The Book 4th Edition
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2. Respected scientists who investigated
“I am absolutely convinced of the
fact that those who once lived on earth can and do communicate
with us. It is hardly possible to convey to the inexperienced
an adequate idea of the strength and cumulative force of
the evidence.”
Sir William Barrett F.R.S.
“I tell you we do persist. Communication is possible.
I have proved that the people who communicate are who and
what they say they are. The conclusion is that survival
is scientifically proved by scientific investigation.”
Sir Oliver Lodge F.R.S.
“It is quite true that a connection has been set up
between this world and the next.”
Sir William Crookes F.R.S.
“I have been talking with my (dead) father, my brother,
my uncles... Whatever supernormal powers we may be pleased
to attribute to (the medium) Mrs. Piper's secondary personalities,
it would be difficult to make me believe that these secondary
personalities could have thus completely reconstituted the
mental personality of my dead relatives...”
Professor Hyslop, Professor of Logic at Columbia University.
The brilliant scientists mentioned above
were among the very first to scientifically investigate
the afterlife. Initially they were all open-minded skeptics
and it was only after thorough investigation that they accepted
the afterlife. There were other world-renowned classical
scientists and thinkers around the world such as Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, Arthur Findlay, Camille Flammarion,
Professor Richet, Alfred Russell Wallace, Professor Robert
Hare, Professor Albert Einstein, Marconi, F.W. Myers, Professor
William James and Dr. Carrington who, after investigation,
accepted the afterlife.
From the late nineteenth century until today there have
been groups of prominent, well-respected scientists—many
of them the best-known names in science—who have worked
to prove that immortality is a natural physical phenomenon
and its study is a branch of physics.
Many of these scientists were highly practical people whose
major discoveries in other areas fundamentally changed the
way people work and live. Many considered themselves to
be Rationalists and Humanists and have had to face intense
opposition from both traditional Christian clergy and from
materialist scientists who joined together to try to suppress
their findings.
Emmanuel Swedenborg
One of the pioneers in this tradition was Emmanuel Swedenborg
who was born in Sweden in 1688. One of the leading scientists
of his day, he wrote 150 works in seventeen sciences. At
the University of Uppsala he studied Greek, Latin, several
European and Oriental languages, geology, metallurgy, astronomy,
mathematics, economics. He was an intensely practical man
who invented the glider, the submarine and an ear trumpet
for the deaf. He was held in high esteem by all, was a Member
of Parliament and held important government posts in mining.
He always showed he had enormously high intelligence and
maintained a keen practical mind until his death.
Swedenborg was also a very highly gifted clairvoyant who
spent more than twenty years investigating other dimensions.
He claimed that he regularly spoke with people after they
had died.
Swedenborg wrote:
After the spirit has been separated
from the body (which happens when a person dies), he is
still alive, a person, the way he was before.
To assure me of this, I have been allowed to talk with practically
everyone I have ever known during this physical life—with
some for hours, with some for weeks or months, with some
for years—all for the overriding purpose that I might
be assured of this fact, (that life continues after death)
and might bear witness to it (Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell:
437).
Swedenborg wrote volumes about what today would
be called his out-of-body experiences, including very detailed
descriptions of the afterlife. Interestingly he put forward
a view of the universe which is remarkably similar to twentieth-century
quantum physics. At a time when Newton was arguing that matter
was composed of impenetrable atoms given motion by outside
forces, Swedenborg taught that matter was made up of a series
of particles in ascending order of size, each of which was
composed of a closed vortex of energy which spiraled at infinite
speeds to give the appearance of solidity.
In his 490-page History of the Paranormal, Brian Inglis (1977)
makes reference to Emmanuel Kant, the great rationalist philosopher,
who investigated Swedenborg. Although Kant was an open-minded
skeptic he felt that the evidence for the afterlife provided
by Swedenborg was, as a whole, overwhelming.
He quotes Kant as saying: “…while I doubt any
of them, still I have certain faith in the whole of them taken
together” (Inglis 1977:132).
The greatest scientist of his time
In England one of the founders of the Society for Psychical
Research (SPR) was Sir William Crookes, a fellow of the Royal
Society—a very prestigious association of the most learned
scientists elected by their peers—and later its President.
He discovered six chemical elements, including thallium. Many
people considered him to be the greatest scientist of his
time.
Crookes worked extensively investigating levitation and physical
mediumship phenomena, which were associated with the medium
D.D. Home. Conclusive photographs were taken as part of his
experiments and the total absence of fraud and trickery were
verified by a number of other leading scientists of the day.
