Historical medium research: Mishlove excerpt #11

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” provides evidence of medium communication after death.

Leonora Piper. William James brought the Boston medium Leonora Piper to the psychical research community’s attention. She became one of the most researched mental mediums in history.

James’ colleague Richard Hodgson had established his skeptical credentials earlier by debunking Madame Blavatsky, a Theosophical Society founder. Hodgson studied over 500 sittings with Piper. He concluded that a man named George Pellew (1859-1892), who produced automatic writing through Piper as her control spirit, was an authentic, discarnate individual.

Hodgson wrote a report detailing the correct and intimate details the deceased George Pellew communicated through Leonora Piper. Of 150 sitters who came to see Piper in sessions where the discarnate George Pellew manifested, thirty were individuals who had known Pellew in life. In 29 of these sessions, the deceased Pellew recognized them and addressed them by name. The only sitter the discarnate Pellew didn’t identify was a woman whom he hadn’t seen in life since she was a little girl.

These detailed and intimate communications convinced Hodgson – who had been skeptical until then – that he was dealing with a formerly incarnate human being.

Hodgson also noted the discarnate Pellew didn’t recognize the other 120 sitters, people attending Piper’s séances, whom he had never known in life. He saw this as evidence counting against the hypothesis the medium Leonora Piper or her communicator George Pellew were getting information by telepathically reading the individual sitters’ minds.

After working with Piper for years, Hodgson himself died unexpectedly in 1905. Subsequently, he appeared as a communicator in sittings with Piper. The prominent psychologist William James analyzed these sessions. He remarked that, because Hodgson had worked for so long with Piper, the conditions were far from ideal. Still, Richard Hodgson’s spirit communicating through Piper provided many intimate and accurate details concerning Hodgson’s life that Piper did not know.

When viewed in the light of his wider knowledge of mental mediums (and Piper in particular), James acknowledged he believed Hodgson’s ostensible spirit provided information that was paranormal. It wasn’t likely to be attributed to Piper’s telepathic abilities:

... the total effect in the way of dramatic probability of the whole mass of similar phenomena on my mind, is to make me believe that a “will to communicate” [meaning via a spirit entity] is in some shape there.

Therefore, he speculated that if the discarnate Hodgson wasn’t communicating through Piper – perhaps it was a spirit entity, with access to a cosmic reservoir of all knowledge, masquerading as Hodgson. James hoped, within the next hundred years, psychical research would resolve this potential confusion.

Frederic Myers’ return. The major case of a deceased entity starting and taking part in psychical research is that of Frederic Myers. In 1902, the discarnate Myers started an experiment lasting for over three decades. It resulted in over 3,600 documents, referred to as the cross-correspondences. Near the end of this series, Myers dictated two books about the afterlife through Geraldine Cummins’ automatic writing mediumship.

Frederic Myers was, without question, a stellar figure in the founding and early investigations of the Society for Psychical Research. He was coauthor, with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, of Phantasms of the Living. Over a century after its posthumous publication in 1903, Myers’ book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, remains a classic.

Myers introduced the term telepathy and preceded Freud in discussing the subconscious mind, which he called the subliminal mind. Myers expected that communicators from the other side were planning experiments:

... there are probably experiments of a complexity and difficulty which surpass our imagination; but they are made from the other side of the gulf by the efforts of spirits who discern pathways and personalities which for us are impenetrably dark.

The discarnate Myers laid out a plan for the cross-correspondences in messages transmitted via automatic writing through Margaret Verrall in Cambridge, a classical scholar, and Myers’ friend:

Record the bits and when fitted they will make the whole.... I will give the words between you neither alone can read but together they will give the clue he wants.

Thus began a project that ran, at least, until 1936 and included scripts from nine different automatic writers receiving messages from Myers and other deceased researchers from the Society. The overall project is too complex to be summarized adequately here. This complexity has led some critics to dismiss the entire matter as hopelessly obscure – requiring Greek and Latin knowledge, and an understanding of poetic allusions from Wordsworth and others.

