Michael Prescott's Blog

Time 2021-01-11 01:09:14

Web Name: Michael Prescott's Blog

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Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It s heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times.The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and similar phenomena. In this case, an elderly patient remembered a deeply meaningful event from his time in World War II. After a particularly traumatic day of dealing with casualties from a combat operation, the patient was unable to shake the memory of one patient in particular. He said:“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”I nod, waiting for him to continue.Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”“What was he doing?” I ask.Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”“What was real?”“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’Janssen asked him why he d brought up this subject, and Evan replied:“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”“What’d he say?”“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”Janssen goes on to describe some paranormal experiences of his own, which opened his mind to the conviction that his patients were not merely hallucinating. He writes that while he tried to dismiss one such experience as coincidence ...Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.I would add to this only two things.First, I think there are times when we all feel we are going insane with pain. This particular moment in American history may be one of them – and this is true for people on both sides of the increasingly wide political divide. It is comforting to think that others who ve endured their own share of earthly misery, perhaps in much larger measure, are watching over us and are ready to take our hand and lead us to a better place when it s our time to go.As an aside, I sometimes think that only my exposure to spiritualist concepts and the evidence for them has kept me from losing my mind entirely. Admittedly, sometimes I come pretty close to losing it, anyway ... But as G.K. Chesterton reportedly said when told he was a pretty rotten person for all his Christian faith, Imagine how much worse I would be without Christianity. (Quoted from memory, because I can t track down the actual quote.) In my case, just imagine how much worse I would be without my knowledge of the afterlife and the higher self! I shudder to think of it.Second, I would note that my own rather limited experience with hospice workers, during the brief time when my father was on in-home hospice care, made me realize that these people – people who deal with death on a daily basis – are often profoundly spiritual in their outlook. In fact, I would even describe them as Spiritualist. Some of them use the language and concepts familiar to me from my own readings of Spiritualist literature of a hundred years ago.It is, of course, entirely possible that some people influenced by Spiritualism went into the hospice field precisely so they could attend the dying. But I think it is also the case that hospice workers have witnessed so many examples of anomalous phenomena – deathbed visions, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and so forth – that they have no choice but to adopt the language and mindset of spiritualism in order to make sense of it.I might add that years ago, I was in a used bookstore when two hospice nurses asked the clerk if she had any of John Edward s books. This was a time when John Edward was the most famous medium in America. I somewhat regret not talking to those nurses, as I imagine they had some interesting stories to tell.To repeat what hospice patient Evan said, his comfort came from knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.” This is so easy to forget and so hard to remember. Yet it is true – profoundly true.Why do we forget? My forthcoming book The Far Horizon has some thoughts on this, essentially suggesting that we are temporarily players in a fully immersive virtual-reality environment. Fully immersive means we cannot easily emerge from the illusion of earthly life. We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow. And those who refuse to engage with the world and endure its highs and lows, those who prefer to sequester themselves in ignorance and apathy, are missing out and will probably have to return again and again until they learn their lesson.The late Bruce Siegel, who often commented on this blog, liked to emphasize the primary role of love in any understanding of life and spirituality. I was frequently inclined to downplay his input, preferring to focus on more scientific concepts like information theory. But I m starting to suspect he was right all along. Without love, what is there? What s the point?Ultimately, one way or the other, all the pain and drama of this world will fade like a bad dream. That s worth remembering at times when the bad dream becomes especially nightmarish.Duncan is in his grave;After life s fitful fever he sleeps well;Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,Can touch him further.MacBeth Act 3, Scene 2 Well, it happened. I’ve been watching the comments total for a while, and today we hit the magic number of 50,000.Fifty. Thousand.Woohoo! Let the celebrations begin!Given the frequency of his appearances here, it’s appropriate that comment #50,000 was posted by Art. Here it is:I made a D in political science 101 in college. That pretty much describes my interest in politics over my entire life. I was an Animal Science/Agriculture major in college and when I finally started taking courses in my major my GPA shot up and I actually made the Dean s list for a couple of quarters. I have family who are endlessly fascinated by politics and they shame me into voting but I do it for them, not for me. Me? I could care less. Politics to me is sort of like a pendulum and swings back and forth and is just something I have to put up with? I was born mid 20th century during the Eisenhower administration and since that time have lived and managed to survive under all flavors of politics. People tell me all kinds of stuff about how it s going to affect my life but so far? Not so much. It doesn t seem to be any worse now than it was when I was growing up, especially during the 1960s when people were getting shot and they made us duck under our desks to save us from Atom bombs? Heck I even remember the Cuban missile crisis and how freaked out people were about that? And Vietnam was even more bizarre. The Universe seems to have a never ending smorgasbord of separation for us to experience in this life and I don t expect it to ever be peace and love in this life? Like my mom used to say to me sometimes, life ain t a bowl of cherries you know kiddo! I certainly never expected that this humble blog would draw this much commentary when I started it two decades ago. So, for all those, past and present, who contributed to this total: I m not interested in arguing the details. All I know is that several swing states stopped counting votes around midnight on Election Night, and when they resumed, Joe Biden enjoyed a remarkable surge of votes.I also know that in some precincts, huge numbers of ballots were delivered in the middle of the night, during the vote-counting hiatus, that had no races filled out except the presidency – 100% for Joe Biden. This happened in Philadelphia and possibly other