Paranormalia

Anders Breivik

Like many people, I've been trying to make sense of the stuff Anders Breivik has been coming out with during his trial. He's clearly a fantasist, but not clinically insane; he knew what he was doing.

Those of us who aspire to some kind of spiritual goal have to discipline ourselves. It requires an act of will to face down selfish desires, impatience, and do the right thing. We also intuitively understand that deliberately to take another human life is wrong, and indeed the most evil act that anyone can commit.

But Breivik was going in the opposite direction. To kill young people in cold blood, he said, he had to steel himself to overcome his sensitive nature. When he had victims in his sights and his finger hesitated on the trigger he kept telling himself that they weren't really innocent; they were working for multi-culturalism, and thereby destroying Norway's precious national identity.

So he wasn't killing out of hatred, like other homicidal nationalists. Quite the contrary, it was out of compassion for his countrymen, whom he thought he was rescuing from a terrible fate. It's scary to think that in some people an idea can have so much force as to overcome the natural aversion to cruelty that many if not most humans feel. It recalls Heinrich Himmler explaining to his SS underlings that the business of butchering other humans - men, women, children, the old and infirm - was bound to be upsetting, but had to be done.

What interests me especially is that Breivik does claim to be religious, at least 'a little bit'. He calls himself a 'militant Christian' and says he believes in an afterlife. He compares himself favourably with the leftwing Bader-Meinhof terrorists - atheists who didn't want to die and weren't prepared to sacrifice themselves. Peversely, although Islam is the enemy, he feels kinship with Islamic suicide bombers because they are prepared to martyr themselves. He says he'd rather live than die, but that he'd prefer execution to the 'pathetic' punishment of the maximum 21-year jail sentence.

As with religious terrorists, I wonder what on earth Breivik thinks the afterlife is about. What kind of existence does he think it is? Does he expect to find his national identity has some holy status in heaven? A Valhalla for Nordic warriors?

Coincidentally I've been dipping into one of Jane Sherwood's books, The Country Beyond. Sherwood lost the love of her life in the 1914-18 war and never got over it. Having tried with little success to make contact with her dead husband 'on the other side' she tried her hand at automatic writing, which eventually worked. The text is based on exchanges she had with her husband and two other individuals about afterlife conditions.

One passage describes a gradual breakdown of barriers.

Nations keep their own languages and customs but they are less defined because movement has become more simple. Thus there is much coming and going among us and our sympathies are wider and knowledge of each other fuller. The language barrier begins to be removed because it is so much easier to pass thought between us. Groups are formed more for the purposes of special interests and occupations than for national reasons and thus we get aggregates of talent of a high level of attainment which cut across all artificial boundaries of nation and class. Here are brotherhoods of mutual interests having a rich and satisfying communal life. Co-operative activity and close and sympathetic human relationships bring into being many of the ideals of the world's dreamers. A social order emerges which brings satisfaction to all its members and enables each to arrive at full self-development.

The spiritual conception of life, beginning here and continuing after physical death, is of the gradual overcoming of separateness. The first step is to cease to glorify it, then look for ways to communicate with other beings, understanding them until the sense of individual boundaries are overcome, and finally we start to merge into groups - maintaining some individuality of our own, yet enriched by closeness of understanding with others.

But for Breivik, as for many people in our world, this process of breaking down barriers is profoundly threatening. For them, the boundaries guarantee their personal identity. If breached, the basis of their beliefs and being are compromised. The self is endangered.

Later in the book one of the communicators talks about the process of 'purgation'. This bears close echoes of the near-death experience, which however did not become known until at least four decades following the book's publication. At first, he says, one's thoughts are concerned with the previous life. Memory is dulled to begin with, but as one becomes used to the conditions the scenes and events of the past life begin to return vividly. But this time they are much more comprehensive.

The difference in this presentiment of the past is that included in it now is the reaction of other people. I find this difficult to explain. Everything that happens to you affects others as well as yourself and every event has therefore as many aspects in reality as there are consciousnesses affected by it.

Now, in this process of recollection, as an incident comes back to one's mind it brings with it the actual feelings, not of oneself alone but of the others who were affected by the event. All their feelings have now to be experienced in oneself as though they were one's own. This means that the effects of deeds on the lives of others must be experienced as intimately as though to do and to suffer the deed were one. Where sorrow and wrong have been inflicted, sorrow and wrong must be felt, not merely known to exist.

Most of our deeds on earth are performed in ignorance of their real bearing on the lives of others. There may be an uneasy sense that others are involved in suffering because of us but we often choose to ignore this. We have understood a situation with our mere intellect and have kept back sympathy which is the beginning of knowing in oneself what this suffering is. So often we have remained in ignorance of the real events we have set going in the lives of others and these things are now gradually revealed to us as a part of our own experience. We have to face the reliving of our whole earth experience in this way.

If this is true, then Breivik has set up a formidable challenge for himself in the next life. He must fully experience the feelings of every one of his seventy-seven victims, and of all their families and friends who were devastated by their loss. In that case, two or three decades in jail would be a mercy, giving him an opportunity to slowly grasp the enormity of what he has done, rather than go directly into a new state of being, where it would crash into him with the force of a speeding truck.

There's always a temptation to feel satisfaction at the idea of a cruel man getting his just desserts, in the next world if not here. It's fair enough to be angry. But if we fully understand the implications we may also feel some compassion. And reflecting further, we realise that we ourselves can't afford to be complacent: we too will have shocks to deal with when the time comes.

A Medical Medium

As I've mentioned, I'm fascinated by what psychics and mediums do. I've long been convinced by the academic research that it's a real process. But how does it start? What exactly do they experience?

Not being psychic at all, to me mediums seem like a different species. Many of them say they've always had the gift, that as children they saw dead people, and assumed everyone did, and so on. They're so much part of the whole psychic spiritualism thing, with its jargon of 'energy' and 'vibrations', that it takes an effort of will to enter into their world. Some small part of me still thinks it's all made up.

But what if someone who is very much part of the real world - if there is such a thing - were to cross over? Doctors, for instance. I've always considered them to be a highly sceptical bunch, having been trained in the rationalist, problem-solving scientific tradition.

Years ago I recall visiting my local GP about a minor complaint carrying with me a book about psi research. He commented on this, having just read somewhere that ESP had been definitively debunked. (I believe it was an article by Susan Blackmore, who was pretty much everywhere at the time.) He wasn't hostile, but I got the sense that it would be pointless trying to convince him otherwise.

So I was glad when I was recently given an excellent book about a London GP who works as a spirit medium. It's called Consulting Spirit: A Doctor's Experience with Practical Mediumship, by Ian D. Rubenstein. (I thought at first he must be an American, since the book uses American terms like 'primary care physician' but it turns out this is only because the book is published in the US.)

Rubenstein's experience started in his surgery one day when a patient having his blood pressure checked suddenly said he had a man with him, and he wanted to have a word. The doctor had previously had no idea that this patient, a public relations whizz in the entertainment world, had anything to do with spirits. But went along with it, and to his complete astonishment the man then channelled his grandfather with a 20-minute discussion about Rubenstein's personal life.

Rubenstein subsequently learned this was something that he should be doing too, and started having powerful and accurate intuitions. He talks about receiving what feels like a 'tug' or even a 'slap' on the back of the head. This happened once when he chucked his car keys on the table just as he was going out, knowing he wouldn't need them; he felt a slap and a verbal warning to take them or they would get stolen. He ignored it, the keys were stolen, and all kinds of problems ensued.

