Multiple apparition witnesses: Rawlette excerpt #3

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "More evidence that apparitions cannot all be explained merely as hallucinations induced by grief or wishful thinking comes from cases where the apparition appears to multiple people, as in the Captain Wheatcroft example cited above. In the 89 apparition cases that Erlendur Haraldsson collected in his book The Departed Among the Living, in which an additional living person was in a physical position from which they should have been able to see it, 41 of them did—almost half. Also, when multiple people see an apparition, they report perceiving it from varying angles, as though the apparition were a true three-dimensional object. This suggests that at least some apparitions may be objectively located in space but that not all people are equally capable of detecting them.

Apparitions to Bystanders, Including Animals

"In fact, while some people have never experienced an apparition, others report seeing them frequently, even when the people appearing have little or no connection to them. Haraldsson quotes a man who says he frequently sees the deceased and mentions one time waking up in the night to see his wife’s mother’s stepfather standing by his wife’s side of the bed. His wife’s mother’s stepfather had been dead many years, and they’d never met in life. It seems he was probably present out of some concern or attachment to the wife, and the husband just happened to perceive him. Such apparitions to bystanders are another strike against the wishful thinking hypothesis, as a “bystander” in this case is someone with no real emotional connection to the deceased and presumably no particular desire to encounter them.

"Consider another case from Haraldsson’s book. A young man named Gisli Frimannsson was staying at Hjorsey in Iceland when one night he woke up to see “an elderly man from the district...standing on the middle of the floor.” The apparition stayed for some time before “disintegrating” and disappearing. The next evening, Frimannsson got word this man had died. When he spoke to the man’s widow, she said she had a dream right after her husband’s death where he said to her, “I have already been to Hjorsey, but no one was aware of me there except Gisli.”

"Sometimes the bystanders who experience an apparition are animals. In another case of Haraldsson’s, a woman was trying to herd her sheep into a particular pen, but they refused to go in. “They just shied away,” she says, “so I went to find out what was wrong. And there he [her brother Erik, who had died at 16] stood in the doorway of the sheep shed. I told him sharply to go to God and stop wandering about here on earth. Then he left and the sheep entered the pen.”

"Anecdotes about cats and dogs reacting to apparitions abound. Bill and Judy Guggenheim’s 1995 book Hello from Heaven! contains the account of a woman named Tina whose brother Rudy had died a year previously. Tina recounted, “I was in the kitchen doing my housecleaning. All of a sudden, our cat shot out of the family room! Her hair was standing on end and she was hissing. ... At the same time, our little dog was backing out of the family room, barking and growling with his hair standing up! They prompted me to look, and when I did, I saw my brother, Rudy, sitting in the rocking chair!” Tina notes that she would have thought she was hallucinating if she hadn’t also seen the reactions of the animals.

Apparitions to Multiple People in Different Locations Unaware of Each Other’s Experience

"Although we do have to consider the possibility of collective hallucination, this explanation seems particularly unlikely in cases where an apparition is perceived by multiple people who are in different physical locations and unaware of each other’s experiences as they are happening. The Captain Wheatcroft case gives us one example of this, and we find another such case in Joyce and Barry Vissell’s book Meant to Be, where Myrna L. Smith gives a detailed account of the way in which her deceased husband appeared separately to her and each of her two sons on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Smith saw her husband by the Christmas tree in the living room, and each of her boys saw their father in their own bedroom. Each boy mentioned the event before they knew of anyone else’s experience, and two of the apparitions were noted as happening around 3am.

"In another case, the “apparition” was olfactory rather than visual. Parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach was one of three men who at the same time all inexplicably smelled cigar smoke and connected it to their mutual friend Martin Caidin, recently deceased and a big smoker of cigars. At the time of the anomalous smell, Auerbach was in his car, his friend Bob was flying in a Cessna three time zones away in New Jersey, and the third man was flying in a plane over Florida."

 

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.

Apparitions: Rawlette excerpt #2

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness — "Let’s start with one of the most common types of ostensible after-death communication: apparitions. The late Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson, one of the preeminent investigators of after-death communication in the last few decades, reported that visual experiences of the deceased constituted 67% of the cases he collected of apparent contact with the dead while in a waking state. But apparitions aren’t only a visual phenomenon. Many apparitions are heard to speak, and others actually touch the perceiver. According to one of Haraldsson’s informants, the apparition “held out her hand, grasped my fingers hard and said: ‘Hello there.’ ... I had seen spirits before, [but] I had never seen the like of this and never touched one, not one which seemed to be of flesh and blood.” While such lifelike apparitions could conceivably be very vivid hallucinations, several pieces of evidence count in favor of at least some apparitions’ being genuine contacts with the consciousness of the deceased.