It took several years before Society for Psychical Research investigators detected Myers’ project and wrote about it. This first occurred when Alice Johnson, the Society’s secretary, published a lengthy article concerning the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland in India – a pseudonym for Alice Fleming, the famous poet Rudyard Kipling’s married sister. Fleming’s family disapproved of her remarkable “uncanniness.”

Nevertheless, Alice Fleming persisted in her experiments with automatic writing. Transcripts show discarnates Myers and Edmund Gurney (another of the Society’s deceased founders) both coached her in this discipline. However, as she had been reading Myers’ classic book, it is reasonable to assume her subconscious mind was, at least, helping them along.

At one point, she wrote the address, 5 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge, along with a message that Fleming should contact Margaret Verrall, the first automatic writer to receive messages dictated by Myers. Fleming had never been to Cambridge and had never met Verrall – although she knew of her from Myers’ book. She had no way of knowing Verrall’s address (which it was). Fleming, however, didn’t contact Verrall directly. Instead, she reached out to Alice Johnson.

Johnson, in that lengthy article, describes the cross-correspondence process:

What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script, which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other, of an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one another and that there is apparently one coherent idea underlying both, but only partially expressed in each.

These cross-correspondences are complicated, with many overlapping meanings. It took Johnson 226 pages to describe the early instances. Despite its obscurity, the cross-correspondences present substantial evidence for survival.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Xenoglossy: Mishlove excerpt #10

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” argues that xenoglossy, which is the ability to understand, and even converse, in a language one has never learned (sometimes an archaic language), constitutes evidence favoring reincarnation or possession. 

The Hensen Jacoby case

Walter Semkiw, MD, describes a Philadelphia woman of Russian-Jewish descent. Upon being hypnotized by her husband, a medical doctor, she began speaking an old form of Swedish, claiming to be a Swedish man named Jensen Jacoby.

He said he was a Christian farmer who owned livestock and who lived near the coast. He expressed great fear of Russians, saying he had died when he was forced into a body of water – and then hit on the head (the implication being Russian soldiers had killed him).

Swedish scholars examined recordings and determined the speech was middle Swedish, as used in the seventeenth century. Ian Stevenson who investigated this case even subjected the family members to lie detector tests and had them sign affidavits testifying none of them spoke Swedish. Also, Jensen Jacoby could accurately name objects in Swedish.

For example, when shown a Swedish seventeenth century sailing ship model, Jenson correctly called it a “skuta” or “skute.

The Uttara/Sharada case

Semkiw also describes a well-known xenoglossy case involving intermittent, temporary possession. Here, the replacing personality, Sharada, spoke only the Bengali language – a language unknown to Uttara and her family.

Uttara was an educated woman with two master’s degrees. She was a university lecturer. At one point in her life, she was hospitalized for medical problems. While she was in the hospital, a guru came there and taught meditation. Uttara started to meditate.

One day, unexpectedly, a Bengali personality, called Sharada, emerged from her. Uttara only spoke the Marathi Indian language. Sharada could only speak Bengali. This was strange for the family, because they could not communicate with their daughter. Nobody in the family knew Bengali. The Sharada personality completely took over the body for as long as 43 continuous days, during which the family had to bring in translators, so they could interact with their daughter. 

Sharada still thought she was alive, in the 1820s, in Bengal. She expressed disdain for the people who spoke Marathi, and she didn’t know how to use modern appliances. She was unable, for example, to cook on a gas stove, being familiar only with wood-burning stoves. Multiple Bengali academics, and outside researchers, studied the case over nine years, making tape recordings of their Bengali conversations.