In one particularly striking incident he hears from an acquaintance at the gym that her grand daughter has swallowed the plastic cap from a pen. It's assumed to be in her digestive system, but Rubenstein has the strong impression that it has lodged in one of her bronchial tubes, which would be much more serious. He convinces the woman and her daughter to have the child tested, but x-rays show nothing wrong. Having spooked them completely they insist on further tests in a major hospital. Still nothing seems amiss.

Finally, to calm the frantic women, a doctor suggests pushing a bronchoscope tube down the girl's windpipe.

That afternoon, the doctor looking after Kirsty extracted the chewed cap of a red plastic ballpoint pen from her right main bronchus. Because she'd chewed it, the plastic cap had frayed into little barbs so that it had begun to embed itself into the wall of the bronchus. It was unlikely she would have been able to cough it up. The consequences of it being left in her lung for any length of time would have been disastrous for Kirsty's health. She would have developed pneumonia or possibly even a serious chronic lung condition called bronchiectasis.

A useful come-back to the 'what good does it do?' complaint that sceptics always make about psychics, methinks.

Encouraged to go into it more deeply, Rubenstein joined a training circle at a spiritualist church. His first experience at the circle involved sitting in a circle and trying to focus on the first image that came into his head - as he says, the complete opposite of what they teach you at medical school. But he quickly discovered that the images were meaningful to other people. The figures he saw, and the situations they described, were understood and accepted by them, with a level of detail that makes any kind of chance or Barnum effect implausible.

Here's an example:

In my mind's eye, I could still clearly see Jane, standing behind Hayley. But behind her I became aware of an altogether more shadowy presence. This was a woman, older than Jane, with gray hair and wearing a floral dress. She was smiling and had her hands on Jane's shoulders. Then the image changed and became more vivid. I experienced the startlingly clear vision of a crystal chandelier, which took up my entire inner field of view. It radiated a powerful light and I could clearly see rainbow colors refracted from the cut crystal.

With that, I felt I'd suddenly been handed a vast amount of information about this woman; as if she'd somehow dropped it into my head, all at once.

I heard myself saying, very quickly, "I can see a crystal chandelier. There wasn't just one - she had lots of them. Her house was full of crystal chandeliers. She was very proud of her house. It was always neat. She was very close to you. I think she was your grandmother or maybe your grandmother's sister. She had a stroke and was incapacitated towards the end of her life... Then I started to splutter... I felt an intense happiness welling up in my chest. It became impossible to contain it and I burst into tears. Everyone in the room was looking at me. I couldn't help it. I was overcome with emotion. Then I lost the connection. It just went. I could remember what I'd seen but the vividness of the information was not longer so apparent. The emotions I'd been feeling had suddenly disappeared, as if someone had thrown a switch. However, the image of the crystal chandelier remained very clear - I can still recall it.

Hayley was looking at me intensely. "That was my aunt. My great aunt. You got her exactly right. And she loved crystal chandeliers. But the best bit is the fact that you're crying." "Why?" I asked. I felt extremely foolish. I hadn't cried in public since I was a child. "Because nine years or so before she died she'd had a stroke, like you said. It affected her brain. She became much more emotional. She used to cry whenever she was happy." I was pleased but I felt as if I'd been put through the wringer. My headache was back and I was completely drained of energy.

I found these sorts of detailed descriptions of the inner process quite useful. I also resonated with the way the author dealt with his new experiences. The tone is well judged: he is properly sceptical, in the sense of examining and questioning them, but he doesn't let this get in the way of his curiosity. He doesn't panic or try to suppress his intuitions. Nor does he agonise about what people might think when he develops his mediumship. He just gets on with it. In fact it surprised me how enthusiastically he embraced his new calling, while continuing his professional work. (It helps that he has a supportive wife, and nobody at his work appeared to seriously stand in his way.)

The book is breezy like a novel, written largely in dialogue, which makes it an easy and entertaining read. As I say, it's informative about the process of becoming a medium, and I really recommend it.

But more than that, it's also an important book. Rubenstein has shown how it is possible for an ordinary non-psychic member of society, someone who in his professional work is embedded in rationalist thinking, not merely to adjust to psychic intuition when it arrives unbidden, but to learn how to use it for the benefit of others.

(Since posting this, Ian Rubenstein has been in touch, and is happy to answer any questions readers may have in the comments thread below.)

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Susan Goes to a Séance

Went to Goldsmiths in South London yesterday to hear Susan Blackmore give an entertaining talk about her visit to a séance. She explained that her notoriety as a sceptic makes her a target for people trying to change her mind, and had half promised she would go to one if an opportunity arose. Someone took her up on that and she decided to give it a go.

(She didn't identify the circle, having been asked by the organiser not to. But she mentioned it posts audio files online, and I found it here. )

It's a materialisation circle which meets regularly, in a large garden shed. Blackmore was invited to arrive early and check the place out for anything suspicious. She found the usual set-up with a 'cabinet' consisting of an enclosed space for the medium to sit in covered by a curtain, and couldn't see anything obviously amiss, although wasn't sure what to look for. There were about ten sitters, who mostly seemed to know each other. The medium, when he arrived, turned out to be a big burly chap. When the sitting started he was tied to the chair "with the most incompetent tying I have ever seen" - a bit of rope and a granny knot, although cable ties were also used that looked more impressive. She didn't know what method was used to escape from cable ties, but assumed there must be one.

Blackmore had certain expectations of what a séance would be like - a lot of holding of hands and hymn-singing to "build up the power". It turned out there was little of that - only a rather perfunctory prayer at the beginning, and then an Abba CD playing for the duration. There was total darkness, so she couldn't see anything. I think she had intended to play a section of audio from the website, but the equipment wasn't working, so to give us an idea of what she heard she asked us to close our eyes (to simulate darkness), then rattled two chairs together quite violently for a bit. She then produced an extraordinary choking roar, which settled down into a rough rasping whisper - the voice of the materialised spirit.

There was a lot of excited chatter, with talk of the 'power' being 'really strong this evening'. A number of 'spirits' were said to have materialised, including one named Yellow Feather, talking in different voices that all, as far as she could see, came from the medium himself. At one point there was a big to-do when they announced they would dematerialise him: he duly appeared to vanish from the chair - according to sitters who were invited to touch it - and his voice came from the ceiling. Everyone seemed very impressed, and afterwards they adjourned for tea and cakes.

My own expectation was that Blackmore would treat the whole business with laughing incredulity, which of course she did. She provided the standard sceptic - and in my view, entirely inadequate - preamble about the history of Victorian spiritualism to set the tone, and wondered - perhaps with more justice - why nothing seems to have changed in a century and a half. The séance always involves the same props: the trumpet for direct voice, the obligatory native American, and so on.

But she did seem genuinely baffled by it all. Why on earth would people behave like this? She was sure no one was benefiting materially, as there was no charge for attendance. Talking with the other guests afterwards she heard that people came because they wanted something 'spiritual' in their lives. But this didn't make sense, because there was nothing remotely spiritual about anything that happened. Perhaps it was the mere sense of being visited by 'spirits' that gave them the sense of this. Or perhaps they just did it to get out of the house and have fun.

