The Afterlife Experiments

This book by Dr. Gary E. Schawartz, PhD, (2002, Pocket Books) announces scientific evidence of life after death. The author making the claim is a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona and director of its Human Energy Systems laboratory.

What Schwartz and his partner, Linda G. Russek, Phd, did, was to take five of the top mediums in the United States and subject them to rigorous experiments, each subsequent experiment more restrictive than the last. The scientific findings announced following the two years spent conducting the research stated the five mediums being studied produced accurate and replicable after-death communications.

The performance of the mediums in each experiment was far better than could be expected for random responses and responses provided by the controls. The restrictions placed on the mediums were increasingly stringent as well. In the first experiment, the sitter was seated behind the medium, but the medium could hear "yes" and "no" responses. In the experiment with the most restrictions, the sitter was at a remote location and neither the sitters nor the mediums could hear each others' actual voices. The five mediums still succeeded.

Even an agnostic scientist like Schwartz, after reading this book and studying the data from the experiements, will be forced to admit that at least with these five mediums, there was definite communications with the dead. Many profound questions are born if the hypothesis that some people can talk to the dead is validated. The very question of when life begins and when it ends has to be addressed.

Religious scholars have opined that the soul lives forever but this is the first time the premise has ever been validated by men of science. Then why hasn't the rest of their community hailed their findings and attempted to replicate them with their own experiments? Consciousness survives after death. That sentence should have been placed in banner headlines in newspapers across the world, yet, for the most part, it was ignored.

I challenge you to read The Afterlife Experiments and then try to defend the scoffing of the skeptics. I bought the book at Half-Price Books for less than eight bucks. Not a bad investment for information that can change the world as we know it.

Jeff Brailey