Making an observation: Beischel excerpt #6

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

What happens after we die is a tremendously important question that speaks to the nature of consciousness, the potentially infinite essence of our relationships to each other, and even the purpose of our existence. The scientific investigation of mediumship allows us to at least peek through the cracks, to get a glimpse of what might be going on after we die. As such, engaging in the scientific method to examine mediumship must be a precise, careful endeavor. What follows covers specific details of my research. In my descriptions, it is necessary to be thorough in order to demonstrate the quality of the evidence I collected. I only included what was directly relevant. What I will share here may seem nearly overwhelming at times but understanding the details of the methods used and the analyses performed is necessary in order to objectively assess the validity of my conclusions. (Here we go. Buckle up!

Using the steps of the scientific method, I can first make an observation about some aspect of nature. I can then formulate a hypothesis about the observed phenomenon. Experiments can then be designed and performed, collected data can be analyzed, and conclusions can be drawn. Then I can start again based on what I learned in the previous cycle. This standard method can easily be applied to studying mediumship.

The phenomenon of mediumship has several advantages that make it an ideal candidate for scientific inquiry in order to gather the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. A relatively plentiful population exists capable of performing the task. These individuals can intentionally engage in the phenomenon and can follow instructions while they do so. The bodily death of the discarnate in a mediumship reading is permanent rather than temporary as is the case for NDEs. We don’t have to wait for the phenomenon to spontaneously happen as is the case for OBEs, for NDEs, and for children who report memories of previous lives. It doesn’t require expensive equipment or a specific laboratory set-up; this makes it possible for the experiments to be easily replicated by other qualified researchers to determine if published findings appropriately reflect the actual phenomenon. We can repeatedly bring mediums into a controlled laboratory environment. This allows us to address aspects of the phenomenon that might complicate what we could conclude if we were to let it just run amok or only observe it spontaneously out in the wild.

Step 1: Make an Observation

It is important for scientists to work from a place of observation. To complete this step, I directly observed that there are people here in the US and here in the 21st century who identify as mediums. I further observed that, as the primary aspect of their mediumship, these modern American mediums verbally utter words, phrases, and sentences during a process called a reading. I observed that those utterances are requested by and provided to a second living person called a sitter. I observed that the content of the reading centers around a third person who is deceased and who we call, during research, a discarnate (dis = not, carnate = in the flesh). The word simply identifies the person as someone who previously existed associated with a physical living body but who is now deceased. It does not imply anything further about the survival, location, or characteristics of that person. It just allows researchers to refer to the three people involved in the reading: the medium, the sitter, and the discarnate.

So far, I don’t think even the hardiest of deniers (often called skeptics) could refute the content of those observations. It is irrefutably true that mediums exist and utter words about discarnates to sitters. Therefore, we cannot move forward in the scientific method without keeping in mind the medium-discarnate-sitter triad that we have observed.

Another observation is that it does not appear to be a flawless connection. There seems to be noise or static in the metaphorical signal. Not every single statement made by a medium resonates with the sitter. That is the reality of the observed phenomenon. It is important that we not expect perfection.

A final observation is that the three people in the mediumship triad are just regular folks. The most evidential info comes from mediumship readings for everyday people containing everyday info that can be objectively verified. I observed that the information mediums most often report falls into three main categories (39, also 40). The first is identifying information that allows the sitter to recognize the discarnate. This usually includes the discarnate’s physical and personality descriptions, favorite activities, and cause of death. The second type of information references events that have happened in the sitter’s life since the death. And the third type of information reported in a mediumship reading involves messages specifically for the sitter. These are the types of statements that you might say to someone with whom you had a close relationship but who had to move away: ‘Thank you for everything’ and ‘I love you.’ More specific messages might encourage, reprimand, or provide advice to the sitter. 

 

So, mediumship readings are not perfect and involve regular information from regular people. We don’t need famous dead people to test mediumship scientifically. In fact, that would be problematic because we couldn’t control for information that could be obtained through normal means like Googling. We don’t need to ask for the secrets to the universe channeled from etheric entities. That would also be problematic because that information could not be objectively verified. All we need are some regular mediums providing regular readings to regular sitters about regular discarnates. Easy peasy.

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Applying science to research: Beischel excerpt #5

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

Science is considered the most valid and reliable method for acquiring knowledge. It combines the methods of inference and of experience to collect verifiable evidence for natural phenomena. Our Western society and culture require the objective, agreed-upon standards of science to determine what is real. Because people have already made such scientific discoveries as the laws of thermodynamics, the layout of the solar system, and the relationships of chemicals as clarified on the periodic table of elements, we currently use science to know facts like which pharmaceuticals are relatively efficacious and safe and which weather patterns are on their way to our location.

