Death and our purpose: Mishlove excerpt #16

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove ends his award winning paper, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death," with these two conclusions. Footnotes in Mishlove's essay and videos he includeshave been removed in this presentation of his essay but are available and may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Terminal Lucidity

This well-documented phenomenon occurs among individuals who have Alzheimer’s disease or who are otherwise brain damaged. Bedridden patients can sometimes sit up, bright-eyed and alert. They can carry on conversations beyond their earlier abilities. Since a severely compromised brain cannot regenerate suddenly like this while a patient is on their deathbed, the most reasonable interpretation is that consciousness can function independently of the brain. One might even say the brain has deteriorated so much it can no longer act as a filter keeping the larger consciousness (or self or soul) from awareness.

Terminal lucidity usually occurs between two-weeks and shortly before death. Philosopher Stafford Betty describes a typical case of terminal lucidity in the video segment below. The dying person, who may even be in a vegetative state, can suddenly “erupt” into their old personality with full memory. It happens in 5-10% of Alzheimer’s cases.

My wife, Janelle Barlow, witnessed terminal lucidity with my mother who was suffering from both Alzheimer’s and a stroke. The episode lasted for about two hours and occurred within a week of her final passing. It included a heartfelt conversation about life, marriage, children, and the progress of my mother’s disease. 

Postmortem survival is natural

Since 1972, when Uncle Harry came to me in a dream at the time of his death, I have spent my professional life exploring parapsychology and its implications for our understanding of postmortem survival and consciousness. Having a solid theoretical and practical knowledge of the field, I have over the decades been able to engage in persistent inquiries through the interview process – and have created video conversations with both experts and experiencers, going back thirty-five years.

Science has yet to show that consciousness is a product of neurological functioning. Alternative viewpoints have a lengthy history, going back more than a century. There is empirical support for the filtration theory of William James. We can also integrate postmortem survival into science by developing hypotheses entailing hyperspace mathematics. Pure logic favors metaphysical idealism as an explanatory model of reality, as Max Planck, quantum mechanics’ founder, explicitly said. From this perspective, consciousness survival is natural and expected.

The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung addressed what he considers civilization’s primary ailment in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

“As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic – if I may use the word – to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”

We hide from our own deepest identity when we postulate that consciousness is extinguished with the death of the body – resulting in a severe gap in our capacity for self-knowledge.

 

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 to 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.” 

The parsimony principle: Mishlove excerpt #15

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” argues that consciousness is fundamental.

For centuries, scholars have recognized Occam’s Razor as the fundamental rule of explanation itself. The preferred explanation is always the one with the fewest assumptions that can account for all the relevant facts. There is almost universal consensus concerning this principle. In scientism’s dark age, we have deviated from this important principle by presuming dead matter is the foundation of reality. That’s why we say when something is important to us, it matters. In this dark age, we give precedence to external sensations over intuitions and feelings. That’s also why, when we agree with some statement, we say it makes sense. These ideas, elevating the importance of materiality and sensation, are so deeply ingrained we don’t normally even consider whether or not they are valid.

Paradoxically, all philosophy begins in the mind – and not in matter. Descartes made this explicit with his simple statement in Latin: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am.

We each have direct knowledge of our mind. Nothing is more immediate and intimate. We lack direct access to anything else but mind. The great twentieth-century physicists, such as Erwin Schrödinger and Max Planck, understood this. Planck, the founder of quantum physics, famously said:

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

Planck’s position – an explicit statement of idealist metaphysics – is neither a fringe, nor outdated, viewpoint. Richard Conn Henry, Academy Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, published a similar perspective in Nature in 2005. He wrote:

"Physicists shy from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics... The universe is immaterial – mental and spiritual."

Unfortunately for the subject matter at hand, for many people, “immaterial” means irrelevant! This is yet another example of scientism’s distorting influence.

If Max Planck was correct and pure mind-at-large, as the fundamental category of reality, suffices to explain all knowledge – then there is no need to postulate dead matter as an extra category of existence! Idealism, the position the universe is essentially mindlike, satisfies the parsimony requirement in the metaphysical domain. Metaphysical idealism is a worldview where postmortem survival is both natural and expected. 

 

Note by Robert Traer: For scientific arguments in support of a post-materialist science, see https://rtraer.com/post-materialist-science.html.

 

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.”

Medium evidence in courts: Mishlove excerpt #14

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

Legal evidence from Chico Xavier. A few cases involve a court of law admitting testimony or evidence from a deceased spirit. In May 1976, Mauricio Garcez Henrique was at the house of his friend José Divino Nunes, age 18.

José was looking for cigarettes. He didn’t find any, but he came upon his father’s gun instead. He wondered what would happen if he shot at his reflection in a mirror. Mauricio suddenly walked between José and the mirror, at which point the gun went off, fatally wounding Mauricio.

José was arrested and charged with murder. Prior to the trial, Mauricio’s parents had been to see Chico Xavier, the famous Brazilian medium. The message they received from their dead son described what had happened:

José Divino was not guilty, nor was anybody else. We were just playing around, thinking about shooting somebody’s reflection in a mirror, and when I passed in front of my image reflected in the mirror, the shot hit me. If anybody has to ask forgiveness, it should be me – I should have been studying instead of fooling around.