While the Sharada case has attracted much criticism, the critics have all failed to account for (a) Sharada’s Bengali was what one would expect from the 1820s; (b) lengthy conversations Sharada had in Bengali with scholars; and (c) Sharada’s ability to identify, by name, ancestors in her family tree.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Electrical Communication: Mishlove excerpt #9

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that beginning with Thomas Alva Edison, researchers, hobbyists, and ghost hunters have been experimenting with electronic devices for communication with the deceased. Popular television programs and books report hundreds of successes.

The potential criticism of apophenia (projecting meaning onto random stimuli) clouds most instances. However, we shouldn’t lightly dismiss Instrumental Trans Communication. The late Willis Harman – emeritus Stanford University engineering professor – took this data seriously. While many discarnate voices appear vague and subject to varying interpretations, others are unmistakable.

Konstantin Raudive’s return. In the following video excerpt from the mid-1990s, Willis Harman expresses his interest in the phenomena. After World War II, commercial tape recorders became available. It wasn’t long before voices mysteriously appeared on tape. Researchers and hobbyists soon came to accept that these were discarnate entities.

Konstantin Raudive was an early researcher who died in 1974 but kept up his interest from the other side. Messages and pictures from him have come through on audiotapes, videotapes, television screens, and computer disks.

Dan Drasin, an esteemed colleague I have known for over thirty years, presents (with audio) several Konstantin Raudive communications to which Willis Harman was referring. One recipient, Mark Macy – author of Instrumental Trans Communication (ITC) books, tape-recorded detailed technical instructions from Raudive. Raudive’s voice is clear!

Anabela Cardoso’s voices. Cardoso is a former Portuguese diplomat who has served as Consul General in the United States, Spain, and France as well as Charge D’Affairs in Japan and India. She has authored three books on ITC and, over two decades, she has made hundreds of audio recordings of anomalous voices.

Cardoso has specialized in a technique known as Direct Radio Voice. She tunes her radios to a government channel, reserved for emergencies, so the only sound normally is white noise. When voices appear, she can engage in two-way conversations, even though there is no radio transmission coming from her end. In the following video, she describes how she communicates with her family members who call her by her pet name of Bela.

Psychologist David Fontana, former president of the Society for Psychical Research, has observed Cardoso communicating with these voices on multiple occasions. He states, as a corroborating witness:

The voices were clear, at normal volume, and ... there was no doubt that the voices were direct communications with Anabela and could not be dismissed as stray radio voices.

Fontana conducted his own tests and background research and concluded that Cardoso, herself, was not engaged in subterfuge.

Cardoso also organized a two-year study of the voices, conducted at a well-equipped and well-shielded acoustical laboratory at the School of Engineering, Vigo University, Spain. There, many anomalous voices were detected and independently verified.

Phone calls from the dead. As in the previous videos, individuals report having received telephone messages, and sometimes clear, two-way conversations with the deceased. Researchers D. Scott Rogo, working with Raymond Bayliss, carefully investigated fifty such cases.

Callum Cooper, a psychologist in the UK has continued to investigate over thirty additional cases. Cooper has analyzed these cases, putting them into different categories. He describes what a typical case, in the most extreme category involving a prolonged conversation, would be like. 

The telephone conversation, initiated by a discarnate person, might last half an hour and be with somebody whom you believe to be alive. The conversation could cover many topics and end with a suggestion that the person will be going away. Only later it is learned that the caller was deceased. The phone company will then show no call record.

I had a minor experience along these lines in combination with a lucid dream involving the late Elisabeth Targ who died in 2002. In the dream, I was conversing with Elisabeth (who had been a friend) and congratulating her on all the reported after-death communications involving her. When I picked up the receiver, all I heard was white noise. I do not recall another time when I answered a ringing phone to discover only white noise.

