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What if you could have a scientific reason to believe that what you already know in your heart is true? The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life after Death (Pocket Books) by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., offers such a gift to those who know that life is eternal, that the soul survives the death of the physical body. University of Arizona professor Dr. Schwartz and his innovative double-blind experiments have attracted a lot of attention. His methodology removes all skeptical objections to survival research except one: that he does such research in the first place.
As a scientist, Dr. Schwartz likes to develop hypotheses and test them. He believes that his work offers evidence to support the hypothesis that living info-energy systems, once created, continue indefinitely, that is, that there are eternal souls. He does not say that he has “proof” of life after death. How can you show another person, he asks, that you love a particular person? Not because of what you say, nor because of what you do, because those words and actions can be motivated by something other than love. You just “know” inside that you love that particular person, but how do you “prove” it to someone else? That is a problem. Another problem is this: How do you know that you are correctly interpreting what you experience as “love”? Maybe it really is something else. Dr. Schwartz answers that the scientific process allows us to infer the existence of things that we cannot detect directly, to assert the existence of the invisible, such as gravity. Science also allows us to evaluate interpretations of our experience, rejecting some interpretations and allowing others to remain viable.
We all know that experiments in mediumship cannot “prove” the existence of life after death, because there are too many alternative interpretations of the data. For one thing, perhaps the medium, or psychic, has tremendous clairvoyant abilities and can simply “know” the answer to any question posed, without having to receive information transmitted by an actual spirit from a deceased person. This “Super Psi” hypothesis is nearly impossible to disprove. The double-blind experiments reported by Dr. Schwartz provide evidence of “anomalous information transfer”, to be sure, but no experiment can absolutely “prove” that the information is from non-material souls. Instead, Dr. Schwartz considers the details in the information exchanged. For example, when a medium relays some information from the deceased to the seated relative, the spirit often corrects the medium, jokes around, and interacts with the medium. If the medium were simply collecting information and were not in actual dialogue with an intelligent being, this type of event would not occur. The bottom line is that the simplest explanation for all the data is that the anomalous information transfer comes from living souls. So he has the scientific data that allows us to believe what we already know to be true. And that?
Gary Schwartz has a grander vision than proving that life survives death. His investigation has provided reason to suspect that it is love that is behind it all. It is love that motivates the transfer of information, the communication between the loved one in spirit and the loved one in the physical body. Sir Isaac Newton, the man who discovered gravity, declared that this attractive force that existed between all things in creation was a manifestation of God’s love. In other words, Newton equated gravity with love. Love is the universal energy, says Professor Schwartz.
Love puts a human face on energy; in the info-energy systems we call souls. He also points out that it is love that motivates most of the communication between the psychic environment and the information and energy system, also known as the soul. In many instances of his experiments, the spirit communicated information that had less to do with the experimental requirements than with the communication of love to living relative. As much as a spirit may have shown motivation to help the experiment succeed and passed on the required information, there would be other communications that were motivated by the spirit’s strong desire for the living relative to know of the love that still emanated from the deceased relative. to the living
When Dr. Schwartz tells the story of how he became involved in this research, it was his love for a colleague’s love for his deceased father that inspired him to investigate the afterlife hypothesis. There was intellectual curiosity, but perhaps not enough to justify the criticism such an investigation would generate among his colleagues. It was love that propelled him into action. As a bonus to the success of his experimental design in demonstrating the feasibility of a scientific exploration of the question of survival, his work clearly revealed the eternal presence and infinite power of love to unite creation, making communication and communion not only are possible, but vital. to life itself.
