OCTOBER UPDATE

*** Strange anomaly captured on Canon PowerShot G9 Camera on double refractive image ***

Please take the time to visit

 "PHOTO FOCUS"

and the

"CROSSING OVER"

page(s)

*** This is one of the first Australian Forums dedicated to EVP/ITC research and discussion that is moderated by my good friend Kevin and I invite you to join up if you are interested in experimenting with EVP ***

http://evpaustralia.proboards105.com/index.cgi

For those interested in learning about and researching EVP/ITC, there is a fantastic International opportunity awaiting you next year.

The AAEVP (American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena) are holding a mid-year weekend Conference in Los Angeles on 11th/12th July which I will be attending.

It will provide a two-day overview/introduction to the many facets of EVP/ITC and there will be demonstrations offering communication with conscious entities and loved ones beyond this physical realm.

Hope to see you there

(See below for details)

Rob

~~~~~~~~

DID YOU KNOW?

The standard range of human hearing is 20-20,000 hertz - but many EVP transmissions are recorded BELOW 20 hertz (subsonic) or ABOVE 20.000 hertz (supersonic) - often at speeds faster than glottal speech

STONEYCROFT COTTAGE

29092008_Some_Call_Me_Ron!.wav

We were recently on holidays and spent some time in an old Shearer's cottage (Circa 1860) near Hamilton in the Western District of Victoria.

I asked if anyone was present on my H4 Recorder and received this male voiced comment from a discarnate calling himself 'Ron'

He also adds 'rob' to my 'Thank You' at the end of the recording to reciprocate my thanks!

Also

this recording was received by the medium of an AM manual radio sweep captured on H4 Handy Recorder

06102008_Hate_Fenton_Sick_LOOK_He's_Good!.wav

We were advised this morning that my partner's horse is unwell  (called FENTON) and I received the above message which includes an opening comment by a discarnate female saying, "Hate Fenton Sick!" - which is then followed by two male comments, "Look!" - "He's Good!"

The comment is current to our situation, is related to a specific issue affecting us, and one that makes contextual sense.

It seems that these discarnate voices are fully aware of our situation.

I will update you regarding the plight of the horse in the NOV UPDATE

Where Have All the Apparitions Gone?

An educational project by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena sought to investigate and research all known haunting reports in the borough of Swindon, England.

One hundred and forty-five accounts were found but only half of these were included in the“census report.” The other half lacked the quality of detail needed for useful analysis. Reports from the last thirty to forty years showed that 82% of the reported haunting involved at least one sighting of an apparition and more than half also involved some sort of movement (seen or unseen) of inanimate objects as well as auditory phenomena and unusual “sensations.”  Twenty-four of the reports included events that happened in the last ten years, either as part of a longer-term “haunting” or as a new event. Of those hauntings taking place in the last decade, only one-third included the sighting of an apparition. This stands in stark contrast to the 82% sighted from older surveys.

Surprisingly, even the hauntings that were a continuation of long-running cases primarily marked by apparitions prior to the last decade were now found to be largely apparition-free.

Another interesting finding looked at that old idea that hauntings take place at night. This theory was inconsistent with the findings in the study which showed the most common time for haunting events to occur was in the afternoon.

In fact, over two-thirds of the events in this survey happen in the afternoon.

From: The Paranormal Review , April 2008, Issue 46, “Where Have All the Apparitions Gone? Conclusions of a Census of Hauntings” by David Wood

Current Status of Mediumship Research at The Windbridge Institute by Julie Beischel, PhD

Although the issues of survival of consciousness (life after death) and mediumship were fundamental during the inception and development of parapsychology as a science, research interests soon shifted toward psychic abilities including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition and investigations of mediums became few and far between.

Several authors have also noted that historical mediumship research lacked the proper research design, statistical power,and elimination of potential sources of error for current researchers to value even “positive” studies. Furthermore, historical mediumship research often involved trance mediums who entered a sleep-like state involving amnesia during their readings; modern, American participants,however, most often practice mental mediumship involving a focused and waking state of consciousness.

The continued evaluation of the phenomenon of anomalous information reception (AIR) by mediums and research addressing the survival of consciousness hypothesis are important for many reasons, including those that are academically important as well as those that are socially relevant.

First, an understanding of the mediumship process may aid in determining which mechanisms may be at work during the cognitive processing of non-local, non-sensory information. In addition, survival and mediumship studies provide unique evidence for an issue central to consciousness science: the relationship between the mind/ consciousness and the brain.

That is, is consciousness (a) a product of the brain as theorized by materialist neuroscientists or is consciousness (b) mediated, transmitted, transformed, guided, or arbitrated by the brain as hypothesized by such scientists as Max Plank and William James? On a socially applicable front, this research is important beyond just addressing the public’s growing interest in mediumship and the survival of consciousness.

First, mediums may be able to perform socially useful tasks like finding missing persons or contributing to criminal investigations,but in order for society to sensibly utilize the information mediums provide, the process by which it is acquired needs to be better understood. In addition, the information mediums provide may contain wisdom or knowledge that could benefit scientific, technological, and/or social progress.

Furthermore, scientific evidence for life after death could revolutionize health care by alleviating the anxiety felt by hospice patients and their families and

changing the way allopathic physicians view death.

Finally, mediumship readings may be helpful in grief counseling and recovery. For these academic and socially relevant reasons, it is important to continue investigating the information mediums report as well as the mediumship process itself.

As with the study of any natural phenomenon,bringing mediumship into the regulated environment of the laboratory allows for the controlled and repeated examination of AIR by mediums.

Ideally, laboratory-based mediumship research should include two equally important factors: a research environment that optimizes the mediumship process for both the medium and the hypothesized discarnate in order to increase the probability of capturing the phenomenon, if it exists, in a laboratory setting, and research methods that maximize the experimental blinding of the medium, the rater, and the experimenter in order to eliminate all conventional explanations for the reported information and its accuracy and specificity.  

