Theory

Abstract

Spontaneous communication across the veil has been characterized as After death Communication (ADC) and Induced ADC for the Botkin method of EMDR. ATransC does not use “death” as a concept, preferring the use of “trans-” to indicate etheric-physical interaction. We do not “die” we “transition.”

After Death Communication or ADC is a concept popularized by Bill and Judy Guggenheim in their book, Hello from Heaven. From their website: [ADC is defined as] “…a spiritual experience, which occurs when you are contacted directly and spontaneously by a deceased family member or friend, without the use of psychics, mediums, rituals or devices of any kind” The important points in this explanation are that ADCs are spontaneous and instruments are not required. They do include phone calls as a type, but they are very definite that EVP is not included in the list.

The Guggenheims are also very definite that ADCs are spontaneous, which is why Allan Botkin refers to his EMDR induced ADCs as induced or IADC.^TM Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic technique in which the practitioner guides a client to move his or her eyes back and forth while dwelling on an emotional memory. This is an oversimplification, but in practice, the technique helps remove the emotional charge of a memory. Based on his work with war veterans, Botkin developed a technique in which clients have impressively vivid communication with transitioned loved ones, thus the “Induced” part of ADC.

Because of the emphasis the Guggenheims made about spontaneous ADC, we have always distinguished the class of transcommunication that is spontaneous as ”ADC” and the class of ADC that are induced as “induced ADC.” Botkin has protected “IADC” with a trademark for his therapeutic technique, meaning that he owns its use in this field.

It was recently pointed out to us that people look for information about contacting loved ones by searching for “After Death Communication” or “ADC.” Searching atransc.org for these, we see that virtually all of our references to ADC are either talking about Botkin’s work, the Guggenheim’s book or what others have used when talking about transcommunication. We simply do not use the term for our work.

With There is No Death and There are No Dead the name of the book we wrote for the Association, it should not be surprising that the term, “death,” is not part of our usual nomenclature. The name of the Association is Association TransCommunication. It is based on Instrumental TransCommunication or ITC as coined by Ernst Senkowski in the 1980s to embrace all forms of instrument-based communication across the veil. You have probably noticed that we use the “trans” prefix quite a lot. For instance, the term, “survival” is also used by people preparing for the end of the world, so technically, we should say “trans-survival.” It all depends on the understanding that we mean “trans” as in across the veil.

It is important to understand that the viewpoint of the ATransC is that we transition from one aspect of reality to another when our physical body is no longer able to support us in the physical. We avoid saying that “we die” or that someone is “dead.” We say that “we transition” and that someone has “transitioned.”

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The Research of Bill and Judy Guggenheim

by Lisa Butler
Previously published in the Summer 2005 ATransC NewsJournal

Between 1988 and 1995, the Guggenheims asked two thousand people, living in the United States and Canada, if they had been contacted by a loved one who had died.* The people interviewed represented diverse backgrounds and ranged in age from children to the elderly. The Guggenheims collected more than thirty-three hundred firsthand accounts of After-Death Communication (ADC). Their book, Hello from Heaven, was based on this research.

Based upon this research, the Guggenheims came up with the twelve most frequently reported types of afterdeath communication. They are:

1. Sensing a Presence: This is the most common form of ADC. It happens when a person has an unmistakable feeling that their loved one is there, even though they cannot be seen or heard. Many people that experience this feel that they are just imagining the event. Sensing a presence is most often reported just days or weeks after a loved one’s death, but has been reported months and even years later.
2. ADC while Asleep: These experiences are much more vivid and real than normal dreams. They are very common and experiencers usually feel that they are having an actual visit from their loved one. These episodes are not fragmented or filled with symbols like typical dreams.
3. Hearing a Voice: People have reported hearing the physical voice of their loved one as if the person was right in the room; however, most communications are reported as telepathic; experiencers hear the voice in their head.
4. Feeling a Touch: The loved one touches the experiencer with their hand or places their arm around his or her shoulders. Hugs, kisses, pats and caresses have all been reported.
5. Smelling a Fragrance: The smell of a loved one’s personal scent. For instance, their favorite flower, cologne, after-shave lotion, perfume, bath powder, favorite food or tobacco product.
6. Visual Experiences: A person actually sees their loved one. There are partial visual (example: only head and shoulders are seen) and full visual ADCs. Typically the loved one will express love and appear healed no matter what the cause of death.
7. Visions: People report seeing their loved one in a picture in the air. There are usually radiant colors and the vision may be seen by the eyes or in the mind.
8. Twilight Experiences: These occur in the alpha state when experiencers are meditating, praying, falling asleep or just waking up. Any or all of the various types of ADCs may be experienced when in the alpha state.
9. Out-Of-Body ADC: These happen during sleep or a meditative state. Experiencers leave their body and visit their loved one on the level at which they exist. These are often described as more real than physical life, very vivid and beautiful with lots of color and light.
10. Telephone Calls: The phone rings and the call is from a loved one. The voice may seem far away and there is often no disconnect sound when the call is ended.
11. Physical Phenomena: A wide range of physical signs are reported such as lights blinking on and off, radios, televisions, stereos and other mechanical objects being tuned on or off. Pictures, photographs and other items may be moved or turned over.
12. Symbolic ADC: These are signs that our loved ones still exist. They are often subtle and may be seen as a coincidence. Common signs include butterflies, rainbows, flowers, birds, animals and inanimate objects such as coins and pictures.

One thing that will be very obvious about the above list for AA-EVP members is that EVP is not included. That is because the Guggenheims feel that ADCs are spontaneous occurrences and EVP, along with some other method for after death communication, as you will see in the next article, are induced. EVP not being included in the Guggenheim list does not lessen the importance of the experiences on their list. Many of us in the Association have lost a loved one and have experienced an ADC. It is important for us to realize that these are real occurrences and not just our imagination.

The Guggenheims state that most, “ADCs are positive and uplifting encounters that reduce grief, provide lasting comfort and hope, and accelerate emotional and spiritual healing.

“Not all people are contacted by their deceased loved ones … It seems that fear, anger and prolonged heavy grief can inhibit the possibility of an ADC.”

The Guggenheims suggest that a person ask for a sign that their loved one continues to exist. “Pray for the person as well as all others affected by the death, including yourself.” They suggest learning how to meditate, especially for those who are currently bereaved or experiencing unresolved grief. “Meditation will enable you to relax and soften any fear or anger you may have. It will reduce your depression, improve your ability to eat and sleep and facilitate your healing process. These deep relaxation exercises will also allow you to unfold your inner, intuitive senses.”

* After-Death Communication – Joyous Reunions with Deceased Loved

 

Further Reading: Formation of EVP

Abstract

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) can occur in a number of different ways. Knowing how the voices are formed, or at least where in the circuit, might help researchers design more effective devices and help avoid false positives. This article is intended to explore the various methodologies used in EVP experimentation. It is not intended to select one technology or methodology over another or to discourage research in what might appear to be a less productive approach. The main intent is to understand voice formation so as to avoid mistaking and reporting mundane signals as phenomenal.

Introduction

This article is intended to frame the discussion of where EVP are formed in the technology and how to detect and avoid false positive results. It is an attempt to deal with the subject in an analytical format without making unsubstantiated comments. Based on this and similar articles, best practices will be proposed under the Practices Tab of ATransC.org..

Transform EVP

The most common technique for EVP experimentation is the use of an audio recorder, and if necessary, a background sound source. Transform EVP are not an acoustical phenomenon, and so are not heard at the input of the electronic device. In some recorders, it is possible to listen to the signal as it is saved to memory; however, there are problems with experimenter comprehension that usually makes this “real time” approach impractical.