Apparitions Occurring Before Knowledge of the Death

"One of the strongest pieces of evidence that apparitions are not mere hallucinations induced by grief or wishful thinking is the fact that people often see an apparition before they were even informed of the death of the person involved.

"Cases like this go all the way back to the earliest years of parapsychological research. For instance, in 1860, Robert Dale Owen published his personal investigation of the case of a British military captain, Captain Wheatcroft. Wheatcroft was stationed in India, but on the night of November 14-15, 1857, he apparently appeared to his wife beside her bed back in Cambridge, England. She said that she saw him bent forward, as if suffering, and that he appeared to be trying to speak but no sound came out. After a minute or so, he vanished. This experience led the captain’s wife to suspect he’d been killed or badly wounded, but it wasn’t until the following month that she got word her husband had died on November 15. When she heard this, however, she felt sure that the date she was given was wrong and that her husband must have died the previous day, November 14, before she saw him appear. Wheatcroft’s lawyer also subsequently discovered that another woman of his acquaintance had experienced an apparition of a man corresponding to the captain’s description, bent over in pain, and that this apparition had happened around 9pm on November 14. This, too, seemed to support the idea that there was a problem with the reported date of death. Indeed, a few months later, a man who was an eye- witness to Wheatcroft’s death confirmed that he had in fact died on November 14. This was the date inscribed on his grave in India, and the British War Office records were subsequently corrected to reflect this.

"Here’s another carefully investigated case in which an apparition provided otherwise unknown information about the death of the person involved. A 17-year-old girl named Minnie Wilson was living at a convent in Belgium when she received an unexpected visit from her godfather. He came up to her while she was kneeling at prayer in a chapel (and possibly in a trance-like state). “I thought something was wrong as he had such a pained expression,” Minnie recounted in her written statement. “[H]e took my hand and said he had done something very wrong and that it would help him a great deal to have me to pray for him; then he told me he had been refused by the woman he loved and that he had shot himself in his despair.” In fact, Minnie’s godfather had died three days before in London, in precisely the way his apparition described. Minnie had not yet been informed of the death, as the convent in which she lived did not allow newspapers, and her mother did not write to her about it until three days after the apparition. Even then, her mother did not tell her the circumstances of her godfather’s death. It was Minnie herself who, on her next visit home to England, insisted that her mother tell her whether her godfather had taken his own life because a woman wouldn’t love him. Her mother then confirmed this was true.

"While these cases are somewhat exceptional in the amount of detail relayed by the apparitions, experiencing an apparition before being informed of a death is itself very common. Haraldsson reports that, of the 449 cases of apparent encounters with the dead that he collected, one out of every nine happened within 24 hours of the death, and in 86% of those cases, the person having the experience did not yet know that the death had occurred."

  

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.

Evidence for Survival of Human Consciousness

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.

God is benevolent & forgiving: Krohn excerpt #18

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her essay The Eternal Life of Consciousness—"One of the clear messages I received in the afterlife was that our actions and thoughts in life will play a role in our afterlife. I learned that we personally have a hand in determining what type of afterlife experience we will have.

"I learned in the Garden that the core of a person—the soul—survives. A handicapped person, a sick person, or a person suffering from mental illness in life becomes a soul without limitations in the afterlife since they have shed their physical body. We are all equally whole there.

"However, what we do while we are here matters greatly in determining what our afterlife will look like. It has to do with an individual’s expectations, actions, and thoughts. It was surprising to me to learn that my thoughts here played a role in my afterlife. If a person has led a good, loving, clean life in which they helped others, then that person knows at a soul level that they are good. But it is also important that a person’s thoughts are good, loving, and charitable, as well as their actions. God hears us when we pray to him, out loud or silently.

"I learned that God knows what’s in our minds and hearts, as well as knowing how we act as a person in our life on Earth. A person who knows they have led a good life will expect Heaven to be beautiful. And it will be—partially because the person has “earned” it, partially because it will meet the person’s expectations, but mostly because God has a hand in this, too.

"Fortunately, since in this dimension we are all flawed humans, God is benevolent and forgiving. It is through a combination of God’s love, our own thoughts and actions in life, and our own expectations, that our afterlife is shaped and becomes a uniquely personalized experience for each of us." 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018).

Conversing with God often: Krohn excerpt #17

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her essay The Eternal Life of Consciousness—"The only common factor to all of the strange phenomena that have happened to me is the fact that they started after my NDE. To me, it is obvious that my near-death experience is related to my after-death communication and increased sensitivity, spirituality, and knowledge about consciousness and the afterlife. It is as if the voltage I received from that finger of electricity charged me with an energy that pulses through everything. The energy of that lightning was somehow alive and made me more alive—more sensitive to and conscious of my surroundings.

"Speaking of consciousness, what does all of this mean with regard to human consciousness after death?

