Post-mortem consciousness? Beischel excerpt #1

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition:

 

As I left the medium’s house that day, my overwhelming sense was how completely normal I felt for having just connected with my dead mother. In fact, the only thing weird about the mediumship reading was that—somehow—it wasn’t weird at all. Which, for me, as someone saturated with science and having had a strained relationship with my mother, was very weird. That experience marked the first step on a near-20-year journey of scientific exploration. I wanted to understand if it was possible for a living human being to genuinely connect with a post-mortem consciousness. My conclusion from the statistically significant evidence I proceeded to collect—under randomized, controlled conditions addressing falsifiable hypotheses—meets if not surpasses what could be considered proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court system. That is, the most logical explanation for what at least some mediums are doing and based on the most rigorous experiments is that human consciousness does, in fact, survive permanent bodily death. Here, I will retrace the journey that led me confidently to that conclusion.  

I’ve always been a scientist. I grew up near Phoenix, and when I graduated from elementary school, I was chosen for the class Science Award. During my first year of high school, my water pollution project received an honorable mention in the nearby university’s science fair. I received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sciences with a Microbiology emphasis. My PhD is in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology. Although my training primarily involved the topics of bugs and drugs, I became skilled in utilizing the scientific method to obtain answers to a wide variety of questions.

Thus, I naturally turned to those tools after my mother died by suicide while I was in graduate school. She was 54. I was 24. As you may know, not all parents are good ones. My mother was mentally ill, although not diagnosed as such until shortly before her death. My childhood was tremendously difficult, but I was well-behaved and got good grades so no one thought to intervene. When my mother died, it was, sadly, a relief to me. I’d heard about this place called Heaven because my extended family is remarkably Catholic, but, to me, it was a nebulous, unknowable, nearly metaphorical idea that I’d never really thought much about and didn’t feel any need to pursue. I hadn’t inherited my family’s cultural views about what happens after we die.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after my mom’s death that I was visiting with some aunts and we saw a medium on TV sharing messages from the deceased. My aunts were curious. I’d never heard of the phenomenon and didn’t know anything about psychic abilities of any kind. Currently, I define a medium as an individual who experiences regular communication with the deceased and shares the resulting messages with their living loved ones, called sitters, during a process called a reading.

The general purpose of these readings is facilitating communication between sitters and the deceased. Experiences of communication with the deceased have occurred regularly all over the world throughout time. Although anyone can have a mediumistic experience, people termed mediums have this experience regularly, reliably, and on-demand. Psychics, on the other hand, convey information about people, events, places, or times unknown to them, but messages about the deceased are not usually shared. A specific reading may include either or both psychic and mediumistic information. It is often said that all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums.

Twenty years ago, when I saw the TV medium (clearly, it was John Edward) sharing messages, the people receiving them seemed, to me, genuinely moved by his statements. The content also appeared relatively specific. I was intrigued. Not as a grieving daughter but as a scientist. When one of my aunts later sent me a book featuring mediums, it further piqued my curiosity.

 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. Her studies began with testing the accuracy and specificity of the information reported by mediums during phone readings performed under controlled, more than double-blind laboratory conditions that address alternative explanations for the source of their statements such as fraud, cueing, and overly general information. This protocol optimizes the research environment while also maximizing experimental controls. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).