I've never been to any kind of séance, let alone one that purports to materialise spirits. I know that psychic researchers who started checking them out in the 1880s found them quite tiresome, and I suppose I would have felt the same. If I'd had to sit in the darkness listening to Abba for two hours, and a succession of voices talking platitudes, without any clear indication that they came from anyone else but the medium, and having to accept all the claims of what was happening on trust - I think I'd have gone a bit mental.

There was some discussion afterwards, and I don't think anyone came up with any halfway plausible explanation. This has always been one of the great puzzles facing investigators of séance phenomena, that it's not just about charlatans fleecing the gullible public, but that groups of people seem willing to meet once or twice a week, over periods of years, to converse with spirits who, according to all sensible notions, cannot possibly exist. Why do they do it? What do they get out of it?

I did not get much sense of how much Blackmore had thought about this. Did she think it was a charade that the sitters voluntarily acted out? In that case, the psychological issues involved would be dramatic. Then how much of it was deception, and how much self-deception? Any serious simulation would presumably require a certain amount of skill to achieve.

I personally think that sceptics give far too much credit to people in these situations for the amount of effort they are prepared to go to in order to carry out their nefarious tricks. I doubt that they are that motivated. It would make more sense if they were just sitting there and letting stuff happen.

So my own, admittedly heretical suggestion would be that this lot have stumbled on something that exists in nature, some odd natural process, whether or not it is what it seems to be, and are just working with it - as many have done before them. I can't accept Blackmore's version of history, that William Crookes was 'taken in', as she puts it, nor do I think Charles Richet was fooled at the Villa Carmen. But I can readily accept that her bafflement at the idea of a silly charade is nothing compared to the confusion most of us would feel at having to take it seriously.

Scandinavian Fires

The new Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research has just turned up. It has an interesting paper by Erlendur Haraldsson on an Icelandic case which is reminiscent of the famous Stockholm fire incident involving Swedenborg, and described by Immanuel Kant.

The Icelandic case first. It concerns Indridi Indridason, a physical medium who began sitting in Reykavik in 1905, producing strong table movements, automatic writing and trance speech. In November of that year a new communicator appeared, unrecognised by anyone present. He spoke Danish and identified himself as 'Mr Jensen', a common Danish name. There was a rest break, and when the sitting resumed, 'Jensen' reappeared. He said that during the interval he had been to Copenhagen (1300 miles distant) and seen a fire that had just started in a factory there. He left but then returned later in the sitting, saying the fire service had succeeded in putting the fire out after an hour.

As Haraldsson has established, there exist press reports of a fire in Copenhagen at this time. The details match up, that it was in a factory, the time it started, and that it was brought under control within an hour. At this time Iceland was not connected telegraphically with anywhere else. Telephones arrived a year later, and telegraphy only in 1918. The island was completely dependent on snail mail by sea.

A rather obvious explanation is coincidence. Fires in big cities are hardly uncommon. In the four weeks during which the fire occurred (two before and two after), four fires were reported in the main newspaper, including the one described in the Icelandic séance. Only that one started in a factory, which was a far less common occurrence than fires in homes. And only that one was a major fire - the others were small and quickly extinguished, and attracted much less notice.

Haraldsson dutifully considers some other possibilities, that the medium had a confederate in Copenhagen who started the fire or that the message was brought by carrier pigeon - neither of which really get off the ground.

I don't think this is particularly strong evidence, simply because it can be dismissed as coincidence. But I do find it interesting for this reason: that if mediumship is a genuine phenomenon, and if, even, it's more than clairvoyance, and disembodied spirits can return to this world and pay us a visit, then this is the sort of thing one would expect to happen. It would be surprising if the visitors couldn't travel around the globe and observe what's going on.

The incident of the Stockholm fire is a case of seeming clairvoyance. It occurred in 1759 and is described in a letter written four years later by Kant to a friend. The Swedish intellectual (seer, polymath, etc) Swedenborg had been travelling from England and had arrived in the port of Gothenburg, some 250 miles from Stockholm.

About six o'clock, Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Södermalm, and that it was spreading fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, "Thank God! The fire is extinguished three doors from my house!". The news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, but particularly among the company in which he was. It was announced to the Governor the same evening. On Sunday morning, Swedenborg was summoned to the Governor, who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, and in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news spread throughout the city, and as the Governor had thought it worthy of attention, the consternation was considerably increased; because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster.

On Monday evening a messenger arrived in Gothenburg who was sent by the Board of Trade at the time of the fire. In the letter brought by him, the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the Governor's with the sad news of the fire, the loss which it had occasioned, and houses it had damaged or ruined, not in the least different from that which Swedenborg had given at the time when it happened, for the fire was extinguished at eight o'clock.

This is very unlikely to be mere coincidence. The dates and times match, and Swedenborg's alarm is appropriate to the scale of the conflagration, the largest to occur in the city for many years. It started in Södermalm half a mile from Swedenborg's home and was extinguished less than 300 feet from his house.

Kant seems to have considered it good evidence, and having got a friend to check it out, in both cities, says it is "free from all possible doubt". On the other hand, apart from descriptions of the fire in two newspapers there doesn't seem to be much in the way of independent supporting evidence, so that's all there is to go on. Purely anecdotal. But still pretty startling stuff and, again, if psi is a genuine phenomenon it's the sort of thing we'd expect sometimes to happen.

The Joseph Communications

I've been sent two channelling books to review, Revelation: Joseph's Message (2008) and The Joseph Communications: Your Life After Death (2011). I have mixed feelings about channelling literature, but I'll try to give an objective sense of the contents and then give my two pennyworth.

The books come from a new-ish circle based in the north of England, and are transcripts of trance sessions channelled by Michael G. Reccia, via a 'highly-evolved spirit guide' who (obviously) goes under the name Joseph. Revelation is a series of talks on particular subjects: creation, death and karma, health, work, power, etc. Your Life After Death focuses on the experience of life after death. There is a third book which I haven't seen, and a fourth is said to be planned.

The set-up is similar to Jane Roberts's Seth. As 'Joseph', Reccia talks fluently in front of small gatherings - first delivering a discourse on a particular topic, then answering questions. Joseph describes himself as a former denizen of this world, who some time ago chose not to reincarnate, and wants to help us rediscover the truth about reality and the severity of the situation we face. The delivery is clear and articulate, with no funny accents or behaviour, although Reccia as Joseph gesticulates a lot and sometimes bangs the desk to emphasise a point.

My impression is that the ideas accord mainly, but perhaps not completely, with the picture given by theosophy and spiritualism over the past century and a half. His concepts are sometimes quite hard to follow, but that's typical too. An example:

We wish to talk about beginnings today, and about the seed that is within the human soul; for the soul is not the seed, it is a covering, a vehicle for the seed and not the seed itself. The seed is separate and comes into being of its own violition. Yet there is a paradox here, because it does not have that volition until it becomes separate. So we ask you to consider that God wishes separation in order to grow. The volition first comes from God but, at that point, the seed becomes aware of its own purpose. In other words, God at first thinks of separation and, at that point, the separation exists. Again, the paradox is that the separation is a concept of God, and therefore a part of God, so actual separation never - in terms of your understanding - exists.

So each seed is separate and yet contained within the whole that is God, but God allows the seed to experience growth through the illusion of individuality. The seed is then clothed in various radiations that allow it to interact on a physical level with that physical level. These can be compared to 'skins' or fields of various energies that complete the illusion of separateness from God, from the inner to the outer, the skins become more dense, but they are nothing more than shades put around a light and, within those shades - and particularly within the outermost three - the Earthly perceptions and consciousness reside; but these are nothing more than an illusion, a field which is tissue-thin.