places.Do I think the election was stolen? Yes, I do.Biden left his house only (approximately) one out of every three days, attended events that consisted of a handful of media people listening to him read off a Teleprompter (very badly), and yet somehow managed to defeat an incumbent president with a huge base of support, a president who attracted more support and more votes, including minority support, than he did in 2016?I don t buy it.Perhaps this is just personal bias on my part. Nevertheless, I will never buy it. And that s that.Readers are free to argue about it, if they wish. For the record, here is what I think:The election was rigged. Moreover, it is likely that all future elections will be rigged. Your vote doesn t matter. The outcome has already been decided. This election was a sham, as it has been in Venezuela and other dictatorships. We have become an oligarchy of rule-by-billionaires. Yes, Trump is a billionaire (or at least he says he is) – but he is a rebel. The other billionaires, such as the software billionaires who are be running things at this point, have no populist instincts and are interested only in squashing the will of the people in order to enforce their own agenda at any cost. We have seen this in the attempts by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to silence any criticism of the status quo.The United States of America has entered a post-representative period in its history. In our case, Caesar was able to cross the Rubicon without anyone particularly noticing, thanks in large part to a willfully compliant national media, which certainly includes the highly overrated Fox News. From this point forward, elections will be entirely meaningless. The results will be determined in advance by the powers that be. Voting is no more than a ritualistic act intended to reassure the hoc polloi that their voice still counts. It does not.I do not recommend voting in any future election whatsoever, except possibly local elections, which may (possibly) not be rigged.Basically, I would opt out of the political system at this point. This is what I intend to do. I m no longer interested in politics, nor do I plan to engage in political controversies. I recognize that my opinion and my persuasive efforts are completely useless. We do not live in a country where the individual s opinion counts.I m not saying this merely because Trump lost. There were many negatives about the Trump presidency, not least his narcissistic and obsessive use of Twitter. But I think it should be obvious to any reasonable observer that Trump, whatever his (many) defects, was infinitely more popular than Biden, a dementia-addled candidate who was unable to hit the campaign trail two-thirds of the time.Where we are now, I think, is in the Augustinian phase of Roman history. Augustus, as you may know, took over the leadership of Rome after the Republic collapsed. He permitted a fairly wide latitude in freedom of speech, and he continued the old forms of the Senate and consuls, but in fact he devised a new and quite practical method of leadership from the top down. He was a genius, which distinguishes him from the idiots who profess to know how to handle our political system going forward. The system authored by Augustus lasted for more than 400 years. I very much doubt that the system authored by Kamala Harris and AOC will last for even one-quarter of that time.The $64,000 question is whether the 70 or 80 million people (who knows how many there really were?) who voted for Trump will accept this new normal or will eventually rebel. They are showing no signs of rebellion so far. I admit that this surprises me. I thought that under the circumstances, civil unrest would be much more widespread. I anticipated the kind of violence from the right that we have seen from the left (Antifa, Black Lives Matter) over the past eight months. Then again, I thought civil unrest would be ignited by the ridiculous demands to shut down businesses and wear masks in the face of a pandemic that is no more serious than the Asian flu or the Hong Kong flu. I was wrong about that; so apparently the American public, in general, is willing to conform to any level of authoritarian demands, no matter how unsupportable and absurd. And the same goes for our vaunted law enforcement officers, who have disgraced themselves by enforcing these ridiculous regulations, and who no longer deserve our support, even as Antifa and BLM target them for destruction. Let them be defunded and destroyed. To be completely honest, I now support Antifa. Their objective is to burn down America. I don t see a problem with this. I would rather see us die quickly than in a long, drawn-out, pointless death. There is dignity in national suicide. There is no dignity in the path we re on now. In any event, the worrisome complacency of Trump supporters may change as the new reality dawns on them that their votes are of no value. Right now, many of them continue to believe, naïvely, that they can still influence the outcome of elections by voting for the candidate they prefer. This faith will be tested and eventually broken in subsequent elections, probably starting with the two Georgia runoff elections for U.S. Senate. Then the question will be: How will the Trump supporters (i.e., the populist American right) react? Will they accept the road to serfdom, or will they rise up in blind, inchoate rebellion?On this pivot point turns the future of our erstwhile democracy. The alternatives seem to be a) willful acquiescence in a soft dictatorship of the tech elites or b) an effort at secession that may or may not succeed.As far as the second option is concerned, I recommend the book American Secession by FH Buckley. This surprisingly levelheaded book presents a number of arguments for secession before ultimately (spoiler alert!) deciding against it. Buckley is a Canadian professor with a longtime interest in American history. His opinions are intelligent, well reasoned, and supported by copious historical evidence and contemporary data. Personally, I think he makes such a good case for secession that his last-minute conversion to a unionist standpoint is less than persuasive.For me personally, I will say that I think some form of secession is the only hope left for preserving any form of freedom on the North American continent. But it is unlikely. We will simply march like lemmings into our 1984-style future. Or is it Brave New World?I am, by the way, fully aware that by expressing such highly charged political opinions on this blog I will alienate people who don t share those opinions. However, I did not start this blog twenty years ago, when I was a mere lad of forty, in order to cultivate popularity. In fact, it never occurred to me that anybody would be interested in my nattering opinions. So whatever happens, happens.I am a loudmouthed asshole, and I intend to continue being a loudmouth asshole, the matter what it costs me. Take it or leave it. When mediums produce strongly evidential information under conditions designed to prevent cheating, three explanations are commonly given. The first is that the medium is actually in touch with the postmortem consciousness of the deceased communicator, who continues to exist and function in an afterlife environment. The second is that the medium is using ESP (or psi) to read the minds of the sitters, or a more robust form of ESP, sometimes called super-ESP (or super-psi), to read the minds of distant strangers, clairvoyantly access hidden documents, etc. The third explanation is that the medium is accessing the Akashic Records.What are these records? According to certain strains of mystical lore, probably originating with Madame Blavatsky s theosophy movement, the Akashic Records consist of the total life experience of every embodied being throughout all of history. The records, which might be visualized as books or computer files, can supposedly be accessed by people with sufficiently powerful psychic talents. The idea is that the medium, rather than getting in touch with a discarnate personality that still functions on another plane, is absorbing the information from these records and then presenting it as if it came from the deceased person directly.If this interpretation is correct, then it could be argued that all the evidence that comes from mediums, no matter how accurate and convincing it may seem, really does nothing to advance the hypothesis that human beings survive death. All that survives, it could be said, is a complete record of their experiences, but the unique self-aware ego – the personal I – has been extinguished. This line of thinking is somewhat popular among people who embrace a spiritual dimension but are not too keen on personal survival.What I want to question is whether there is necessarily any conflict between the idea of the Akashic Records and the idea of personal survival. This point has been brought up before, as I recall, by Matt Rouge in comments on this blog. But it s worth a post of its own.First let me explain my view of the personal self. The easiest approach is via an analogy involving light and refraction.Imagine a beam of pure white light that passes through a prism. The prism refracts the light into a variety of colors. Now, let s say the pure white light is the universal consciousness that is the ground of being, the sine qua non of all existence. Just as pure white light contains all other colors as potentials, universal consciousness contains all varieties of individuated consciousness and potential form. But that potential is not actualized without the prism. Only when consciousness passes through the prism is the rainbow of colors brought out. (Another possible analogy is a beam of laser light passing through a holographic plate and bringing out the three-dimensional image encoded in the plate. But I think the prism is simpler.) For purposes of my analogy, let s say there are countless prisms, each of which is different from any of the others. When the light of consciousness passes through any of them, it produces a unique pattern. To reverse the motto on our currency, e pluribus unum, it s a case of out of one – many. But what is this prism? It s the whole constellation or matrix of experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories, and other subjective content connected with any particular embodied existence. This is why every prism is different from all the rest. Each is built up out of a unique set of experiences and responses.The prism, then, is just like one of the books or computer files in the Akashic Records. It is a complete record of all the experiences and attendant mental states that make up a particular life. And in this sense, I think the Akashic Records do exist. It is irrelevant whether we think of them existing in some library somewhere or floating around in space or whatever. Conventional concepts of space and location are probably inapplicable to higher planes of reality anyway. The bottom line is that the complete dossier on each one of us that mediums are said to access, according to the Akashic Records hypothesis, is probably very real.Even so, it does not follow that postmortem survival is not real. In fact, I think the opposite conclusion is implied.What, after all, is the self, the personal consciousness or personality or ego or I that would survive death? It is the interaction of the pure light of consciousness with a specific prism. All that is required for the personality to exist and function is a) a matrix of experiences that defines that particular personality and makes it unique from all others, and b) pure consciousness focused on this matrix.As long as the matrix exists, the person with whom it is associated will also exist – at least if universal consciousness continues to interact with the matrix. And if universal consciousness is the ground of being, it must continue to interact with the matrix, because it interacts with everything. Anything outside of universal consciousness would be outside of existence altogether; it would not be a thing at all; it would not exist.In short, it is perfectly possible to combine the idea of the Akashic Records with the idea of personal survival. Moreover, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the two. As long as the matrix of one s life experience exists, then it must be bathed in the pure light of consciousness that perfuses everything, and so the individual personality must continue.Now, it could be argued that the whole idea of a record of one s life – a matrix – surviving after death is mistaken. We might think that this matrix just crumbles away once physical life is over. In that case there would be no Akashic Records and no postmortem survival, and the only explanation for evidential mediumship, other than fraud, would be super-ESP.I find this alternative unlikely. The destruction of the information matrix would seem to be possible only in the context of linear time, because only in linear time do you have beginnings and endings (creation and destruction). While the matrix is certainly built up over the course of a lifetime in linear time, there is little likelihood that the matrix as such exists only in linear time. It is far more plausible that it is stored in some extracerebral fashion, which would place it outside the physical plane and therefore, presumably, outside of time and space as we understand them.If this is not true, then we are left with the difficult task of explaining many documented cases that strongly suggest extracerebral consciousness, such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, epiphanies of cosmic consciousness, past-life recall, and savant syndrome. To sum up, I think the likeliest scenario is one in which a nonphysical matrix of information, constructed over the course of a lifetime of experience, persists after physical death. Universal consciousness, which itself is egoless and impersonal, acquires the characteristics of ego and personality when it is refracted and individualized by this matrix. The intersection of the thoughts and memories that make up a unique mindset on the one hand and the vivifying power of pure consciousness on the other is what produces the individual self. I just submitted this review to Amazon, and since it s relevant to our interests, I thought I d also post it here. ____Retired college professor Stafford Betty has written more than one book on visions of the afterlife. In these books, such as The Afterlife Unveiled, he has compiled excerpts from channeled literature — material purportedly conveyed from departed souls via automatic writing. His latest book, The Afterlife Therapist, is a departure from these previous books in that it is a work of fiction. Now I can already hear skeptics guffawing that the channeled material is equally fictional, and I suspect some