Look into my eyes…

I had to be at the airfield, on the other side of London, by 6 am; fortunately they sent a car for me. It was towards the end of Winter, so it was very cold and still dark by the time I arrived. After being introduced to the presenter of the piece and the traffic reporter, I hung around in the control room for a while, then I was introduced to the “client” and given ten minutes alone with him to treat his phobia off-air (UK broadcasting rules don’t allow hypnosis on-air).

With such a short time available I could only use the fastest methods. I chose three, all designed to give the client self-help techniques to use on his own when he went up in the plane. The first was EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), the second was a very fast self-hypnosis induction for relaxation and the third an NLP anchor.

After we had completed the work we were both interviewed on-air by the presenter – the client said he was looking forward to going up and seemed to go back into a light trance while I was talking – and then he and the presenter went up in the plane. I was supposed to be able to talk to him while he was up there, but there was a technical problem; I could hear him and the presenter, and both of us were heard on-air, but they couldn’t hear me. Nevertheless, he remembered and used the techniques that I had taught him and the experiment was a complete success.

For several hours after the broadcast LBC were announcing on their news bulletins that “they” had “cured” a member of their staff’s flying phobia “live on radio” – a radio first, apparently. There are a few slight inaccuracies there, and it was unfortunate that, although they mentioned his name in the news bulletins, they didn’t bother with mine!

How is the fear of sleeping next to somebody called and how can it be cured?

1. Hearing sounds such as buzzing
2. A feeling of peace and painlessness
3. Having an out-of-body experience
4. A feeling of travelling through a tunnel
5. A feeling of rising into the heavens
6. Seeing people, often dead relatives
7. Meeting a spiritual being such as God
8. Seeing a review of one’s life
9. Feeling a reluctance to return to life

Dr Moody based his book on about 150 case histories. Many more cases have been reported since the book was published, and there have been no doubt innumerable unreported cases since the dawn of history. In fact, the earliest report of an NDE can be found in The Republic, written by Plato in around 380 BC.

My copy of Dr Moody’s book has the following tag line on the front cover:

“Actual case histories reveal that there is life after death.”

Is this true? Is that what these (and other) case histories reveal?

Well, as with any other paranormal research, the answer is – maybe! Certainly it seems that anyone who has been through an NDE believes that he has had a glimpse of an afterlife. On the other hand, super-sceptics such as Dr Susan Blackmore, whom I have mentioned before, will tell you that:

1. By definition no-one who has had an NDE has actually died; and
2. NDE phenomena are hallucinations caused by medicinal drugs and the malfunctions of a dying brain.

Perhaps the most convincing – to non-sceptics – published case is that of Pam Reynolds, who featured prominently in a BBC documentary (you can currently find the segment on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNbdUEqDB-k ) and in the 1998 book Light and Death by Dr Michael Sabom. Pam was rendered “dead” for a difficult brain operation – her body was chilled and her brain completely shut down – before being successfully resuscitated. During the operation she experienced an NDE and was later able to give a detailed description of the surgical procedures. Sceptics have argued that the NDE took place before Pam’s brain was flatlined, and this may well have been the case for at least part of it. She did however describe one event which took place while her brain was inactive and in any case the rest of her experience is extremely difficult to explain away (especially as her eyes were taped shut and her ears blocked). Both Pam and her neurosurgeon were interviewed for the BBC documentary; Pam describes her experience and the surgeon comments that he is unable to explain her description of the surgical procedures. So far it’s the closest that we have come to an experimentally induced and controlled NDE and I recommend the YouTube clip if you haven’t seen it before.

Like the other paranormal phenomena which I have discussed in my earlier blogs, NDEs may not be conclusive proof of an afterlife – but taken together with reincarnation studies, mediumship and out-of-the body experiences – not to mention ESP, which I haven’t covered yet – one gets the strong impression that it can’t all be explained away…

Terminology has changed over the years. The early writers, such as Sylvan Muldoon, Oliver Fox, “Ophiel” and “Yram” called the phenomenon astral projection, on the assumption that we all have an “astral body” as well as a physical one, and that this second body can be projected spontaneously or deliberately. Later, parapsychologists referred to travelling clairvoyance or ESP Projection. Currently the neutral term OBE (or occasionally OOBE) is preferred as it doesn’t imply any particular explanation.

