I’ve been thinking about the idea of doing things “right”, and it occurred to me that as a scientist I like having a specific method to follow. If the method doesn’t work, I have no qualms about re-jigging it until I’m happy with it. But I like to start with something specific. It makes me feel like I’m doing something useful, and not just indulging in some silly metaphysical nonsense.

BTW, I don’t mean any badness towards people who believe in all the weird stuff. I wish I could be more accepting of it. If I didn’t experience the world in the way that I do, who knows, I might be working for the Amazing Randi. (OK, so I’m not quite that bad.) In a perfect world, I’d be cured of the weird stuff but still open to the possibilities.

After I was no longer Alex’s teacher, I planned to visit his class. I decided to get him some
favored treats to see if he would draw pictures to request them. The night before, as I was in the supermarket, I was thinking of him as I selected the items. I got him a few fish candies, a tiny pack of chocolate chip cookies, and a tiny pack of donuts along with his beloved butter cookies.

The next day I visited his class, but I forgot about the treats and left them in the car. When I was about to leave his classroom, I remembered. I told him I had some butter cookies for him in the car and would bring them in. I wasn’t even thinking about the other items at the time. I drew a picture of the butter cookie as I handed it to him as I told him that I had some butter cookies in my car. I told him that I would go to the car to get them. He took the piece of paper, drew a circle and put marks in it to indicate the chocolate chip cookies. He then drew a donut and a triangle with a spine through it, which I assumed indicated the fish candy. It was if he had said, “Don’t forget the chocolate chip cookies, the donuts and the fish candy!” I was flabbergasted.

I don’t know if this was remote viewing or if he just tapped into my thoughts the night before when I was selecting the items. It was very perplexing.

A few years earlier, I was having lunch and I felt Alex’s energy body had entered my physical body. It was an interesting but not uncomfortable feeling. Was that my imagination or is there an explanation for tis type of experience?

Ghosts like Jack (my civil engineer) don’t seem very different than anyone living. Sometimes it seems like death is such an arbitrary boundary, because people change and move on in various ways before and after dying. I know that my point of view is tainted by the problem I have with telling ghosts from living people at times. But it seems like a pretty seamless continuum.

That being said, among ghosts it seems like there are ghosts with issues and those without issues. The ones with issues are the most like us; they are the ones that need to “move on”. I don’t think moving on is so much a matter of going to a different place. I think it is more a matter of making personal changes, like it is for living people.

I know I’ve told you in correspondence about how upset I was when my Grandmother moved on. It was like having her die again. I was so used to talking to her every day almost like she was still alive. And then she was different, she made a change… she “moved on”. I knew it was a good change for her. She was so happy, and I wanted to be happy for her. But she was just a little bit less like the woman I knew growing up. The one who baked cookies, enjoyed her garden, and talked my parents into buying me that drum set when I was 11 . I’ve gotten used to the way she is now, but I still miss the way she used to be before she moved on. Just like I miss the way it was when she was a living person.

Grandma became one of those ghosts that don’t seem to have issues. Sometimes it almost seems like she is less emotional, but she is still capable of tremendous joy, compassion, and even great sadness. Her emotions feel purer somehow. Cleaner, less messy than emotions here are. Like really intense colors instead of muddy ones. She can really get points across using mainly images and emotions. And sometimes I still hear her voice, but I have to meet her partway to make that possible now.

There are ghosts that seem very far removed from Grandma. They are just lights shaped like people. I don’t know if they have emotions like Grandma does, but they make me feel emotions. They feel like the NDE place. The following is an excerpt from something I wrote to a friend while actually experiencing these sorts of ghosts very recently:

I can’t really understand them very well. They don’t talk like some ghosts do. But there is light and music. And feelings. love? I guess it could be love. Somehow that word doesn’t seem big enough for what they feel like. I wish I could share this with you better. You would find it pretty neat. They smell like rain in the forest. A bright light that is soft and expressive. A strange buzzing of life. Almost electric. They are so beautiful I could cry. I am crying.

“And ghosts always seem to connect using feelings first.”

I know that spirits have feelings, but I also tend to assume that some emotions or tendencies towards emotions are fundamentally biological and therefore would not pertain in the spirit world without a physical body.

Do you see any evidence of that?

Yes. In my opinion this is one of the strongest arguments against super-psi as an explanation for mediumship. Spirits get better at communicating the

more they do it. This is why I think scientists who study mediumship should work with a development circle of advanced students. The deceased relatives of these students have a lot of practice communicating through other class memebers and are very good at it. A blind study where the medium doesn’t know who the sitter is would give very good results. The results could be judged by having a sitter try to distinguish a reading that was for him from a reading that was for someone else. In this situation it doesn’t matter that the students know all about each other’s deceased relatives because the reading and judging are done blind.

“Different mediums connect differently.”

Different ghosts have different ways too, I suppose. I had one guy who was a civil engineer that was very good at quantifying everything. (Must be an engineer thing.) He made me feel physically ill at first. He was just trying to get my attention and explain how he died (he had cancer). There must be a learning curve to being a ghost, because he learned not to cause me pain that way again. He could communicate really well. If I didn’t hear him correctly, he would show me pictures that were really helpful. If one thing didn’t work, he would just try something else. Poor guy still hasn’t moved on. He never believed in the afterlife before he died, and he still has problems with it. He keeps an eye on his kids, and that seems to be enough for him right now.