"Because I can trace all of this back to my near-death experience and I have a complete detailed memory of what happened during my NDE, this means that I was conscious during the entire event. There is no reason to think that my consciousness would have been any different had I decided to stay in the Garden. I was there, in the afterlife, and was fully aware of what was happening. Fully conscious. Meaning, my consciousness survived my bodily death.

"Because I have such a clear memory of every detail of my NDE, even now thirty-three years after the event, not only was my consciousness intact—it was supercharged. I was more aware, alert, and alive than I ever was before, or have been since. The ADC was striking in its intensity, its accuracy, and my wakeful awareness. Hearing my grandfather’s voice, seeing the smoke-filled room, and feeling that overwhelming love, plus the knowledge that Barry heard the phone ring, heard my conversation, and saw the smoke that filled the room, is further evidence that human consciousness survives permanent bodily death. 

"I have just barely scratched the surface here in describing how my life has been altered by my near-death experience and after-death communication. This abbreviated version of my story just touches on how my relationships have changed, my outlook has changed, and I, as a person, have changed. I keep saying I’m not the same person, that I was one person before my NDE and returned from the afterlife as someone completely different.

"Before the lightning strike, I would have considered myself a good person because I was a law-abiding citizen who lived within society’s constraints. I always loved and was there for my family, and of course for my children whom I loved unconditionally. Barry and I saw to it that our children had a nice, clean home, lots of toys, a good education, healthy food on the table, and clean beds every night. I was an attentive mom, a caring wife, and a thoughtful friend.

"But after the lightning strike, good took on a new, more nuanced meaning. I was suddenly very tuned in to the spiritual side of life. I am much more patient, more giving, more caring, and more loving than I was prior to the NDE. I am kinder, calmer. A person is greatly changed when they no longer fear death. My friends today are very different people from the friends I had before my NDE. My current friends have a similar outlook to mine. Most of the friends I had before my NDE have drifted out of my life. Looking back, I hardly recognize the person I was before.

"I have never been a religious person, and that hasn’t changed. If anything, I am less religious now than I was prior to my visit to the afterlife, as now I am completely turned off by any type of organized religion. Religions tend to believe that their way is the right way. They tend to say that if you want to go to Heaven when you die, you need to do things their way to ensure that you make it there. They also dictate how to pray. That just doesn’t feel right to me any longer. After seeing what I saw in the afterlife, and knowing what I was taught in the Garden, I just don’t have the desire or inclination to associate with any particular doctrine.

"What I now know is that there is a force that I call God, a higher being. And God hears us no matter where we are or how we are praying. He hears us if we are praying together, but also if we are alone. I feel no spiritual compulsion to attend religious services, though I do go occasionally for family, communal, or social reasons. But to go for the purpose of talking to God just doesn’t work for me. I connect with that higher being much more effectively on my own time, in my own way.

"I have to admit, I never ascribed to the concept of spirituality before. Now, my NDE and trip to the afterlife have made me a very spiritual person. I find myself conversing with God often. I marvel at the splendor I see in nature that I rarely noticed before. I can look at an animal and see the beauty in its soul. Most importantly though, I understand that bodily death is just a tiny point on the continuum in the life of human consciousness."

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included.

Synesthesia follows NDE: Krohn excerpt #16

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "Another odd result of my near-death experience is that I now have what neuroscientists call synesthesia. Actually, I do not know if the synesthesia is a result of the near-death experience itself or is a function of being electrocuted by lightning. Either way, I never had it before September 2, 1988, and it was not until decades after my NDE that I first heard the word 'synesthesia,' much less understood what it meant.

"Synesthesia is essentially a neurological phenomenon in which the senses crisscross or fuse so that an individual might “hear” colors, “see” music, “taste” shapes, and so on. It sounds unbelievable, but it is actually much more common than people think. There are around eighty different types of synesthesia. I have a version called Grapheme-Color Synesthesia, where a person will associate letters, numbers, or even words with a specific color.

"I think the Garden experience flowed out of the near-death experience and into my daily life through a new set of abilities to sense things through multiple and unexpected sources. Shortly after my NDE, I was in bed with burned and bandaged feet. Perhaps this made me more attuned to the nuances of my perceptions. In any case, I began to realize that, whenever I heard a day of the week mentioned, I immediately and distinctly associated that day with a color. My perception of the color of a day of the week came to me as had the information I received in my NDE, as an instant download of knowledge.

"If Jeremy mentioned that he wanted a friend to come over on Tuesday, I would see blue. If Barry said he wanted to take the boys to the zoo on Saturday, I would see orange. The colors I associate with the days never vary. Monday was and still is always red, Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is yellow, Thursday is green, Friday is yellow, Saturday is orange, and Sunday is brown. These colors may vary from one synesthete to another, but they don’t for a specific person.