Russell Targ, Elisabeth’s father,  also describes an incident where Elisabeth communicated, shortly after her death, by interfering with the electrical circuitry in his house. On that occasion, not long after Elisabeth’s death, he was with his son, Nicholas and Elisabeth’s widower, Mark Comings. They remarked to each other that, because Elisabeth was such a strong person, perhaps she would try to communicate. At that moment, all of the lights in the house went off and came back on. As Russell was commenting on how unusual that was, as if someone has turned the circuit breaker for the whole house on and off, it happened a second time.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Psychopathology: Mishlove excerpt #8

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that many types and degrees of possession have yet to be cataloged. This is particularly true regarding possession within mental mediumship and channeling. However, there is also a psychopathological dimension associated with possession, obsession, and spirit attachment.

This section includes testimony from multiple professional psychotherapists. Sometimes it includes the identification of discarnate entities. This material highlights the price to be paid – in terms of human well-being – for ignoring the data supporting postmortem survival.

Wilson Van Dusen was Chief Psychologist at Mendocino State Mental Hospital in California. Van Dusen felt negative discarnate entities often hounded the psychotic patients with whom he worked. He maintained that Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary descriptions of heaven and hell were actually an accurate depiction of the human unconscious.

Mental health professionals influenced by the spiritist tradition in Brazil often incorporate a similar diagnostic approach.

Clinical psychologist Edith Fiore describes how some discarnate spirits become earthbound because of their addictions to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and even chocolate. Many discarnates are confused and don’t realize they are no longer in their own body.

The situation Fiore describes may be more common than we realize. Adam Crabtree, a Freudian psychotherapy trainer based in Toronto, acknowledges, that he has also encountered cases of discarnate possession in his therapy practice.

Psychotherapists rarely function as psychical researchers, trying to verify the identities of the possessing entities. They aim to help their patients, not to cultivate evidence about postmortem survival. Because of these diverging interests, the psychical research literature pays little attention to the therapeutic interest in possession.

Nevertheless, there are instances where therapists working with depossession have been able to identify the discarnate possessing entities that manifest under hypnosis. In his 1934 book, The Gateway of Understanding, Carl Wickland, a physician who practiced depossession therapy for several decades, supplies specific, verified details naming four such discarnate persons unknown to him at the time of the treatment

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.

Replacement reincarnation: Mishlove excerpt #7

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that - Possession, in its most extreme form, is also known as replacement reincarnation. A deceased person’s spirit enters someone else’s body, replacing – permanently or temporarily – the original personality. One interesting distinction between these cases and reincarnation is, in possession cases, the possessing personality’s memories don’t seem to fade over time. The replaced person’s memories, however, seem to vanish.

Replacement reincarnation is a rare phenomenon. I doubt there are more than a few dozen cases on record – compared to thousands of reincarnation cases starting at birth. However, in trance mediumship, short- term possession by controlling discarnate persons is common. To my knowledge, we haven’t fully cataloged nor understood the types and degrees of possession – as well as its relationship to obsession and spirit attachment.

The Shiva/Sumitra case shows the difference between possession and reincarnation cases.

Sumitra Singh was a woman living in India. She could barely read and write and had no formal schooling. In 1985, Sumitra, a married woman with children, began experiencing fits, going into altered states of consciousness, and illness. She feared she would die. At one point, after she had stopped breathing and her body was cold, the family was told by a doctor she was dead. As the family was preparing for cremation, she revived.

Upon reviving, she claimed her name was Shiva Tripati. She claimed Shiva’s sister-in-law had murdered her a few months earlier. She seemed to be an educated woman – and she wanted to reconnect with her original birth family, the Tripati family.

The Singh family, naturally, didn’t know what to make of this. This new personality, Shiva, didn’t even recognize the Singh family members.

Shiva was an individual who had apparently been murdered, died accidentally, or took her own life. They found her body on the railroad tracks, after a quarrel with her in-laws. She was cremated quickly thereafter. Three months elapsed before word of this strange occurrence reached the Shiva’s birth family.

The Tripati family sued Shiva’s in-laws – because they felt she had been murdered. Then the rumor reached them that, in another village about 100 kilometers away, a possession was taking place involving their deceased daughter. So, they arranged a visit.

