Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "In 1984, the NORC General Social Survey* found that, among Americans who had suffered the death of a spouse, 53% reported experiencing some kind of after-death contact. Results were much the same in Britain. In Wales, 47% of interviewees reported seeing, hearing, and/or feeling their departed spouse (though only a quarter of them ever told anyone else about the experience), and a survey of widows in London reported that 46% of them believed they’d had after-death contact with their deceased husband. If we look beyond those who have lost spouses, surveys show that somewhere between 36-42% of the American public feel they’ve “really been in touch with” someone who has died.
Clearly, the question is not whether people have experiences that seem to be contact from the deceased. They obviously do. It is rather whether these experiences offer any indication of being genuine evidence for the survival of human consciousness beyond the death of the body, or whether they can all be satisfactorily explained in some other way.
In our examination of this third-person evidence for survival, we will look at six main types of apparent after-death contact and the evidential support that each of them gives to the survival hypothesis. We will begin with an in-depth examination of after-death apparitions and then move on to dreams, mental mediumship, physical mediumship and poltergeists, phantom phone calls, and finally conclude with a discussion of meaningful coincidence or “synchronicity.”
For each of these phenomena, we’ll look at a range of evidential characteristics they present, including occurring before the experiencer has been informed of the death, being observed by multiple people and by those with no emotional connection to the deceased (“bystanders”), showing goal-directed behavior, exhibiting interactivity, providing verifiable new information, and showing continuity with the way these phenomena have been used for psychic communication by living people. We’ll also look at the strengths and weaknesses of some of the alternative hypotheses used to explain apparent contacts with the dead.
*A project
of the independent research organization NORC at the University of
Chicago, with principal funding from the National Science Foundation.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.
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