also have been instances of sudden intrusion of uninvited “drop-in” entities whose identities were later confirmed. In other instances, relevant messages were received in “proxy sittings”, where a distant and uninformed party seeked information in lieu of a close relative or friend of the deceased. In the cases of “cross correspondence”, bits and pieces of a comprehensive message are conveyed through several mediums. An interesting innovation in this area is the procedure described in Raymond Moody’s book Reunions (Moody 1993). Using perceptual ambiguity involved in mirror gazing, Moody induces in his subjects convincing visionary encounters with deceased loved ones. Some of the spiritistic reports considerably stretch the mind of an average Westerner, let alone a traditionally trained scientist. For example, the extreme form of spiritistic phenomena, the “physical mediumship”, includes among others telekinesis and materializations, for example, upward levitation of objects and people, projection of objects through the air, manifestation of ectoplasmic formations, and appearance of writings or objects without explanation (“apports”). In the Brazilian spiritist movement, media perform psychic surgeries using their hands or knives allegedly under the guidance of the spirits of deceased people. These surgeries do not require any anesthesia and the wounds close without sutures. Events of this kind have been repeatedly studied and filmed by Western researchers of the stature of Walter Pahnke, Stanley Krippner and Andrija Puharich. A relatively recent development in the efforts to communicate with spirits of deceased people is an approach called instrumental transcommunication (ITC) that uses for this purpose modern electronic technology. This avenue began when in 1959 filmmaker Friedrich Juergensen picked up on an audiotape human voices of allegedly dead persons while recording the sounds of passerine birds. Inspired by this event, psychologist Konstantin Raudive (Raudive 1971) conducted a systematic study of this phenomenon and recorded over 100 000 multilingual paranormal voices allegedly communicating messages from the Beyond. More recently, a worldwide network of researchers, including Ernest Senkowski, George Meek, Mark Macy, Scott Rogo, Raymond Bayless, and others, have been involved in a group effort to establish “interdimensional transcommunication”. They claim to have received many paranormal verbal communications and pictures from the deceased through electronic media, including tape recorders, telephones, FAX machines, computers, and TV screens. Among the spirits communicating from Beyond are supposedly some of the former researchers in this field, such as Juergensen and Raudive (Senkowski 1994). 4 Individual and social implications of the research on death and dying The research of the psychological philosophical, and spiritual aspects of death and dying discussed in this paper has considerable theoretical and practical implications. The experiences and observations I have explored Spirituality Studies 1 (2) Fall 2015 27 (25)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=