The following is an interview with writer, best-selling author and blogger Michael Prescott. I thank Michael for kindly accepting the interview. This is the first of (I hope) a series of "subversive" interviews in my blog with personalities, writers and researchers on parapsychology, afterlife studies and other unconventional fields. So stay tuned.
I hope this interview will be of the interest for all the readers. Enjoy.
1)Michael, tell us something about your background and how (and why) you got interested in the paranormal?
For many years I basically had a materialistic philosophy, but at a certain point in my life I found it unsatisfying. I felt there ought to be some greater meaning or purpose, so I started looking into things that I had never taken seriously before, such as paranormal phenomena and mystical traditions. It took me a while to be convinced by the evidence, especially when it came to life after death, because I really couldn't visualize such a possibility; it just struck me as impossible on its face. How could you go on existing without a body, and where would you be? Besides, I knew there was a lot of fraud connected with things like mediumship. But eventually I discovered a good deal of persuasive evidence. I was still reluctant to accept the idea completely, though. The earliest essays I wrote on this subject were cautious and equivocal; my attitude was that there might be something to it, but I couldn't be sure.
2)Your blog is one of the better known blogs on the internet regarding the paranormal. Tell us something about your experience being a blogger. Has it been a positive experience?
I enjoy blogging because it lets me get things off my chest and share ideas and get feedback. I've found that blogging on certain controversial subjects, like politics, is not always such a positive experience; I can get pretty worked up on subjects like that, so I've learned to avoid them for the most part. Most of my commenters provide very interesting insights and observations.
3)You’re very familiar with the literature on Christian scholarship, but as far I know, you don’t consider yourself a Christian. What doctrines or claims of Christianity are, in your opinion, worth considering seriously? Do you think the existence of Jesus, and his resurrection, are well-supported facts in the literature? Or instead, the case for Jesus’ existence, or for his resurrection, is weak?
It's true that I'm not a Christian. I think Jesus was a very advanced spiritual master, but I don't think he was part of a triune deity, or that he was omniscient or infallible or omnipotent. I do think he was a real historical figure and that the gospels provide at least a generally reliable overview of his ministry, though undoubtedly with omissions and embellishments. As for the resurrection, I do believe that Jesus' followers witnessed his reappearance after his death. I think what they were probably seeing is what spiritualists today would call the etheric body, which can have physical attributes and yet do things that an ordinary earthly body can't do, like vanish at will. I suspect that Jesus chose his disciples in large part because they had latent psychic abilities of their own, which might have helped them to perceive the etheric body.
4)In your view, what explains the strong hegemony of materialism in intellectual and academic circles?
Well, there's no denying the fact that materialism has been an extraordinarily successful and productive methodology. The physical sciences, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, have made incredible strides over the past couple of hundred years. The sheer amount of information we have about our world today dwarfs anything that was available to, say, Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the very best educated people of his time. In Jefferson's day, you could become a true polymath -- an expert in a variety of specialties. Today that kind of wide-ranging expertise is almost impossible because each specialty has become so incredibly complex. We have accomplished things that would have been considered unthinkable, even magical, as recently as a hundred years ago. As I write this, we are marking the 40th anniversary of man's first landing on the moon, a staggering feat. And now we can communicate with each other via the Internet, which serves as a kind of global nervous system linking billions of minds in real time.
So it's important not to downplay the astonishing success of science, which, ever since the Enlightenment, has depended on essentially a materialistic methodology. What I mean is that modern science does not accept any supernatural explanations. The "rules of the game" require scientists to keep looking until a purely natural explanation can be found for any phenomenon. This insistence on natural explanations has allowed scientists to overcome centuries of religious dogmatism and discover, for instance, that diseases are caused by microscopic organisms, not by demons. So there is a lot that can be said for materialism, and it's not surprising that a methodology that's been so productive would be strongly embraced and fiercely defended.
On the other hand, there's a downside to materialism. I would say that materialism has not been very productive in areas like moral and spiritual advancement, or understanding creativity and inspiration, or promoting the dignity of man. In fact, it could be argued that there has been some backsliding in these areas. The 20th century, which was, at least so far, the heyday of materialism, was also the age of two world wars, genocide, global terrorism, a nuclear arms race, environmental degradation, eugenics, and a widespread sense of existentialist despair in much of the developed world.
I would say that materialism is fine when used as a method, but it is a mistake to elevate a method to the status of a metaphysical principle. The fact that a materialistic methodology works very well, especially in the physical sciences, does not tell us anything about the ultimate nature of the universe. As a rough analogy, Newtonian physics works very well in solving day-to-day engineering problems, but as quantum physics has revealed, the Newtonian system does not tell us how things work at a foundational level. So something can work in a limited area without necessarily being indicative of the nature of reality as a whole.
