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SPIRITUALISM-FOR AND AGAINST
FOR The vast majority of mediums are quiet, inoffensive people prepared to use their gifts to bring peace of mind to the bereaved-often without a charge. They offer very specific information which they could not have known beforehand. Despite the fakers, there is a hard core of mediums who have been intensively investigated over long periods and have never been caugth cheating. The feats of physical mediums have been captured on film. If those feats had been specially set up for the camera, the fraud would have included very many people over the years.
Spiritualism did not invent mediumship, but gave it a name and brought it before the public and the media. Psychic contact with the dead has always been around in one guide or another. The phenomena which occured during the seances are no different from poltergeist activity. Modern mental mediums are so confident in their accuracy that they encourage sitters to tape-record the spirit messages, to study in detail later.
Contrary to popular belief, not all stage magicians are antagonistic towards calims of mediumship. Some are actively involved in paranormal research. Professional American magician and psychic researcher Larry Auerbach told us that debunkers like James Randi are not actually in the majority. The late David Nixon admitted that it was not possible to duplicate all of the feats of Uri Geller through the use of trickery.
Auerbach is an adjunct professor teaching parapsychology at Jogn F. Kennedy University in California, where he gained a master's degree in parapsychology; he also has a BA in cultural anthropology from Nortwestern University. As a magician, he was creative consultant to the television series the Magic of David Copperfield. Together with illusionist Christopher Chacon, in 1980 Auerbach set up the Office of Paranormal Investigations. It looks into claims concerning the paranormal and acts as a resource centre for the media, business people, scientists and law enforcement agencies.
In a recent survey of magician in California, Auerbach discovered that approximately three-quarters claimed that paranormal incidents had occured during their acts. When tricks had gone wrong, paranormal phenomena had taken over to make them work.
Houdini did find proof of a medium who provided him with unambigous prrof of life after death. Details of this are contained in private documentaiotn that the sceptical camp of magicians are trying to suppress. He claims that there is an underground battle taking place to force these documents into the open.
TESTIMONY As a theosophist and science graduate I had reached an athiestic viewpoint which I held for some time. I decided to attend a Spiritualist church near to where I live and expected to have my atheistic viewpoint reinforced. But, however, the medium was able to give me accurate information about deceased relatives of which she could have known by no means other than her personal ability to communicate with those that have passed on. My viewpoint has changed and I have discoverd that their is a unity of brotherhood and sisterhood in the afterlife. It doesn't matter what religion you are so long as your ways were straight and you have commited no great evil. My world view needs updating after this encounter. The basic Christian code is easy to follow which was changed by layer upon layer of extra theory and complications by the Roman Catholic and Protestant movements.Most religions agree about keeping a basic code and your ways straight. The afterlife contains people who have kept their ways straight regardless or race or religion and forms an incredible unity of brotherhood and sisterhood. I suggest other responsible people to approach this with respect with an enquiring mind will find the truth.
AGAINST When Spiritualism popularised 'contact with the dead', turning it into an entertainment, it attracted several types of 'performers'. There were the sincere, the sincerely deluded and the out-and-out frauds.
Believing that information entering the mind comes from a realm where dead spirits reside is by no means the same thing as proving that it does. There are other sources form which such 'voices' might emerge and, although genuinely 'heard' in the mind of the medium, the mistake could be in giving them an external origin.
For instance, mediums might be psychically tapping into the mind of the sitter. Inevitably, at the back of his or her mind, a person in the company of a medium is almost bound to be thinking about the people he or she once knew who had died and who might conceivably 'come through'. If the deceased then appears to 'communicate', might it not be just as likely that the mind-to-mind communication was between the medium and the sitter, rather than between the medium and a mind from a world beyond death? The only way to rule that out is to obtain information that the sitter could not possibly know or ever have known.
The fraudsters saw there was a fast buck to be made and employed conjuring tricks which took advantage of both the sensation seekers and the freshly bereaved looking for consolation and 'proof' of an afterlife. There were many scpetics who successfully exposed fraudulent mediums.