Our task in contacting you is to peel back the layers of misconception that separate the seed from its greater whole and, in doing so, to create an increase of the God-power within the fields, so that the growth that is expected of the seed by God in projecting Itself into individuality can take place. We have to warn mankind that this expected growth is not taking place at this time.

A chapter on 'medicine' argues that the idea of illness is a misconception. There is nothing really wrong with us. We are part of God, and because God is perfect it follows that we are perfect too. If a patient gets better after medical treatment it is because he/she has faith in the treatment. The treatment itself does nothing; it is the patient's faith that makes them well.

In another chapter, Joseph reveals that he was a citizen of the ancient civilization of Atlantis, which existed before the 'second coming' of man. (Reccia reports having been given images of 'a beautiful city set against a lilac-coloured sky and surrounded by peaceful waters in which sailed majestic vessels, intricately carved and decorated.)

Joseph describes Atlantis having a different technology, using 'particle physics' to move objects, able to move and rearrange buildings with the power of mind, heal without touching, and so on. However at some point there was some kind of cataclysm, when it all went to people's heads and changed them.

There was a lot of pain, there was a lot of death, which was caused by these people suddenly creating dark things, dark thoughts that previously didn't exist on the Earth. It changed the nature of how animals looked at each other, and the vibrations were absorbed by the flora and fauna. The earth became a more aggressive place...

I tell you the Earth that I knew is vastly different from the Earth that you know - just a pale shadow of how it used to look. Mistaken thought has done all that, has caused the havoc, the chaos... It is arrogance to suppose that your people are the first people; that your civilisation is the first civilisation. It is not.

This was the Fall, and is the origin of human problems - an idea that Joseph returns to often. Another concept is a sort of mental force field around the Earth made up of humans' thoughts and passions, and which as a result is mainly negative. This 'Field' distorts our thinking, and we let it attract us back into life again and again.

These themes are developed in Your Life After Death, although the focus is less abstract and more personal. Here are a few extracts:

Very quickly in the lower spiritual realms you learn that you have to guard and 'treat' your thoughts - not to hide or mask them but to work on them because your thoughts are instantly displayed in the colour-shield that you have around you. You cannot approach a person in one way and think towards them in another. There is no subterfuge - you do wear your colours 'on your sleeve' and those around you recognise what you are thinking, what you have thought and what you have done because of those colours...

When you view someone in front of you on Earth - your 'friend', your 'enemy', your 'relative', your 'loved one' - you are only seeing one aspect of them. The soul of that person has gone through many incarnations, many experiences, and you do not really know who you are addressing. With the people around you, were you to see who you were really addressing you would be shocked, humbled and amazed and you would change your attitude towards many people. You would approach each person and say, 'I do not know who this person is; I cannot judge them; I cannot be angry with them; I cannot feel superior to them because I do not know who they really are and what they have achieved to this point in their lives.' Appearances are deceptive - please remember that and it will help with your transformation of the physical world...

Souls find themselves in landscapes that are very familiar to them and yet are brighter, clearer and more polished. The skies are bluer; the clouds are whiter; the architecture more perfect; there is a symmetry to the trees (and by symmetry I do not mean they are equally balanced one ach side - I mean that the God within them is more apparent, so more symmetry, perfection and harmony is perceived within their form) and there is nothing that jars about the landscape.

You see great landscapes that on Earth would perhaps frighten you or be too awesome to contemplate. There are towering cliffs, waterfalls, basins of cascading water and vast plains. There are mountains that, to you on Earth, would seem too immense to take in, with dimensions too great to understand. You see spirits who have come from Earth living in places that would terrify you on Earth - living at the edge of waterfalls, living on the edge of chasms, living high in mountains without fear (because there is nothing to fear) ... taking in the majesty of the landscape rather than concentrating on fear of harm to the human frame, which no longer applies...

You are able (using the modern idiom) to 'multi-task' quite easily in the spiritual realms, but you multi-task with your full participation in different aspects of your experience. You can have as many or as few experiences at the same time as you wish, and you can be as involved or as uninvolved in those experiences as you wish. In other words you can be casually involved in a conversation but also be aware that you are undertaking great spiritual tasks at the same time whilst also being aware that, on another level of your consciousness, you are absorbing knowledge whilst you attend a lecture or speak to highly evolved spirits about the evolution of your soul ... and all these things are happening with your conscious participation at the same time.

Many people arrive in the spiritual worlds (as we have said in earlier chapters) and do not wish to change; they wish to get back to the Field and they wish to remain as they always have been - and for them progress is relatively slow. There are other souls who have investigated spiritual possibilities within and outside of themselves and there exists within those souls an eagerness to see what is next. With those souls the journey is far easier and they progress away from the initial physical plane much more rapidly than those souls who wish to come back and be dictated to by the Field once again. Then there are those souls who, fairly instantly upon leaving the physical plane, regain knowledge of who they were before they came to the earth plane. For them it is simply a matter of remembering and re-instanting their personality as an advanced soul and then gaining instant admission to the sphere from which they have come and to which they can gain entry again.

He describes the various spheres of existence and talks about the Lords of Karma, souls who 'have evolved to a point where they have been given custody of certain souls ... in the name of love' and are charged with placing each soul in circumstances where they can grow the most, both on Earth and on other worlds, and plotting out the course of their lives. However in what seems to be a radical departure from other examples of the genre, Joseph forcefully insists that reincarnation is never forced on anyone. People reincarnate of their own volition, because they are drawn in by the Field, wanting to go on having sensual experiences and/or to complete unfinished business.

So many choose to come back, and when they choose to come back, when the decision has been finally and absolutely made and we say to them, 'Are you sure?' and they say, 'Yes,' with an anger. 'Who are you to interfere?' ... they are already pulling themselves back towards the earth plane through free will.

I hope I've given a fair summary of the contents. There's no doubt about the sincerity of everyone involved. The books are attractively produced, and I'd judge them to be a significant addition to channelling literature. I'd also say the project has all the ingredients for commercial success, as the team behind clearly have a good idea about business, branding and marketing (see their website).

On the other hand I'm cautious about taking this sort of material at face value. Even if one happens to accept mediumship as a genuine phenomenon one is bound to wonder about the genesis of these 'spirit teachings'. The stuff about Atlantis is surely fantasy, and it's disturbing to see it being presented as fact. Certain odd comments seem to me to be neither true or wise, eg. 'The Buddhists are mistaken. They strive for Nothing, yes, but they strive for obliteration of the consciousness, which cannot happen,' Ditto the insistence that illness is just in our heads and that all medicine is effectively placebo.

This might not matter if the material is genuinely helpful. For people who haven't thought about it much before, to be stimulated to think about survival, and the nature of the changed psychological environment, is perhaps useful. But the underlying tone, in Revelation particularly, is one of complaint and exasperation: 'Message to Earthlings from Utopia: Your planet is horrible and your situation is dire! It's your fault! You must learn to be spiritual like us!'.

I realize some people find this inspiring, perhaps from appearing to be delivered by some wise being beyond our ken. But for all the obscure metaphysics, and the sermonizing about the need to change our ways, there is little of what would help us to achieve that. It's all about the destination, nothing about the actual journey.

