, about Christianity possibly being composed in part, of myth and fable.  The linked article (www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/NewTestament.html) is heavily referenced and presents a cogent if flawed argument that Constantine merged many different religions together to create modern day christianity for political reasons.  Several assertions did not stand up to my review, but others did.  As a biblical scholar, you could (and may) take this article on should you choose.  However, it is a lesson in academic blubbering.  Although the article was well referenced and fairly well written, that does not make it correct.  Just so with sources on either side of the hypnoregression discussion.  Until one performs the definitive studies, it is just speculation on either side.

Matthew

don't know what you're talking about berserk, but you sure sound like you're full of it      dave said he's arrogant, but in reality i don't think he is.  you on the other hand...

i don't go around trying to convince christians their faith is wrong, though i think it's nonsense.  so what do you get out of attacking people for their beliefs?

Matthew,

As already noted, Dr. Ian Stevenson's research on children's alleged past life recall is one of the primary pieces of evidence cited by New Agers in support of reincarnation.  Yet Stevenson repudiates hypnotic regression as a tool for past life recall, despite the fact that the claims of these hypnotherapists are compatible with his research.  Similarly, I have a vested interest in the genuineness of soul retrievals because this possibility is taught by the Bible and the early church and I once believed I had performed a couple of such retrievals.  So it saddens me to acknowledge that both my own retrievals on those reported on this this site now seem bogus.  I strive to discover valid evidence for the truth, not excuses to rationalize my own belief system.  So you are wrong: there is nothing "mean-spirited" about asking someone to assess evidence that might invaldate a lifetime of regression work.  I regularly seek to do the same when I probe for weaknesses in biblical tradition.  If I expect integrity of others, I must insist on it in myself.  Sadly, posters on this site lack the spirit of honest and open inquiry that might lend their astral experiences a modicum of credibiility and distinguish them from states of consciousness akin to mere lucid dreams.  Recently, a graduate of Bruce's workshop told me he was now disillusioned with this site's retrieval claims.  But he added that if someone like me ever claimed to have performed a retrieval, he would consider that claim in a unique category worth taking seriously.  This issue is far too important  to be suillied by the wishful thinking of the gullible herd whose obsession with comfort trumps any willingness to experience the pain and uncertainty of a truly honest quest.

Don