In his group were scientists Lord Balfour, Sir
William Barrett, Sir Oliver Lodge and Lord Rayleigh, J.
J. Thompson, the discoverer of the electron, and Alfred
Russell Wallace, who propounded the theory of evolution
at the same time as and independently of Charles Darwin.
Wallace painstakingly investigated Spiritualism over a number
of years, eventually stating that its phenomena were proved
quite as well as the facts of any other science.
For over a hundred years some of the most brilliant minds
in the United States and the United Kingdom worked quietly
to accumulate evidence of survival of the human spirit.
In the first century of the existence of the Society for
Psychical Research founded in 1882 there were nineteen professors
and other famous scientists renowned for their work in psychology,
physics, astronomy, biology among the fifty-one Presidents.
The American Society for Psychical Research was founded
in 1885 by a group of top intellectuals including William
James, renowned Harvard psychologist and Professor of Philosophy
and James H. Hyslop, formerly Professor of Logic and Ethics
at Columbia University. It too attracted men of top intellectual
caliber who, after years of investigations, became convinced
of survival after death.
Pioneer inventors
Thomas Alva Edison, the American inventor of the phonograph
and the first electric light bulb, was fascinated with the
possibility of an afterlife and experimented with mechanical
means of contacting the 'dead' (Scientific American, 30/10/1920).
John Logie Baird, television pioneer and inventor of the
infra-red camera, stated that he had contacted the 'deceased'
Thomas A. Edison through a medium. He said:
I have witnessed some very startling
phenomena under circumstances which make trickery out of
the question. (Logie Baird 1988: 68-69)
European Scientists
In Europe from the early 1900s through the 1920s other scientists
including Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, Professor Charles Richet,
Professor Eugene Osty and Professor Gustav Geley were studying
mediums and photographing appearances of people who claimed
to be dead under controlled laboratory conditions. Their written
reports, supported by the testimony of many skeptical scientists
who acted as witnesses, showed that they had investigated
and ruled out all possible sources of trickery and fraud.
One hundred well-known scientists, all profoundly skeptical,
and some openly hostile, declared themselves, without exception,
completely convinced after having worked under the direction
of Dr. Schrenck-Notzing with his medium Willy Schneider (Geley
1927).
Internationally known and powerfully influential psychiatrist
Dr. Carl Jung admitted that metapsychic phenomena could be
better explained by the spirit hypothesis than by any other
(Jung, Collected Letters 1: 431).
George Meek
Another brilliant scientist and inventor who, after investigating,
became totally convinced of the existence of the afterlife
was American George Meek. When he was 60 years old George
retired from his career as an inventor, designer and manufacturer
of devices for air conditioning and for the treatment of waste
water. He held scores of industrial patents which enabled
him to live comfortably and devote the next twenty five years
of his life to self-funded full-time research into life after
death.
Meek says that he was a ‘natural skeptic’and felt
that what he been told about the afterlife just didn’t
‘make sense.’ So he began his own extensive library
and literature research program and traveled all over the
world to locate and establish research projects with the top
medical doctors, psychiatrists, physicists, biochemists, psychics,
healers, parapsychologists, hypnotherapists, ministers, priests
and rabbis.
He established the Metascience Foundation in Franklin, North
Carolina, which sponsored the famous Spiricom research, an
extensive demonstration (more than twenty hours) of two-way
instrumental contact between people alive and people living
in the afterlife (see Chap. 5)
His last book, After We Die What Then (1987), outlines the
conclusions of his years of full-time research—that
we do all survive and that in the last twenty-five years mankind
has learned more about what happens when we die than was learned
in all earlier periods of recorded history (Meek 1987:4).
Medical doctors
Some of the leaders in the scientific research of life after
death are extremely intelligent and astute medical doctors
who began their investigation as skeptics
Dr. Glen Hamilton was a highly respected physician and member
of the Canadian Parliament. In his laboratory under strictly
controlled conditions he had a battery of fourteen electronically
controlled flash cameras which photographed apparitions simultaneously
from all angles. Observers present at his experiments included
four other medical doctors, two lawyers, and both an electrical
and a civil engineer. Each of the witnesses stated strongly
and unequivocally that: “Time after time, I saw dead
persons materialize” (Hamilton 1942).