The first experience of an OBE is usually spontaneous – it’s accidental and unexpected. There are cases, for example, of road accident victims finding themselves floating above the scene looking down at their own injured bodies, and of patients who are able to describe everything which went on in the operating theatre while they were under general anaesthetic. Oliver Fox began with lucid dreams and false awakenings (discussed in my earlier blogs); Sylvan Muldoon and Robert Monroe, a more recent writer, began their experiences while lying awake in bed. The experience may take place (apparently) in the physical world, a close copy of it with differences from “reality”, or in another completely different “plane” or “dimension”.

One thing which is immediately clear from reading accounts of OBEs is that there is a wide variety of experience. Writers such as Fox, Muldoon and Monroe learnt to induce OBEs deliberately; they all give detailed descriptions of their own experiences, and detailed instructions based on them – but their experiences, and therefore their techniques, are all different.

What is an OBE?

Well, it’s unlikely that a second body is physically projected, firstly because it wouldn’t have sense organs such as eyes and secondly because it usually seems to “travel” in a pseudo-physical world, a reconstruction, rather than the real one. It’s more likely to be a product of the “mind” (whatever that is), possibly involving an element of ESP.

How do you deliberately induce an OBE?

The most comprehensive examination of the subject that I’ve come across, summarising the experiences of all the above writers, is Beyond the Body (1982), the first book by Dr Susan Blackmore. (I mention that this is her first book because I can’t recommend her later ones; she is now one of the “super-sceptics” and her opinions have become extremely biased.) She suggests the following techniques, most of which assume that the body is extremely relaxed and therefore immobilised:

• Imagery – imagine yourself floating, or visualise a duplicate of yourself and “transfer your consciousness” into it;
• Inducing a special motivation to leave your body – Muldoon suggested extreme thirst;
• Ophiel’s “little system” – memorise a familiar route and try to project yourself along it;
• The Christos technique – described in detail in one of my earlier blogs;
• Monroe’s fairly complicated techniques, beginning with “vibrations”;
• Ritual magic methods – advanced visualisation techniques such as the use of “astral doorways”;
• Hypnosis – requires a skilled hypnotist and a fairly deep trance (and doesn’t work for everyone); and
• Dream development, starting with a lucid dream.

For more details you should of course refer to the original sources; I particularly recommend the classic The Projection of the Astral Body, by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, and Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe.

My own OBEs…

…have started either from lucid dreams or from the hypnopompic state, the half-awake state when you’re just waking up from sleep. For me this usually starts with the feeling that I can see the room even though I know my eyes are closed, and I can occasionally move my non-physical arms and apparently roll out of bed, leaving my body behind. Once I “walked” around what seemed to be my bedroom – finding objects that I knew shouldn’t be there – then onto the landing and downstairs. On other occasions I have passed through the closed window into the garden. These examples can be regarded as lucid dreams, but they qualify as OBEs if, as Dr Blackmore does, you define an OBE as the experience of being outside your body.

http://www.isma.org.uk/national-stress-awareness-day/

How do you know if you’re stressed? Here are ISMA’s suggestions for identifying the signs of stress:

Psychological & Emotional signs

• Poor concentration
• Feeling out ofcontrol
• Tearful / Irritable
• Anger / Guilt
• Mood swings
• Forgetful
• Worrying
• Low confidence
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Poor decisions

Physical signs

• Muscle tension
• Frequent colds
• Skin problems
• Tiredness
• Headaches
• Indigestion /IBS
• Heartburn
• Weight loss or gain
• High blood pressure
• Heart problems

Behavioural signs

• No time for relaxation
• Accident prone
• Workaholic
• Poor time management
• Change in appearance
• Withdrawn
• Relationship problems
• Insomnia
• Increase in e.g. alcohol/ smoking

If you recognise yourself in this list, I’d be pleased to help!

A lucid dream is generally far more realistic than a “normal” one, often brighter and vividly coloured. The senses of hearing, touch and taste may also be experienced (although pain is rare). Although you’re asleep, your conscious mind is also functioning, so that you can explore your dream world and reflect on what you find there. Also, perhaps because of the realism, lucid dreams are more likely to be remembered after waking than ordinary ones, which often fade very quickly. Speaking personally, I hardly ever remember my non-lucid dreams, but memories of a few of the lucid ones that I’ve had have stayed with me for years.