of it is. But the new book is avowedly fictional — the story of psychological counselor Aiden Lovejoy, who continues his occupation in the first sphere of the “afterworld.” I came to the novel not knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The Afterlife Therapist is as deeply researched as Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, and offers greater psychological depth. The characters may be angels, but they are not saints. They are, after all, still at a comparatively low level of spiritual evolution, still subject to ego-driven conflicts and doubts. Dr. Lovejoy is by no means too good to be true; his character faults prove frustrating to his colleagues and mentors in the next world, just as they did when he was on earth. His arc of development, which is by no means completed at the story’s end, is entirely believable. This focus on the imperfections of all-too-human souls sets The Afterlife Therapist apart from similar books. Another key difference with other books is the novel’s variety of characters and incidents. Just when you think you know where the story is going, it jogs off in a new direction. Some of these moves are quite bold; at one point, a historical character is introduced, reigning over a petty kingdom in a shadowy netherworld. When his name came up, I thought, “This is probably going to be over the top,” but it plays out very well. Speaking of shadowy netherworlds, I have to say that, for me, the chapters set in the lowest levels of the afterworld were especially compelling. Perhaps it reveals something not-so-great about my own level of personal development, but I found Betty’s depiction of these fogbound, grim, rat-infested hells viscerally real. Having read many books on postmortem survival, I’m inclined to believe in it. My expectations with regard to the next life are not always in line with Stafford Betty’s — his afterworld is essentially physical; it exists in physical space not far from the planet Earth, though it is undetectable by Earth’s instruments. While this is consistent with some channeled literature, I feel that asking for the physical location of the afterworld is like asking for the physical location of a dreamscape. We’re dealing, I suspect, with a spectrum of frequencies of consciousness, rather than of matter. But nobody is going to agree on all details of such an esoteric subject, and the truth, as J.B.S. Haldane once said of the universe, is probably not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. In any event, the physicality of the afterworld in Betty’s novel allows for an interesting excursion to several alien planets, another bold move that works out better than you might think. I highly recommend The Afterlife Therapist as an ambitious, imaginative, serious, and self-reflective work that reaches far beyond the usual limits of afterlife exploration. Multiple news outlets have confirmed that James ( The Amazing ) Randi, famed magician, escape artist, and skeptic of the paranormal, has died at the age of 92. Gabe Yuen, one of our faithful commentariat, informed me of this last night. Naturally, given the subject matter of this blog, I was frequently in disagreement with Randi s opinions. But now is not the time for criticism. Looking for something positive to say, I remembered a post from 2008 that relied heavily on a chapter in Randi s book Film-Flam! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) I ve reproduced it below, with updated links. Comments are open but will be moderated with a heavier hand than usual. I m not a fan of badmouthing the recently deceased, and I m especially unimpressed with people who try to predict the afterlife experience of someone who s just passed. When it comes to assessing someone s essential spiritual value, I think the best advice is, Judge not, lest ye be judged. James Randi as a young man The conning of the fairiesSince I ve written two recent posts on Arthur Conan Doyle, I thought I should take up the most notorious incident in his career as a paranormal investigator - the case of the Cottingley Fairies. The story is pretty well known and needs no retelling here; those who are interested can read the essentials in Doyle s own book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies. The complete text is available online, along with all the photos that featured in the controversy. A much shorter version of the story, with some photos, is found at Wikipedia; unlike some Wiki articles on the paranormal, this one seems to be accurate, at least at the present time.Probably the most famous criticism of the Cottingley case was presented by James Randi. In his well-known book Flim-Flam!, Randi devotes all of Chapter 2 to an in-depth analysis of the controversy, which includes original research making use of the then-new technique of computer scanning.I must admit that when I read Doyle s book, I was hoping to find his presentation of the facts more convincing - and hence less damaging to his reputation - than I d been led to expect. Not that I harbored any doubts about the photos; they are obvious fakes, and their artificiality is immediately apparent to any modern viewer, though people in Doyle s era were considerably less sophisticated in regard to trick photography. What strikes us as clear fakery apparently looked pretty convincing to some people - even presumed photographic experts - of that day.So yes, the photos are undoubtedly fakes; nothing can alter that fact. But if Doyle had presented his case with appropriate qualifying remarks, he might have escaped much of the opprobrium he later suffered. Sadly, he did not. Though he sounds a few notes of caution, the overall attitude of his book is that of a true believer, doggedly certain that these five photos are the beginning of a new era for humanity, a time when the mystical creatures previously seen only by clairvoyants would become visible to us all. No wonder he described the Cottingley photos as epoch-making. In his book, elaborate and highly doubtful claims are made on behalf of the photos. It is claimed that the fairies are clearly in motion in the stills, when actually there is little if any blur on the figures - understandably, since they were cutouts. It is claimed that only a photographic genius with the full resources of a studio at his disposal could have attempted such fakes; in reality, the shots were easily done by placing the cutouts in front of a human subject. It is claimed that innocent little girls never lie; well, not all girls are so innocent. Though I m not normally a fan of Randi, I must admit that in Flim-Flam! he makes mincemeat of the fairies - and, with his typically unsparing sarcasm, of Doyle as well. According to Randi, Doyle was convinced of many irrationalities ... a man who needed such evidence desperately to bolster his own delusions... [and who] spent some L250,000 in pursuit of this nonsense [i.e., spiritualism]. Doyle himself begins his book with the earnest hope that his arguments for the validity of the photos, even if rejected by the reader, will not prejudice anyone against the idea of life after death, which is to him a separate issue. In this he was surely naive. His exposure as disappointingly gullible in one area of paranormal investigation inevitably colored all subsequent perception of his efforts in other areas. If he could be taken in by two girls playing a childish prank, how can we trust his judgment regarding séances conducted by professional mediums?Although the photos have been thoroughly debunked, interest in the fairies continues. This Web page, part of a site devoted to the Cottingley area, offers some useful information and links. The Museum of Hoaxes covers the topic and includes all five photos. Joe Cooper, who wrote a book on the subject, presents the essentials of the case here. An essay rather sympathetic to Doyle was put out by the Arthur Conan Doyle Society*; it makes the point that the original prints were not as clear as the more modern ones (see the comparison at the very bottom of the page).I have not found anyone who still believes the fairies were real.