5)Do you think that a materialistic or physicalist worldview could consistently account for the origin of life, morality or normative values, free will, consciousness and parapsychological phenomena? Or could it account for some of them but not for the others?
I very much doubt that a materialistic worldview can account for any of those things. Materialism has made essentially no progress in solving the so-called "hard problem" of neuroscience, namely, the question of how subjective awareness arises in the first place. It is all well and good to study patterns of electrochemical activity in the brain, but brain states are not synonymous with mental states. A flash of electricity across a synaptic junction is not the same thing as the thought "to be or not to be." They are different things -- not only quantitatively but qualitatively different.
As for the origin of life, I think the fact that life depends on encoded information suggests that it did not develop as the result of purely random processes. A DNA molecule contains at least as much information as a set of encyclopedias, and no one thinks the encyclopedias arose by chance. The sheer complexity of even the so-called "simplest" life form strikes me as impossible to account for by purely random, incremental changes. And note that the amount of time available for such life forms to emerge is constantly shrinking as scientists discover evidence of life further and further back in the history of the earth. It used to be thought that at least a billion years passed before the first living cell was formed, but now it appears that only a few million years, at most, elapsed between the time when the earth started to cool and the time when microorganisms originated.
Some scientists have now been reduced to arguing that life originated elsewhere and came to the earth via meteorites. Of course this only pushes the problem back a step. If life didn't originate here, then it had to originate someplace else and it would face the same obstacles.
The best book I've read on the subject is Origins, by Robert Shapiro, a scientist specializing in origin-of-life studies. He puts forward all the leading theories and then shoots them down one by one.
6)In your opinion, what are the paranormal phenomena better supported by scientific evidence?
My main interest is in evidence for life after death, but I do believe that telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis have all been sufficiently well established by laboratory tests that they would be accepted as real phenomena if not for the resistance engendered by the current materialistic paradigm. Chris Carter has an excellent book called Parapsychology and the Skeptics which covers this material very well. Dean Radin has also written a couple of good books on the subject -- The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds -- and there's a first-rate 800-page overview called Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly et al, that reviews a massive amount of data relevant to these questions.
As far as life after death is concerned, I think there's a wide range of evidence that all converges on the same conclusion. Near-death experiences, some of which include veridical details, have been studied extensively. Mediums were studied throughout the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and while some were fraudulent or self-deluded, a number of them were genuine. Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard, for instance, were each studied for about 20 years by very competent investigators. One of the most compelling areas in mediumship research is the so-called "cross correspondences" -- scattered references appearing in the communications of several different mediums who lived in different parts of the world. At first no one understood these references, but eventually someone had the idea of putting them together like pieces of a puzzle, and it was found that they formed connected messages of considerable complexity, reflecting the interests and knowledge of the purported communicators.
Then there's reincarnation research. Most people are familiar with hypnotists who regress their patients to experience past lives. Some of these cases may be genuine, but the problem is that hypnotized subjects have a tendency to confabulate in order to please the hypnotist. And some cases that initially appeared convincing have turned out, on closer inspection, to have involved subconscious memories of books or movies or even radio dramas from years earlier. Scott Rogo's excellent book The Search for Yesterday points out problems with this line of study.
A better approach, I think, is the one used by Ian Stevenson, a psychology professor who traveled the world to interview young children who spontaneously remembered a past life. Many times, the child provided enough details to allow the previous personality to be identified, and in a substantial number of cases, the child was able to interact with the family of the previous personality and to reveal information that would have been known to the deceased person. Also, in at least a couple of hundred cases, the child had a birthmark or birth defect that corresponded closely to an injury suffered by the previous personality. In one case, for instance, the child was born with the fingers of one hand badly truncated. The child remembered a past life lived in a nearby village. When Stevenson investigated, he found that the person in question had suffered an industrial accident that sliced off the fingers of his hand on the diagonal. The injury corresponded precisely to the child's unusual birth defect. In another case, a child with a pair of unusual puckered birthmarks on his chest and back remembered a specific past life. Stevenson found that the past-life personality had been killed by a gunshot, and that the entry and exit wounds, which he viewed in autopsy photos, matched the two birthmarks.
At this point, more than 2,000 cases of children spontaneously recalling a past life have been investigated, and even though Stevenson has passed on, other researchers are continuing his work. One interesting thing about these reincarnation cases is that they nearly always involve a person who died prematurely -- a young person who died in an accident or as a result of foul play or because of a very sudden fatal illness. It's possible that such people are more likely to reincarnate, or at least to reincarnate quickly, because their time on earth was cut short before they had a chance to learn whatever lessons they were intended to learn. Maybe people who live longer don't have to reincarnate at all, or don't have to come back so soon.