Perhaps the most important point about lucid dreams is that you can control them – to some extent, anyway. If you’ve been having an unpleasant dream, for example, you can take action to deal with whatever’s been bothering you. To give one example of my own: I dreamed I was being menaced by a tiger. I concentrated on it, made it shrink, and it turned into a cat! There are also possibilities for creativity and problem solving, and even healing, both psychological and physical, although research into healing in this way is in its infancy.

Lucid dreams can be either spontaneous or induced deliberately. The basic trick is to notice something “wrong” or impossible in your dream – a tiger in your bedroom, for example. Speaking of bedrooms, there is the related experience of the “false awakening”; you seemingly wake up, get out of bed, get dressed, perhaps – then suddenly find yourself back in bed. I have often had “chains” of these, where I’ve apparently woken up several times in a row. Again, finding something “wrong” can turn a false awakening into a lucid dream.

There are a number of techniques for training yourself to dream lucidly, mostly along the lines of conditioning yourself while awake or immediately before going to sleep. You can also buy expensive (and probably uncomfortable) electronic gadgets designed to turn ordinary dreams into lucid ones.

The techniques for healing, creativity and problem solving are similar to guided imagery, which is a helpful procedure in hypnotherapy. In fact, the very detailed imagery reported by clients undergoing past life regression is a very similar experience to lucid dreaming.

As I write this, I have in front of me two books, both titled Lucid Dreaming. One, by Stephen LaBerge (2004), is a short book concentrating on the practical aspects of inducing and using lucid dreams; the other, by Celia Green and Charles McCreery (1994), whom I mentioned in my blog on apparitions, is a detailed study with an academic slant. This book emphasises the close link between apparitions, lucid dreams, false awakenings – and then on to out of the body and near death experiences, which is probably where I’ll be going next…

Apparitions may be seen, heard or felt. When they are seen, they often look so like a normal human being as to be mistaken for one, at least at first. In The Reality of the Paranormal, which I have mentioned before, Prof. Arthur Ellison lists five types of apparition, each of which is well documented:

• hauntings – regularly perceived in a particular place
• crisis cases – seen, heard or felt when the person perceived is undergoing a crisis (often near death)
• post-mortem cases – perceived long after a person has died
• experimental cases – where a living person is deliberately trying to make his apparition visible to another
• suggestion cases – “tricks of the mind” in places believed to be haunted.

The first three of these types may be regarded as ‘ghosts’ but it’s debatable as to whether or not they have an independent existence; they are probably ‘hallucinations’ generated by the unconscious mind, existing only in the minds of those perceiving them (sometimes several people at once). This doesn’t make them any less “real”, but it’s important to distinguish these cases from apparent communications with departed spirits. Generally speaking, apparitions don’t communicate with the living, although spirits may, as I discussed in my previous blog.

It’s generally considered that most hauntings are something like a video recording – stored in the fabric of a building, perhaps, by a strongly emotional event. The classic TV ghost story The Stone Tape was based on this idea. Crisis apparitions are best explained by telepathy from the living (even if at the point of death). Post-mortem cases could be evidence of telepathic communication from the dead in some cases, or possibly just hallucinations created by the unconscious mind in the bereaved.

So while apparitions may be classed as “paranormal” they are not really evidence for life after death in themselves. How and why some people (and not others) experience apparitions are questions which are still to be answered; there’s no simple explanation. For a comprehensive analysis of the subject, I recommend the 1975 book Apparitions by Celia Green and Charles McCreery. They suggest that, when someone sees an apparition, it’s not just the apparition that’s hallucinatory, but the whole environment. This leads into a discussion of lucid dreams and out-of-the-body experiences – but that’s another blog…or two…

To define these terms I’m going to give two quotes from the excellent book The Reality of the Paranormal by Prof. Arthur Ellison (a past president of the SPR).

“The psychic is called by Spiritualists a medium because he or she is assumed to act as a medium between this world and the next. According to the Spiritualist theory, when mediums’ minds are used in this way, they are called mental mediums. In other words, a mental medium is a person receiving data ostensibly communicated from the dead via the mind and body of the medium.”

“When the production of ostensibly paranormal physical effects take place during a séance then the medium is called by Spiritualists a physical medium and the phenomena, which are assumed to be produced by entities in the ‘next world’, are referred to as physical phenomena.” These phenomena include such things as cold breezes, whispered voices, table rapping and levitation and faint lights – the “orbs” familiar to viewers of Most Haunted.

The history of Spiritualism, and by extension that of psychical research, has been plagued by fraud; generally speaking, magicians are more competent investigators than scientists. Physical mediumship has always been particularly suspect, and in my view is largely irrelevant to the question of survival, but mental mediumship has provided some strong evidence.