If it's spiritual guidance we want, I'd argue we should look for it closer to home. Lately I've been re-reading one of Jack Kornfield's books, The Wise Heart, which offers practical advice on how to deal with issues such as fear, anger and resentment, from a human who has had to deal with these issues himself. I have to say, I find this much more helpful than listening to lectures about humanity's shortcomings.

I suppose a come-back to my complaints is that I'm not ready for this sort of exalted teaching. I won't argue with that. But I'm genuinely interested in the phenomenon of channelling and in the worldview that it promotes. Is it all a mysterious confabulation of human minds? Or is Joseph what he claims to be? And in that case, are such teaching entities perhaps themselves sometimes subject to the illusions they strive to warn us against?

Book Review: The Afterlife Revealed by Michael Tymn

I've been enjoying Michael Tymn's new book about afterlife. At one time I read quite a lot about mediumship, so over the years I'm used to coming across the same quotes and stories - I'm not often surprised by anything. But Tymn's reading of psychic research and spiritualist literature is far wider than mine, and I found plenty that was new to me. Stafford Betty, in his foreword, describes him as a master of the evidential approach used to evaluate spirit communications, and says 'there is perhaps no one living today who has dissected so many of them and argued so successfully for their authenticity'. I can believe it.

Tymn starts by revealing that at age 75 he is threatened by a blood clot which could do for him at any time. Not a nice thing to have hanging over you, but apart from the normal concerns, such as the pain of illness and worries about leaving loved ones behind, he is quite excited about the idea of death. That's problematic in a culture in which we are supposed to think of death with fear and dread - or not think about it at all. How does one respond to people who, naturally perhaps, argue that thinking about death is morbid, that it's better to concentrate on this life rather than worry about the next? Tymn responds that the best way to live in the present is to 'live in eternity', as recommended by great artists and thinkers of the past. Life is sweeter when we are prepared for death, wrote Shakespeare, while Montaigne said that 'to practice death is to practice freedom'.

That meant more in an age that believed in a world to come, but what about now, when 20% of Americans don't (as many as half the populations of other Western countries)? Tymn has harsh things to say about the philosophy of materialism, which has resulted in 'an era of moral decadence, a time of egocentricity, intolerance, hatred, hypocrisy, disorder, flux, strife, chaos, and fear' and reduced many people to 'hedonistic materialists, consumed with the pursuit of pleasure and sensory gratification.' He laments, too, the failure of organized religions to address the issue of afterlife. In writing this book, he says, he hopes that at least some people might 'begin to visualize a spirit world, thereby helping them make friends with death, at the same time making this life more meaningful.' Also, knowing about how things work on the other side can make passing a good deal easier, he adds.

Nine chapters trace various topics, starting with the emergence of mediums and their study in the nineteenth century, deathbed visions, the process of separating from the body, the transition stage after death through Hades conditions and the 'second death', the life review, the different spheres or planes, the creative power of thought and imagination and the consequences of dying with unfinished business. A necessarily short final chapter describes what little can be said about the higher spheres, and there are appendices that discuss cases of precognition of death, the effects of suicide and the question of whether or not reincarnation occurs.

Tymn naturally mentions highly evidential cases, such as the deathbed visions where the 'spirit' forms that gathered round the patient's bed included, to her great surprise, an individual she did not know was dead. The back and forth on this question was covered in his earlier book The Articulate Dead; in this book, by contrast, the implication is that the evidence can't realistically be interpreted to mean anything other than survival of consciousness, and I think that's fair enough. Sceptics will wave it away as 'anecdotal', the magic word which neutralizes the challenge and saves them having to think about it. But for many minds the body of accumulated material from mediumship, so ably represented here, overwhelmingly points in that direction. If it doesn't mean what it seems to mean, then what on earth does it mean?

My personal interest in this topic quickens the further on we get from the deathbed and the business of actually passing over. In particular I'm interested in the moral dimension so powerfully present in the life review, and in the experience reported through mediums of being well-and-truly dead. Tymn has quite a lot about this: the quotes are well chosen and often moving, as this early twentieth century communication through automatic writing:

How can I describe to you that which has no parallel on earth? I can give you an imperfect idea of what now occurred, though it came to me with a force hitherto unparalleled in either my earthly or my spiritual existence. The air seemed filled with a strange murmur, and clouds descended and shut from my view all outward objects ...

The story of my life was being told in tones that, it seemed to me, must reach to the farthest heavens, and its events were pictured before me by the tossing clouds. I use the words heard and saw, and yet I am not sure that I did either. But the impression made upon my mind was as if all senses had united in one grand effort to place my past life in its true phases before me. I sat appalled and dismayed, and then as the record of weaknesses and failures went on, I covered my face with my hands and sank in agony and shame to the ground...

I summoned all my courage, and since I must sit in judgment on myself, I resolved to do so bravely and thoroughly. How many sombre pictures there were! How many half light, half shade; but now and then there was a bright one in which some unconscious unselfishness, some little deed I had done and forgotten, without any thought of secret self-glorification, and which had not only been good in its results, but which had sprung from a fountain of genuine good within my heart, shone out like a jewel from the dark clouds which surrounded it.

I sometimes think this sort of reported experience is the only religious text anyone really needs.

The impression one gets from near-death experiences is that the judgment, or life review, happens immediately after death. Actually it's absent from most NDEs, although one might assume that it would have taken place if the experience had lasted a bit longer. On the other hand that is not borne out by mediumistic accounts, where the life review figures rather little. At the very least it seems to be delayed. Tymn surmises that the inconsistency might be explained in terms of the non-local aspect of time in the spirit world, and quotes a communicator who talks of the life review taking place when one is ready for it. He also quotes physicist James Beichler, who in his 2008 book To Die For speculated that

a person who has a highly-developed spiritual consciousness - one that has kept pace with the development of the mind - may not need a life review as the person has reviewed his or her life when alive in the flesh. At the other extreme, there are those not advanced enough in their conscious evolution to appreciate a life review, and still others who may not accept a life review because they deny their death and sense nothing at all.

It seems natural enough that the life review would be delayed until the time is right and one is morally and mentally prepared for it. (Although I can't agree that any self-examination while living could substitute for the intensity of the experience in the discarnate state, and if it was available surely one would eventually want to see it.) But it's still puzzling that the near-death experience implies the life review to be an immediate event, when this is not at all confirmed by mediumistic communications. It reinforces my personal - and admittedly highly speculative - sense that the life review in the near-death experience is not to be viewed entirely as an automatic process, akin to the biological process of dying itself, but at least in some respects as a planned campaign of enlightenment, brought on prematurely in certain cases for the benefit of the individual and in order to send a message to the living.

I admit to being fascinated by the idea of a world moulded by the imagination, which is what comes through mediumistic reports of afterlife conditions. There are plenty of good descriptions and quotes here from the likes of Mike Swain, Raymond Lodge, Frederic Myers and William Stead, which give a good sense of this. Actually I think this exploration might have gone a bit further - I found relatively little reference to Jane Sherwood's T.E. Lawrence and Helen Greaves's Frances Banks, and none to Albert Pauchard, the Swiss spiritualist who talks interestingly in his little book of having to be purged of unacknowledged moral defects and of symbolic imagery being employed in teaching experiences. But of course experience at this level becomes ever more a matter of speculation, and it's true that, as Tymn concludes, 'the celestial world does not easily lend itself to analyses by using terrestrial methods and reasoning'.