There are lots of other areas of research into life after death. For instance, a psychologist named Alan Botkin has developed a technique called Induced After-Death Communication, in which a patient undergoes a simple treatment that allows him to connect with a deceased loved one. According to Botkin, the results can be extraordinarily powerful and positive, with long-standing emotional problems resolved immediately. This certainly calls for further study.
7)Have you had any personal or first-hand paranormal experience?
Nothing very dramatic. I think when you open your mind to this type of thing, you will probably have some experiences, but they will be meaningful mainly to you and not anyone else. I've certainly had a lot of minor precognitive experiences, usually involving trivial things. I also had the entire plot of a novel come to me in a rush, as if it were being dictated to me. This was profoundly unsettling to me at the time, because I really felt as if the words were coming from somewhere else and I was just trying to type them out as quickly as possible. In fact, that experience is what got me interested in the whole subject of the paranormal in the first place. But again, it probably doesn't sound like much to someone who's just reading about it. They might say, "Well, you're a writer, so of course you're going to get ideas for books." But I'd never had a complete, elaborate plot structure just fall into place out of nowhere like that. So it was meaningful for me, but I doubt it would be meaningful to anyone who just hears about it.
8)Regarding afterlife or survival research, what's in your opinion the best evidence for this hypothesis?
Overall, I think the best cases of mediumship, the strongest NDEs, and the best reincarnation research are like three arrows all pointing to the same conclusion -- namely, that the personality survives death, at least for some period of time. But there is other evidence, as well. Apparitions, hauntings, out-of-body experiences, various forms of after-death communication that don't involve mediums, "ghostly" messages left on various electronic media, deathbed visions, and so on. The book Is There an Afterlife? by David Fontana gives a thorough rundown of much of this evidence, though I think Fontana concentrates a little too much on physical mediumship -- mediumship that involves the manipulation or manifestation of physical objects. I think some of this mediumship is genuine, but there has been a huge amount of fraud, so I would tread extra carefully here.
9)Many people see near-death experiences as providing evidence for survival, but it is not clear even for many NDEs scholars. In your opinion, NDEs (at least, some cases) provide evidence for survival of consciousness? And how much evidential value you would give it to support the survival hypothesis?
Yes, I think some NDEs provide very good evidence of postmortem survival. There are those who disagree. For instance, in his book Immortal Remains, Stephen E. Braude argues that NDEs can be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition. But I find such elaborate arguments unconvincing. It is simpler to accept NDEs as what the experiencers themselves say they are -- actual glimpses of the early stages of the next phase of existence. Still, I realize that unless a person has studied the literature for himself, this contention will not be very convincing. What makes it convincing is the sheer quantity of cases and the quality of many of them. You have to immerse yourself in the literature, and if you do so with an open mind, you will find your natural skepticism gradually worn down as you read case after case after case. Or at least this is what I've found to be true.
10)Do you see any contradiction or tension between reincarnation and evolutionary biology? The existence of reincarnation suggests some kind of independent “spiritual” path parallel to the evolutionary line and some regard this as implausible.
No, I can't see any contradiction there. I haven't encountered this objection before. I would not assume that biological evolution is an entirely undirected process. It could be a combination of undirected, random events and purposeful planning that originates in a spiritual dimension. I doubt it's entirely purposeful, or there would not be so many dead ends and false starts. On the other hand, it may not be wholly a matter of chance, either. I doubt very much that the neo-Darwinian model is the full and final answer, though it is probably part of the answer. Also, I don't know if reincarnation applies to lower life forms, or only to human beings -- perhaps only to certain human beings.
11)Do you think that, given the best evidence for some psi phenomena and afterlife, it is reasonable to remain skeptical about it? I mean, could a neutral observer examine the best evidence, and remain skeptical about it?
That's a good question. For me personally, I have found that my skepticism -- which was considerable when I started -- gave way to a pretty high level of belief. I would say I'm about 95% convinced of life after death. In the absence of any direct personal experience, such as an NDE of my own, I probably will not reach 100%.
But I don't have to be 100% sure. After all, how many things can we ever be 100% sure of? I'm not even 100% sure the sun will rise tomorrow.
I wouldn't want to prescribe how other people ought to react to the evidence. Different people have different thresholds of belief. Some people accept it right away, and other people will never accept it. And I don't think that's really a problem. Why should everybody believe the same things? Why should we all march in lockstep? Disagreements may produce friction, but friction can produce the spark of a new idea, a new insight. It would be a dull world if everyone agreed on everything and we all thought and behaved the same way.
