MEDIUM COMMUNICATIONS

At this point, the reality of survival of consciousness has been established through the strong evidence provided by reincarnation researchers, primarily Stevenson. A comprehensive vision of the afterlife has been put forward in three books, written by Newton and Cannon, describing life after life, based on results obtained from many patients in deep hypnotic regression. These results are not strongly evidential by themselves, but only in the high degree of commonality that each researcher experienced and the fact that both investigations were independent and led essentially to the same conclusions. A strong body of evidence has next been given in Radin's book, The Conscious Universe, that indicates that human beings have psychic capabilities that are not predicted by modern medicine or physics, in the areas of telepathy, remote viewing, pre-cognition and psycho-kinesis. An independent source of afterlife description has been found in the numerous reports of people who report having left their body while apparently dead, travelled to heaven, interacted with spiritual entities, and returned to regain life. Some of these have provided evidence of the reality of out-of-body events. A study has been made of the messages which a number of these NDE experiencers claim to have received from spiritual sources.

A medium is a person who claims to be able to receive and send information between our three-dimensional world and the spirit world. A great mass of evidence exists proving the validity of this communication capability in a number of gifted individuals. These accounts are interwoven with cases of proven fraud, however, which served to discourage scientific inquiry into this phenomenon over the past century.

In the last decade a number of mediums have emerged into public view and demonstrated through radio, video and written media the capability to communicate with spirits of persons who have previously died. This collective evidence is very strong proof of the survival of consciousness. These mediums are often able to pass along messages to bereaved humans which contain information that only the deceased person would know. Recent scientific experiments have shown that this communication can take place with a high probability of success and without any form of fraud or cold-reading. Because of the possibility that this information could have come through telepathic communications between the medium and his/her client, the most credible evidence is that which is unknown to the client at the time of the sitting but which is later found to be true. A number of cases of this kind have been reported.

Besides the evidential value and grief healing associated with communication with spirits who have crossed over, another contribution that mediums can make is to receive information about the afterlife from seemingly authoritative spiritual sources, such as spirit guides or angels or "old souls". An extended interactive dialog between these two worlds, eventually transcribed into written language, can produce unique spiritual insights, advice, and understanding, such as found on this website in the Afterlife 101 book. These can be compared with the information gained from the various other sources presented on this website.

The most important recent book in the area of medium communications is The Afterlife Experiments, principally authored by Dr. Gary Schwartz, director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona. This book describes a number of experiments under controlled conditions where leading national mediums held readings for a variety of sitters, with credible results much higher than could have been obtained by chance.

One of these mediums is John Edward, who conducts a television program, Cross Country (Source 2), which can be seen weekly on the WE channel. It is a continuous demonstration of the ability of a medium to apparently contact spirits and bring forth evidential information for particular studio guests.

The next source is a recent book written by a medium who was also tested by Dr. Schwartz , George Anderson. He is regarded by many as the most gifted medium in the U.S. today. His book, Lessons from the Light, describes the imperfect process by which communication with spirits occurs together with a summary of his understanding of the afterlife based on his thousands of "discernments".

Two other excellent books in this area have been written by James Van Praagh, a very well-known medium who has given frequent demonstrations of his spirit communications on U.S. television. These books are Talking to Heaven and Reaching to Heaven. Together, they provide a significant amount of evidential detail and description of the spirit-world.

The next book is Interview with an Angel, written by Stevan J. Thayer and Linda Sue Nathanson. This is a transcript of a two-year dialog conducted with a spirit, treating a very wide variety of topics concerning the afterlife. Although not evidential, its contribution can be judged by the quality of the information provided and the degree which it is confirmed by other sources of spiritual information.

The next material relating to medium communications has been prepared especially for this website. In the Near-Death Experience area a set of research conclusions was identified, based on an analysis of communications received from spiritual entities during more than 30 NDE's. The Spirit Guides who presented the content of the Afterlife 101 book have provided comments on almost all of the 405 statements of the research conclusions. The result is (1) a complementary picture of the afterlife which is quite consistent with the descriptions obtained elsewhere throughout this website and (2) a critique of the current inhabitants of earth.

 The medium and spirit guides who provided the above commentary have brought together other spirits, those of passed-over cancer patients, to create collectively-approved spiritual advice for those cancer patients who are facing an early crossing-over here on earth.

Information provided by very high quality spiritual sources can be timeless. In 1857 Allan Kardec, the founder of the Spiritist movement, published in France a very comprehensive description of the afterlife that he obtained from a number of spiritual sources. This work, the Spirits' Book, has undergone a modern translation and the resulting product seems to be the most comprehensive framework for understanding the afterlife available today. It places into context the many subject areas dealt with on this website in an intellectually consistent manner.

The same approach was taken a century later (in 1961) by Dr. Robert Crookall, who distilled information provided by a large number of spiritual sources into 35 statements. These describe the death experience and the afterlife with a high degree of credibility because of the diversity and the correlation among these sources.