There are some key messages to take from this material, which Tymn covers deftly. One is the clear indication that we don't go empty-headed into the beyond, but on the contrary, remain burdened by a lifetime of habits, obsessions and unresolved conflicts. Unless we clearly confront these and deal with them before our demise, they may mould our experience and weigh us down.

Another pressing issue is the consequence of suicide, which emerges as a serious no-no. Cutting short a life, it appears, not only robs the individual of the chance to learn important lessons but leaves him/her in a desperately weakened state akin to a coma. On this, more than any other subject, communicators are agreed, Tymn says. But obviously there are major issues here. As western society wrestles with the idea of assisted suicide, and the desperate wish of those with appalling conditions like motor neuron disease to have some control over their demise, one is bound to ask what, from a spiritual perspective, the true moral criteria really are. Tymn rather sidesteps this question, but he does at least offer a quote from Silver Birch, the spirit teacher channeled by Maurice Barbanell:

It depends upon the soul's progress; and, above all these things, it depends on the motive. The churches are wrong when they say that all suicide comes in the same category; it does not. While you have no right to terminate your earthly existence, there are undoubtedly in many cases, ameliorating factors, mitigating circumstances, to be considered. No soul is better off because it has terminated its earthly existence. But it does not automatically follow that every suicide is consigned for aeons of time into the darkest of dark sphere.

Certainly that would be a hard punishment for simply saying no thanks to a death by slow strangulation. From a human perspective it's hard to deny that a person who takes a trip to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, or gets a friend or relative to administer poison in order to avoid this ghastly fate, would be a good deal 'better off'. And those of us who take psychic and near-death reports seriously, and believe they carry an important message about the after-death state, will have increasingly to try to reconcile these apparently divergent positions.

But in the meantime this is an excellent book, and I can thoroughly recommend it. It's absolutely packed with quotes and anecdotes, not just bland descriptions, a here-it-is-make-of-it-what-you-will approach that I've often come across, but showing a passionate engagement with the material with a clear message about its implications. It should do well.

Coming Out

I've often wondered what it's like to be a medium, to sense the presence of discarnate beings and interact telepathically with them. But it's not something they talk about much. I suppose they're so used to it they take it for granted.

So I was interested to hear from someone recently who is in the process of finding his feet as a medium and who talks about all this in quite a bit of detail. He doesn't like the term "medium", and isn't even completely sure yet what to make of his experiences. The point is, they are experiences , and having avoided the issue for years he's finally having to deal with it.

He's a former journalist and long time corporate affairs executive, says he's used to being sceptical and asking tough questions.

The toughest question I've had to ask is one for myself - why do I see and experience the things I can't explain? As you can imagine, when you are a 'normal' businessperson dealing daily with the standard principles and practices of corporate and family life, trying to then rationalise the other side of your life which doesn't appear rational at all ... is not an easy ride. The thought has crossed my mind on many occasions that perhaps I'm mentally ill despite being able to successfully forge a career and raise a family. I'm so mainstream but the other 'side' of me isn't - if that makes sense.

He says that all his life he has had the sense of "energies" - spirits, ghosts, souls, auras, whatever - around him and communicating with him mentally. He always found it a burden, and tried to avoid it. He also got headaches frequently, and although he could make them go away by meditating, this increased the sense of the "energies", which was worse. Now he's coming to terms with it all.

The best part of all this is when I feel the presence of an energy or spirit that I somehow 'know' to be that of my Grandma. She often 'speaks' to me through my dreams or at times when I've been willing to accept this 'gift' via intense meditation, it can feel as though she is sitting in the chair next to me and we are having a conversation even though we aren't in the true meaning of conversation. Please understand, I can't physically see her but I see an energy. It isn't on a level we understand as part of what we experience with others on earth. The best way to describe it is I see what some people might consider an aura - which then begins to form an outline of a presence of energy or light that I feel is my Grandma.

Fascinating stuff. If you want to read more he is blogging regularly about this coming-out process. This last bit is an extract from his first post, which is probably the best place to start, but there are several more recent ones on another page.

Dabbling in the Occult

Recent posts (eg on the Scole report) have raised the issue of trust. Why should we believe paranormal claimants just because they seem so sincere? It's a good question, and I've been thinking about it in relation to Joe Fisher.

Fisher was a British-born investigative journalist who died in 2001 aged 53. Some 17 years earlier he had joined a channelling group in Toronto. The medium was a woman suffering from leukemia who had discovered her ability after undergoing hypnotic therapy. An 'alter-consciousness' came through while she was in a trance state, giving deep discourses on a wide range of metaphysical topics to the listening sitters: the worlds beyond, reincarnation, the true nature of mind and personality, and so on.

Eventually the medium's 'spirit guide' came through, a nineteenth century Yorkshire sheep farmer named Russell Parnick. As word spread, others came to visit and contacted their own guides. On Friday nights they would gather, and all the various guides would come through expressing concern for their charges and offering advice that was gratefully accepted. On his first visit Fisher learned that his guide was someone named Filipa; the two of them had shared a passion in an eighteenth century Greek village. Over the following months he became enthralled with this discarnate old flame to the point of obsession and dumped his real-life girl-friend to spend all his waking moments thinking about her.

In the meantime, the medium's poor health was a constant concern. At a certain point, 'Russell' demanded that the hypnotic therapist who had been conducting the sessions should withdraw, and his place be taken by one of the other sitters, named Sandford, who could more easily channel the healing energy that would keep her alive.

Fisher observed that over the following months Sandford became increasingly subdued and eventually disappeared. However at the time he paid little attention as he was engrossed in his own infatuation, while also carrying out an investigation into the true origins of the guides. One of them, 'Ernest Scott', had provided a lot of detail about a recent incarnation as a RAF bomber pilot, and he set off to England to see what else he could discover.

The background story checked out: the squadron, the aerodrome that 'Ernest' described, and little details, like the fact that initially there was no accommodation, and they had to sleep in a converted sports stadium. But there was no record whatever of an Ernest Scott. Confronted with this discrepancy back in Toronto 'Ernest' was evasive and unhelpful. However Fisher thought he might have better luck with some of the other guides. He got 'Russell' and 'Filipa' to provide him with copious details and set off again. Russell's village in Yorkshire more or less checked out, but crucial details were wrong and, again, there was no record of a Russell Parnick. With a sinking heart Fisher travelled to Greece. There was no village of the name Filipa had given, nor anything that could confirm her story, which was plainly untrue.

Devastated by this evidence of serial lying, Fisher now paid a visit to Sandford, who told him of the disaster that had nearly befallen him at the hands of the 'spirit guides'. Pressured, somewhat against his will, into directing the medium's trances and providing her with healing, he found himself being cajoled into forming a relationship with her. The guides got angry if he resisted, always telling him it was 'for his own good'. They started a whispering campaign against his wife, to the extent that they separated. His business was neglected and he became ever more depressed and lethargic. Things got so bad that he rowed with the medium, and that saved him: his contact with the guides was cut and he started to recover.

Sandford then realized how they had been brainwashing him.

It was magnificently done. They would scramble my thinking and feeling processes so that I wasn't able to function properly. And then they would be the ones to make me feel better. Practically every day I would get what you might call a maintenance shot which would make me feel better for a while. They turned me into a psychic drug addict. The guides were out to create enormous dependency - and they succeeded.