12)You have supported the transmission theory of consciousness as a reasonable explanation for the mind-body connection. In your opinion, what are the strong and weak aspects of this theory?
The strongest aspect is that the theory covers all the known facts, while the production theory -- the idea that the mind is produced by the brain -- covers only some of the facts. The production theory is not consistent with the evidence of parapsychology, so people who want to uphold the production theory have to dispute, or dismiss out of hand, all the evidence that parapsychologists have accumulated.
The weakest aspect is that we still don't know the mechanism by which transmission would occur. We can use the analogy of a television signal being received by a television set, but this is only a crude illustration, and no one is saying that the mind is actually an electromagnetic signal.
On the other hand, proponents of the production theory can't explain the mechanism by which subjective awareness arises out of physical matter, either. So neither theory can explain, in detailed step-by-step fashion, exactly how consciousness works. In fact, I'm not sure that either viewpoint should even be called a "theory." Neither one offers enough detail to qualify as a theory in the strict sense, and I'm not sure how we would go about testing either idea at the moment. There is still a great deal that we just don't know.
13)The survival hypothesis has been challenged by the Super-ESP hypothesis; and many parapsychologists tend to be agnostic regarding an afterlife, precisely because the Super-ESP seems to be a reasonable alternative. Do you consider the latter a serious alternative to the survival hypothesis?
I'm not a fan of the super-ESP hypothesis because it would require a range of psychic abilities that have never been observed or measured in a laboratory. I have no doubt that telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. do exist, as mentioned above, but these abilities seem to be pretty limited. If they were more robust, there wouldn't be any controversy about their existence. They appear to be rather marginal abilities that can produce statistically significant results if you run enough tests and acquire a large enough database. In some cases they can produce spectacular "hits," but these are often followed by serious errors. For instance, a remote viewer may be incredibly accurate with one description and totally off base with the next one.
I don't see anything that would suggest that the kind of ESP we find in the laboratory could do the things that super-ESP is purported to do. Super-ESP would consist of the ability to read the minds of total strangers even at a great distance, to pull relevant pieces of information out of people's minds even if the information is deeply buried in the subconscious, to obtain other relevant details clairvoyantly or precognitively, to put together all these pieces of information into a coherent narrative, to dramatize this narrative in the distinctive personal style of a deceased person -- and to do all this almost instantaneously! Moreover, all of it has to be done unconsciously on the part of the medium. The medium has no idea that she is using these talents, or even that she possesses them. In fact, her subconscious mind must actually concoct an elaborate spiritualistic explanation to conceal the true nature of its activities. And the whole process would have to work consistently, in a fairly glitch-free manner, so that a conversation between the sitter and the purportedly deceased person could take place in real time, with a fairly natural give and take.
I find all of this more implausible than the more straightforward explanation that, in some cases, the medium actually is in contact with a deceased person. Personally, I think super-ESP is put forward as a hypothesis only because some people, while accepting much of the evidence for life after death, simply cannot allow themselves to believe it. Perhaps they think that such a belief is too good to be true, or that it would mark them as "unscientific," or perhaps they have an aversion to the idea of an afterlife and would simply prefer not to believe in it. C.D. Broad, a philosopher with an interest in parapsychology, admitted that while the evidence for life after death was quite good, he was reluctant to accept it because he didn't want to go on existing after death. Eventually, though, he did come around to accepting postmortem survival as the most plausible explanation of all the evidence. But I'm not sure he was happy about it!
14)What books or literature on spirituality, psi research and afterlife would you recommend for the readers of this interview?
I've already mentioned a few, including Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly et al; Parapsychology and the Skeptics, by Chris Carter; Is There an Afterlife? by David Fontana; and Immortal Remains, by Stephen E. Braude. The latter book deals extensively with the super-ESP hypothesis. Other good books include Mediumship and Survival, by Alan Gauld, which also covers super-ESP; The Limits of Influence, by Stephen E. Braude, which discusses psychokinesis; Old Souls, by Tom Shroder, a journalistic account of Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research, which is more readable than Stevenson's dry academic works; Recollections of Death, by Michael Sabom, the first methodical study of the NDE phenomenon; and Mindsight, by Kenneth Ring, which discusses visual perceptions in NDEs reported by people blind from birth. For discussions of psi research unrelated to the afterlife, I would recommend books by Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin.
There are many good books online also, including Death-Bed Visions, by William Barrett; An Amazing Experiment, by Charles Drayton Thomas; The Survival of Man, by Oliver Lodge; and The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, both by Geraldine Cummins. Web sites with good collections include Survival After Death, Spirit Writings, and Survival E-Books .
15)Any further comments you would like to do to end the interview?
