Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations

by Alan Gauld

Whether or not we survive physical death is one of humanity's most fundamental concerns. Here Dr. Gauld draws on a century of evidence - mediumship, reincarnation, obsession, possession, hauntings and apparitions all seem to indicate survival. This is a compulsively readable assessment of evidence for and against survival and an excellent introduction to the field of psychical research.The Paranormal, the new ebook series from F&W Media International Ltd, resurrecting rare titles, classic publications and out-of-print texts, as well as new ebook titles on the supernatural - other-worldly books for the digital age. The series includes a range of paranormal subjects from angels, fairies and UFOs to near-death experiences, vampires, ghosts and witchcraft.

463 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 31, 2012

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book difficult to read. The anecdotes, many of which derived from publications of the Societies for Psychical Research, sponsors of this publication, were fine. The author's prose, his style of argument, however, was difficult for me despite some background in analytical philosophy, a field exhibiting similar characteristics of style. Having some resistance, mostly on ethical grounds, to notions of personal survival after physical death, I must wonder at the objectivity of this criticism.

What I found most interesting about this book was Gauld's notion of 'overshadowing', this being an explanatory model whereby there is a dialectical relationship between a perceiver's nervous system and a suprapersonal mind (herein usually treated as that of a deceased person). Gauld argues for this notion in terms of the mind/body problem, attacking the inadequacies of prevailing physicalist models of memory and consciousness-as-rooted-in-the-nervous system. Although I had trouble initially in following his logic, other readings on this matter sympathetically predisposed me to the critique of the physicalists.

This had been my bedtime book for a few days. Appropriately, some insight was afforded by a dream--not one of adventure, but one of thought and image which took me back to seminary days.

Amongst the many streams of biblical theology is one discernable in the Wisdom Books and in the prologue to John's gospel. In more modern theology it is to be found in Kant's 'Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone'. I think of it as 'logos theology' and regard it as pointing towards one of the ways in which one can do theology today without flying in the face of evidence. Basically, the idea is this: That god qua logos is the ratio, or balanced measure, of all things and that we approximately participate in this when we think and when we speak. Jung and Chomsky point in a similar direction in their own transcendental deductions of the foundations of imagination and of language, formal structures which underlie and are shared by all individual thinkers and speakers. In other words, the mystery of mind, of psyche, has both a personal and a suprapersonal dimension.

This logos business helps me with beginning to apprehend some ESP phenomena, it does not, however, resolve the central mystery of Gauld's book, namely the super-ESP vs. personal survival dilemma. --nor, it should be noted, does Gauld himself arrive at a conclusion.

[Albus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but there is a lot of focus in this book on the debate between the “survivalists” (who believe in life after death because of evidence from mediums, reincarnation cases, etc.) and the “super-ESP” group (who believe that most or all of the phenomena pointed to as evidence for survival can in fact be explained by ESP by living persons). This can be an interesting discussion if you are already a believer in these phenomena, but it is a distraction from what I see as the most urgent question: providing solid evidence that the phenomena of mediums, reincarnation cases, and related supernatural events, cannot be explained away by conventional methods (fraud, misremembering, biased observers, coincidences, hallucinations or dreams, etc.). I for one would be ecstatic if the scientific mainstream could accept “super-ESP” as a real thing which explains these supernatural phenomena, even if they continued to strenuously deny the possibility of survival. I think until strong, widely accepted evidence for the supernatural has been provided, parapsychologists must focus their attention there.

[Jamie Cupit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an excellent meta-review of SPR case studies of mediumship. While the history of mediumship is littered with examples of fraud, obvious over-reaching and willful, favorable misinterpretation on behalf of sitters, this book presents a series of cases that stretch such skeptical explanations to the limit of credulity. The fundamental theoretical question pursued thus becomes whether these are derived from a) true contact with our dearly departed or b) Super-ESP powers of telepathy, clairvoyance in relation to the sitters they interact with. And there are no easy answers...