I have long supported the position that science should not have limitations. At the Windbridge Research Center, where I serve as Director of Research, we understand science as simply a set of tools for answering questions. We have found that those tools can be applied to nearly any topic, even a controversial one like life after death. Competent scientists follow the data wherever they lead and do not make unfounded assumptions about what is possible or about how the world works. Assuming that we fully understand every phenomenon in the universe is illogical. True science leaves room for discoveries. Scientists, ideally, just follow the data, draw conclusions, and develop theories. Through science, knowledge is ever evolving.

Viewing science as a widely applicable equal opportunist is not standard. Currently, phenomena considered metaphysical, like mind or spirit, are usually specifically called out as beyond the bounds of science. Some academic sources list metaphysical knowledge gained through various world traditions as important but clarify that “material explanations for observable phenomena are always sufficient and metaphysical explanations are never needed”.

Some sources go even further. One research methods textbook I came across had this to say about the topic of this essay:

Science always investigates empirically solvable problems—questions that are potentially answerable by means of currently available research techniques. If a theory cannot be tested using empirical techniques, then scientists are not interested in it. For example, the question “Is there life after death?” is not an empirical question and thus cannot be tested scientifically.

I beg to differ. No, that’s incorrect. More accurately: I forcefully disagree, with vehemence. Again, science can be used to learn about nearly anything. Also: “cannot be tested scientifically”? Challenge accepted.

As I have previously noted elsewhere, in the Western world, phenomena not easily explained by the traditional, established sciences are usually dismissed as impossible. As a result, people who believe in phenomena like mediumship are labeled ignorant, gullible, or delusional, and the unfortunate individuals who experience mediumistic communication are called frauds, con artists, schizophrenics, evil, or worse. Now, what if we calmed down, put aside our assumptions about how the world works, and actually applied the scientific method to the phenomenon of mediumship? Well, I did just that.

In an effort to evoke your knowing by authority, I will provide my credentials for studying mediums here. After receiving my PhD in 2003, I served as the William James Post- doctoral Fellow in Mediumship and Survival Research in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona. I went on, with my husband and research partner, Mark Boccuzzi, to co-found the Windbridge Institute, LLC, in 2008, and then the Windbridge Research Center non- profit in 2017, in order to continue addressing the survival of consciousness hypothesis. I have received multiple mediumship research grants from international funding foundations, have shared my findings at various conferences through juried and invited presentations, and published my work performing controlled laboratory research with mediums in several peer-reviewed journals.

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Intuition and knowing: Beischel excerpt #4

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

 

It is not clear where knowledge by intuition fits in the list of methods for knowing. If it is included at all, it may be listed as in between tenacity and authority or as the very least valid method and equated with superstition. I’m going to use mine right now: My intuitive sense is that people who have intuitive experiences and acquire knowledge through them would give this method top billing. (Even higher than science!) For example, my colleagues and I found through our research that a phenomenon commonly experienced by mediums is “just knowing” information

about the deceased. Similarly, Emmons and Emmons* found that the mediums they studied “just ‘g-know’ (pronounced ‘guh-know’) things intuitively,” a term based on the word gnostic). Like experience, knowledge by intuition cannot easily be generalized to the natural world, leaving it somewhat lacking within the knowledge hierarchy. 

On the topic of survival, different people’s knowledge may come through different methods. People who know there is an afterlife based on religious teachings may be using the method of knowing by authority. People who have had near-death experiences may know through empiricism that consciousness survives. For some, it may simply seem logical; they may be able to infer an afterlife. And others may know intuitively that there is life after death. 

When I asked some mediums I know, each with decades of experience involving communication with the deceased, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” and “What makes you sure?” the responses I received were similar: “When you have an actual experience, you KNOW” (SA; emphasis in original), “It is a knowing, not a believing” (DC), “I know it is real because I live with it every day. I am part of it and I know it” (NM), and “I don’t need to believe, I know.” 

Other mediums chose to quantify their beliefs about an afterlife: “I believe 100% with no doubt” (DeM), “I believe without a doubt that there is an afterlife” (MR). “There is no doubt in my mind that our loved ones live on” (JG), and “100% yes!” (GQ). Several mediums listed personal out-of-body and near-death experiences (OBEs and NDEs) as the originating source of their belief in an afterlife. Several noted that they did not hold this belief before their OBEs, NDEs, or similar spiritually transformative experiences (STEs). 

The mediums’ regular and continued experiences of communicating with the deceased during readings for sitters also served to reinforce their beliefs: “I constantly look for validation from spirit and with great success get it. Spirit does not disappoint” (MR); “Communication with the energy of those who crossed has made me certain that survival of consciousness after bodily death exists” (LJ); “The most compelling part for me is watching how people respond to the information that comes through... The sitter seems to recognize ‘who’ is communicating” (DoM); and “Not knowing someone, sitting down and communicating with spirit prior to the reading, and relaying that and other information/messages to the client is a very powerful validation that there is life beyond this physical world” (TN). 