As soon as they arrived, Shiva hugged and kissed them, treated them warmly, and called them by their nicknames. She wanted to see her children and make sure they were being taken care of.

Shiva gave sixteen facts about her life, not mentioned in any press reports. She named 22 relatives of Shiva from photographs. A video also has an interview with Shiva’s father and mother who explain how Shiva convinced them she was their daughter. The video shows Shiva five years after the original transformation, still adamantly insisting she has all of Shiva’s memories and none of Sumitra’s.

In 2010, Canadian anthropologist Antonia Mills went to India and conducted more research on this case, assisted by Kildip Dhiman. By interviewing witnesses, Mills learned that Shiva Tripati’s personality remained in Sumitra Singh’s body consistently for thirteen years.

Shiva had a college education and wrote letters. She expressed herself using much more sophisticated language than the uneducated Sumitra.

Shiva found herself married to a stranger. However, she kept Sumitra’s social status as the wife of Sumitra husband, Jagdish Singh. She was uncomfortable about this. Shiva would look at Sumitra’s body in the mirror and say, “This isn’t me. These people are not my family.” But she realized she had to accommodate herself to these new circumstances. She even had two more children before she died.

The case is strong evidence for survival. You have an intact personality surviving for a sustained period, with the deceased person’s full emotional expression and memories. For example, she insisted on being referred to as Shiva for the entire thirteen years. That’s who she felt she was.

Interestingly, in replacement reincarnation cases, the replaced person’s memories don’t appear to remain with the physical body.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

Reincarnation: Mishlove's excerpt #6

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that: The University of Virginia, Department of Perceptual Studies, now has a database of over 2,500 individual cases in which young children report former life memories. In roughly 1,700 cases, the information led to the deceased previous person’s identification. We know these as solved cases. This work was initiated by former Psychiatry Department chair Ian Stevenson.

The most solid reincarnation evidence comes from the totality of the 2,500 cases in the database, instead of from the strength of particular cases.

Stevenson worked in the field, meeting the children, talking with their families, and with the previous person’s families. He collected firsthand observations – as well as autopsy and police reports. In many cases, children named the previous person or the village where they had lived. The children’s behaviors are an essential feature. They are often in line with the previous person’s habits. Stevenson would often re-interview the children and other witnesses after a period of time had elapsed, to see how consistent their stories were.

Essentially, Stevenson followed the case study procedures established in the 19th century by the researchers with the Society for Psychical Research to corroborate spontaneous events such as apparitions. Stevenson depended upon legal and forensic methods. He researched reincarnation cases as if he were preparing to present them in a court of law.

Some patterns found in the reincarnation database are culturally specific. Others are universal and apply across cultures. Birthmarks, physical features, and even deformities often conform to the previous person’s death wounds. Sometimes, the children begin to speak about their past life as soon as they start to talk. The main window at which these cases begin is two to five years of age. After a few years, the memories fade. This process is generally completed by late childhood, i.e., five to eight years old. Only about a third of the children retain past-life memories into adulthood.

Reincarnations usually seem to occur in the same area, with the same religious or ethnic group or the same race – essentially within psychological comfort zones.

Recollection is first person, not as if children were watching someone else in a movie. They feel as if their consciousness is continuous with the earlier lifetime they recall. It is personal and can be emotional, with fears and phobias carrying over from the former lifetime.

There is an extremely high incidence, 50% of solved cases in the reincarnation database, where the previous person met with a violent death. We may relate this to the fact that about two-thirds of cases, cross-culturally, involve male children.

An afterlife existence between incarnations is reported in about 20% of reincarnation cases. These intermission memories are often like reports from near-death experiences, including communication with spirit guides and other deceased entities.

Anthropologist James Matlock studied the length of the intermission time between lives. It varies by culture. Globally, the median time is 16-18 months from the death of the earlier, identified life to the birth of the present life.

The median time for western cases is 35 years. 80-90% of reported cases come from Asia.

