rondele wrote on Dec 12^th, 2011 at 4:00pm:

Yes, exactly.  From what I've been able to ascertain the protocol is dependent upon the need of individuals or groups of individuals as well as if there is a determined potential that the contact would be beneficial for spiritual growth for those individuals.

K

Matthew,

Here again are the 4 issues that make me skeptical about genuine contact through most mental mediumship:

(1) The cases in which deceased people seem to communcate in an authetic style with lots of paranornal information are best explained by the medium's discernment of this information through the Collective Unconscious, which preserves all our thoughts and memories, quite apart from whether a discarnate mind is in contact with us.  If the contacts were genuine, then I would expect the medium to elicit convincing answers to questions like these:
(a) What have you [the deceased] been doing since our last channeling session?  Such questions never seem to get answered, if they are asked at all.  The mediums are not creative enough to spontaneously produce a satisfactory answer to such a question. Genuine contact could produce such an answer. 

(b) Or what about a question like this?  Gordon, when you were in the 7th grade, you had a crush on a girl at school and used to resent it when I teased you about her.  What was her name?  Such follow-up questions never seem to get answered correctly. 

(2) In the Gordon Davis case, the sitter mistakenly believed that his old friend Gordon Davis was dead, when in fact he was alive.  The medium was somehow able to exploit the sitter's false belief to tap the memory information via ESP, nurtured by faith.  This information was then issued in the false form of a contact with Gordon Davis, a contact he later denied. 

(3) Either that or a spirit impersonator tapped the information from the memories of the living. 

(4) The psychologists who duped mediums into a paranormal recreation of a fictional character were clearly having their memories paranormally read by the mediums.  So the burden of proof rests with those who postulate genuine contact with the deceased persons instead.
___________________
Rondele and Kathy, my e-mail is not working.  So I'd love to communicate with you both by PMs on this site.  Did I share with you both my heroic adventures in Costa Rica?!

R

I agree those are good questions and as you say we most likely are unable, maybe even incapable of discovering all the answers.  Perhaps that's intended.  More and more I seem to feel the only thing that is certain is uncertainty.  lol

Don,

I'm still waiting to hear all of your jungle tales  unless you wrote to me on the other site that I haven't checked for quite a while.  You can pm me here if you like.

K

Rondele,

Thanks for the heads up about medium John Edwards' appearance on Anderson Cooper's show.  Edwards demonstrated paranormal abilities, but confirmed my past preconception of his gift, namely he gains his information by ESP, gleaning information from the minds of living relatives.   His "hemming an hawing" and ultimate revisionism about "Sam" made this particularly apparent to me.  Why couldn't a deceased family member just tell Edwards that the "Sam" identified was a dead pet snake?  Edwards sees pictures; so why not a picture of a snake? 

I was amazed that Edwards revealed the fact that Anderson's Mom knew Marilyn Monroe.  [How could she have kept that fact from Anderson?]  But that strikes me as ESP, not genuine contact with Anderson's father.  In the final analysis, the deafening silence of obvious details that Edwards might have revealed, but did not make me skeptical. 

heisenberg,

Given Swedenberg's discoveries of the sense in which the deceased live apart from time, I would expect entitites channeled by mediums to be able to answer the question, "What have you been doing since our last channeling session?"  Or at least, I'd expect the entities to explain why they can't answer that question. 

Granted that the Collective Unconscious is itself a theoretical construct, I think Jung has made it a plausible construct and I consider it a better source of a medium's paranormal material than genuiine contact with the professed discarnate spirit. 

I understand that everyone has their own ideas about whether purported medium contact is genuine and that's fine.But I can imagine a scenario where the following conditions are met:

1. The medium provides highly evidential information about the deceased which the sitter both can confirm instantly but also information which the sitter has to confirm at a later date because they don't know the relevent facts e.g uncle Bert had a secret love child (later cofirmed correct)(negating simple mind reading).
2. The messages are obviously loving and in the character of the deceased (negating imposters).
3.The messages provide comfort and allow the bereaved to move on in their life knowing the deceased is doing fine. (suggesting the reading is a positive thing).
4.The medium senses the contact as a 'living' presence (negating collective unconscious theory).

I agree that a broad interpretation of 'super-psi' could probably account for much of the above but such a wide interpretation is practically indistinguishable from survival in my view.For my money genuine contact is as good an explanation as any for the above situation.

What is clarion clear and certain to me is that second hand information, either from a mental medium or an illusionist, is not the best way to obtain knowledge of the afterlife.

Bruce and TMI have the right idea about it - practice self mastery, and explore on your own.  Bruce has documented his experiences, including that point where he found verification that for him was beyond any doubt. 

If you accept a medium's reading at face value, it may initially be quite comforting.  But keep in mind, you are not truly making direct contact with your own exploration. 