Although these are compelling claims, the described knowledge acquired is based primarily on experience. It is important to remember here that knowledge by experience is truly evidential and an entirely valid method of knowing for each individual. As I have noted before, science “can neither refute the existence nor defend the reality” of anyone’s experiences or what they know in their hearts to be true. However, society as a whole requires a more reliable method of knowing that includes conclusions that we can all agree on. Since at least the mid-1600’s, this method has been objective scientific inquiry, the roots of which are most likely thousands of years old. 

*Emmons, C. F., & Emmons, P. (2003). Guided by spirit: A journey into the mind of the medium. Writers Club Press. 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Authority, inference, experience: Beischel excerpt #3

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

Knowledge by authority happens when claims made by trusted authority figures are accepted as true. Because we can’t learn everything through direct experience or even through logical inference, knowledge conveyed by authoritative figures is often required. Trusting that Mrs. Gustafsen was correct in saying to my kindergarten class that three follows two and N follows M was probably a valid pathway toward knowing. This can become problematic, however, when sources are inappropriately trusted simply because they, say, attended a prestigious university, are on TV, published a book, or have a Twitter following.

One step up from authority, when we can’t observe or experience things for ourselves, is knowing by inference, by using logical reasoning (also called rationalism; think Sherlock Holmes). For example, because I know how peristalsis of the digestive tract works (through knowledge conveyed by the authority of physiology professors and textbooks), I can infer that it is impossible for swallowed gum (or swallowed anything) to stay in the gut for seven years. If everything in the pantry is askew or upside-down when I open it in the morning, I can infer that my husband did some late-night stress eating. If my welcome mat looks more threadbare than it did yesterday, I can infer that some neighborhood birds are making nests and need building supplies. Knowing through inference, however, can be problematic if the assumptions used in the reasoning process are incorrect. Maybe I, myself, recently developed sleep-eating or sleep-door- mat-larceny habits and didn’t know it. That’s still logical (though not probable).

As stated above, the evidence that brain produces consciousness (materialism) is circumstantial and relies on inference. Moreover, because we can’t repeatedly experience consciousness after death (short of a Flatliners scenario), a lot of the evidence for survival is based on inference. Survival researchers “cannot send expeditions of scientists to the next world to report on their findings and return with specimens susceptible to analysis in human laboratories, but inference is a perfectly acceptable scientific tool”.

Direct personal observation or experience (also called empiricism) is another method of knowing. Early on in the evolution of our species we most likely had to do most of our learning about how the world worked through observation. Perhaps we learned which berries were safe to eat by watching the birds and animals. Most likely, we learned that leaves changing color meant that the cold season was coming.

In the modern era, by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve each already learned a sufficient number of facts through knowledge by authority (and hopefully less so through tenacity) and have developed the critical thinking skills necessary to use inference to collect others. Therefore, knowledge gained through individual experiences in contemporary society is primarily about ourselves and those close to us, rather than about the world in general.  

Once I know I am capable of, say, lucid dreaming, remote viewing, mentally controlling the timing of my menstrual cycle, or feeling physiologically connected to someone at a distance, I can never un-know that those things are possible for me. However, knowledge by experience cannot be generalized as applicable to others. This limits its usefulness.

Two faces      

In addition, the physical senses that humans use for observation and experience are tremendously fallible. In a novel I happened to be reading while writing this, a character named Dr. Marconi made this observation:

“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks Nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum... We can’t see heat or cold. We can’t see electricity or radio signals... It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it. Yet, we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ’I’ll believe it when I see it.’”

Similarly, my husband worked in a science museum where a colleague had a sign in his office that read, “Seeing is the brain’s best guess.” And so, I choose to believe, many perceptual cognition experts. Because personal experience often cannot be generalized as being true for others, and our human sensory perceptual apparatuses are so limited, empiricism falls short of being a truly valid method for knowing about the natural world in general.

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

My only mediumship reading: Beischel excerpt #2

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition: I knew all sorts of magic can happen with TV editing, so I wanted to see this process for myself. I got a recommendation for a local medium and received an in-person reading in the summer of 2002. I had read a little about fraudulent psychic practices (7) and was prepared for the possibility of generic information and fishing for content. But, as a scientist, I wanted to keep my assumptions and my expectations to a minimum.

I want you to understand that I do not need what I am going to share with you here to be true. I have been accused of being an advocate or proponent of mediumship because I personally need it to be real. I have been called, among other much more terrible things, “a believer”.

In reality, it would have been easier for me if I discovered that mediumship was just an entertaining parlor trick. I would have preferred to learn that death was the end and that the people we have lost are gone.