Attorneys presented the message in court, and Judge Orimar de Bastos noted it agreed with the evidence. He concluded:

We must give credibility to the message automatically written by Francisco Candido Xavier where the victim recounts the event, exempting the defendant from any guilt. He describes the scene where he and his friend were playing with the gun, and how the shot came to be fired.

The case was dismissed. Psychical researcher Guy Lyon Playfair writes that this was the first known instance of a criminal case decided on evidence purportedly originating from a deceased person. However, he also reports on three other Brazilian cases where a message from Chico Xavier was enough to influence a murder trial. One case resulted in an acquittal. In the other two, the court reduced the charges because of the mediumistic testimony.

Murders solved by mediums. In a 1977 case in Chicago, the court convicted Allan Showery of murdering a Filipino woman named Teresita Basa. Police arrested him following the claim by another Filipino woman, Remibias Chua. She had communicated with Basa’s spirit in their native language, Tagalog, and was told about the theft of a ring in addition to the murder. Confronted with this evidence, Showery (who had previously been interviewed by police) confessed, and police recovered the ring.

An even stronger case is the 1983 murder of Jacqueline Poole in a London suburb. Poole’s spirit communicated, unbidden, to a young Irish medium, Christine Holohan – who had no other connection to Poole, nor to her friends, or anyone else associated with the case. The information provided by Poole through the medium impressed the police. Although there was insufficient evidence at the time for a conviction of the identified murderer, Anthony Ruark – they saved the suspect’s pullover sweater identified by the medium Holohan. Police reopened the case in 2000 when new laboratory techniques analyzing the sweater enabled police to make a convincing identification of Ruark, who was convicted and jailed for life.

A careful analysis by skilled psychical researchers Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen reached the same conclusion as the police. There was no plausible alternative to the hypothesis that Jacqueline Poole’s spirit had communicated with the medium Christine Holohan.

 

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.”

Chapman/Lang healings: Mishlove excerpt #13

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” writes - In my estimation, the single most evidential case for human postmortem survival is the ongoing manifestation of William Lang (1852-1937), a prominent ophthalmic surgeon in London, through the mediumship of George Chapman. Chapman was a firefighter working in Aylesbury, UK, when his mediumship began in 1946. Lang’s spirit worked through Chapman regularly for sixty years until Chapman’s death in 2006. During these sessions, Chapman was in trance and knew nothing of what Lang was doing while using his body to conduct healing sessions.

George Chapman was a military veteran and a former boxer with no higher education. His personality, when not in trance, was manifestly distinct from William Lang. Through Chapman, Lang called these sessions etheric healing.

In 1966, noted psychical researcher Eric Dingwall pleaded for a serious investigation of this case. Nevertheless, the professional psychical research and parapsychology literature has ignored it. On the other hand, the spiritualist community knew of and celebrated this case. A search of the Psychic News archives, at the University of Manitoba, for the name “George Chapman,” returned 734 pages mentioning the name.

In March 2021, I interviewed Roy Stemman, former Psychic News editor and author of many articles about the Chapman mediumship. Stemman’s 2017 book, Surgeon from another World, was an updated version of a 1978 book coauthored with Chapman. Here are the salient facts about this extraordinary case making it especially evidential.

Former patients, family members, and medical colleagues acknowledged Chapman’s spirit control as Lang’s actual personality – complete with memory, professional knowledge, speaking style, and mannerisms.

William Lang’s daughter Lyndon Lang, and a group of Lang’s former medical colleagues (and colleagues of his son Basil, who predeceased him), held weekly séances with George Chapman for decades. They were convinced of the authenticity of Lang’s spirit. Journalist Roy Stemman reports how this arrangement came about. First Lyndon Lang’s skepticism was overcome by information from William Lang’s spirit that only he could have known. Then she introduced Chapman to medical colleagues of Lang and his son, Basil.

These former colleagues, family members, and friends of Lang so respected the work of George Chapman’s mediumship they gave Chapman many personal items – including the bed originally belonging to Lang. Stemman was a witness to this series of gifts. Chapman had so many of these personal items, he called it the “Lang Museum.” Today, they are still in the possession of Chapman’s family.

Lyndon Lang supported this mediumship financially, leaving a testimonial and bequeathing a portion of her estate upon her death to George Chapman.

During his six decades of mediumship, while in trance for as much as six hours at a time, George Chapman engaged in a spiritual healing practice that attained international repute. Medical professionals, who didn’t hesitate to send their patients for healing, often attested to cures.

As Roy Stemman reports, throughout his decades of journalistic coverage of the Chapman/Lang mediumship, there was never a time when he found any reason to question the integrity of either the medium or the controlling spirit.

In 1979, the prestigious Ophthalmology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine (of which Lang had formerly been president) invited George Chapman, the former firefighter, to speak about his mediumistic relationship with the deceased Lang.

William Lang’s manifestation is particularly evidential because it persisted over sixty- years. Multiple individuals who had known Lang attested to the authenticity of his discarnate spirit.

