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Media Watch for March 2004 (Issue 28)
Old views are still strong. Writer Richard Rowley recently told us that a new text book is repeating old myths about Spiritualism as if they were true. He said that authors Ludy Benjamin and David Becker derive most of their knowledge of Spiritualism from Leahey and Leahey’s 1983 Chicago publication, Psychology’s Occult Doubles (0882297171) for their book, From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession and Practice of Psychology in America, (ISBN: 0155042645). He said that the authors talk of all circles holding hands, and mention the Fox sisters, who “discovered that they could make weird noises by cracking the joints in their toes, and they used this ability to trick their superstitious mother into believing that a ghost was present.” Rowley continued, “So the myth of the cracking joints is still alive, in spite of it having been disproved by medical science. Raps of such loudness and intensity cannot possibly be produced without damaging the joints themselves, so that they could not have been sustained beyond a very short time, if they really were produced in this manner.
“The authors quote directly from Leahey and Leahey’s book: ‘So many visitors came to their cabin that the older sister, Leah Fox Fish, noticed the financial possibilities of going into the ghost business.’”
Rowley observed in his letter to us that, “What is startling is that the authors make no mention of J.B. Rhine and the birth of Parapsychology. Nor was there any reference to Trans-Personal Psychology, Metapsychiatry and developments in the areas of ITC and EVP, and the work of such psychic researchers as Dr. Hamilton of Winnipeg, Manly Hall, Ira Progoff, and more recently, Gary Schwartz.”
Comment: A brief survey of current survival research should have helped Benjamin and Becker accept the validity of the Peddler. Apparently there is danger in basing current fact on ancient history. Such unsupported bias amounts to an expression of prejudice that should not be condoned in a text book.
The Soul Hypothesis. Elaine Jarvik writes that Dick Burgess, a neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Utah is “challenging the generally accepted scientific belief that voluntary motor activity—making a fist, for example—is essentially no different, physiologically, from an involuntary movement like a knee-jerk reflex. The perception that we will ourselves to make the fist is just a perception. The decision to make a fist, as this explanation goes, is a result of nerve activity begun by other nerve activity, influenced by external and internal stimuli.” But Burgess wonders whether something else—a separate consciousness, a soul perhaps—is what sets voluntary activity into motion.
Burgess recounts the baffling case of Uttara Haddur, a Hindu woman who started speaking in a form of antiquated Bengali in 1974. She told stories of people that she said she knew from a village hundreds of miles away. She told people that her name was Sharada. Ian Stevenson, University of Virginia Medical Center psychiatry professor, traveled to India to study Uttara/Sharada. He found that her stories were accurate and that they referenced families and events that happened in the early 1800s. Burgess says, “This case is very difficult to explain unless Sharads’s soul is driving Uttara’s nervous system.”
Burgess says that the soul hypotheses would also explain other phenomena like the “reliable sightings of apparitions, cases where trance mediums have spoken fluently in languages unknown to them, other cases similar to Sharada’s, and near-death experiences in which the nearly dead reported out-of-body experiences in which they saw something—a shoe on a hidden ledge, for example—that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise.” From “The soul hypothesis: Scientist wonders if there is proof for existence of consciousness,” By Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,525036215,00.html
Physical Phenomena at UK Seminar. A successful seminar organized by Alf and June Winchester in October of 2003 at the Cober Hill Conference Centre in Yorkshire treated attendees to flying trumpets and other phenomena. On the first night, participants sat in the dark with medium Stewart Alexander who was positioned in the corner behind a curtain. The group reported that it was not long before two trumpets that had luminous bands on them could be seen floating around. Next, a light was seen and it was strong enough for sitters close to it to distinguish the materialized fingers holding it. The sitters were told that this partly materialized form was that of a regular communicator called Freda. Freda spoke to the sitters via independent direct voice telling them that she was using an ectoplasmic voice box. Freda’s voice could he heard moving across the room. It was noted that the medium, Stewart, is often conscious while the phenomena is taking place and is able to speak to the sitters.
Attendees were able to enjoy another séance the next morning with medium David Thompson. (More in the article below.) David was tied into a chair with plastic cable ties and also gagged. This did not prevent many direct voice communications from being received. Myriad people heard from loved ones and many evidential messages were received. The spirits played musical toys and trumpets flew through the air. Spirit visitors physically touched all of the people who attended this séance.
From “Physical Phenomena at Cober Hill” by Lew Sutton Psychic World No 119 November 2003
A few of the phenomena reported were: 1) The translocation to a different part of the room of the medium bound in his chair. 2) The reversal of the medium’s cardigan, with the plastic ties (that bound him to the chair) still unbroken. 3) A very clear, loud and distinctive series of four voices were heard, all of which answered questions intelligently.
David Thompson is shown here just after the séance, his eyes still covered for protection. The picture is courtesy of the photographer, Veronica Keen.
Strengths of the Evidence. Michael Grosso in an article in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research titled, “Psi, Survival, and Transpersonal Psychology: Some Points of Mutual Support,” addresses the strengths of survival evidence. He writes, “The first thing to note about evidence suggestive of an afterlife is its antiquity, persistence, variety, and surprising abundance. Whatever it is that causes all these afterlife manifestations, something deep in human nature recurrently manages to give the impression, and tends to produce the conviction, that human personalities survive death. Four types of data need to be reckoned with: out-of-body experiences; apparitions of the dead; mediumistic behaviors; and, reincarnation effects. From The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research Volume 94 Numbers 3-4
Negative Thoughts Make you Sick. Activity in the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain is linked to negative emotions and activity in the left pre-frontal cortex is linked to positive emotional responses. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied people with high levels of brain activity in the right pre-frontal cortex (negative emotions). The study linked “negative” brain activity with a weakened immune system. Dr. Richard Davidson, who led the research, said, “Emotions play an important role in modulating bodily systems that influence our health.” From BBC News, Negative Thoughts make you Ill, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3198935.stm
Meditation improves Immune Response. Brain scans have shown researchers that meditation changes brain activity and improves immune response. In other studies, meditation has been shown to lower heart rate and blood pressure thereby reducing the body’s stress response. From “Faith & Healing” by Claudia Kalb, Newsweek Nov. 10 2003
Mind/Body Medicine. The National Institutes of Health will spend 3.5 million over the next several years on mind/body medicine. As you can see from the above two items there is a growing belief in the medical community that a person’s mind can be as important in healing as what happens on a cellular level.
From “Faith & Healing” by Claudia Kalb in Newsweek Nov 10.2003
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There
is Still Physical Mediumship. The International Survivalist Society has included
an article by well known researcher Montague Keen titled, “Physical Phenomena
at the David Thompson Séance of October 25th
2003,” on their
web site. You can find it at