There is a substantial body of evidence based on well-designed research, and years of anecdotal reports, indicating that this form of EVP is the result of a transformation, within an electronic device, of available audio-frequency energy into a simulation of human speech. (1) This research has produced a list of characteristics for EVP that can be considered a “litmus test” that provides a means of avoiding mundane sound being mistaken as phenomena. (2) (See: Characteristic test for EVP) The current working hypothesis for how the voice is actually formed maintains that a small signal “message” is amplified via the action of stochastic resonance on the audio signal caused by background noise. (3)

Sources for a “Message” in Transform EVP

The EVP recording technique of using an audio recorder, and if necessary, supplying audio-frequency noise will be referred to here as the “basic recorder technique.” This technique is intended to produce transform EVP, but there are two other possible results. Figure 1 shows the intended mode, in which the EVP communicator somehow injects an utterance into the electronic device. The utterance exists in the output and the experimenter hears what is said.

A second result that can be encountered is illustrated in Figure 2. The experimenter mistakes mundane sounds in the recording as being paranormal utterances. This is the common human response referred to as “pareidolia” (4) by the skeptical community.

A third result is the accidental recording of unnoticed voices, for instance, someone speaking in the next room. When the recording is played back, the mundane voices are mistaken as EVP. This is illustrated in Figure 3.

A fourth result is more of a possible characteristic than a different result, but it is listed here because of the apparent origin of a new utterance. This is illustrated in Figure 4. An EVP is recorded in the usual manner and is stored in either digital or analog media. When it is played at a later time, the utterance thought to have been recorded is apparently replaced with another or transfigured to say something else. Reports of this were more common when analog and magnetic tape was the storage media. It has also been reported that, once digitized, the EVP remains unchanged whether it is stored in magnetic media or transistor devices.

Figure 4 is representative of a block diagram for any recording device, in that there is an analog input stage which has an output that is the input to a storage mechanism. If the recording is to be heard by human ears, recovery from the storage mechanism is via a second or “output” analog stage. EVP is thought to be formed in analog processes, as (I believe) stochastic resonance does not work in digitized signals. Also the energy well for nonlinear digitized signals is considerably greater than for linear analog and should require considerably more energy to influence. (This is conjecture.)

If the recording is transferred to a computer by connecting the earphone jack of the recorder to the line in jack of the computer, even if it was initially stored in a digital format, it is converted into analog and passes through two analog stages before being digitized for storage in the computer. If the recording is transferred via an all-digital format, say with a USB cable, then it remains digital until it is converted to analog for playback. Thus using a USB interface eliminates two analog stages, and therefore should offer less opportunity for etheric influence.

Close examination of “changed EVP” has shown that there is a likelihood that the utterance only seems to be changed. Class C and many Class B examples can seem to change when the experimenter leaves the recording for a time and then returns to it with a different perspective.

Assuming that EVP does not occur in digital format, each playback will begin with the same sound file once it has been digitized. If the output seems to be different, then it must be different in the same way on each playback. If the recording is stored in magnetic media in an analog format, there is less certainty that the recording cannot be changed in the magnetic media.

The problem of changed utterances is one that is not commonly reported, but such reports should be carefully documented as to the technical circumstances. Analysis of such reports may offer insights as to how EVP are formed.

Transform EVP Summary

Four possible results of using the basic recorder technique are that an EVP will be formed out of available noise (Figure 1), the experimenter might mistake mundane sound as EVP (Figure 2), unnoticed conversations in the recording environment might be mistaken as EVP (Figure 3) and an existing recording might be changed in storage or on output (Figure 4). All of the transform EVP techniques we are aware of are based on voice formation out of available audio-frequency energy, within an electronic circuit. Variations of this theme only represent novel ways to condition the audio-frequency noise used for voice formation.

Opportunistic EVP

          

This category of EVP is relatively new and much less understood as compared to transform EVP. Opportunistic EVP devices usually have additional electronic stages which are different than what is found in the basic recorder technique using just an audio recorder and sound source. It therefore has additional ways in which an EVP might be formed. There are many variations on the theme represented by Radio-sweep technology, popularly known as “ghost boxes” or “spirit boxes” and EVPmaker.