Together, these two factors optimize the possibility of achieving positive results while also controlling for experimental artifacts.

There are two major mediumship research fronts in progress at The Windbridge Institute: prooffocused studies aiming to gather additional evidence about mediums’ reported communication with the deceased (i.e., anomalous information reception), and process-focused studies that investigate the mediums’ experiences of that communication. Both directions contribute to our understanding of the information that mediums report and to our ability to use the information appropriately as a society.

On the proof-focused side, the studies are designed simply to further test the primary hypothesis of mediumship research: Skilled mediums can report accurate and specific information about the deceased loved ones (termed discarnates) of living people (termed sitters) even without any prior knowledge about the sitters or the discarnates and in the complete absence of any sensory feedback.

In January of 2007, a study I performed while still with the University of Arizona was published in the peer-reviewed journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.  In that paper, titled “Anomalous Information Reception by Research Mediums Demonstrated Using a Novel Triple-Blind Protocol,” we put forth this conclusion:

“The present findings provide evidence for anomalous information reception but do not directly address what parapsychological mechanisms are involved in that reception.”

In other words, the mediums were reporting accurate and specific information that they could not have received by any normal means or through deception, but where the information was coming from, we couldn’t say.

Back in 1896, Harvard Professor and American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) co-founder William James (often called the father of American or modern psychology) came to a similar conclusion regarding his study of trance medium Mrs. Leonora Piper:

In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make,but from admitting the fact of such evidence I can see no escape.

 [Address by the president. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , 12, 2-10.]

And while far more eloquent, Professor James came to basically the same conclusion about one trance medium that we did regarding a group of mental mediums over 100 years later.

Clearly, further modern research is needed.

Most scientists would agree that we cannot accept the findings from a study as real until that study has been replicated and the same results found. And some, if not most, scientists would argue that the replication needs to take place in a laboratory separate from the one that published the first

study before we can view the findings as real rather than as just a fluke.

At Windbridge, we are currently seeking support for a replication of the published AIR study (that is, the AIRII). We have collected about half of the data to date. Once a second positive peer-reviewed study is published, we hope the phenomenon of anomalous information reception by mediums will begin to be taken seriously by more conventional scientists.

The data collected to date (from over a century of mediumship research) cannot distinguish between three main explanations:

Survival of Consciousness — there is life after death and some recognizable part of our consciousness goes on to live beyond the body and talk to mediums;

• Super-Psi — the medium retrieves the information using clairvoyance, precognition, and/or telepathy with the living (collectively called “psi”); and,

• Psychic Reservoir — all information since the beginning of time is stored somehow and somewhere in the universe and mediums are accessing that cosmic store rather than communicating with the deceased.

However , a medium’s experience of communication with the deceased is reportedly much different than her experience with psi. It is the difference between dead people and dead information. But that concept is only anecdotal at this point. We now need to study it in the controlled environment of the laboratory.

That brings us to the second arm of the current Windbridge research: process-focused studies about the mediums’ experiences.

The study of how things are experienced by the experience is called phenomenology. For our current phenomenology studies with mediums, I have been working with Windbridge Adjunct Research Fellow Adam Rock, PhD.

For the first study (Phenomenology I), Dr. Rock qualitatively analyzed research mediums’ answers to the questionnaire item “Describe in as much detail as possible your experiences while communicating with the deceased.”

Our peer-reviewed paper detailing the results of that study was recently published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration [22(2): 179-192].

We found that the mediums most often reported experiencing the deceased in multiple ways including seeing and hearing the deceased, smelling fragrances associated with the deceased’s physical life, feeling ailments or causes of death, and changes in the mediums’ emotional feelings.

In the second phase of that study, mediums filled out an instrument called the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) that quantitatively measured their experiences.

Dr. Rock and I recently submitted a paper detailing the results of that study for publication in the Australian Journal of Parapsychology . Briefly, we found that mediums’ states of consciousness are statistically different during communication with the deceased than their normal (i.e., non-AIR) states of consciousness.

For the Phenomenology III and IV studies, we hope to both qualitatively and quantitatively analyze mediums’experiences during communication with the deceased as compared to their experiences while performing psychic telepathy readings for the living. This data should begin to differentiate between the hypotheses suggesting the source of mediums’ information and thus address the issue of survival of consciousness.

Julie Beischel, PhD, is the Co-Founder and Director of Research at The Windbridge Institute. www.windbridge.org  Dr. Beischel received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona. She was the first ever recipient of the William James Post-doctoral Fellowship in Mediumship and Survival Research at the University of Arizona where she served as Co-Director of the VERITAS Research Program . She is currently a member of the Parapsychological Association , a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Rhine Research Center and the Forever Family Foundation , and an Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Shift-In-Action Luminary. Her academic training allows her to design and apply traditional research methods to investigating more unconventional topics of study including the survival of consciousness and other parapsychological phenomena.   In June of 2008, Dr. Beischel and Windbridge Co-Founder Mark Boccuzzi began a pilot study supported by AA-EVP investigating real-time EVP conversations. More information and full copies of published articles are available at www.windbridge.org .

Julie will present results of the Real-Time EVP Conversation study funded at the 2009 AA-EVP conference.