I think by now I've said more than enough! Thanks very much for this opportunity.
Links of interest:
-Michael Prescott's website
-Michael Prescott's blog.
I hope this interview will be of the interest for all the readers. Enjoy.
1)Michael, tell us something about your background and how (and why) you got interested in the paranormal?
For many years I basically had a materialistic philosophy, but at a certain point in my life I found it unsatisfying. I felt there ought to be some greater meaning or purpose, so I started looking into things that I had never taken seriously before, such as paranormal phenomena and mystical traditions. It took me a while to be convinced by the evidence, especially when it came to life after death, because I really couldn't visualize such a possibility; it just struck me as impossible on its face. How could you go on existing without a body, and where would you be? Besides, I knew there was a lot of fraud connected with things like mediumship. But eventually I discovered a good deal of persuasive evidence. I was still reluctant to accept the idea completely, though. The earliest essays I wrote on this subject were cautious and equivocal; my attitude was that there might be something to it, but I couldn't be sure.
2)Your blog is one of the better known blogs on the internet regarding the paranormal. Tell us something about your experience being a blogger. Has it been a positive experience?
I enjoy blogging because it lets me get things off my chest and share ideas and get feedback. I've found that blogging on certain controversial subjects, like politics, is not always such a positive experience; I can get pretty worked up on subjects like that, so I've learned to avoid them for the most part. Most of my commenters provide very interesting insights and observations.
3)You’re very familiar with the literature on Christian scholarship, but as far I know, you don’t consider yourself a Christian. What doctrines or claims of Christianity are, in your opinion, worth considering seriously? Do you think the existence of Jesus, and his resurrection, are well-supported facts in the literature? Or instead, the case for Jesus’ existence, or for his resurrection, is weak?
It's true that I'm not a Christian. I think Jesus was a very advanced spiritual master, but I don't think he was part of a triune deity, or that he was omniscient or infallible or omnipotent. I do think he was a real historical figure and that the gospels provide at least a generally reliable overview of his ministry, though undoubtedly with omissions and embellishments. As for the resurrection, I do believe that Jesus' followers witnessed his reappearance after his death. I think what they were probably seeing is what spiritualists today would call the etheric body, which can have physical attributes and yet do things that an ordinary earthly body can't do, like vanish at will. I suspect that Jesus chose his disciples in large part because they had latent psychic abilities of their own, which might have helped them to perceive the etheric body.
4)In your view, what explains the strong hegemony of materialism in intellectual and academic circles?
Well, there's no denying the fact that materialism has been an extraordinarily successful and productive methodology. The physical sciences, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, have made incredible strides over the past couple of hundred years. The sheer amount of information we have about our world today dwarfs anything that was available to, say, Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the very best educated people of his time. In Jefferson's day, you could become a true polymath -- an expert in a variety of specialties. Today that kind of wide-ranging expertise is almost impossible because each specialty has become so incredibly complex. We have accomplished things that would have been considered unthinkable, even magical, as recently as a hundred years ago. As I write this, we are marking the 40th anniversary of man's first landing on the moon, a staggering feat. And now we can communicate with each other via the Internet, which serves as a kind of global nervous system linking billions of minds in real time.
So it's important not to downplay the astonishing success of science, which, ever since the Enlightenment, has depended on essentially a materialistic methodology. What I mean is that modern science does not accept any supernatural explanations. The "rules of the game" require scientists to keep looking until a purely natural explanation can be found for any phenomenon. This insistence on natural explanations has allowed scientists to overcome centuries of religious dogmatism and discover, for instance, that diseases are caused by microscopic organisms, not by demons. So there is a lot that can be said for materialism, and it's not surprising that a methodology that's been so productive would be strongly embraced and fiercely defended.
On the other hand, there's a downside to materialism. I would say that materialism has not been very productive in areas like moral and spiritual advancement, or understanding creativity and inspiration, or promoting the dignity of man. In fact, it could be argued that there has been some backsliding in these areas. The 20th century, which was, at least so far, the heyday of materialism, was also the age of two world wars, genocide, global terrorism, a nuclear arms race, environmental degradation, eugenics, and a widespread sense of existentialist despair in much of the developed world.
I would say that materialism is fine when used as a method, but it is a mistake to elevate a method to the status of a metaphysical principle. The fact that a materialistic methodology works very well, especially in the physical sciences, does not tell us anything about the ultimate nature of the universe. As a rough analogy, Newtonian physics works very well in solving day-to-day engineering problems, but as quantum physics has revealed, the Newtonian system does not tell us how things work at a foundational level. So something can work in a limited area without necessarily being indicative of the nature of reality as a whole.
