Direct experiences of encounters and communication with deceased persons do not occur only around the time when these people died or as part of the NDEs, but also at a later date, spontaneously or in the context of holotropic states induced by psychedelics, experiential psychotherapies, or meditation. Naturally, the data of this kind have to be evaluated particularly carefully and critically. The simple fact of a private experience of the deceased does not really amount to very much and can easily be dismissed as a wishful fantasy or hallucination. Some additional factors must be present as well before the experiences constitute interesting research material. It is also, of course, important to make a distinction between those apparitions that seem to satisfy some strong need of the percipient and others, where any motivation of this kind cannot be found.
It is important to mention that some of the apparitions have certain characteristics that make them very interesting or even challenging for researchers. There are a number of cases reported that describe apparitions of persons unknown to the percipient, who are later identified through photographs and verbal descriptions. It also is not uncommon that such apparitions are witnessed collectively or by many different individuals over long periods of time, such as in the case of “haunted” houses and castles.
In some instances, the apparitions can have distinct distinguishing bodily marks accrued around the time of death, which is unbeknownst to the percipient. Of particular interest are those cases where the deceased convey some specific and accurate new information that can be verified or is linked with an extraordinary synchronicity. I have myself observed in LSD therapy and in Holotropic Breathwork several amazing instances of the second kind. One example of such is an event that occurred during the LSD therapy of Richard, a young depressed patient who had made repeated suicide attempts.
In one of his LSD sessions, Richard had a very unusual experience involving a strange and uncanny astral realm. This domain had an eerie luminescence and was filled with discarnate beings that were trying to communicate with him in a very urgent and demanding manner. He could not see or hear them; however, he sensed their almost tangible presence and was receiving telepathic messages from them. I wrote down one of these messages that was very specific and could be subjected to subsequent verification. It was a request for Richard to connect with a couple in the Moravian city of Kroměříž and let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was well taken care of.
The message included the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number; all of these details were unknown to me and the patient. This experience was extremely puzzling; it seemed to be an alien enclave in Richard’s experience, totally unrelated to his problems and the rest of his treatment. After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes had they found out. I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kroměříž, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: “Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away. We lost him three weeks ago.”
Another example involves a close friend and former colleague of mine, Walter N. Pahnke, who was a member of our psychedelic research team at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland. He had a deep interest in parapsychology, particularly in the problem of consciousness after death, and worked with many famous mediums and psychics, including his friend Eileen Garrett, president of the American Parapsychological Association. He was also the initiator of our LSD program for patients dying of cancer.
In the summer of 1971, Walter went with his wife Eva and their children for a vacation in their cabin in Maine, situated right on the ocean. One day, he went scuba-diving before lunch, by himself, and did not return. A systematic and extensive search involving the Coast Guard and several famous psychics failed to find his body or any part of his diving gear. Under these circumstances, Eva found it very difficult to accept and integrate his death. Her last memory of Walter when he was leaving the cabin involved him full of energy and in perfect health. It was hard for her to believe that he was not part of her life anymore and she could not start a new chapter of her existence without a sense of closure for the preceding one.
Being a psychologist herself, she qualified for an LSD training session for mental health professionals that was offered through a special program in our institute. She decided to have a psychedelic experience with the hope of getting some insight into this situation and asked me to be her sitter. In the second half of the session, she had a very powerful vision of Walter and carried on a long and meaningful dialogue with him. He gave her specific instructions concerning each of their three children and released her to start a new life of her own, unencumbered and unrestricted by a sense of commitment to his memory. It was a very profound and liberating experience.
Just as Eva was questioning whether the entire episode was just a wishful fabrication of her own mind, Walter appeared once more for a brief period of time and asked Eva to return a book that he had borrowed from a friend of his. He then proceeded to give her the name of the friend, the room where the book was, the name of the book, the shelf, and the sequential order of the book on this shelf. Giving Eva this kind of specific confirmation of the authenticity of their communication was very much in Walter’s style. During his life, he had had extensive contact with psychics from different parts of the world and had been fascinated by the attempt of the famous magician Harry Houdini to prove the existence of the Beyond. Following the instructions, Eva was actually able to find and return the book, about the existence of which she had had no previous knowledge.
One of the psychologists participating in our three-year professional training had witnessed a wide variety of his colleagues’ transpersonal experiences during our Holotropic Breathwork sessions, and had also had several of them himself. However, he continued to be very skeptical about the authenticity of these phenomena, constantly questioning whether or not they deserved any special attention. Then, after one of his Holotropic Breathwork sessions, he experienced an unusual synchronicity that convinced him that he might have been too skeptical and conservative in his approach to transpersonal experiences and ESP phenomena.
Toward the end of his session, he had a vivid experience of encountering his grandmother, who had been dead for many years. He had been very close to her in his childhood and was deeply moved by the possibility that he might really be communicating with her again. In spite of a deep emotional involvement in the experience, he continued to maintain an attitude of professional skepticism about the encounter. He knew that he had had many real interactions with his grandmother while she was alive and that his mind could have easily fabricated an imaginary encounter using these old memories.
However, this meeting with his dead grandmother was so emotionally profound and convincing that he simply could not dismiss it as a wishful fantasy. He decided to seek proof that the experience was real, not just in his imagination. He asked his grandmother for some form of confirmation and received the following message: “Go to aunt Anna and look for cut roses.” Still skeptical, he decided to visit his aunt Anna’s home on the following weekend and see what would happen. Upon his arrival, he found his aunt in the garden, surrounded by cut roses. He was astonished. The day of his visit just happened to be the one day of the year that his aunt had decided to do some radical pruning of her roses.
Experiences of this kind are certainly far from being a definitive proof of the existence of astral realms and discarnate beings. However, these astonishing synchronicities clearly suggest that this fascinating area deserves the serious attention of consciousness researchers. Of special interest is the quasi-experimental evidence that is suggestive of the survival of consciousness after death that comes from the highly charged and controversial area of spiritistic seances and mental or trance mediumship, as I examined in Volume I. Although some of the professional mediums were occasionally caught cheating, a number of others—such as Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, and Mrs. Verrall—successfully passed credible research tests (Grosso 1994).
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 induced 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, upward levitation of objects and people, projection of objects through the air, the manifestation of ectoplasmic formations, and the appearance of writings or objects without explanation (“apports”). In the Brazilian spiritist movement, mediums 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), which uses modern electronic technology for this purpose.
This avenue of research began in 1959 when Scandinavian filmmaker Friedrich Jurgensen picked up human voices of allegedly dead persons on an audiotape while recording the sounds of passerine birds in a quiet forest. Inspired by this event, Latvian parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive conducted a systematic study of this phenomenon and recorded more than 100,000 multilingual paranormal voices allegedly communicating messages from the Beyond (Raudive 1971).
More recently, a worldwide network of researchers, including Ernst Senkowski, George Meek, Mark Macy, Scott Rogo, Raymond Bayless, and others have been involved in a group effort to establish “interdimensional transcommunication” (ITC). 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 the Beyond are supposedly some of the former researchers in this field, such as Jurgensen and Raudive (Senkowski 1994).
The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys Volume Two
by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.
