Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The ectoplasm emanating from the vaginal canal is such an odd sexual streak in this story, because talk of spirituality and the afterlife tends to be so sexless.
And humorless. Séances started in the Victorian era. Some of the descriptions of these mediums when they would go into trances, it was this kind of ecstatic, orgasmic -- they would be moaning and twitching around in their chairs -- it was incredibly sexual stuff. And you see photographs of these men in a séance circle intently staring at these women who are writhing and moaning.
But then you have a University of Arizona researcher questioning spirits through mediums and finding a general agreement that there's no sex in the afterlife.
Yeah, it didn't seem to me like a nonstop party.
Also, as you note in the book, the dead tend to tell these mediums very dull, mundane things -- if mediums were faking, why wouldn't they be more creative?
That's a good question. Lots of the reports that come through mediums, if you have a medium who does not have a gift and is just plying the trade, are vague. "I see a woman with gray hair," "I see a cat in the window," "I see a ring on someone's finger." They're never answering the question, "Hey, what are you doing up there? What's it like?" They're never getting at that. And I think it's a huge failing in the world of mediumship. [Laughs.] That thing Allison DuBois said about my brother was very specific and kind of amazing. But it led me to think, OK so this is my mother coming through to me. Why are we talking about my brother's hourglass collection? Why would this be what she chooses to communicate? It was so frustrating. If this were some message from my dead mother, it sure is a trivial and non-sequiturial thing to throw at me!
That was such a moving scene in the book. You had been so skeptical, and then there was this very personal moment you couldn't explain away. I wonder how you feel about it now, since a little more time has passed.
I say in the book that I was startled and impressed. But there were so many other things she said that were vague or didn't fit my mother at all. So I was trying to reconcile the two and the best I could come up with is that if mediums are tuned some ways that others aren't, it's almost sort of like a radio receiver, and most of the time you're just getting static, but every now and then something would come through. If that were the case, it would be frustrating to convince someone, because so much of what you're getting is wrong, but every now and then you'd hit a home run. So some people focus on the home run and some people focus on the things that were wrong. I could almost imagine that scenario being real.
Later in the book you posit that, "if paranormal insights occur rarely, and largely outside of voluntary control, then perhaps it makes sense to focus on isolated moments" and research that's qualitative as opposed to quantitative. If psychic ability is such a rare thing and outside of voluntary control, can science really say anything about it at all?
Exactly. It's very frustrating to research it. There is a study at Duke University of the out-of-body experience guy [Stuart Harary], and he was supposed to travel outside his body and go into this other room, and there were people in there who were supposed to sense his presence. Already it's a maddeningly bizarre experimental setup. But what happened is the official sensors didn't get it right any more than chance, but other people who were just hanging around, they were dead on accurate [about sensing Harary's presence when he claimed to have left his body]. They kept getting it right, but they weren't the ones whose data mattered. So I can just imagine the experimenter going, "Oh shit, why didn't we have those two in there? What do I do now?"
What I take to be the conclusion of your book is that there really is no way to prove or disprove this, and what it ultimately comes down to is belief. For all the scientific explanations available on a phenomenon, as you write, "For those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you're hearing your dead dad's spirit."
Right, that seems like a simple explanation. But if you don't buy that a spirit can communicate with a memory, with a brain, then it seems to you incredibly far-fetched how this blob of energy transmits thoughts into your head, or even has thoughts.
And again, I'm thinking in terms of contemporary politics, in this case the debate over evolution. It seems like that's an example of a fundamental difference between faith-based and science-based people that cannot be bridged.
I think that people come down on one side or the other of the debate, and it doesn't really matter what you throw at them. If that University of Virginia study [in which a researcher set a laptop near the ceiling so that if patients claimed to have an out-of-body experience, he could ask them what image was on the screen], if somebody did see an image on that computer on the ceiling, I don't think you would change the mind of any skeptic out there. I think they would come up with a reason why the study is flawed. People are devoted to their convictions. And the only thing that changes a person's mind is personal experience, or your best friend's personal experience. I just don't think any of these studies are going to change people's minds.