5)Do you think that a materialistic or physicalist worldview could consistently account for the origin of life, morality or normative values, free will, consciousness and parapsychological phenomena? Or could it account for some of them but not for the others?
I very much doubt that a materialistic worldview can account for any of those things. Materialism has made essentially no progress in solving the so-called "hard problem" of neuroscience, namely, the question of how subjective awareness arises in the first place. It is all well and good to study patterns of electrochemical activity in the brain, but brain states are not synonymous with mental states. A flash of electricity across a synaptic junction is not the same thing as the thought "to be or not to be." They are different things -- not only quantitatively but qualitatively different.
As for the origin of life, I think the fact that life depends on encoded information suggests that it did not develop as the result of purely random processes. A DNA molecule contains at least as much information as a set of encyclopedias, and no one thinks the encyclopedias arose by chance. The sheer complexity of even the so-called "simplest" life form strikes me as impossible to account for by purely random, incremental changes. And note that the amount of time available for such life forms to emerge is constantly shrinking as scientists discover evidence of life further and further back in the history of the earth. It used to be thought that at least a billion years passed before the first living cell was formed, but now it appears that only a few million years, at most, elapsed between the time when the earth started to cool and the time when microorganisms originated.
Some scientists have now been reduced to arguing that life originated elsewhere and came to the earth via meteorites. Of course this only pushes the problem back a step. If life didn't originate here, then it had to originate someplace else and it would face the same obstacles.
The best book I've read on the subject is Origins, by Robert Shapiro, a scientist specializing in origin-of-life studies. He puts forward all the leading theories and then shoots them down one by one.
6)In your opinion, what are the paranormal phenomena better supported by scientific evidence?
My main interest is in evidence for life after death, but I do believe that telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis have all been sufficiently well established by laboratory tests that they would be accepted as real phenomena if not for the resistance engendered by the current materialistic paradigm. Chris Carter has an excellent book called Parapsychology and the Skeptics which covers this material very well. Dean Radin has also written a couple of good books on the subject -- The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds -- and there's a first-rate 800-page overview called Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly et al, that reviews a massive amount of data relevant to these questions.
As far as life after death is concerned, I think there's a wide range of evidence that all converges on the same conclusion. Near-death experiences, some of which include veridical details, have been studied extensively. Mediums were studied throughout the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and while some were fraudulent or self-deluded, a number of them were genuine. Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard, for instance, were each studied for about 20 years by very competent investigators. One of the most compelling areas in mediumship research is the so-called "cross correspondences" -- scattered references appearing in the communications of several different mediums who lived in different parts of the world. At first no one understood these references, but eventually someone had the idea of putting them together like pieces of a puzzle, and it was found that they formed connected messages of considerable complexity, reflecting the interests and knowledge of the purported communicators.
Then there's reincarnation research. Most people are familiar with hypnotists who regress their patients to experience past lives. Some of these cases may be genuine, but the problem is that hypnotized subjects have a tendency to confabulate in order to please the hypnotist. And some cases that initially appeared convincing have turned out, on closer inspection, to have involved subconscious memories of books or movies or even radio dramas from years earlier. Scott Rogo's excellent book The Search for Yesterday points out problems with this line of study.
A better approach, I think, is the one used by Ian Stevenson, a psychology professor who traveled the world to interview young children who spontaneously remembered a past life. Many times, the child provided enough details to allow the previous personality to be identified, and in a substantial number of cases, the child was able to interact with the family of the previous personality and to reveal information that would have been known to the deceased person. Also, in at least a couple of hundred cases, the child had a birthmark or birth defect that corresponded closely to an injury suffered by the previous personality. In one case, for instance, the child was born with the fingers of one hand badly truncated. The child remembered a past life lived in a nearby village. When Stevenson investigated, he found that the person in question had suffered an industrial accident that sliced off the fingers of his hand on the diagonal. The injury corresponded precisely to the child's unusual birth defect. In another case, a child with a pair of unusual puckered birthmarks on his chest and back remembered a specific past life. Stevenson found that the past-life personality had been killed by a gunshot, and that the entry and exit wounds, which he viewed in autopsy photos, matched the two birthmarks.
At this point, more than 2,000 cases of children spontaneously recalling a past life have been investigated, and even though Stevenson has passed on, other researchers are continuing his work. One interesting thing about these reincarnation cases is that they nearly always involve a person who died prematurely -- a young person who died in an accident or as a result of foul play or because of a very sudden fatal illness. It's possible that such people are more likely to reincarnate, or at least to reincarnate quickly, because their time on earth was cut short before they had a chance to learn whatever lessons they were intended to learn. Maybe people who live longer don't have to reincarnate at all, or don't have to come back so soon.
