The belief that the spiritual part of the human being is experiencing the destruction of the physical body is characteristic of all religious traditions, with the exception of classical Buddhism, which denies the existence of the soul. The confidence of spiritualists in life after death is not based on faith, but on the manifestations of disembodied spirits, for example, through mediums. There are disagreements between spiritualism and the study of the psychic - the scientific field to which the "problem of life" belongs. Many psychic researchers do not recognize the phenomenon of life after death as proven, arguing that human extrasensory perception serves as a more satisfactory explanation for it. In addition, the explanation of this possibility depends on the explanation of mediumistic communications, out-of-body perceptions and states of clinical death, as well as visions,ghosts and poltergeists.
Belief in life after death exists not only in the vast majority of religious traditions; it is also part of the animistic performances of the tribal societies of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. According to anthropologist JB Tylor, the belief in the preservation of the human spirit after the death of the body once existed alongside belief in reincarnation. Animistic ideas about reincarnation as an integral part were included in Hinduism, Buddhism and their varieties and, possibly, formed the basis of the Christian idea of resurrection. According to Tylor, animistic ideas about the soul are rooted in such phenomena as visions, mediumistic states of trance and dreams, in which a person seemed to leave his own body and meet with his own kind. This is in many ways reminiscent of modern spiritualistic views. Tylor recognizes a direct link between animism and spiritualism.
Thus, belief in life after death is characteristic of almost all peoples of the world and, apparently, has its roots in the distant past. The tendency to disbelief in a phenomenon on the basis of the impossibility of its scientific "proof" dates back to the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Nineteenth-century spiritualism, with its appeal to "scientific" evidence, was a direct reaction to this way of thinking and an attempt to resist it in its own way.
By the end of the 19th century, spiritualism had millions of adherents on both sides of the Atlantic. Attempts were made to test the claims of the spiritualists (the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR, was founded in 1882, and the American Society for Psychical Research three years later).
The early investigators of the psychic, however, were confronted with numerous facts of fraud and concluded from this that the claims of the spiritualists hardly stand up to scrutiny. Contrary to popular belief, societies for psychic research were not formed to study the problem of life after death, but to determine the validity of claims about extrasensory perception.
However, thanks to Leonora Piper, interest shifted to this issue. Piper was different from most mediums that existed at the time: instead of producing physical phenomena, such as floating tables and materializing objects, she went into a state of trance and seemed to receive verbal messages from dead people. Throughout her career, Piper has worked closely with OPI and AOPI. Thanks to her psychic abilities, some researchers (for example, Richard Hodgson, James G. Heislop, Oliver Lodge) believed in survival. After Piper, other "mental mediums" appeared and became objects of research, including Eileen J. Gareth and Gladys Osborne Leonard.
The significance of the communications established in trance by mediums such as Piper, Leonard, and Gareth was that they delivered information that could be verified through written documents and the memories of living people. Therefore, in order to establish that the knowledge of these mediums had a paranormal basis, it was necessary to show that they did not receive and could not receive information in a normal way (excluding fraud), such as, for example, a special preliminary study of their visitors. However, even when there was reason to assert about the paranormal source of their knowledge, there was a possibility that the information received by the medium not from disembodied spirits, but from living consciousnesses or physical sources, through extrasensory perception (ESP).
Various attempts have been made to monitor the psychic abilities of mediums, including attending sessions by “trusted participants,” representing individuals who wish to establish contact with the deceased and have little knowledge of the purpose of the session. Particular attention was paid to casual communicators, completely unfamiliar to either the medium or the visitors. Particular value was given to cross-correspondence, the meaning of which was only clarified by comparing messages received by two or more different mediums, and which therefore suggested a guiding mind behind it. Nevertheless, ESP can theoretically extend so far as to encompass the evidence of even these special classes, and the growing awareness of this fact has gradually led to the decline of life after death research and the growth of the importance of experiments.aimed at establishing ESP limits. This movement, which continues today, received a strong impetus from the research of J. B. Rain.
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Strong evidence for physical mediumship also began to appear at the turn of the century. Eusapia Paladino has made the most significant contribution to changing views on this subject. The Mediumship of Paladino was reminiscent of the mediumship of D. D. Home, the only famous medium of the 19th century who did not give rise to any suspicion of fraud. A thorough laboratory analysis of the sessions was subsequently carried out with the Schneider brothers. Materialization phenomena have been reported in connection with the Schneiders and Martha Béraud ("Eva K."), as well as scholars such as William Jackson Scoford and Thomas Hamilton. Although Crawford and Hamilton agreed with the Spiritualist hypothesis that these phenomena were produced by disembodied spirits, most other researchers were convinced that they were produced by the mediums themselves - unconsciously, through psychokinesis. This last explanation is today accepted as the correct one by the majority of psychic researchers.