I think it is very valuable that the method of training for remote viewing was developed at the same time a systematic methodology was developed for doing it. That makes a big difference in studying remote viewing scientifically. It would be nice if an analogous system existed for mediumship.

“Same problem came up repeatedly in the remote viewing research at SRI.”

Yes, I’ve read some of the popular books on the remote viewing research and looked through the military remote viewing manual available on the internet. I was impressed with the methods the remote viewers have for detecting and dealing with analytic overlay.

I think it would be interesting to have mediums go through a remote viewing course and remote viewers go to a mediumship class. I think there would be some benefits in cross training.

Also, with mediumship, presumably there are spirits working to help the psychic, so it would be interesting to see if there was some way to measure or identify that there is something different going on with mediumship than remote viewing.

>Having to put things into words also gives your analytical brain a chance to color the reading with inferences, deductions, and associations which is a problem.<
Same problem came up repeatedly in the remote viewing research at SRI. A viewer would get a correct impression, say, of the shape of a distant target, but then her analytic mind would come in and add associations to that shape and the clarity of the original percept, which might have been right on, could easily get lost and buried. We called it analytical overlay, and instructed viewers to try to stay with straightforward descriptions of their impressions and not get carried off into analysis.

“And ghosts always seem to connect using feelings first.”

Different mediums connect differently. In mediumship class I would get a picture of the spirit first. We used the term clairvoyant specifically to refer to visual perceptions. A lot of mediums are like this. However some mediums do get feelings first but I think it is less common.

Often with the visual images there would be other information somehow attached. I would know what I was seeing, and I would know things about it. It was like an email with attachments. It seemed to me that the easiest way for them to get through to me was visually but once I had the “packet” and knew it was psychic they knew I’d be able to notice the other information.

I think one of the hardest thing for the spirits was to convince me that the mental impressions I recieved were psychic and not my imagination. The way they would help me realize this was by showing me things from weird angles or placing them off center. If you imagine a house you imagine looking at it from the street in the center of your visual field. Once I saw a house from two feet away and looking along the side of the outside wall. It seemed pretty obvious to me that I wasn’t imagining that.

The advantage to being clairvoyant is that you can describe the spirit and the sitter will generally be able to recognize who it is. The spirit can also show you what they did in life etc. It’s great for getting recognition and identification. The disadvantage is that you have to use symbols to give a message. I would occasionally get feelings, and less often smells, and words. When you get words we used the term clairaudient, but for me the words came to my mouth like I was saying them rather than to my ears like I was hearing them. It was weird.

One of the hardest things about mediumship was putting psychic perceptions into words. You have to develop an appropriate vocabulary, for example, to say things without offending people or to describe what you see. It is a skill I didn’t have much practice in before. I had plenty of experience putting things into words from writing corporate e-mails and writing on technical subjects from work life and graduate school, but that was not the same as what I had to do in mediumshiup. Having to put things into words also gives your analytical brain a chance to color the reading with inferences, deductions, and associations which is a problem. I think being clairaudient must be easiest for the medium. They just repeat what they hear.

By the end of the reading I would often get a feeling of the personality of the spirit the way you have a mental idea of the personality of someone you know. One spirit in particular had a really cheerful attitude and, as you know, spirits’ attitudes are contagious. Just communicating with him make me feel cheerful.

“Are feelings the first rudimentary step towards experiencing things the way you do in the NDE place?”

I don’t know, but I hope not! I was looking forward to getting some relief when the time came.

One thing that parapsychology has shown is that emotional envolvement does seem to correlate with better psychic functioning. From what you are saying it sounds like it’s true when we’re disembodied also. This is consistent with mediumship lore that says a close emotional bond between the sitter and the spirit or the spirit and the medium usually results in better communication.

anonymous

I was thinking about feelings. That is the one sense that does seem to connect to the others, even here. And ghosts always seem to connect using feelings first. Really strong feelings from ghosts get information across much better than neutral feelings. I always pick up on the ghosts that are afraid or angry (not to mention living people who are strongly emotional). Sometimes even nice ghosts will resort to yelling in anger to help get a point across. (They could just be really frustrated at how unskilled I am at understanding them, I suppose.)

Is that why meditation works? Because it connects us to how we feel, and how we feel connects us to the rest? Are feelings the first rudimentary step towards experiencing things the way you do in the NDE place?

Those experiences do remind me of my NDE to varying degrees. The farther away you get, the harder it is to describe the experience when you get back here. And sometimes I have trouble making sense of things afterward. Like I’m forgetting how things work here. When colors are just colors again, I feel disoriented and really sad for a while.

It is like there are two very different ways to sense things. Over there, things are all mixed up and together, but instead of being confusing, it is like you get way more information about everything. Words can’t compete with that sort of clarity and completeness of information. But that doesn’t work here. Here you have words, and words suck. Here everything is separate. Color is separate from sound, which isn’t mixed up with smell or feelings. Well, maybe feelings are still connected to the other senses. Music or beautiful colors or a familiar scent can make anyone feel things, even here.