As is illustrated in Figure 5, radio-sweep involves rapidly scanning available Amplitude Modulation (AM) radio stations to create a single stream of sound fragments. The sound fragments are then used as an input to a recording device. In some applications, a speaker is also attached to the output of the sweep stage in an attempt to achieve real-time communication. Although it is possible to simply turn the tuner on a radio with a recorder microphone nearby, there are a number of “boxes” designed by inventors, such as the MiniBox (5) and Frank’s Box. (6) From our observations, these are all variations of essentially the same theme with different mechanizing techniques.

The software program, EVPmaker (7) developed by Stefan Bion, is also opportunistic in that a single stream of conversation is chopped into small bits and then reassembled into a second stream of sound made by concatenating bits based on a random number process. Bion’s research has shown that message formation is caused by manipulation of the random number process.

These techniques are called “Opportunistic EVP” because it appears that the EVP is formed by selecting available sound bits to form a word or sound that closely matches the intended utterance. This is different from changing sound to match the required output.

Figure 6 illustrates what is being referred to as Mistaken, Opportunistic EVP. As in transform EVP, mistaken EVP in radio-sweep and EVPmaker result from the assigning of meaning where there is none intended. Because the resulting stream of sound bits does have voice, it is easy for the mind to assign meaning to word-like sounds, even though none was intended or a second listener might hear something very different. The meaning is not caused by a communicating entity, but is from the tendency of the mind to find meaning in otherwise random sounds.

Figure 7 illustrates how the analog stage might be used to induce a transform EVP into a radio-sweep or EVPmaker circuit. Transform EVP in this circuit will tend to be interrupted by the sound bits from the radio-sweep, causing an effect similar to an experimenter talking over an utterance in the basic recorder technique. EVPmaker is not as likely to produce a transform EVP because all of the processing is in the digital format and the output is usually the only analog stage.

Opportunistic EVP Summary

EVP may be formed in the sound stream resulting from the fragmentation of a mundane source, either pre-recorded conversation in EVPmaker or multiple radio stations in radio-sweep. The resulting sound stream might also be mistaken as EVP when there is none, but transform EVP might be formed in the device. In concept, all of the opportunistic EVP devices depend on the sound frequency, amplitude and inflection to be present in the raw source at the time it is required for voice formation.

Selective reporting of EVP

In transform EVP, the utterance typically occurs before the next question or comment. In some instances, convincing evidence has been reported suggesting that some utterances precede the question, as if anticipating it. (An alternative explanation to precognition is that the experimenter anticipates the question by mentally composing it before speaking, and that mental processing is detected and responded to.)

It would be considered a Best Practice to never associate utterances occurring before the preceding question and after the following question with the question. For instance, as is illustrated in Figure 8, Answer 2 would normally not be associated with Question 1.

Opportunistic EVP poses unique problems for question and answer associations, and the question of appropriate associations should be addressed in this article. For instance, asking a question and simply allowing the sweep to continue until a likely answer is heard does not seem to allow for the old question as to whether or not a typing monkey will eventually produce meaningful text.

Techniques for Eliminating False Positives

A “false positive” is the assignment of “EVP” status to mundane sounds. This would include imagined (Figure 2) and mistaken (Figure 3) results in transform EVP, and mistaken results (Figure 6) in opportunistic EVP. It would also include inappropriate association of questions and answers. The challenge is to find a way to experimentally establish that both categories of EVP formation actually produce EVP. Next is the task of finding a way to distinguish true EVP from mistaken and imagined results.

Transform EVP

In transform EVP, the known sources of false positives are:

• Radio-frequency contamination
• Unnoticed voices or voice-like sounds in the environment
• Recorder artifacts
• Imagination of the listener

Radio-Frequency Contamination

RF contamination is usually pretty obvious because it produces unusually long messages that are often cut-off as incomplete expressions or which are nonsensical when the circumstances of the recording is considered. Digital wireless devices such as cell phones, wireless servers, most wireless land-line phones and baby monitors using security codes will not produce an intelligible signal in RF contamination. Frequency Modulation (FM) radio will not produce intelligible contamination, as with broadcast television. The only realistic source for such contamination is AM radio.