Psychokinesis has also been seen as an explanation for many poltergeist explosions where objects moved or flew around without any contact with other objects. The center of poltergeists is often a specific person, whom many researchers regard as the “agent” responsible for their work. Often the agents of poltergeist are children in adolescence, and this fact leads many researchers to suspect deception - which in some cases is indeed confirmed. In cases of paranormal activity, hormonal changes characteristic of puberty often play a role. In the case of Eleanor Tsugun, the startling phenomena stopped as soon as she began her period. In several cases of poltergeist, the agents appeared to be deceased people, however, such situations are relatively rare. Poltergeist can also be explained by the appearance of ghosts.
With regard to out-of-body perceptions and states of clinical death, they are less convincing evidence in favor of life after death, and about these experiences we can only say that they do not contradict the hypothesis of life after death. If conscious knowledge during life can exist separately from the body, then it can, in principle, survive death.
Although mediumship, vision, poltergeist, out-of-body perceptions, and near-death states are usually discussed separately, many real life situations cannot be categorized so rigidly. In dual visions, for example, the agent has a clear out-of-body perception: it seems to him (or her) that he is making a long journey to where he is perceived as a vision. Wilmot's vision is a particularly difficult case of this kind, including the agent's dream. Mediumship and visions are not so often associated if the phenomena of materialization are understood in some other way. Nevertheless, there are cases of mediumistic communicators in the form of visions. The effects of psychokinesis or poltergeist (such as knocking) are typical of physical mediumship. In the case of Stella K. the phenomena of poltergeist turned out to be associated with mediumistic abilities,which no one knew existed.
Cases involving more than one type of perception strengthen the argument for life after death. The argument can be based on each individual type of perception. It is much easier to imagine a disembodied spirit that appears as a vision, acts on the world as a poltergeist and enters into communication through a medium - than to imagine how all these things can be produced simultaneously thanks to ESP and psychokinesis manifested by living people. A good reinforcement of belief in life after death is also provided by cases where the agent seems to have a special reason or intent to enter into communication, or when the agent communicates information unknown to the visitor (in the case of mediumship) or the perceiver (in the case of vision).
In Chaffin's case, the vision indicates the location where the second will is hidden.
Informed skeptics who doubt the postulate of life after death point to many inconsistencies in facts and problematic cases, for example, cases with fictitious or living communicators. One communicator through Piper stated that she was the writer George Elliot, but at the same time said that she had met Adam Bede in the afterlife, in fact, a character in one of the author's novels. In another sensational case, a communicator who introduced himself as deceased turned out to be alive and well. There are frequent cases where it is possible that the information came from a visitor through the ESP, and in several cases there was an explicit connection - through the ESP - not with the visitor, but with someone from the visitor's acquaintances. In one such case, the medium described the images in detail,which were on the person's mind (a visitor visited him on the way to the session), but were not verbally formalized.
If life after death is a fact, then it is clear that the processes of mediumistic communication and perception of visions, for example, are complex. At the very least, the data requires an interaction between the agent and the medium or perceiver, during which information could be filtered or modified by the medium at an unconscious level before reaching the level of consciousness. This kind of thought has been expressed by several researchers, including Frederick W. G. Myers, James G. Heislop, and Hornell Hart. This point of view is based on the survival of the individual as a whole, and although philosophers doubted its validity, it is at least theoretically possible that only fragmentary survival takes place, such an assumption was made by William J. Roll. Other theorists - for example, Frederic Bligh Bond - believethat life after death takes place only as the preservation of information stored in a kind of heavenly data bank. Again, the animistic concepts are different from the ones presented here: they include the concept of multiple souls and spirits that undergo differentiation and separation after death.
Spiritualism as a religious movement peaked at the end of the 19th century in both the United States and Europe, but spiritualist organizations exist and publications continue to this day. Spiritualism is especially strong in the UK, where the Collge of Psychic Studies welcomes many new members every year. The popularity of channeling in the United States also suggests a belief in life after death. Indeed, a Gallup poll in the early 1980s found that two-thirds of Americans believe in life after death. At the same time, gender, age, educational level and religious affiliation of the respondents practically did not matter. The tendency to doubt in life after death is not only uncommon - it is found by a minority of people even in modern society.