Verifying apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #4

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "As we’ve seen, one type of new, verifiable information that can be provided by an apparition is that the person appearing is recently deceased, as well as the manner in which they died. But sometimes the information provided is about someone other than the one doing the appearing. For instance, a widower named Gary confided in researcher Dianne Arcangel that he was starting to have a lot of vivid after-death encounters. He was puzzled in particular by something that had happened while he was washing his car in preparation for trading it in. He told Arcangel, 'I saw my wife standing there as plain as day. She said, Don’t bother. Just enjoy your family and friends because you’ll be with me soon. Gary was in great health and actually starting to enjoy life again, so he didn’t know what to make of his wife’s comment. Nevertheless, only hours after Gary told her this story, Arcangel got a call from Gary’s work informing her he’d just been killed in a car accident.

"In another case, a woman named Lois Miller had gotten up to go to the bathroom during the night, and when she returned to bed, she suddenly saw her deceased mother near her, surrounded in light. 'She was facing toward my father’s bedroom,' says Miller, 'and she was motioning to him to come with her.' Miller’s father died unexpectedly two days later, while taking a nap in his recliner.

Non-Survival Hypotheses That Could Explain Apparitions

"While hallucination induced by grief and/or wishful thinking is not a sufficient explanation for the above types of apparitions, that doesn’t mean that survival of death is the only remaining option. Some parapsychologists have suggested that apparitions could be a sort of telepathic projection that the dying person produced before they were dead. That is, even when the apparition is experienced hours or days later, the leave-taking message could have been generated by the dying person’s consciousness while they were still alive and not made its way into the receiving person’s conscious awareness until sometime later.

"However, this is not a good explanation for apparitions with multiple simultaneous percipients, as it seems unlikely that all of the persons involved would have had their internal blocks to receiving the telepathic message removed at exactly the same time. It also seems unlikely that a dying person would have sent telepathic messages specifically to the people or animals who would happen to be bystanders when the person they were emotionally connected to received their delayed telepathic communication. Furthermore, the telepathic residue hypothesis has difficulty explaining apparitions that come to people who never knew the deceased, or who hadn’t even been born by the time the deceased died. And the telepathic residue hypothesis is stretched to the breaking point when it comes to the great number of apparitions that occur many years after the associated death. For example, half of the apparitions in Haraldsson’s collection occurred more than a year after death, and 18% occurred more than ten years later.

"To account for these sorts of cases, we might formulate a new hypothesis. Let’s call it the 'hologram hypothesis. On this hypothesis, what the dying person creates in their last moments is not a telepathic message to specific loved ones but rather a semi-physical object of some kind that can later appear at a particular place and pass on a message by looking/sounding like the deceased person. This would be something like a psychic hologram of the person that would outlast the death of their physical body. The hologram’s objective rather than telepathic nature would explain why it is sometimes perceived by bystanders and why apparitions sometimes happen long after the death of the person involved.

"One problem with the hologram hypothesis is the fact that, as we’ve seen, apparitions sometimes provide new information that was not only unavailable to the experiencer of the apparition but also unavailable to the deceased person while they were dying. But perhaps an even bigger problem is that the hologram hypothesis can’t explain the many apparitions that are actually interactive."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. 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.