As a scientist, however, I had to go through the process of collecting data before I could draw conclusions. And now, actually, with the death of someone close to me, I could personally examine the phenomenon of mediumship in a manner that would have been a stretch if the only dead person I knew was a school acquaintance or some distant uncle. 

I met with the medium in her home. She was a wife and a mother of three living in a Phoenix suburb who just happened to be a medium. She was about my age and did not look at all like a cartoon stereotype of a psychic: no crystal ball, no incense, no excessive bead accessories. In fact, she was wearing the same long denim skirt that I had at home. 

The reading contained many specific and accurate items. For example, the medium spoke about our deceased pet Dalmatian being with my mom and of Colorado where we sometimes vacationed. She also spoke about the symptoms of my mother’s psychiatric diagnosis, her siblings, her birth month, and where she was buried. The scoring system I used at the time demonstrated an accuracy level of 93%. Some information that I didn’t understand was later verified by my aunts. 

Most of the people in my life were supportive when I shared the story about the reading I’d received. I was surrounded by scientists and our training (ideally) prevents us from drawing conclusions without sufficient data. So, mostly I heard things like, “I don’t really know anything about mediums, but that sounds like an interesting experience that you had.” 

However, a few were—actually, one guy in particular was—convinced that I’d been duped by a con artist, because there was no way that what I described could be real. (His religious ideology may have bullied his scientific training into submission.) This closed-mindedness was motivation enough for me to want to bring mediums into a laboratory setting and test the phenomenon under controlled conditions.

The general hateful reactions and ongoing derision regarding mediums as a whole I’ve seen since have kept that motivation at full steam. I get it. There are frauds. But claiming that every person in a group is represented by a fraudulent subset of that group is, frankly, bigotry. The right thing to do is act rationally, bring it into the lab, and check it out.

After my mediumship reading, what I knew was that there was clearly more to know.

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).

Post-mortem consciousness? Beischel excerpt #1

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Easter Life

News editor for the New Scientist, Anil Ananthaswamy, ends a remarkably clear explanation of a mysterious reality by acknowledging: “The case remains to be solved.”1 He was writing about the famous two-slit experiment in which a single photon of light may appear when measured to be a particle or a wave, depending on how the observer measures it.

 

I am writing about a very different case, the resurrection celebrated by Christians on Easter, which I affirm also “remains to be solved.” Ananthaswamy explains how “a sunbeam split in two” has shed “light on the underlying nature of reality.” I suggest the resurrection has shed light on the underlying nature of life.

 

The resurrection of Jesus after his death on a Roman cross has given Christians hope that conscious life can survive physical death. The dominant paradigm in science, which holds that all conscious life depends on a physical brain, assumes that physical death is the end of every form of conscious life. Yet, quantum physics has discovered that matter comes from energy, like the photon arising from the wave function of light. Material reality itself arises from energy that, like conscious thoughts and feelings, is not in itself material.

 

Near-death experiences, too, when a person’s brain is non-functional, are immaterial events that have significant consequences. My father remembered such an experience when during surgery his heart stopped, and his conscious awareness “awakened” despite anesthesia and observed the life-saving efforts of the medical team. Furthermore, my father’s conscious awareness left the hospital and “traveled” toward a brilliant but not blinding light, which he experienced as unconditional love. He also saw my mother in front of the light and wanted to remain there with her. But she communicated telepathically that it was not his time to die.

 

        James K Traer            

My father, a scientist, knew that materialist scientific explanations could not explain his near-death experience. Nonetheless, he told me, the experience was absolutely “real” and ended his fear of death. In addition, I knew that he had become a more compassionate person after his near-death experience. Moreover, research has confirmed that this character change is common among those who have shared their near-death experience with researchers. 2

 

Four hundred scientists have affirmed a “Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science” that asserts: “Conscious mental activity can be experienced in clinical death during a cardiac arrest.”3 And other scientists have affirmed in “Beyond a Materialist Vision” that “the belief that consciousness is nothing but a consequence . . . of brain activity . . . is neither proven, nor warranted.”4

 

I am not suggesting near-death experiences explain the resurrection. I am suggesting the materialist assumptions of scientists have not resolved our experience of consciousness—even when we are physically healthy, much less in cases such as near-death experiences.

 

The resurrection was a conscious experience for those who were its initial witnesses, and Easter has been and continues to be a real source of hope for many. The case for conscious life after physical death has not been resolved but remains both a scientific and spiritual possibility.

 

Humbly, I wish you all an inspiring Easter . . . Robert Traer

 

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1 Anil Ananthaswamy, “Through two doors: How a sunbeam split in two became physics’ most elegant experiment, shedding light on the underlying nature of reality,” Aeon, Oct. 2, 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/the-elegant-physics-experiment-to-decode-the-nature-of-reality

 

2 Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021).

 

3 See https://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science.

 

4 See https://galileocommission.org.