--- I m sorry to say that our longtime commenter Bruce Siegel passed away this week. As I understand it, Bruce, who was in his seventies, had suffered from serious cardiovascular problems since at least 2016. Though I never met Bruce, I got to know him online through his many comments here and through occasional emails. After his book on precognitive dreams came out, we sometimes exchanged stories of possibly precognitive dreams we d had. Most of mine, for some reason, involved animals — scary ones, like sharks.I reviewed Bruce s book here. Bruce also maintained a blog of his own.One of his last emails to me touched on the work of Stanislav Grof, who had influenced Bruce profoundly. He quoted Grof in The Cosmic Game: The divine does not create something outside of itself, but rather by subdivisions and transformations within the field of its own being ... The various manifestations of evil are expressions of the energy that makes the split-off units of consciousness feel separate from each other. Since the divine play is unimaginable without individual protagonists, the existence of evil is absolutely essential.”Then he added:I love that last insight! It’s really all we need to know about suffering: without the dark side, there is no separation, no individual actors. You and I go back to Oneness. Ecstatic, but after a while, boring (evidently).Good luck, Bruce, in the next phase of your adventure. I m sorry we won t have you with us anymore. Conan Doyle for the Defense, by Margalit Fox, tells the gripping story of Oscar Slater, a German-born Jew who was arrested in Glasgow for the brutal murder of an elderly, wealthy woman, Marion Gilchrist. Sentenced to death, Slater won a reprieve at almost the last minute when his sentence was changed to life imprisonment at the notorious Peterhead Prison, where convicts labored in all weather to hack out chunks of granite to build a breakwater. For 18 years Slater suffered at Peterhead, until – almost miraculously – he found himself released and eventually exonerated in a second trial. His good fortune was due largely to the efforts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had already made a name for himself as an amateur detective capable, at times, of the same feats of ratiocination that characterized his most famous fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes.Doyle* was brought into the case soon after Slater s conviction and quickly became convinced of his innocence. He wrote a scathing book on the subject, but changed few minds. Years later, a personal message from the convict – smuggled out in the form of a rolled-up scrap of paper hidden under a paroled convict s dentures – convinced Doyle to renew his involvement in the controversy. This time he was assisted by an intrepid journalist, William Park. Together the pair put out a new book on Slater that succeeded in rousing the public.There seems little doubt that Slater was the victim of a frame-up by the police and the courts. Originally the police pursued him after hearing that he had hocked a diamond brooch at a Glasgow pawnshop; a diamond brooch was missing from Miss Gilchrist s personal effects. They quickly learned, however, that the pawnshop brooch was not the same one, and moreover, it had been hocked nearly a month before the Gilchrist murder. Doyle scathingly wrote,Already the very bottom of the case had dropped out. The starting link of what had seemed an imposing chain, had suddenly broken … The original suspicion of Slater was founded upon the fact that he had pawned a crescent diamond brooch … It was not the one which was missing from the room of the murdered woman, and it had belonged for years to Slater, who had repeatedly pawned it before. This was shown beyond all cavil or dispute. The case of the police might well seem desperate after this, since if Slater were indeed guilty, it would mean that by pure chance they had pursued the right man. (emphasis in original)Nevertheless, authorities continued to see Slater as the prime suspect, for no evident reason beyond an unwillingness to admit they d made a mistake. Slater s conviction ultimately rested on eyewitness testimony that had changed markedly between the night of the murder and the day of the trial, months later. A competent defense attorney would have brought out these damning changes of memory, but Slater s lawyer fell down on the job. Slater s fate was sealed by the instructions given by the presiding judge, who told the jury:About [the defendant s] character … there is no doubt at all. He has maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women. And he has lived in a way that many blackguards would scorn to live …I use the name Oscar Slater. We do not know who that man is. His name is not Slater … He is a mystery … We do not know where he was born, where he was brought up, what he was brought up to, whether he was trained to anything. The man remains a mystery as much as he was when this trial began … A man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favor which is … a reality in the case of the ordinary man.Most of this was simply untrue. By the time of the trial, Slater s birth name (Oscar Leschziner) was known, as were the circumstances of his early life.The judge s instructions point to one reason why the police were so keen on Slater as a suspect, even in the absence of any tangible link between him and the crime. Slater was widely seen, not without reason, as a shady character. He had used multiple aliases, of which the name Oscar Slater was one; others included Otto Sando and A. Anderson. He had told his neighbors he was a dentist, but this was not true, and his actual source of income was unknown. It was rumored that he was a gambler and loan shark and, less plausibly, a pimp who used his own common-law wife as a prostitute. Beyond all this, he was a foreigner and a Jew in an age when xenophobia and anti-Semitism were rampant.In the book, Fox does her best to broaden the scope of the story by relating the Slater case to conflicting trends in the police methodology of the era – on the one hand, the analysis of physical characteristics as evidence of criminal tendencies, an approach pioneered by Cesare Lombroso**, who believed that certain physiognomical features, such as a protruding brow or sloped forehead, correlated with primitive personality types; and on the other hand, the scientific study of the crime scene and the subtle physical clues it might afford. Naturally, she disparages the first approach, which has no adherents today, while celebrating the second approach, which served as the foundation for modern forensic criminalistics of the CSI type.The trouble is that the Slater case doesn t serve as a very good illustration of either point. Slater