These are dramatic findings. They strongly suggest the interpenetration of the living world with that of the deceased. If the afterlife operated independently, according to its own laws and principles, one would expect the intermission length reported by children with past-life memories – as well as gender change between lives – to be unaffected by cultural expectations. This is clearly not so. However, since we are referring to solved reincarnation cases, neither can the results be purely a fantasy- based, cultural artifact.

Such findings show us we the living can influence the afterlife. People who enter the immediate afterlife will see what they need to see or what they’re prepared or conditioned to see. They are still encountering something very real on the other side. To the degree that these stories enter our culture, we are setting ourselves up to have different afterlife experiences.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”

After death communications: Mishlove excerpt #5

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that: According to Gallup surveys, approximately 25-33% of the population believe mental communication with the dead occurs.72 These spontaneous experiences include sensing the deceased; visual, olfactory, tactile, and auditory phenomena; powerful dreams; hearing meaningfully timed music associated with the deceased; lost-things-found; communication through electronic devices; symbolic messages; synchronicities; and other phenomena unexplainable through the prevailing Western materialist worldview.

Paying a debt. Rev. Charles McKay, a Catholic priest, reported an evidential case in 1842. When he moved to a new assignment in Perth, Scotland, a Presbyterian woman named Anne Simpson approached him. She described a repeating dream where a deceased woman she had known, named Malloy, insisted she must contact a priest. Malloy owed a small sum, three-and-tenpence, at the time of her death. She apparently expected a priest would go to the trouble of settling her debt.

Simpson, however, didn’t know to whom Malloy owed the debt. But McKay began asking around. Eventually, he contacted a local grocer who checked his books and found Malloy had a debt in his records of exactly that amount. McKay paid the required sum.

This case is instructive as it shows the deceased acting with a sense of purpose we can’t attribute to any living person.

Kübler-Ross’ transformative after-death communication. As reported in the Introduction, a brief dream visitation from my deceased Uncle Harry catalyzed my life transformation. Another life-changing example is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whom Time magazine named in 1999 as one of the “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the previous century. A powerful, evidential after-death communication stimulated her pioneering work on the stages of confronting death.

At the time this after-death communication occurred, Kübler-Ross was experiencing burnout. Her seminars on death and dying had deteriorated. She had decided, even though she hadn’t told anyone, to quit her work at the University of Chicago. She was about to announce her decision to a new minister with whom she was working, when suddenly a woman appeared and asked to walk with Kübler-Ross to her office.

As they walked, Kübler-Ross recognized this woman as the memorable Mrs. Schwartz, a former patient who had been the first person to report a near-death experience to Kübler- Ross and had died ten months previously. The woman was insistent Kübler-Ross mustn’t abandon her work on death and dying. She even insisted Kübler-Ross promise her right then and there that she would continue.

Kübler-Ross, recognizing the situation’s astonishing gravity, asked Mrs. Schwartz to write a note. Kübler-Ross describes the event’s emotional intensity:

And this woman, with the most human, no, not human, most loving smile, knowing every thought I had – and I knew it, it was thought transference if I’ve ever experienced it – took the paper and wrote a note.

Kübler-Ross kept Mrs. Schwartz’ note with her signature – as physical evidence of the remarkable event, which she continued to describe in public appearances. Then she agreed to her demand and promised she wouldn’t abandon the work that eventually made her famous worldwide.

This case is significant because it combines evidence of identity, spirit materialization, and evidence of intentionality with a life-transforming event.

At the time of death. Peter Fenwick, a British neuroscientist, has been investigating after-death communications. He found many occurred close to the moment of death (as was my powerful Uncle Harry dream visitation).

Fenwick describes such an incident when a drowned sailor in England appeared to his mother in Australia. He appeared dripping wet at the end of her bed in the middle of the night. Moving toward her, he became surrounded by light. He told her he was fine, and then left. When she checked with the Navy, she learned he had fallen overboard and drowned at the time he had appeared to her.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”