These 'guides', Fisher now decided, were merely the denizens of the 'lower astral planes' that insinuate their way into the minds of weak humans and, by manipulating them, vicariously experience the sense of physical existence which they crave. They are the tulpas or 'hungry ghosts' of Tibetan tradition. And it could apply across the board. He investigated the spirit personalities of other mediums and found that they too were lying. However helpful they might prove to be, in providing healing, for instance, they were not who they claimed to be. He then recalled Swedenborg's insistence on the brilliant yet delusive nature of many communicating entities, and his urgent warnings not to believe a word they say.

Having rejected his parents' Christian fundamentalism in order to pursue his New Age inclinations Fisher had, in a sense, come full circle. His disillusion now extended to the whole New Age channelling craze: even personalities like Jane Roberts's Seth were suspect. Spirit communication was by definition evil, as good spirits don't communicate; only demons do, just as his mother had always insisted. Why on earth, he wondered, would people voluntarily open themselves up to this sort of malign occult influence?

Fisher described this experience in his book 'Hungry Ghosts' (recently republished as The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts), and it's the kind of thing for which the cliché 'unflinching honesty' was surely invented. To admit to having had a destructive fling with a ghost would be difficult, to describe in detail how he was fooled by its lies must have been excruciating. A sceptic, of course, would say that the real error was to pay any attention to this nonsense in the first place. But is that realistic?

I haven't personally witnessed it, but the appearance of possession in trance states is so consistent and widespread, and has been so frequently verified, it's clearly a genuine phenomenon. It's something that happens in our world, part of the human experience. The information that is provided is not necessarily always evidential of survival of death, but it can be uncannily detailed and specific. For instance 'Filipa's' story of eighteenth-century passion may have been a fantasy, but idiosyncrasies of speech and certain linguistic references were discovered to be absolutely appropriate to the circumstances of the locality around 1912-1915 which only someone who had lived there at this time could possibly know. The only possible explanation would be cryptomnesia, but that leaves a lot unexplained. This is the puzzle that motivated the people who investigated Leonora Piper; they didn't doubt the paranormality of the information, they just didn't know where it was coming from or the real identities of the voices that spoke through her.

We have two ways of dealing with this. We can either ignore it altogether, reassuring ourselves that mediumship is explicable as 'cold-reading' - all flummery and foolishness. Or we can engage with it. But if we do that, we have to approach it with extreme caution, as the researchers did with Piper. If we don't, we risk becoming unhinged.

Our society knows this: that is why, for all its sophistication and scientific understanding, it continues to talk about the dangers of 'dabbling in the occult'. Possession following use of the ouija board has in the past been a frequently described phenomenon. And it can be fatal. The desperate coda to Fisher's tale is that he appears never to have recovered from his encounter with the ghosts, who he believed continued to persecute him, and he ended his life by leaping off a cliff.

I've often thought that this is the real significance of the idea of 'healthy scepticism', at least in this context. I'm fascinated by the visceral dislike which underlies so much sceptical discourse, the sense of disgust that the ideas of spiritualism and paranormal belief seem to evoke in certain people. Overtly, there's a sense of danger of giving in to illusions, things that aren't true. But perhaps on some unconscious level we know that the illusion is not the existence of an unseen world, it's the identity of the voices who communicate to us from it. Should we believe what they tell us? Or are they just luring us to destruction?

So one could argue that scientific scepticism, for all its intellectual shortcomings, is a necessary bulwark, a secular inheritance of the Biblical injunction against traffic with spirits. It's not just superstition in general we have to be wary of. It's being seduced by ghosts that inspire with their high metaphysical talk, merely to suck the life out of us. That's why it's ringfenced. We can stray beyond the perimeter if we wish, but if harm befalls us, we have only ourselves to blame for believing any of it was true in the first place.

Book Review: Witnessing the Impossible, by Robin Foy

Years ago I spent some time trying to get to grips with claims about séance phenomena. I remember spending weeks in the library plowing through long reports, including, among others, investigations of the Boston medium Mina 'Margery' Crandon that were published in the journal of the American SPR in the 1930s. The magazine Scientific American had offered a cash prize for a successful display of mediumship, but attempts to evaluate her effects quickly deteriorated into a long and noisy controversy.

The SPR's investigation of the Scole group in the 1990s was like deja vu. There's a circle of enthusiasts who claim to be generating superlative physical phenomena, including lights, images on film and materialised spirit forms. There are investigators who take an active interest and think it's real. Then there others who think their colleagues have lost their marbles. The sceptics had a point, given that the phenomena occurred only in total darkness, there were virtually no controls for fraud and that requests for infrared filming were rebuffed. But either way, I'd had enough of all of that, so when SPR's report came out in 1999 I just noted that some things never change and went on to less controversial matters.

I got interested again recently after reading a letter in the most recent SPR journal by David Fontana, one of the three sympathetic investigators (sadly deceased late last year). Fontana welcomed the publication of a definitive account of the Scole group's activities by its founder Robin Foy, titled Witnessing the Impossible. So I thought I'd take another look.

Foy is a retired RAF pilot, who at the time was working as a sales rep for a paper manufacturer. He'd had some striking personal experiences with mediums and had set up the Noah's Ark Society for physical phenomena, before moving on with his wife Sandra to found this new group. The circle met in the large basement of the Foy's newly acquired farmhouse in Scole, a small village near Diss in East Anglia. They were originally seven, but three dropped out leaving the Foys and two people, identified only as Alan and Diana, who acted as trance mediums, through whom a variety of 'spirit communicators' made themselves known.

The communicators also worked to produce a variety of physical phenomena. The one that is most frequently described is lights (in one place described as being 'like fireflies') that make displays forming catherine wheels, circles and ellipses. They are also seen to pass through objects and the sitter's bodies, causing a tickling sensation and on occasion bringing about healing effects.

Materialisation is another big feature: the forms can't be seen but make their presence known by constantly touching the sitters on various parts of the body. They include children, and at least one occasion a dog, and often make quite a commotion, walking around the room, clapping, clicking their fingers and sometimes even managing to talk.

The table levitates occasionally. There is a lot of experimenting with Polaroid film, producing some seemingly impressive images on film that was unused when it was introduced into the room drawings: writing from poems, signatures, photographs of deceased celebrities, etc. Apports appear: old coins and other small objects.

Mainly the unseen communicators seem preoccupied with trying new ways to create physical interactions. They mainly talk through the two members of the group who are entranced, but they also work hard to enable independent communication, and quite often succeed. This is not the old 'ectoplasmic' method, Foy stresses, but a new approach that they are pioneering for the first time. They also try to create a sort of rudimentary telephone, which by the end is starting to produce results, and even provides the beginnings of a synchronised video image of the celestial speaker.

At this point it all becomes a bit Star Wars, as the regular team of communicators abruptly disappears and an authoritative being, apparently from a far distant dimension, comes on the line. He identifies himself as Varren-here-ic and urgently addresses Jar-had-we Scole to tell them that they have to abort. Apparently their experiments have opened up a doorway, or vortex, in the time-space continuum, and this has unfortunately attracted the attention of experimenters in the future.

The interdimensional time wave pattern - generated by your future - is coming from another time belonging to your world... It is being generated by a crystalline time probe. This method of exploring time patterns is very basic, but still capable of generating a broad timecast. These are amongst the first of such experiments... It is this timecast that is creating the interference. .. By attempting to access your present time, those responsible are causing time ripples - or shock waves - to penetrate the doorway and the surrounding time space. It was these shock waves that severed your own special links with your spirit team at Scole, and are still causing imbalance in your dimension. ... this probing of time is a violation of the Cosmic and Intermidemnsional laws relating to time and space - and this will not be allowed to continue.