The notion of ESP is always amusing to me, as it is a term coined by mystic Frederick Meyers, and has been soundly discredited by the scientific community (references available if requested).  At best, Western science thinks that experiments about ESP may show some statistically relevant data that do not clearly validate ESP as its own phenomenon but make one wonder.  Wow.  Now, if we invoke ESP as the source of the data, how exactly does that work?  Western science does not recognize that there even is a "mind" to read.  The current theories are that our subjective conscious experiences are illusory freakish accidents of nature, caused by neurochemical synaptic firings. 

If one can truly prove that there is a plane of mental existence to communicate with, then we already have proven the extraordinary premise that we are MORE than our physical bodies.  Admittedly, this doesn't prove the "survival" hypothesis of an afterlife.  My strong intuitive feeling is that the plane of "mind" is our  truest state of being, and that encasing ourself in a physical world is one phase of the experience. 

I have not been interested in meeting with a medium myself, as I feel it is a cop out to one's own development of abilities.  I also, through recent research, have come to believe that there are a large number of fraudulent physical mediums (the free online book The Psychic Mafia is a must read as is the University of Pennsylvania's study on Mediums - also available for free which I discussed earlier in this thread), and in some ways, I feel that if the afterlife could be verified just through mediums, it would have happened a long time ago.

I don't understand the lack of time in the after-death experience.  Swedenborg said that spirits don't measure time, but look at themselves as moving from one state of being to another.  Fascinating, and deep.  I can't imagine how ES understood all that in the 1700s, but he had a most brilliant mind.....

Swedenborg also mentioned that for  a discarnate person, they do lose track of earthly things after a time - if there are no corresponding things in the heavenly plane.  Common experience of eating food or using the bathroom become, I'm quite sure alien to the deceased.  The best chance of information that Don is requesting is with the recently deceased, who have not yet forgotten some common earthly facts. 

I would be surprised if after we pass on we would still give out social security numbers and the like.  I know it may have happened, but it just strikes me as counter intuitive once we've passed.

People forget things from their earthly lives.  Swedenborg recalls meeting a deceased human who told him that he was quite the scholar when alive, and fluent in several ancient languages.  Yet because his love was based on ego, and not love, the knowledge he had amassed was not lasting, and sounded more like gibberish.  This supported Swedenborg's theory that those who act out of love move closer to God and bliss, while those who act out self love do not.

But to get back to mediums - to each his own.  If some out there on this forum are comforted by what they hear, so be it.  Its not for me.


Matthew

Don,

I suppose I am saying that ESP and Psi are simply examples of communication on a spiritual or mental plane, rather than events identifiable in the physical world.  That perception itself occurs independent of the physical brain on a spiritual/mental plane.  The notion that we perceive in a localized manner is simply wrong.

I should mention that I think Sheldrake is brilliant, but his theories have not been embraced or accepted by most western scientists.  Clasically trained scientists do not universally accept Sheldrake's example or the existence of Psi.  If you go through the journals, what is found at best is a small statistically significant difference in Psi from experiments that are above that would be expected from random chance.   This happened with Princeton's P.E.A.R. lab data, but when I investigated ESP tests done many years ago, I found that tests published on precognitive and other psi abilities were also, when taken together in a meta-analysis demonstrative of a small significant difference compared with that which was expected by random chance (a significant but small P value ). 

What this means is that classically trained scientists at major universities, believe there is something unexplained about "ESP," but are not willing yet to codify the effects as a definite scientific fact.  Some skeptics like Blackmore wrote that they spent decades trying to validate the existence of ESP or Psi phenomena, and in the end, she was unable to do so using classical scientific technique in any reproducible way.  Parapsychologists are still considered these days to be on the fringe of "true" research, and somewhat ostracized from the halls of academia in many universities.

Sheldrake's studies have been widely critiqued and independent scientists have disputed his conclusions in the scientific literature about the learning of species, and his experimentation on being stared at.  That being said, his data remain......controversial.....termed "unfalsifiable" due to the nature of his experiments and his theory being more of a statement than a proof.

I, on the other hand believe that the examples you raised suggest a deeper spiritual experience at work.  If an entire species of birds "learns" a certain behaviour after only a few birds learn it thousands of miles away - it is unlikely that this learning took place on the physical plane of existence or can be explained by pre-programming of DNA.  So, what other planes are there?  If the education of these birds took place on a mental or spiritual plane, then we are talking of a plane independent of the physical body and world.

This is the main reason why I never let Psi or ESP phenomenon discredit the existence of an afterlife - for the reason that Psi and ESP are not accepted as scientific fact, and not explainable in any way we know in the physical world.  As I said before, its not that ESP validates an afterlife, but that if real, ESP proves that there is more to us than a physical being.  If we are more than our physical bodies, then we are one step closer to realizing that our bodies are not primary, but our consciousness and that of God is primary (our bodies secondary).

Matthew