Research has shown that EVP can be recorded even when the recorder is shielded from RF contamination, so it has been empirically shown that transform EVP are not caused in that manner. (8) (9) Nevertheless, RF contamination is a possible cause of mistaken results, and this source of false positives must be accounted for. The most effective way to avoid any of the false positives in EVP is described in the Best Practice: Characteristic Test for EVP. (2) In that practice, common characteristics of EVP which have been anecdotally identified via long-time experience within the community and empirically via controlled experiments are used as a norm for EVP. If an utterance falls outside of that norm, then it is considered suspect. It is always recommended that practitioners set aside suspect EVP until more evidence is available.

Unnoticed Voices or Voice-Like Sounds in the Environment

This is a bigger problem than might be expected. It is common for a practitioner to make a recording in the field and not review the results until after returning home. For most people, memory is not sufficient for knowing whether or not voices in recordings were from physical people speaking elsewhere in the environment.

The recommended solution for this is the use of a second recording device as a “control.” (10) Two important characteristic of EVP are that the exact same utterances is never recorded in more than one recording circuit at the same instant, and that higher quality recorders are less likely to record an EVP. As such, a simple solution is to require that field recording be done in tandem with a second, higher quality recorder such as is found in a video camera. This is a Best Practice titled: Using a Control recorder for EVP.

Recorder Artifacts and Imagined EVP

The less expensive digital voice recorders are thought to be so successful in EVP experimentation because of the noise generated within the recorder, presumably in the analog input stage. It is often unnecessary to supply background noise. At least with the earlier models, they were also subject to bursts of noise that are reminiscent of an angry man yelling a message. Further analysis has shown that the bursts of noise are simply artifacts, but that the communicating entity sometimes uses the sound to form voice. Since the sound naturally has an angry sound, the resulting EVP sounded angry.

Other artifacts include induced noise from nearby electrical devices. The induced noise has a frequency of equal to power-line frequency, two times line frequency or a harmonic of line frequency, and it can be modulated to sound like voice by moving the recorder in relationship to the source.

Protection from false positives of this kind is the characteristic test (2) and a listening panel. The intention of a listening panel is that people experienced in hearing EVP should be able to agree with what the utterance is thought to say without prompting. The EVP online listening trials report details the results of double-blind listening trials. In the trials, 25.2% of the words were correctly identified by website visitors. The examples are considered Class A that should be correctly heard 100% of the time by an experienced listener. In fact, a not exactly the same experiment was conducted for the same examples using more experienced ATransC members with estimated average correct word recognition of 74%.

Mistaken Results in Opportunistic EVP

When radio-sweep is configured with a direct connection to a recorder or recorder program, both radio-sweep and EVPmaker are closed to ambient voice, and therefore, unnoticed voices in the environment are not a consideration. However, understanding random sequences of audio bits as EVP is a problem, the extent of which is unknown. I am not aware of any empirical studies that have been conducted to establish a standard for accepting results.

In what has been “normal” experimentation by individual researchers, the question of how to avoid false positives has not been an issue except in the case of radio-sweep. This has been true because most researchers have gained a reasonable level of experience and have developed an “ear” for understanding the utterances. Today, we are seeing more and more people begin their experience with EVP by using the radio-sweep devices or EVPmaker software. The resulting lack of experience is producing false positives that are too often being accepted as genuine EVP.

On behalf of the ATransC, we recommend that all people new to trans-etheric communication learn to record for EVP using the basic recorder technique. Then, after learning how to record EVP and how to recognize false positives in that way, we encourage people to try other methods. The field has progressed, but it may be true that the basic recorder technique is not ultimately as productive as other techniques, so it is important that people try approaches such as radio-sweep. Beyond the desire that people should not believe something that is not true, we are concerned with the damage to the entire field of study that can be caused by a large population of people claiming EVP that are seen as false positives.

Testing to Identify False Positives

Currently the content of the message is the primary test for determining a false positive, but even that seems to require modification to accommodate the kind of results being reported with opportunistic EVP. For instance, it is common for the practitioner’s name to be spoken in the results while this is much less the case with transform EVP. The messages are potentially endless while an important characteristic of transform EVP is that they are relatively short. It is also difficult to distinguish which possible utterance is associated with which question put by the practitioner while transform EVP is pretty clearly a question and answer response as in normal communication.

