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Author: Michael Prescott
There's a major discrepancy in the evidence for the afterlife that's always puzzled me. I don't claim to have the answer, but I thought I would throw out a highly speculative suggestion.
The discrepancy pertains to the always thorny issue of reincarnation. In most near-death experiences and in a great deal of channeled communications, reincarnation does not come up. Some alleged communicators have even gone so far as to state with certainty that reincarnation is a myth. Other communications received by mediums, however, say just the opposite. Moreover, past-life researchers who have hypnotized their subjects not only obtain detailed accounts of previous lives, but in some cases obtain descriptions of a life between lives in which the soul plans its next incarnation.
The inconsistency is most apparent in accounts of the soul's transition to the afterlife. If we listen to near-death experiencers and many purported spirit communicators, we hear that the soul arrives in the afterlife with no memory of any physical incarnation other than the most recent one. The afterlife environment, at least initially, is a place for rest and the casual enjoyment of arts, leisure, and learning. But if we listen to patients placed into deep hypnosis, we hear that the soul arrives in the afterlife with an immediate recall of many past lives. The soul is reunited with other souls that it knows from various earthly incarnations and from many interludes in the spirit world. Moreover, the soul almost immediately embarks on a training program to prepare itself for its next incarnation. Though there are some parallels between the two accounts, the differences are substantial and seemingly irreconcilable.
One obvious explanation is that at least one of these two bodies of evidence is not reliable. If I had to jettison one batch of afterlife accounts, I would choose the material obtained through hypnosis. Hypnotized subjects are notorious for their tendency to confabulate–in other words to invent fictional accounts–in order to satisfy the explicit or implicit demands of the hypnotist. Experiments in hypnotism performed in the late 19th century strongly suggest that a person's latent psi abilities may be greatly accentuated when under hypnosis; therefore, I would not rule out the possibility that the hypnotized subject is actually reading the hypnotist's mind and simply reiterating what it finds there, creating a kind of feedback loop or folie a deux. If this is the case, then the evidence from hypnosis studies may be of limited value. Meanwhile, the evidence of near-death experiences and mediumship in general strikes me as much more solid.
Copyright© Michael Prescott
Continues over at Michael Prescott's Blog and reproduced here by kind permission of Michael Prescott
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