There are lots of other areas of research into life after death. For instance, a psychologist named Alan Botkin has developed a technique called Induced After-Death Communication, in which a patient undergoes a simple treatment that allows him to connect with a deceased loved one. According to Botkin, the results can be extraordinarily powerful and positive, with long-standing emotional problems resolved immediately. This certainly calls for further study.
7)Have you had any personal or first-hand paranormal experience?
Nothing very dramatic. I think when you open your mind to this type of thing, you will probably have some experiences, but they will be meaningful mainly to you and not anyone else. I've certainly had a lot of minor precognitive experiences, usually involving trivial things. I also had the entire plot of a novel come to me in a rush, as if it were being dictated to me. This was profoundly unsettling to me at the time, because I really felt as if the words were coming from somewhere else and I was just trying to type them out as quickly as possible. In fact, that experience is what got me interested in the whole subject of the paranormal in the first place. But again, it probably doesn't sound like much to someone who's just reading about it. They might say, "Well, you're a writer, so of course you're going to get ideas for books." But I'd never had a complete, elaborate plot structure just fall into place out of nowhere like that. So it was meaningful for me, but I doubt it would be meaningful to anyone who just hears about it.
8)Regarding afterlife or survival research, what's in your opinion the best evidence for this hypothesis?
Overall, I think the best cases of mediumship, the strongest NDEs, and the best reincarnation research are like three arrows all pointing to the same conclusion -- namely, that the personality survives death, at least for some period of time. But there is other evidence, as well. Apparitions, hauntings, out-of-body experiences, various forms of after-death communication that don't involve mediums, "ghostly" messages left on various electronic media, deathbed visions, and so on. The book Is There an Afterlife? by David Fontana gives a thorough rundown of much of this evidence, though I think Fontana concentrates a little too much on physical mediumship -- mediumship that involves the manipulation or manifestation of physical objects. I think some of this mediumship is genuine, but there has been a huge amount of fraud, so I would tread extra carefully here.
9)Many people see near-death experiences as providing evidence for survival, but it is not clear even for many NDEs scholars. In your opinion, NDEs (at least, some cases) provide evidence for survival of consciousness? And how much evidential value you would give it to support the survival hypothesis?
Yes, I think some NDEs provide very good evidence of postmortem survival. There are those who disagree. For instance, in his book Immortal Remains, Stephen E. Braude argues that NDEs can be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition. But I find such elaborate arguments unconvincing. It is simpler to accept NDEs as what the experiencers themselves say they are -- actual glimpses of the early stages of the next phase of existence. Still, I realize that unless a person has studied the literature for himself, this contention will not be very convincing. What makes it convincing is the sheer quantity of cases and the quality of many of them. You have to immerse yourself in the literature, and if you do so with an open mind, you will find your natural skepticism gradually worn down as you read case after case after case. Or at least this is what I've found to be true.
10)Do you see any contradiction or tension between reincarnation and evolutionary biology? The existence of reincarnation suggests some kind of independent “spiritual” path parallel to the evolutionary line and some regard this as implausible.
No, I can't see any contradiction there. I haven't encountered this objection before. I would not assume that biological evolution is an entirely undirected process. It could be a combination of undirected, random events and purposeful planning that originates in a spiritual dimension. I doubt it's entirely purposeful, or there would not be so many dead ends and false starts. On the other hand, it may not be wholly a matter of chance, either. I doubt very much that the neo-Darwinian model is the full and final answer, though it is probably part of the answer. Also, I don't know if reincarnation applies to lower life forms, or only to human beings -- perhaps only to certain human beings.
11)Do you think that, given the best evidence for some psi phenomena and afterlife, it is reasonable to remain skeptical about it? I mean, could a neutral observer examine the best evidence, and remain skeptical about it?
That's a good question. For me personally, I have found that my skepticism -- which was considerable when I started -- gave way to a pretty high level of belief. I would say I'm about 95% convinced of life after death. In the absence of any direct personal experience, such as an NDE of my own, I probably will not reach 100%.
But I don't have to be 100% sure. After all, how many things can we ever be 100% sure of? I'm not even 100% sure the sun will rise tomorrow.
I wouldn't want to prescribe how other people ought to react to the evidence. Different people have different thresholds of belief. Some people accept it right away, and other people will never accept it. And I don't think that's really a problem. Why should everybody believe the same things? Why should we all march in lockstep? Disagreements may produce friction, but friction can produce the spark of a new idea, a new insight. It would be a dull world if everyone agreed on everything and we all thought and behaved the same way.
12)You have supported the transmission theory of consciousness as a reasonable explanation for the mind-body connection. In your opinion, what are the strong and weak aspects of this theory?