Dr. Kübler-Ross, who has had global impact on the way
that dying people are treated, became totally convinced of
life after death through her close association with thousands
of dying patients. She writes:
“Up until then I had absolutely no belief in an afterlife,
but the data convinced me that these were not coincidences
or hallucinations.” (Kübler-Ross 1997: 188) She
became so convinced that she wrote four books specifically
dealing with the afterlife: On Life After Death (1991), The
Facts on Life After Death (1992), Death is of Vital Importance:
On Life, Death and Life After Death (1995), The Wheel of Life
(1997).
Dr. Melvin Morse (a pediatrician and a recognized world leading
authority on dying children) was, as he put it, “an
arrogant critical-care physician” with “an emotional
bias against anything spiritual” before his scientifically
based studies of dying children and his extensive study of
the literature led him to the inescapable conclusion that
“there is a divine something which serves as a glue
for the universe.” He writes:
“When I review the medical literature, I think it points
directly to evidence that some aspect of human consciousness
survives death. Other researchers agree with me. Physician
Michael Schroter-Kunhardt, for instance, conducted a comprehensive
review of the scientific literature and concluded that the
paranormal capacities of the dying person suggest the existence
of a time-and-space transcending immortal soul. Other researchers
have reached the same conclusion. Be it through case studies
of their own or research they have reviewed, there is in the
scientific community a growing belief in the human spirit.”
(Morse 1994:190).
Professor Archie Roy
Scottish professor Archie Roy is a Professor Emeritus of Astronomy
in the University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh, The Royal Astronomical Society and the British
Interplanetary Society. He has published 20 books, six of
them novels, some 70 scientific papers and scores of articles
and directed Advanced Scientific Institutes for NATO.
For the best part of thirty years he has also been passionately
interested in psychical research and helped to found PRISM
(Psychical Research Involving Selected Mediums) which encourages,
guides and funds research work with mediums. He has worked
with Tricia Robertson, vice-president of the Scottish SPR,
on research work which validated mediumship. Together they
have published three papers on mediumship with the Society
for Psychical Research.
In addition to such experimental work Prof. Roy has, over
the past thirty years, investigated innumerable spontaneous
cases of allegedly haunted places and haunted people. His
300-page book Archives of the Mind presents over twenty of
the best authenticated cases from over a century of research
and rejects the possibility of fraud and coincidence.
Professor Gary Schwartz
In 1993 Professor Gary Schwartz, then Professor of Psychology,
Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry and Surgery at the University
of Arizona, USA, and Director of its Human Energy Systems
Laboratory, began his own personal search for evidence of
the afterlife. With impressive academic credentials and
more than 400 scientific papers to his credit, he was initially
highly skeptical and kept his investigations secret.
However in 1995 Professor Schwartz met the renowned medium
Suzie Smith. She had been vitally interested in ESP, parapsychology
and psychic research since the 1950s and had written more
than 30 popular books about her investigations. In 1971
she had set up the Survival Research Foundation to collect
scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond
physical death.
Professor Schwartz became so impressed with the evidence
that he decided to apply for formal consent from the University
of Arizona to conduct research into the survival of consciousness,
as a topic of importance to humanity.
Since that time Professor Schwartz has conducted a number
of double blind research studies with some of the top mediums
in the United States.
He writes:
“These mediums have been tested under experimental
conditions that rule out the use of fraud and cold reading
techniques commonly used by psychic entertainers and mental
magicians.” (Schwartz 2002, and website http://veritas.arizona.edu/)
Drs. Joseph B. and Louisa Rhine
While evidence of the existence of psi (a neutral term for
all extrasensory perception and psychokinetic phenomena
like telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition) is not strictly
evidence for the afterlife, in practice the two are intertwined
since many of those who experience clairvoyance and precognition
also claim communication from the afterlife.
The two are linked together in popular culture and ‘psychics’
is a term used to describe both those with ‘a sixth
sense’ as well as those who experience direct communication
with the deceased who prefer to be called mediums. Materialist
science has not been both able to account for either psi
or the afterlife.
Extensive experiments into psi have been carried out at
the Rhine Research Centre, started by Dr. J.B. Rhine and
his wife Dr. Louisa Rhine, who coined the term “parapsychology.”
In their book Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years
(Rhine et al.) they claim that by 1940, 33 experiments had
been done involving almost a million trials, with protocols
which rigorously excluded possible sensory clues, e.g. by
introducing distance and/or barriers between sender and
receiver, or by employing precognition protocols where the
target has not yet been selected at the time subjects make
their responses. Twenty-seven (27) of the 33 studies produced
statistically significant results.
These studies were replicated in 33 independent replication
experiments by different laboratories in the five years
following Rhine’s first publication of his results.