In fact, there’s a huge amount of evidence, and I only have room here to give a very brief outline of two historical, related cases which appeal personally to me. The first is the Cross-Correspondences, apparently an experiment which originated from “the other side”. Communications ostensibly came from deceased leading members of the SPR, classical scholars who wove obscure literary references into automatic writing scripts received by several mediums living well apart, some even on different continents. This is such a vast subject in itself that the best I can do is refer you to online introductory articles at http://www.montaguekeen.com/page42.html One of the mediums involved, Mrs Piper, was studied in great detail (not only in connection with the Cross-Correspondences) and is particularly highly regarded among psychical researchers.

Another of the mediums involved in the Cross-Correspondences was “Mrs Willett” (in fact Mrs Winifred Coombe Tennant, the first British woman appointed as a delegate to the League of Nations), who, after her death, apparently started communicating with another medium, Geraldine Cummins. The Cummins-Willett scripts have been published in edited book form under the title Swan on a Black Sea, and I can recommend it as strongly convincing evidence suggesting that Mrs Coombe Tennant’s consciousness lived on after her death.

As with other paranormal phenomena, I don’t think that there will ever be definitive unarguable proof that the living can communicate with the dead; the sceptic can always fall back on the “Super-ESP” argument referred to in my last blog. Any verifiable information received by a medium must exist somewhere in the world, either in writing or a living person’s mind, for it to be checked. But if you read communications such as those in Swan on a Black Sea, where Mrs Coombe Tennant’s personality clearly comes through, you would be justified in wondering whether Super-ESP is the simplest explanation.

The first is hypnotic regression, but this is not generally considered to have produced anything conclusive. The principal reason for this is that it’s relatively easy for sceptics to come up with alternative explanations, such as suppressed memories (from books, newspapers, TV programmes and films), false memories implanted by the hypnotist, or simply fantasy.* Having said this, past life experiences under hypnosis are usually very convincing to the person having them, and there is some useful research in this area. I can recommend the book Reliving Past Lives: The evidence under hypnosis by Dr Helen Wambach for a comprehensive description of her own research.

The second line of research, which is rather harder for sceptics to explain away, comes from studies with young, sometimes very young, children, particularly those conducted by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who published a number of books on his research. There are two reasons why these studies are more convincing than those involving hypnosis: firstly, the suppressed memories argument is not plausible when the subjects are two to three years old and secondly Stevenson’s subjects mainly lived in semi-literate cultures where access to other sources of information was extremely limited.

To give you an idea of this research I’d like to give a very brief summary of one of Stevenson’s classic cases – that of Imad Elawar.** Imad was born in in a village in Lebanon in 1958, and the first word that he spoke was “Jamileh”, the name of the mistress of Ibrahim Boumhazy, who had lived in a village 20 miles away and died in 1949 at the age of twenty-five. As soon as Imad learnt to speak in sentences he began to talk about his past life, and at the age of two recognised a neighbour of Boumhazy’s in the street. He also gave many details about Boumhazy’s house, relatives and his life. At that time the people of the region tended to do little travelling, and the members of the Elawar and Boumhazy families insisted that they had never met. After collecting as much information as possible from both villages, Stevenson took Imad (then aged five) to Boumhazy’s village, where he recognised many of Ibrahim Boumhazy’s relatives and addressed them correctly. They were amazed at Imad’s behaviour, which was just like Ibrahim’s.

Stevenson collated 57 factual statements made by Imad; of these, 51 were verified as correct. This case, and others like it, is very difficult to explain if it is not a genuine example of reincarnation. Communication between communities in the region was extremely limited at the time. Imad had never visited the other village and the two families were adamant that they had never met. Fraud was also most unlikely, as Imad’s comments were more of an embarrassment to his family than giving any benefit.

“Super-ESP”, i.e. telepathy from Boumhazy’s family, is of course a possible explanation for the information given by Imad; it’s the sceptic’s “Get out of jail free” card, as it can explain almost anything – except perhaps Imad’s behaviour. In cases like this, reincarnation is the most straightforward explanation, and these cases do give very strong evidence – but not, of course, conclusive proof.

*None of these arguments affect the effectiveness of past life regression for therapeutic purposes, for reasons that I have explained in other blogs and articles.

** A detailed discussion of this case can be found at http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/imad_elawar_revisited.html#review