The strongest aspect is that the theory covers all the known facts, while the production theory -- the idea that the mind is produced by the brain -- covers only some of the facts. The production theory is not consistent with the evidence of parapsychology, so people who want to uphold the production theory have to dispute, or dismiss out of hand, all the evidence that parapsychologists have accumulated.
The weakest aspect is that we still don't know the mechanism by which transmission would occur. We can use the analogy of a television signal being received by a television set, but this is only a crude illustration, and no one is saying that the mind is actually an electromagnetic signal.
On the other hand, proponents of the production theory can't explain the mechanism by which subjective awareness arises out of physical matter, either. So neither theory can explain, in detailed step-by-step fashion, exactly how consciousness works. In fact, I'm not sure that either viewpoint should even be called a "theory." Neither one offers enough detail to qualify as a theory in the strict sense, and I'm not sure how we would go about testing either idea at the moment. There is still a great deal that we just don't know.
13)The survival hypothesis has been challenged by the Super-ESP hypothesis; and many parapsychologists tend to be agnostic regarding an afterlife, precisely because the Super-ESP seems to be a reasonable alternative. Do you consider the latter a serious alternative to the survival hypothesis?
I'm not a fan of the super-ESP hypothesis because it would require a range of psychic abilities that have never been observed or measured in a laboratory. I have no doubt that telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. do exist, as mentioned above, but these abilities seem to be pretty limited. If they were more robust, there wouldn't be any controversy about their existence. They appear to be rather marginal abilities that can produce statistically significant results if you run enough tests and acquire a large enough database. In some cases they can produce spectacular "hits," but these are often followed by serious errors. For instance, a remote viewer may be incredibly accurate with one description and totally off base with the next one.
I don't see anything that would suggest that the kind of ESP we find in the laboratory could do the things that super-ESP is purported to do. Super-ESP would consist of the ability to read the minds of total strangers even at a great distance, to pull relevant pieces of information out of people's minds even if the information is deeply buried in the subconscious, to obtain other relevant details clairvoyantly or precognitively, to put together all these pieces of information into a coherent narrative, to dramatize this narrative in the distinctive personal style of a deceased person -- and to do all this almost instantaneously! Moreover, all of it has to be done unconsciously on the part of the medium. The medium has no idea that she is using these talents, or even that she possesses them. In fact, her subconscious mind must actually concoct an elaborate spiritualistic explanation to conceal the true nature of its activities. And the whole process would have to work consistently, in a fairly glitch-free manner, so that a conversation between the sitter and the purportedly deceased person could take place in real time, with a fairly natural give and take.
I find all of this more implausible than the more straightforward explanation that, in some cases, the medium actually is in contact with a deceased person. Personally, I think super-ESP is put forward as a hypothesis only because some people, while accepting much of the evidence for life after death, simply cannot allow themselves to believe it. Perhaps they think that such a belief is too good to be true, or that it would mark them as "unscientific," or perhaps they have an aversion to the idea of an afterlife and would simply prefer not to believe in it. C.D. Broad, a philosopher with an interest in parapsychology, admitted that while the evidence for life after death was quite good, he was reluctant to accept it because he didn't want to go on existing after death. Eventually, though, he did come around to accepting postmortem survival as the most plausible explanation of all the evidence. But I'm not sure he was happy about it!
14)What books or literature on spirituality, psi research and afterlife would you recommend for the readers of this interview?
I've already mentioned a few, including Irreducible Mind, by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly et al; Parapsychology and the Skeptics, by Chris Carter; Is There an Afterlife? by David Fontana; and Immortal Remains, by Stephen E. Braude. The latter book deals extensively with the super-ESP hypothesis. Other good books include Mediumship and Survival, by Alan Gauld, which also covers super-ESP; The Limits of Influence, by Stephen E. Braude, which discusses psychokinesis; Old Souls, by Tom Shroder, a journalistic account of Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research, which is more readable than Stevenson's dry academic works; Recollections of Death, by Michael Sabom, the first methodical study of the NDE phenomenon; and Mindsight, by Kenneth Ring, which discusses visual perceptions in NDEs reported by people blind from birth. For discussions of psi research unrelated to the afterlife, I would recommend books by Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin.
There are many good books online also, including Death-Bed Visions, by William Barrett; An Amazing Experiment, by Charles Drayton Thomas; The Survival of Man, by Oliver Lodge; and The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, both by Geraldine Cummins. Web sites with good collections include Survival After Death, Spirit Writings, and Survival E-Books .
15)Any further comments you would like to do to end the interview?
I think by now I've said more than enough! Thanks very much for this opportunity.
Links of interest:
-Michael Prescott's website
-Michael Prescott's blog.
