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Author: Michael Prescott
Some time ago I posted a few thoughts on the introduction to The Afterlife Interviews, Volume 1, by Jeffrey A. Marks. I'd read the introduction online, and I was critical of it because I thought the author had oversold the novelty of his book, suggesting that detailed descriptions of conditions in the afterlife had seldom or never been channeled through mediums. Still, I felt a little bit bad about dismissing the book on the basis of the opening pages, without having read the rest. So after some delay, I finally got around to reading the book itself. And I enjoyed it.
Marks is a medium living in Washington state, where he is involved in a ghost-hunter society. His plan for the book was fairly simple. He wrote out a list of questions that he wanted his sitters to ask during his sessions. The sessions were recorded and transcribed, and his answers became the basis for this book. Before fielding questions about the afterlife, Marks brought through enough evidential material to satisfy the sitter and himself that he had made legitimate contact with the other side.
Naturally, the all-important question is: how do we evaluate material like this? I don't know of any really scientific way to do it. It is, after all, always possible that the medium got the evidential material from the other side (or via telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.) but relied on his subconscious mind to supply the non-evidential communications. Most mediumistic sessions seem to consist of a mixture of legitimate messages and subconscious invention, and it may be impossible to entirely separate the wheat from the chaff. The fact that we are dealing with only a single medium here complicates the situation. Had several mediums been involved, and had their statements dovetailed even though the mediums were kept in the dark about what their colleagues had said, the results might be more scientifically meaningful.
Still, any information along these lines can be helpful – and ultimately I think it has to be assessed according to one's own personal, subjective sense of what rings through or feels right. I admit that this is in not a scientific approach, but there are limits to the scientific method, especially when dealing with esoteric matters. And I have to say that nearly all of what Marks communicated did ring true to me. Moreover, some of it fit in rather neatly with my own speculations about the nature of the afterlife, as expressed in some of my previous posts. Perhaps it's just confirmation bias, but when a medium starts channeling information that matches my own hypothesis about how things work on the other side, I'm more inclined to take it seriously..... FULL REVIEW
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Copyright©Michael Prescott
Reproduced courtesy of Michael Prescott
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