was not suspected by the police, or arrested or convicted, because of his physiognomy, except perhaps in the limited sense that he looked Jewish. He was suspected for entirely different reasons, as mentioned above. Moreover, forensic criminalistics did him no favors; the highly regarded criminalist who testified at his trial misstated the evidence left at the crime scene so badly, and made so many questionable or even absurd inferences, that he was instrumental in securing a guilty verdict. Among other things, he insisted that a small, fragile hammer found in Slater s possession could have been the murder weapon, while ignoring a chair in the murder victim s room, the legs of which were spattered in blood. The extensive damage done to Miss Gilchrist was obviously the result of being battered by the chair, which was in fact the conclusion of the first doctor on the scene. But the criminalist never even mentioned the chair or the doctor.In any case, Doyle was for the most part refreshingly untouched by the prejudices of his era, though Fox occasionally tries to paint him in a less flattering light. Quoting Doyle s account of the trial that exonerated Slater, Fox claims that his description is suffused with the Victorian idea about the link between physiognomy and character. I don t see it that way. Doyle describes Slater s lawyer as a Pickwickian figure. His face is as pink as a baby s, and a baby might have owned those eyes of forget-me-not blue. A little heavy the face, but calmly and fresh-complexioned withal, redeemed from weakness by the tight, decided lips. As for Slater himself: It is not an ill-famed face nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible nonetheless for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is. I see no pseudoscientific theories of physiognomy in this description. It is simply a case of a literary man writing (quite ably) in the somewhat florid style of the time.What comes through most clearly in Conan Doyle for the Defense is Doyle s basic decency and dogged determination to clear a man of a wrongful conviction, even though he had no personal acquaintance with the man and clearly held a low opinion of him. For Doyle, the fact that Slater was a disreputable fellow, even a rogue, did not mean that he could be abandoned to the hellish confines of Peterhead prison for life if he had been denied an impartial hearing. Doyle devoted months of strenuous effort, on and off over a period of two decades, to freeing Slater, even paying most of the cost of Slater s defense in his second trial. (Slater s refusal to defray any of the costs even after he had been awarded a 6000-pound settlement by the state upset Doyle s sense of fair play and brought their association to an acrimonious conclusion.)Doyle s implacable commitment to justice, undimmed after nearly twenty years of involvement in the case, is readily apparent in his introduction to the book written by William Park (published by Doyle s own company, the Psychic Press). Doyle writes,It is certain that the case of the alien German Jew, who bore the pseudonym of Oscar Slater, will live in the history of criminology as a miscarriage of justice of a character very unusual in the records of our Courts. There is not one point of the evidence which does not crumble to pieces when it is touched …I fear very little can be done for Slater. Who can restore the vanished years? But his name may be cleared, and possibly some small provision be made for his declining years … Above all, for the credit of British justice, for the discipline of the police force, and for the teaching of officials that their duty to the public has to be done, a thorough public inquiry should be made into the matter … Only when this has been done will the public mind be at ease … It is indeed a lamentable story of official blundering from start to finish. But eighteen years have passed and an innocent man still wears the convict s dress. (emphasis in original)You might wonder how Doyle s interest in psychic phenomena figures in the book. The answer is, it scarcely figures at all, because Fox is clearly somewhat embarrassed by it. She prefers to see Doyle as a rationalist and a humanist, and for her, his devotion to spiritualism does not fit this picture. She writes:On questions of spiritualism, it is clear that Conan Doyle s ardent personal longing eclipsed his scientific acumen. By the 1920s, he had come to believe almost unreservedly in ghosts, fairies, and the reality of life after death.This is not entirely unfair. Doyle did embarrass himself by his overly enthusiastic embrace of some paranormal claims, most notoriously in the Cottingley fairies fiasco, as well as by defending rather obvious frauds like the Davenport brothers. Still, it would be more correct, I think, to see Doyle s steadfast defense of the essential truths of mediumship and life after death, not as a contradiction of his behavior in the Slater case, but rather as another instance of that same behavior. Just as he became convinced of Slater s innocence and insisted on broadcasting this opinion to the world regardless of the world s indifference or hostility, so he likewise, once convinced of the immortality of the soul, never ceased to proselytize for the new revelation, as he titled one of his books. The same courage, tenacity, and independence of thought that defined his approach to Oscar Slater also defined his approach to spiritualism.The book includes an amusing anecdote excerpted from a biography of Conan Doyle written by Russell Miller in 2008. Miller writes:At Windlesham [Doyle s home], Conan Doyle became accustomed to receiving hate mail [about his spiritualist stand], most of which he disregarded, but there was one particularly vituperative letter, dated 16 December 1919, from Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde s former lover and a relatively recent convert to the Roman Catholic church: Sir, What a disgusting beast you are with your filthy caricatures of Christ. The proper way to deal with such a man as you would be to give you a thrashing with a horse whip. … Douglas accused Conan Doyle of promoting spiritualism for the sake of money and notoriety, in short for the same purposes and with the same flat-footed low persistence as you worked your idiot Sherlock Holmes business. He went on to prophecy that Conan Doyle s blasphemous ravings would bring a dreadful judgment on him and signed himself Yours with the utmost contempt. Conan Doyle replied the following day, with a masterful and succinct dismissal: Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me. ----* Margalit Fox refers to Sir Arthur as Conan Doyle throughout, explaining that he took the name Conan as part of a double surname. Some other writers refer to him as Doyle, treating Conan as a middle name. Fox is no doubt correct, but I m accustomed to calling him Doyle and it s a hard habit to break.