"Months of the year took on distinct hues for me, as well. For example, August is orange. It was the time I spent in the Garden immersed in meaning, knowledge, and sensory stimuli all at once that colored the months as it did. While I was in the Garden, the colors carried information. I received knowledge simply by being there and being immersed in the riotous Garden palette. And then again, when my deceased grandfather called me on the phone, I was shown a red point of light. That light carried love. So, the idea of associating color with other ideas is something I’ve become comfortable with.

"It was not long after I acknowledged to myself my newfound way of seeing the calendar as colorful that I realized I was doing the same thing with numbers. The digits from zero to nine all evoke a sensation of color within me. Zero was and still is white, one is orange, two is blue, three is yellow, four is blue, five is red, six is purple, seven is yellow, eight is green, and nine is orange.

"These colors are not nearly as spectacular as the otherworldly colors of the Garden, but they do saturate my life. Between the synesthesia and the ability to see colorful auras around living things, hues flow together for me like watercolors now. This ability allows me to see and sense my world awash in a glorious rainbow."

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Tumultous energy relationship: Krohn excerpt #15

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "Yet another strange new ability I discovered after my NDE was the ability to see auras. An aura is a field of light generated by an energy-producing entity. That entity can be anything from the sun, whose aura gives life and light to our world, to a light bulb, whose filament brightens when fed electricity. In addition to the typical auras that all people can see, I also see colored auras emanating from living things; plants, animals, and humans. Unlike the auras from a light source like the sun or a light bulb, auras of living beings are delicate, evasive, and constantly changing. They are all different colors and textures. Some are bright, others dim. Some are thick and dense, others thin and wispy. Some are solid and unmoving, others diffuse. Some are steady, others sparkle, twinkle, and pulsate. The colors of auras range from white to black, and all colors in between. I can see this energy as it rises off or emanates from living people. I can also feel it if I close my eyes and put my hand into someone’s energy field.

"In order to see these auras, I have to unfocus my eyes. A white background aids me in detecting them, although that is not always necessary. A good way to practice seeing auras is to look at the old “Magic Eye” books. Those picture books have complex abstract patterned pictures that, if you stare at them long enough, will come into focus as a three-dimensional picture of something clearly definable. The trick is to unfocus your eyes and look through the picture. Once you get the hang of that, the clear three-dimensional pictures almost pop off the page at you. Auras work the same way for me. For example, I can look at a person, a tree, or a dog and unfocus my eyes to look through the living being. When I do that, the outline of an aura just pops out at me.

"The different colors and textures of the auras depend on things like the health and emotional status of the being. Accordingly, the colors and textures of auras change constantly around people. One day I may see a blue steady solid aura around someone, and the next day I see a green wavy aura around the same person. Sometimes the auras shimmer and sparkle. Sometimes they don’t.

"The only one I know the probable meaning of with any degree of certainty is a black aura. My feeling is that a black aura bodes ill for the person generating it. I don’t know if what generates it is physical (say, an illness) or what such an aura might signal or represent: a comment on the mental status of the person (i.e.; depression), an indicator of a serious physical illness (i.e.; terminal cancer), or something else entirely.

"I have only seen a black aura once, and I felt dread. It was in 1992, around someone I knew well. I was driving and had stopped in the left lane at a red light. I looked over to my right. In the car stopped next to me was a close relative of mine. His head turned toward me, but he didn’t smile or acknowledge me at all. I wasn’t even sure he was seeing me, even though he was looking at me. I said to myself, Look at that! He has a black aura. I’ve never seen one of those before!

"I had no idea what that indicated but thought it was strange that he didn’t respond to my smile or wave. Four hours later, he had a massive heart attack and died. This was a young man, and it was as devastating as it was surprising. No one expected anything like that to happen. This was very early in my post-near-death-experience life, and I had no idea what auras meant. All I knew was that I could see them, whereas prior to 1988 I could not.

"I see auras, but I still have no idea what they mean, which implies, of course, that I think they mean something. I do think they carry information, that they can speak to us, if we learn how to interpret and interact with them. When I returned from my near-death experience, I found that I had this new ability to see, sense, and interact with energy. Whatever these auras are, my own ability to see them has something to do with my NDE.

"My interaction with energy doesn’t end with auras. Ever since my near-death experience, I cannot wear wristwatches or fitbits. Anything battery operated in close contact with me stops working. The batteries drain quickly. Even my cell phone, if it’s in my pocket or otherwise very close to my body, drains more quickly than if it’s sitting on a desk or tabletop. And, on occasion, light bulbs near me just burn out. Once I was walking down a flight of stairs and, as I walked down, the light bulbs above my head popped and burned out as I passed by.

"My relationship with energy has been tumultuous since 1988."

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.