Twenty of these, or 61%, were statistically significant
whereas 5% would be expected by chance alone.
The predictable skeptical responses – “they
cheated” or “the experimenters were sloppy”
or “they employed people who cheated” –
just don’t stand up in the face of the numbers. Honorton
and Ferrari conducted a meta-analysis of the precognition
experiments conducted between the years 1935 - 1987. This
included 309 studies, conducted by 62 experimenters. The
cumulative probability associated with the overall results
was p = 10-24 (that is equivalent to .000000000000000000000001
where .05 is considered statistically significant).
In 1997 Dr. Dean Radin, director of the Consciousness Research
Laboratory at the University of Nevada, published a ground
breaking book The Conscious Universe--The Scientific Truth
of Psychic Phenomena. In it he analyzes the overwhelming
scientific evidence for telepathy and clairvoyance.
Typical of the staggering experimental results was a meta-analysis
of all psi experiments conducted at the Stanford Research
Institute from 1973 to 1988 by Edwin May and his colleagues.
The analysis was based on 154 experiments with more than
26,000 separate trials conducted over 16 years. The statistical
results of this analysis indicated odds against chance of
more than a billion billion to one (Radin 1997:101)
Radin notes that as yet few scientists and science journalists
“are aware of this dramatic shift in informed opinion.”
(Radin 1997).
Professor David Fontana
In 2005 Professor David Fontana, Professor of Transpersonal
Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, published
a scholarly 500-page book called Is There An Afterlife?
that reviews some of the evidence for the afterlife accumulated
during more than one hundred and fifty years of systematic
research. In the Introduction to the book, Professor Archie
Roy points out that as yet most mainstream scientists are
simply unaware of the evidence for the afterlife. They have
never done psychic research and have never read the evidence,
but they are often hostile to it because they think it challenges
their scientific world view.
Skeptics haven’t done their homework
Without exception I have found that the materialist closed-minded
skeptics who oppose the existence of psychic phenomena and
the afterlife are still grounded in outdated scientific
paradigms and just have not done their homework. They simply
have not read, as I have, volume after volume of first hand
accounts by the greatest minds of science who were all initially
highly skeptical and had no belief in the afterlife before
they started their own personal investigations.
Earlier this year I published on the Internet replies to
comments by the late Professor Carl Sagan and to Professor
Richard Dawkins – both internationally recognized
for their contribution to orthodox science.
Professor Carl Sagan wrote in Chapter 12 of his book The
Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996):
If some good evidence for life after death were announced,
I’d be eager to examine it…(1996)
He was apparently not familiar with any part of the evidence
mentioned in this chapter. He showed he was just happy to
read and research information which was consistent with
his own negative partiality.
My response: “A Lawyer Responds to Prof. Carl Sagan--a
Scientist/Astronomer--about the Afterlife and the Paranormal”
is available at http://www.victorzammit.com/articles/sagan.html
In his article “What’s wrong with the paranormal”
Professor Richard Dawkins went out of his way to attack
psi scientists, empiricists, researchers and gifted mediums.
He imputed dishonesty and fraud, the only refuge of the
skeptic. Whilst Dr. Richard Dawkins may be a good theoretical
scientist close content analysis of his criticisms of the
paranormal and the afterlife shows he does not understand
what “admissible evidence” is. My response,
“A Lawyer Rebuts Prof. Richard Dawkins” re.
the paranormal is available at http://www.victorzammit.com/articles/dawkins.html
I sent my research to leading scholars, theologians, scientists,
materialist closed-minded skeptics in the United States,
the United Kingdom and Australia. It has been placed on
the Internet for world consumption. I have invited rebuttals.
A few people stated they would be in touch again, but today,
years later, no one has contacted me again. Not one person
has shown that the evidence presented in this work can be
rebutted or negated in any way.
Further reading
A most comprehensive overview of the work of researchers
into life after death is contained in the webpages of
http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/investigators.htm
The American Society for Psychical Research
http://www.aspr.com/index.html
and
The British Society for Psychical Research
http://www.spr.ac.uk/
To get some idea of the number of eminent professionals
involved in these investigations see Gustav Geley’s
article “Experimental Demonstrations by Dr. von Schrenck
Notzing” where he gives the names and positions of
100 prominent scientists who witnessed materialization experiments
conduced by Dr. von Schrenck Notzing with medium Willy Schneider.
http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/geley/notzing.htm.
For updates on Dean Radin’s work see his blog "Entangled
Minds."
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/
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