** Cesare Lombroso, in addition to his now-discredited work as a physiognomist, was also known as a pioneering figure in psychical research.Folks, we ve officially entered a dystopian alternate reality that seems to be combination of Mad Max and Through the Looking Glass. It s not even October, and the wheels of our society are coming off. In this video from Hollywood, the glamour capital of the USA, a confused driver in a Prius blunders into a BLM-Antifa (aka BLAMtifa) riot. The driver cautiously maneuvers around the rioters, avoiding contact with any of them. The rioters, having none of it, dispatch a customized truck to chase down the Prius and block it off. (This is the Mad Max part.) Rioters then swarm the trapped Prius and try to drag the driver out of his car in the hope of delivering a savage beatdown. After having his windshield smashed, the driver manages to back away in his vehicle and escape the scene. In a charming coda (this is the Through the Looking Glass part), we see him pulled over by L.A. s Finest, the Thin Blue Line, the brave men of the LAPD, who arrest him for the crime of not allowing BLAMtifa to kill him. CBS News, reporting the story, says that the driver struck several rioters (he did not) and was stopped by protesters (no, CBS, he was chased down, trapped, and swarmed by a homicidal mob that tried to assassinate him). If you re wondering why the Prius driver didn t just emerge from his car to reason calmly with the protesters, perhaps it s because, like many Angelenos, he s seen footage of what happened to truck driver Reginald Denny in the 1992 riots. Pro tip: Do not ever let them pull you out of your car. Fasten your seatbelts. The next two or three months will be among the most turbulent in American history. Odds are that most of us will come through okay — America is a big place, and BLAMtifa can t be everywhere. Still, it would be a wise precaution to put your personal affairs in order. You never know how far the violence will spread or how many innocents, like the Prius driver, will be caught up in it. And if the angry mobs don t get you, the police (who do not seem to know who they re working for) just might. This is a good time to hunker down and stay safe. It may not be the most heroic option, but for those of us who are not action heroes, it s the sensible thing to do. It s hardly news that many Americans are nervous about the upcoming election, not merely because of uncertainty about who will win but, more profoundly, because of fears that no clear winner will be determined. With mail-in voting to be used on an unprecedented scale, there are questions about the timely delivery and the accurate count of the ballots. Phalanxes of attorneys have already lined up on both sides to challenge decisions made by local electoral boards. There seems to be a real danger that some states will be unable to certify a slate of electors in time to meet the deadline for the Electoral College vote, in which case the election would be referred to the Congress, with the House of Representatives choosing the president and the Senate choosing the vice president.Complicating matters still further is the fact that it s the newly elected House and Senate that are supposed to make this choice, yet it s unclear how the newly elected bodies can assemble if critical ballots remain in dispute. If the Congress manages to work around this issue, the House will choose the president by a vote of state delegations. At present, Republicans control 26 state delegations, giving them the advantage in the current House, though not necessarily in the post-election House. If no president can be selected by Inauguration Day, the Speaker of the House assumes the duties of acting President of the United States. And there are many more complexities and uncertainties.It would be one thing if all this drama were to play out in an atmosphere of calm deliberation, but – to put it mildly – that seems unlikely. Instead we can probably expect a wave of demonstrations, many turning violent.To get some idea of what we may be in store for, I recently read Fraud of the Century, by Roy Morris, Jr., which covers the contested election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. It s an exhaustively researched, generally compelling narrative that perhaps offers a glimpse into the events of the next few months. The election took place eleven years after the end of the Civil War. Antagonisms were still strong on both sides. Racism remained widespread and not at all covert. South Carolina politician Edmund Rhett said openly that the goal of his policies was for blacks to be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible, and as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable. Florida governor William Marvin told blacks to return to the plantations where they had been enslaved and call your old Master – Master. In response to such attitudes, the government in Washington had imposed federal troops on the South to protect the civil rights (and the lives) of the black population — the defining feature of the policy known as Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly chafed under this de facto martial law, and many Northerners had grown weary of policing the region.The Democratic Party, which had been the party of secession, continued to represent the interests of Southern whites, though some canny Democrats were making inroads with black voters. These inroads were made a bit easier by the widespread corruption of Ulysses S. Grant s presidential administration. Sordid scandals involving patronage and kickbacks had led to resignations and indictments, and had made the hapless Grant a figure of ridicule and contempt. Corruption was by no means limited to the Republicans. The most notoriously corrupt politician in America was a Democrat, the famous Boss Tweed of New York s Tammany Hall. Morris writes, With his diamond stick pins, loud checked suits, ruby shirt studs, and bowler hats, the corpulent Tweed was the walking embodiment of big-city corruption. The scale of Tweed s misdeeds is legendary. Morris focuses on the erection of the New York County courthouse, which took ten years to complete:The building, which was supposed to cost $250,000, wound up costing the city nearly $14 million … Carpenters were paid $2.1 million for $30,000 worth of work; a Tammany Hall [crony] named Andrew Garvey received $1.9 million to plaster the building …; the furniture bill was $1.6 million, including $179,729 for three tables and forty chairs; and the bill for carpeting the courthouse was a staggering $4.8 million – enough to carpet the entire city.Both Hayes and Tilden ran against corruption and in favor of reform. Tilden in particular had bona fides in this regard. He had been one of the leading voices against Tammany Hall and was instrumental in sending Tweed into exile (eventually followed by extradition and prison).The presidential campaign was ugly and vicious, as is usual in American politics. The Republican-leaning Chicago Tribune described Tilden as weazened, and shrimpled, and meanly cute. There is nothing about the man that is large, big, generous, solid, inspiring, powerful, or awakening. He s a small, lazy, odorous, ungainly, trickling stream, winding along and among the weeds ... and so on. His masculinity was questioned because he was a lifelong bachelor. The political cartoonist Thomas Nast frequently depicted him wearing a skirt. More worryingly, some of Hayes s supporters adopted the tactic of waving the bloody shirt – reminding ex-Union soldiers of the wounds they d won in battle ( Soldiers, Robert G. Ingersoll would declaim, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given to you by a Democrat ) and exhorting them to vote as you shot. The attacks went in the other direction as well, of course. One Tilden supporter urged the candidate to pose the question, Did Hayes shoot his mother in a fit of insanity? On election night, it