This made me giggle, but in other respects I was struck by the book's sheer ordinariness. The tone and ambience is absolutely unremarkable. Foy could be describing a group of enthusiasts setting up a successful animal shelter, perhaps, or a community choir practising to compete in a national choral event. There are discussions about the best way forward, excitement when progress is made, occasional arguments and disagreements, plans for extending the scope, and so on. It's all quite repetitive - a chronological description of each sitting, who was there, what happened, etc. In this case, half of the group are dead people, and they are meeting in a blacked out cellar two or three times a week to figure out new ways for the two sides to communicate.

The only real drama comes when the group starts opening up sessions to other people, including the SPR investigators Monty Keen, Arthur Ellison and David Fontana. Initially things go well but the group is shocked by the hostility Keen starts to show when his demands for infrared photography are turned down. Foy makes clear that this refusal was made by the 'Team', which had strong ideas of what they were trying to achieve, in which this sort of intrusion would be unhelpful. From a scientific point of view this is no kind of answer, but from Foy's perspective it would have seemed reasonable. (Fontana in his letter claims the investigators remained completely unaware of the bad feeling they had caused, so the group obviously kept their irritation to themselves).

It also becomes apparent that the hostility that Keen's (and also on one occasion Ellison's) tetchiness was an effect of the extreme pressure they were facing from sceptics within the SPR. In these situations there are always people who assume it must be fraudulent, and either behave badly and disrupt the proceedings or else say nothing, but then go around afterwards noisily proclaiming that they know how the tricks were done. To be fair, the critics Alan Gauld, Donald West and Tony Cornell, had reasonable complaints. Gauld, in his typically acute analysis, pointed out that he was sympathetic to the existence of this sort of phenomena, he just didn't think the controls were sufficient for the group to be taken seriously.

However here's what Foy says about one particular incident:

WM - a member of the SPR - was apparently unsure and suspicious of the proceedings. We discovered afterwards that (although during our pre-sitting briefing we had specifically asked delegates not to do so) he had actually been making a grab for the spirit lights when they were in his vicinity - which may well be the reason that they did not travel down to his end of the room as much as they would normally have done. This information came directly from Monty Keen, who testified several months later that WM had telephone him personally - immediately he arrived back home from the Scole seminar - to allege that the sitting must have been fraudulent because he had been suspicious of the two microphones that hung down from the ceiling to record the session. These sat quite obviously in everybody's vision and - if anybody had bothered to ask about them at the time - we would have been quite happy to fully explain their use and allow any or all the delegates present to inspect and test them.

In a way, WM's allegations were a slight on the integrity and intelligence of the senior SPR colleagues who sat with us regularly; all of whom were vastly more experienced that he was in the research and investigation of physical psychic phenomena!

This is a pattern where physical phenomena is concerned. There are the enthusiasts who spend a lot of time on their own, and then invite other people in to watch. There are investigators who spend a lot of time with them and become convinced of their sincerity (for instance Malcolm Bird and Hereward Carrington in the 'Margery' investigations, or William Crawford in the Goligher circle). And then there are the occasional visitors (Walter Prince, Harry Houdini, Joseph Rhine in the case of Margery) who think it's nonsense. One's left trying to make sense of it all.

Looking at it from the outside, even through largely sympathetic third party appraisals like the SPR report, there's always a suspicion that we're dealing with shady tricksters. The claims are just too fantastic to be taken at face value. But if the logical conclusion is that it's all false - or 'a load of rubbish' as Richard Wiseman is said to have concluded after his visit - that doesn't make any sense either. It would be an extraordinarily complex and time-consuming hoax, and it must surely mean that the many sittings the group held on their own which Foy's book describes, and which were far more numerous than those held with other people present, were invented. For if the purpose was to fool investigators and the public, perhaps to make themselves famous on the world stage (there was certainly no money in it), they would hardly have had to meet on their own. In short, Witnessing the Impossible would be largely a work of fiction.

Read in another way, what this book provides, more than any other than has yet appeared on the Scole group, is a sense of the absolute sincerity of the participants, that they were doing something meaningful and useful. And at the end of the day, is there anything wrong about basing one judgements around these sorts of considerations?

David Fontana, perhaps the most open of the three SPR investigators, thinks not. He says he argued with Keen and Ellison about the value of infrared filming. It was an illusion, he told them, to suppose that it would satisfy die-hard sceptics, who would simply look for some other reason to reject it in order to stay secure in their comfort zone. 'The task of psychical research is to collect and publish evidence and to leave others to make of it what they will. If the evidence is good enough, those interested and with open minds will find it convincing, and that is all for which we can hope.'

Spiritualists on TV

There's been a bit of discussion about Sunday's Channel 4 documentary by Richard Alwyn about a Spiritualist church, while I was in a tent in a field in Norfolk (see the post before this, 'So not farewell after all'). I've caught up with the film now (thanks to The Major for the link), and here are my thoughts, for what they're worth.

I liked the programme, and thought it was a pretty fair view. Alwyn seemed genuinely struck by the accurate information a medium gave him about his grandfather - also the fact that the medium was rather surprisingly a doctor, an educated man of science - and the success of a 20-minute healing session that fixed the back pain he had endured for years, and which he remains free from four months later.

However commentators are struck by Alwyn's failure to acknowledge the paranormality of what he experienced. Actually that didn't at all surprise me. It would have been a very different sort of programme if he'd shown any instant personal commitment. At the end of the programme he did suggest that once these things are better understood, they would come to seem normal. 

In these sorts of cases it's not what people say, but the way they say it, that counts. There have been a few books on paranormal subjects recently where the writers implied that they weren't personally convinced while showing a depth of interest and sympathy that rather belies it (eg. Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters, Barbara Weisberg's Talking to the Dead). But considering how controversial the subject is, that's what they have to do if they are going to retain credibility with their audience.

Also, I agree with Paul that there's a natural defence mechanism here. I think of it as a sort of psychological gag reflex. We reject experiences that seem to have no rational basis; we call that 'healthy scepticism'. It takes time for these things to sink in, to rearrange the furniture in our heads, to create a new worldview.

I remember having early experiences of this kind, to which I paid little or no attention at the time. They were just curiosities. But they stayed with me, and when I began reading about psychical research, they started to have resonance. It may take ten or twenty years, but my guess is that Alwyn will one day join the many of us who have come to recognise the validity of these sorts of experiences, and place them in a meaningful context.  

I think it would help bridge the gulf between sceptics and believers if we understood this psychological process a bit better. It wasn't hard to guess what the sceptical reactions should be: the folk at JREF were upset at the idea of a doctor acting as a medium in his surgery - he should stick to handing out pills - and one made a rather pedestrian stab at revealing cold reading by the doctor. But my take on this is that people are describing stuff that happens to them, not just acting out beliefs or performing parts.

This is terribly difficult for sceptics to grasp, particularly those who follow James Randi: they are so obsessed with the idea of conscious deceit they can't see what more open minded people would see - and which the film did a good job of showing - that whether they like it or not, some people actually are subject to meaningful hallucinations or other uncanny experiences, and in some cases learn that they have a practical benefit. The whole point about the surgery incident, as the doctor described it, was that his vision of the patient's father, and his ability to describe him to her, cured her of her depression and enabled her to stop taking pills. How is that wrong? Isn't it something we need to understand better?