Monthly Book Review (December): The Afterlife Experiments by Gary E Schwartz

Every month - that is the plan, anyway - I will review a book selected randomly from my Paranormal Library. This month, I will review The Afterlife Experiments by Gary E Schwartz.

Having previously read his other book, The Sacred Promise, I knew what to expect when I began to turn the pages of The Afterlife Experiments. Like his last book, I found his style of writing very addictive - very quickly, I discovered that I was zooming through the chapters, hungry to learn more about his intriguing experiments involving mediums and their unknown sitters in his laboratory.
    Although reading this book has made me realise that a second read of The Sacred Promise would probably be a good idea, The Afterlife Experiments proved to be just as interesting (at least for me) as The Sacred Promise. 
    Scattered throughout the pages of the book are the details and results of the experiments that Schwartz conducted. These seemed extremely interesting, especially since the mediums' readings for the unknown and hidden sitters were not always flawless - for example, in his reading for a sitter named Pat, John Edward made a small error in the identity of one of the deceased family members of his sitter, which was partly due to his sitter accidentally saying more than she was supposed to and leading him to think that her husband was dead when, in actuality, he was alive and sitting in another room! However, this apparent error was later explained, as it related to the sitter's dream and subsequent events that made her wonder how long her husband had left to live on Earth. The readings didn't seem to be obvious cold-reading, although there were aspects of that at times with some of the readings for at least one of the sitters. Although the method and procedure of the experiment seemed to be good, I wasn't convinced that the medium being unable to see their sitter was sufficient against hot or warm reading, since they could still hear them and be able to deduce some aspects about the sitter which they could then put in the reading - for example, one sitter may have had a nasty cough, which may make the medium deduce that they have an illness or flu. I was, however, relieved to discover that in the following chapter, the author gave an in-depth account about the next series of sitter-medium experiments, which included a silent period - so that the sitter remained silent whilst they were given their reading. Whilst I read the details concerning this series of experiments, I still had doubts about the experimental design. The accuracy of the information as given by the mediums seemed, from the extracts, too good to be true and I suppose I was still looking for loop-holes somewhere - and somehow. Once again, when I approached the following chapter, my doubts were met once more: another series of sittings with the mediums, this time with the sitters remaining silent throughout.
    However, the readings proved to be interesting, as there were certain areas that overlapped with the readings performed by the different mediums for the same sitter, despite the experimenters ensuring that the mediums didn't mingle with each other after the separate readings. I was also glad that although the sitter did have a small hiccough one time,that they were instructed to only say 'Yes/No' answers to prevent them from giving away much information to the medium (this was during the non-silent periods when the sitter was allowed to reply 'Yes' or 'No' to the statements). 
   Although the mediums made some errors in their readings some of the time and despite frequently making statements that could have two possible interpretations - I found it extremely interesting. This interest was increased due to the fact that with each experiment (which had increasingly better controls put into place, such as the third experiment being double-blind) all of the mediums acquired a very high level of accuracy which was greater than the control group of students' guesswork and this trend also happened for when the sitters had to evaluate all of the readings including their own for accuracy. Their own readings were rated a greater level of accuracy than the readings that were done for the other sitters.
I was pleased that the author took the results of the studies as evidence supportive of his 'Living Soul Hypothesis', though I myself think that there might be alternative explanations for the research: for example, one of the possibilities that I've often thought about is the concept that psi is some kind of living energy that even if it doesn't have awareness or consciousness at least similar to our own, then it might have some kind of intelligence behind it. I feel that reality is a kind of "playground" for the mind, in which the mind affects the psi, moulding it like playdough into the features of the individual concerned's beliefs. For example, a person who believes in angels might see angels because psi manifests itself (at least sometimes) as angels. I believe that this theory might explain some of the phenomena that occurred in the experiment, since the mediums may not have been speaking to "dead people" literally, but perhaps aspects of the universal consciousness that Carl Jung talked about which was manifested by psi. 
   In conclusion, it was a great read, but I feel there are still alternative explanations for the findings - even if fraud or deception wasn't involved consciously by the mediums, is it possible that they are not talking to actual dead people, but some other spiritual energy such as the one my theory above concerns? Also, I wasn't convinced the data was not supportive of the existence of the Akashic Records, since the mediums may have consulted these unconsciously. This would have meant that they could obtain information concerning the past, the present and the future, even if the sitter was unaware of the validity of some information given by the medium. Lastly, another theory of psi in relation to the results of Schwartz's experiments is the Decision Augmentation Theory (DAT) which proposes that there is an aspect of goal-seeking and that the individual (e.g. medium) uses psi to find information in relation to their goal (e.g. information that would prove or support the notion that their sitter's loved one/s are still alive and well but in the world of spirit). The book, for me, raised more questions than answers, yet despite this I feel it was well worth reading.