 

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.”

More medium evidence: Mishlove excerpt #12

By psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.”

Gladys Osborne Leonard’s mediumship.

There were many examples of information coming through Mrs. Leonard’s mediumship that convinced the eminent physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, that his son Raymond who was killed in World War I was alive on the other side. Lodge’s book, Raymond or Life and Death: With Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death, was a best- seller and immediately catapulted Gladys Osborne Leonard to international fame as a trance medium.

She continued her mediumship for the next half-century, during which members of the Society for Psychical Research studied her extensively. There have been over thirty articles about her in the publications of the Society, and seven more in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Nea Walker, Oliver Lodge’s secretary, made a long-term study of Leonard that ran for nineteen years. One researcher, the Methodist minister, Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, had over 500 sittings with her. Throughout this entire time, there has never been a single, credible instance when Leonard’s integrity or sincerity has been questioned.

In 1921, Katie Dawson-Smith heard from her son who had been killed in WWI in a session with Leonard. He was insistent she find an old leather wallet, which she did. He said it held a tiny, yet important check stub. The significance of this became clear when, in 1924, she received a demand from a Hamburg firm for the repayment of a debt incurred by her son in 1914. However, the check stub enabled her to show that her son had already repaid the ten-year-old debt. She received an apology from the company. Dawson-Smith later sent the relevant documentation of this incident to the Society for Psychical Research.

Under the supervision of William McDougall at Duke University, John Thomas earned a doctoral degree in psychology for his extensive study of Gladys Osborne Leonard’s mediumship. Thomas was seeking evidence of his wife’s afterlife existence. She had died in 1926. His study ran for nine years. It included 2,964 specific points of information – a point being a single statement of a possibly verifiable fact. Of these, 2,358 were correct; 196 incorrect; 231 inconclusive; and 179 unverifiable. The percentage correct of the total verifiable points was 92.3%.171 Psychical researcher Trevor Hamilton describes Thomas’ approach as meticulous:

…he often had someone else sit with Leonard as a proxy on his behalf, ensured they were accurately recorded, looked for verifiable sources for the medium’s statements among his own records, and discarded unverifiable points, no matter how seemingly persuasive.

These examples merely represent some highlights from Gladys Leonard’s long career as a medium.

Forensic evidence via Eileen Garrett.

On October 5, 1930, the R101 dirigible crashed in France, killing 48 crew members and passengers. Two days later, Eileen Garrett, one of the twentieth century’s greatest mediums, experienced an unanticipated drop-in communicator, i.e., an unexpected visitor, during a sitting. The communicator identified himself as Herbert Irwin, the vessel’s deceased pilot. Irwin described the technical failures and design flaws that caused the crash.

This disaster was fraught with politics. The British Air Minister Lord Thomson, who had overridden the captain’s desire for more test flights, died in the crash.

Will Charlton, a former supply officer for the R101 who knew the airship and its personnel well, independently reviewed the mediumistic information. He confirmed the accuracy of many details provided.

William H. Wood, an airship pilot and a frequent contributor to the Freethinker, an atheist publication – conducted another independent review. In 1949, Wood shocked the British rationalist and atheist world by announcing the data convinced him of postmortem survival. He wrote in the Freethinker,

If this case does not prove survival, then nothing ever will. I consider the R-101 case to be cast iron.

While accepting survival, Wood kept up his status as an atheist.

Medium Ena Twigg and Bishop James Pike.  

Bishop James Pike famously resigned his post as California’s Episcopal Bishop after ongoing mediumistic communications with his son Jim who had taken his own life.180 Shortly after his son’s death, Bishop Pike, who was devastated by the suicide, began noticing poltergeist-like phenomena in the Cambridge apartment he had been sharing with Jim a few weeks prior. He drew up a list of 55 inexplicable events he suspected were signs of Jim’s surviving presence.

This led him to seek advice from Canon Pierce-Higgins, an Anglican Church official, who recommended a visit to the respected medium Ena Twigg. Eventually, Pierce-Higgins arranged a sitting, and Peirce-Higgins drove Bishop Pike to the séance. He took copious notes that he eventually shared with my next interviewee Roy Stemman, a journalist who covered the story for Psychic News in England.

Bishop Pike also confirmed that Ena Twigg provided information about his son she couldn’t have known or guessed. Through Ena Twigg, the late theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) also appeared. Tillich had been both Pike’s friend and Jim’s godfather. Communications with Jim continued through other mediums Pike consulted.

Bishop Pike’s book, The Other Side, documents a lengthy conversation he held with his deceased son and Paul Tillich. The topics touched upon personal friends, family, educational matters, and the emotional turmoil that led Jim to take his own life. Another topic discussed was the poltergeist- like phenomena seen at the Cambridge apartment – which were Jim’s initial attempts to communicate. The conversation also touched upon the controversy swirling around Bishop Pike’s liberal attitudes toward church dogma. Each time, the responses given by the discarnate spirits, Pike’s son Jim or Tillich, were knowledgeable and appropriate. Pike regarded the session as highly evidential.

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.”

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.”