While these differences pose a problem for avoiding false positives, they may also tell us something about how EVP are formed. For instance, if the experimenter’s name is being called out more often in opportunistic EVP, why is there a difference?

A potentially inflammatory question that needs to be addressed is why there is so much more social tension associated with opportunistic EVP than is associated with transform EVP. For some experimenters who report extraordinarily long messages, the communication has turned to predictions of doom that have not been fulfilled. EVP is as much about the person as it is about the technology, so these questions do need to be asked and answered in a candid, but analytical way.

References

1. Gullà, Daniele, Computer–Based Analysis of Supposed Paranormal Voice: The Question of Anomalies Detected and Speaker Identification, Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Biopsychocybernetics Research, Bologna, Italy, atransc.org/gulla-voice-analysis/
2. Butler, Tom, Characteristic Test for EVP, ATransC, atransc.org/characteristic-test-for-evp/
3. Butler, Tom, Formation of EVP, Association TransCommunication, atransc.org/evp-formation/
4. Pareidolia, Wordspy, wordspy.com/index.php?word=pareidolia
5. Paranormal Systems, (Website missing as of 9-23-2016)
6. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen, Frank’s Box, Paranormal Insider, Paranormal Systems, (Website missing as of 9-23-2016)
7. Bion, Stephan, EVPmaker, evpmaker.software.informer.com/
8. Weisensale, Bill, Eliminating Radio Frequency Contamination for EVP, ATransC, atransc.org/eliminating-rf-contamination/
9. MacRae, Alexander. “Report of an Anomalous Speech Products Experiment inside a Double Screened Room.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 2009. Society for Psychical Research. sgha.net/library/MacRaeAnomalousSpeech.pdf
10. Best Practices, Control recorder for EVP, ATransC Collective, atransc.org/using-a-control-recorder-for-evp/

First published in the Summer 2011 ATransC NewsJournal

 

Other SORRAT Articles

SORRAT History and Background
The Fishharp
Full  I. Grattan-Guinness Article
SORRAT Examples
Its All About Intentionality (this article)
FEG Blog: SORRAT – A Long Term PK Study

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In times past, the ability to function as a spiritual healer or physical medium was described as an ability to manage the subtle energy. Spiritualists have long known that this subtle energy can be accumulated and tends to remain for a while. Through the ATransC, we came to see that haunting events were more frequent in places that have had long-time human occupancy or in which strong emotions were expressed. Putting two and two together, we decided that the haunting events were more likely because there was more energy available to facilitate trans-etheric influences. We saw the same effect with developing EVP practitioners, and we now recommend that a person set aside a special place for meditation and transcommunication so that the energy can accumulate.

Like mediums, some EVP practitioners are just naturally more effective than others. The ability to manage the intention seemed to be the most obvious reason and recent research with Random Event Generators (REG) seems to confirm this. You are probably familiar with the Global Consciousness Project (see: noosphere.princeton.edu). The study detected a decisive change in randomness of the output of an REG array just before the 9-11 attack on New York and the Pentagon. It has become routine for researchers to use REGs to detect the effects of meditation and other psi processes on ambient subtle energy.

At the same time, researchers have been developing effective protocols for the study of energy healing. You will hear a lot more about this rapidly evolving field of study in future issues of this NewsJournal. The research often shows decisive changes in the well-being of organisms in response to the practitioner’s intention to heal. For our discussion, the study of energy healing is also the study of the effect of intentionality on subtle energy.

Intentionality

We now know that there is a field of, not energy but influence, existent throughout known reality which is responsive to the influence of intention. It is being referred to as the psi field in parapsychology because it appears to be the product (or the enabler) of life. When a person senses the thought of others, influences physical objects with thought or mentally tries to send healing to another person, he or she is what parapsychologists refer to as psi functioning. In practice, all of these psi abilities are the expression of intention which is transmitted as a change in the psi field. Your intention to love or hate someone is immediately delivered to them wherever they are in the world as a change in this field which we all share.

