Author of a
best-selling book on UFO's, investigative journalist Leslie Kean has
written a recently published book entitled Surviving Death: A
Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. The book
includes some startling eyewitness accounts by the author, and has
ten chapters written by various researchers (mostly PhD's or doctors)
who have accumulated evidence relevant to this topic.
The first part of
the book deals with evidence for reincarnation. Such evidence was
first systematically gathered by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who
spent decades documenting cases of children who claimed to have had
a previous life, often doing a birthmark corroboration that links
birthmarks on the child with the cause of death of a previously
living person. Stevenson was able to find many cases of children who
reported past lives, with the details apparently matching the lives
of previously living persons. His research has been continued by Jim
Tucker, MD, who contributes a chapter to Kean's book. Kean describes
an interview with a family with a son who claimed to have had a
previous life as a minor show business figure. Kean presents a list
of 55 similarities between the child's account and the life of a
minor show business figure named Marty Martyn.
On page 229 Tucker
says that 70% of the children who claim to remember past lives say
they died in their previous lives by violence, accidents or suicide.
Could it be that reincarnation occurs only to those who didn't live
to old age? It should be noted that a particular “past life” case
never proves a universal tendency for people to reincarnate. There are
always still possibilities such as voluntary reincarnation and the
possibility that knowledge is being transferred in some paranormal
way that does not involve reincarnation.
The second part of
the book deals mainly with near-death experiences. There is a chapter
by a person involved in one of the most famous cases, the social
worker who found on a hospital ledge a dark blue tennis shoe that a
patient claimed to have seen while floating out of her body. One
chapter discusses children who claimed to recall a life between
earthly incarnations. We are told on page 128 that one in five
children who claim to remember previous lives report remembering some
otherworldly or heavenly existence where they existed between earthly
incarnations.
There is a chapter
by Peter Fenwick, an MD who is the author of the excellent book The
Art of Dying. Fenwick discusses deathbed visions, in which people
close to death often report seeing visions of dead relatives.
Fenwick's chapter includes this strange narrative (page 141) of
people seeing a mist-like thing leaving the body at death:
What is seen has
been described to us variously as a “smoke,” a “gray mist,” a
“white mist,” a “very wispy white shape,” seen leaving the
body, usually from the chest or through the head. Some describe the
air being wavy, like the heat haze of a mirage. It can also be an
almost solid white form.
In Part 3 of the
book, Leslie Kean discusses her experiences with mediums, psychics
who claim to be able to contact the dead. She discusses what she
calls an “almost perfect reading” with a medium, one in which the
medium mentioned 19 things that seemed to be accurate. There is a
chapter by Julie Beischel, PhD, who has long done scientific research
involving mediums, getting “highly statistically significant
results” suggesting some real paranormal effect (an example of one of her papers is here).
In Chapter 19 (page
231) Kean reports hearing the voice of her dead brother saying,
“Leslie..I'm fine. It's okay.” She reports other strange
experiences such as electrical disturbances and bottle caps flying
off bottles. She also reports seeing a weird dark apparition that
slowly dissolved. She says on page 238, “This really, actually, and
without question was something otherworldly, ghostly, inexplicable,
an apparition that I had witnessed right there next to me.”
In Part Four of the
book there is a discussion by psychic researcher Erlendur Haraldsson,
PhD of observations of a large variety of stunningly paranormal
phenomena produced by the Icelandic medium Indridi Indridason while
he was in a specially constructed observation center created to
observe the strange effects he was producing, under controlled
conditions apparently offering no possibility for cheating. As reported at length here, Indridason was observed at length in such a center by some
prestigious people such as a professor and someone who would later
become a prime minister of Iceland. Such witnesses could find no
evidence of trickery or fraud. In a similar vein, Kean discusses
some utterly paranormal activity at a séance she attended. Not
wishing to give too many “spoilers” about her book, I won't
describe this jaw-dropping activity in detail.
Nearly 400 pages in
length, and including many references at the end, Kean's fascinating
book is one of the more substantive treatments of life after death to
appear in recent years. The book includes very many relevant accounts
I haven't mentioned. Although the parapsychological significance of
some of her personal accounts are debatable, Kean deserves credit for
sticking her neck out and reporting astonishing personal incidents
that many people might never reveal out of fear of being ridiculed.
Postscript: In Chapter 3 of his book The Scalpel and the Soul, Allan J. Hamilton M.D. discusses a strange phenomenon he has observed. Hamilton says:
A dull, waxy, yellowish light accumulates around those who are about to die....This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient's skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon....I've seen patients precariously close to dying in the ICU, who have had this soft, candle-like light come into their being. Then it faded back to a crisper, cleaner white light as they recovered. But when the yellowish hue comes, the individual is near death.
Postscript: In Chapter 3 of his book The Scalpel and the Soul, Allan J. Hamilton M.D. discusses a strange phenomenon he has observed. Hamilton says:
A dull, waxy, yellowish light accumulates around those who are about to die....This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient's skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon....I've seen patients precariously close to dying in the ICU, who have had this soft, candle-like light come into their being. Then it faded back to a crisper, cleaner white light as they recovered. But when the yellowish hue comes, the individual is near death.
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