RESEARCHER RECEIVES PERSONAL EVIDENCE

       In his 2002 book, The Afterlife Experiments, Dr. Gary Schwartz, professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona, offered “breakthrough scientific evidence of life after death” (the subtitle of the book) based on experiments carried out with five prominent mediums in his Human Energy Systems Laboratory.

      While Schwartz, who received his doctorate from Harvard and taught at Yale before moving to Arizona, came under attack by some scientific fundamentalists for his methods and conclusions, he has not backed away from continuing survival research. “We are not just doing research to get percent hits under different levels of control [as is the focus of the book],” he told me in a recent interview.  “We are now interested in studying the process.  The whole idea of how you establish that the medium is actually receiving communication from a genuine, conscious, decision-making person (spirit) is a very important question, and we’re now asking questions as to what the afterlife is like.  That takes the work substantially further.”

    Among the mediums studied by Schwartz have been John Edward, who hosted a popular television program, Crossing Over, and more recently, Allison Dubois, whose life as a psychic legal investigator is the model for the now popular television weekly drama, Medium.

   An ongoing set of “discarnate intention” studies is called the “departed hypothesized co-investigator experiments” or the “double-deceased paradigm.”   The idea came to Schwartz not long ago when Janet Mayer, a St. Louis, Missouri housewife, contacted him and claimed to have received communication for him from Susy Smith.  It was Smith, a medium and author on psychic subject before her death in 2002, who introduced Schwartz to mediumship.

     “She (Mayer) said that Susy was watching over me,” Schwartz explained, “so I asked her if she could ask Susy what happened to me over the next 24 hours and then e-mail the information to me every day Monday through Friday.  The very first night I decided I would watch a movie, Field of Dreams, and order Chinese food in, which I almost never do, and the third thing is I watched the movie lying down in bed.”

     The following day Schwartz received an e-mail from Mayer saying that Susy showed her something about baseball (the subject of the movie) and saw him eating some sort of unusual foreign food.  She also saw him reclining.  “Five days a week for a few months, it was as if they had a camera in my house,” Schwartz exclaimed.  “This did not prove, of course, that it was Susy.  There are other explanations, like remote viewing.”

     During the personal experiment with Mayer, Schwartz visited a family one weekend.  The wife had recently lost a sister and was grieving badly.  Schwartz thought how nice it would be if people like her could have the verification that he had about survival.  “The next morning, I’m back in Manhattan and get an e-mail from Janet,” Schwartz continues the story.  “Remember, she e-mailed me Monday through Friday, not on weekends, but she explained that she was driving her car Saturday night when Susy shows up in the car and insists she do a reading, saying she has brought along another deceased person.  So Janet pulls over and took notes as she received communication from the unknown woman.  I look at the information and realized it might be the sister of the person I had been visiting the prior day.”

    Schwartz hesitated before calling the living sister he had just visited and went through the information item by item.   Especially interesting and veridical was that Mayer was shown an eagle and told that it is very important to the family.  As Schwartz would learn from the living sister, the deceased sister collected statues and paintings of eagles and at her memorial service a statue of an eagle was placed where the ashes of the woman would normally have been.

     “I said, wow, one deceased person can bring another deceased person to a medium, that’s a great experimental paradigm,” Schwartz said.  “It shows intention on the part of the deceased and very hard to explain by Super PSI.”

     Does he have any generalizations now relative to the afterlife?  “There’s only one I feel comfortable about now, even though we have all the questions,” he responded.  “There is a massive amount of data and we are in the throes of analyzing it.  What I find most amusing and potentially reassuring is that when we are ‘dead’ it’s easier to ‘multitask’ in the afterlife.  Meaning, to do multiple things at the same time but also to be in ‘multiple places’ at the same time as well. The capacity for doing non-local and multi-process activities is just easier than when you are in the physical and located in a very specific place.  That’s something that has been universally observed.”

      In spite of the attacks by closed-minded scientists, the indifference of orthodox religion, and generally inaccurate and unfair coverage by the mainstream media, Schwartz courageously moves on with his research, feeling that it is having some impact on the public.  “I think it is ultimately the research mediums, like Allison DuBois, as they become visible and public,” he ended the interview, “who will awaken the public to the science, and then people can go to the science and reach their own conclusions.” 

                                                 – Michael E. Tymn