appeared that Tilden had won by a slim but unassailable margin. Republicans, however, immediately focused on three key southern states: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. They asserted that widespread suppression of the black vote in those states had allowed Tilden s victory. Teams of strategists from both parties descended on the states to oversee the certification of the ballots. Though undoubtedly there was some suppression of the black vote, Morris argues that it was insufficient to account for Tilden s margins of victory (I gather that other historians disagree). In any case, hard-working Republican operatives were able to cloud the issue sufficiently that the outcome in all three states remained unresolved.The general atmosphere of these deliberations was extremely disheartening for believers in democracy. After witnessing some of the behind-the-scenes activities, onetime Union general and Republican politician Lew Wallace, today best known as the author of Ben-Hur, wrote his wife,I scarcely ever passed a week under such depression of spirits. It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win. Conscience offers no restraint. Nothing is so common as the resort to perjury, unless it is violence – in short, I do not know whom to believe. If we win, our methods are subject to impeachment for possible fraud. If the enemy win, it is the same thing exactly – doubt, suspicion, irritation go with the consequence, whatever it may be.This forecast proved accurate. There was never any chance that the eventual winner of the election would be respected by the losing side.Ultimately, four states submitted multiple slates of electors to the Electoral College. North Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana each offered at least two different slates, reflecting ongoing disputes over whether Hayes or Tilden had carried the vote. A fourth state, Oregon, posed a different dilemma; the state had gone for Hayes by an indisputable margin, but one of the Hayes electors had been retroactively disqualified for being a federal employee, and there was a question of what to do with his single electoral college vote. Should it be awarded to Hayes anyway, or should it go to Tilden, whose elector had received the next-largest number of votes? The matter was more critical than it might appear; Tilden already had a confirmed total of 184 electoral votes, leaving him just one vote shy of the presidency. Should the orphaned Oregon vote go his way, he would be inaugurated. To resolve these issues, Congress agreed to set up two electoral commissions, later merged into one, comprised of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. The Republicans one-seat advantage on the commission – a somewhat accidental result of the selection process – proved decisive, as the commission ruled in favor of the Republicans in all four states. By receiving all the disputed votes, including the one in Oregon, Hayes was able to edge out Tilden, 185-184.The transparently partisan rulings of the electoral commission left the public feeling cheated. The new president was quickly dubbed His Fraudulency and Rutherfraud Hayes. Although Hayes overcame this bad beginning and ended his single term in office (he did not run for reelection) as a reasonably popular figure, his reputation was forever marked by the dubious circumstances under which he attained power. Hayes s election is often framed as the result of a corrupt bargain in which Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction in exchange for some limited but crucial Democratic support. Morris argues that this is an oversimplification. He points out that the North had already grown frustrated with overseeing the postwar South, and that the policy of withdrawing federal troops would have been implemented no matter who was in power. He also thinks the last-minute bargain has been oversold and amounted to little more than a ratification of the inevitable. In any event, Reconstruction did end with Hayes, and for nearly a century Southern blacks were left without federal protection and were reduced to the states of second-class citizens as whites implemented Jim Crow laws and turned a blind eye to lynchings and mob action. Returning to our present circumstances, it s somewhat reassuring to see that violence in the turbulent post-election atmosphere of 1876 was kept to a minimum. True, there was an assassination attempt against Hayes (an assailant, never apprehended, fired a gun at him through a window of his home), which was hushed up at the time to avoid exacerbating tensions. Even so, the widespread civil unrest that might have been expected did not arise. This was mainly due to the forbearance of Hayes and Tilden, both of whom made every effort to prevent large assemblies that might degenerate into riots. It was also due to the prudence of President Grant, who made sure that Washington, DC, was protected by federal troops to prevent any attempt to seize the White House by force. Another factor was Tilden s principled decision to abide by the law. Some of his more hotheaded advisers pressed him to take the oath of office in defiance of the electoral commission and set up a parallel government. Tilden steadfastly refused, saying simply that he had no warrant of authority. Had he taken their advice, he could have been arrested as an insurrectionist and even shot. The potential consequences are appalling. The country would have risked a resumption of the Civil War. Needless to say, the United States survived the contested election of 1876. There was no mass uprising, no confrontation between protesters and federal troops, no parallel government that might have prompted divided loyalties on the part of the military. Hayes was peacefully succeeded by another Republican, James A. Garfield. Garfield, in turn was assassinated six months into his presidency, but the killing had nothing to do with ideology; the assassin was a mentally ill low-level political operative incensed at not having been appointed ambassador to France. Looking ahead, it s possible that November s election will be so one-sided (in either direction) that there will be no serious dispute over the outcome. I hope so. Regardless of who wins, I would rather have a blowout that silences all doubts than a squeaker that encourages recounts, litigation, protests, and possibly a spiraling descent into chaos.If we re not so lucky and we end up with a replay of 1876, we can only hope that the moderation and good sense shown by Hayes and Tilden in restraining their supporters and adhering to constitutional norms will be shown by both of our contemporary presidential candidates and their advisors.Somehow I m not optimistic, but when it comes to human nature, I never am.---P.S. If you re interested in reading Fraud of the Century, I recommend purchasing the print edition, rather than the Kindle ebook. The Kindle is poorly formatted; most of the chapters have the text centered so that it runs down the middle of the page. This makes it almost impossible to read. I don t know if ebook editions other than the Kindle suffer from the same formatting issue, but they might.

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Informal but serious discussions of evidence for psi and life after death, with an attempt to balance judicious skepticism and rational open-mindedness.

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