The influence of intentionality cannot be shielded against as one might shield from radio signals, and distance does not seem to be a factor in its influence. Clear visualization and focused intention appear to be the deciding factor.

Focus of attention is really what Spiritualists teach in healing intention and in mediumship. In metaphysical terms, the process of creation is turning attention to an imagined result with the intention that it will be so. It is useful to think that the psi field provides the substance from which objects of reality are created, so the two things that you can control are the ability to clearly imagine your objective and how to focus your intention to make imagination real.

Managing Intention

Most of us have pretty vivid imaginations which are difficult to control. Traditional meditation is all about learning to control that imagination. When someone tells us not to think of a pink elephant, for most of us, the very next thing we do is think of one. Most of what we are taught in the various forms of healing intention is the clear visualization of good health. Mental mediumship is all about learning to set aside our internal visualizing so that we can sense the impressions coming from our etheric communicators.

Intention is much the same, in that we might think we want something but there may be numerous unconscious reasons why we do not. This is a common complaint of healers. Some people will say they want to be healed, but they have also become comfortable with their ailment and the social support it might bring. If there is an underlying concern that the person might not be able to live independently, being healed might pose unexpected risk and the healing is rejected as a subconscious act by the sitter. It is easy to say that you forgive a transgression, but too common to harbor unconscious anger. Psi functioning is a product of all of our intentionality. If we only think we want something, we are not as likely to create it as we are if we want it with all of our personality.

The article about the Fishharp provides one way to manage intention. It appears that, through history, people have learned to use devices and tricks to guide thoughts away from distractions. Just as one might train for the use of a memory aid, it is possible to train the mind to respond in a certain way when a particular path is followed or a specific object is handled.

Transcript of portions of the séances pertaining to metaphysical concepts.
First published in the Fall 2013 ATransC NewsJournal

Spoken by Hans Bender via the mediumship of the Felix Experimental Group:

[An observation by a sitter: Hans appears to follow a path from knocks and touches, spirit lights, levitation of objects, production of shapes visible over a luminous plaque, the production of ectoplasm, and finally, faces in ectoplasm. Not all of these milestones are met every time, but it seems clear that there is a progression of complexity and level of difficulty for Hans and the Chemists. (The Chemists are a group of entities that work behind Hans and who make the phenomena happen). Hans talks about erecting a field in which sitters and medium cooperate with the Chemists to enable physical phenomena. He speaks of psychic structures which are tenuous at first, but which become more substantial as the field strengthens. Interspersed with Hans’ comments transcribed below, are many demonstrations of physical phenomena which are in some part visible and/or audible.]

FEG Session 3, 25 August 2013 Séance

We will erect now something which is hard to explain in the terminology of the three-dimensional land. It is something like a mesh-like force field. It will extend into the room to reach opposite sides of the room and up to the ceiling. From this mesh-like force field, compacted units (we think endoplasmic structures) can act independently into the room.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you all have come with a company. None of you have come alone. Those you admire; there are those you do not even think of that came with you and that will be given the opportunity on behalf of that force field to regain a certain form of physicality; a substituted form of physicality for a certain time so that each of you will experience caresses and touches. This does not happen without a purpose. That means each of you will be touched purposefully by someone out of the planes of spiritual energy that you carry around with you, at least to a certain degree.

And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, you will feed that force field with the physiological energy of your biological system. We are coalescing the psychological, the psychical and the spiritual with the material, but because the spiritual, the consciousness and the emotional is involved, your psychology is not efficient. That is why we want you to emanate positive mental energy by singing with the music, and yes, by participating over the course of the evening.

Yes, when the force field starts to extend, the objects will be affected the moment the force field reaches the little focus table. The moment the objects are affected in rhythm to the music, then the grade of controllability is reached and we can proceed into the evening.

Ladies and gentlemen, during our demonstrations, we are always talking about gifts; that precious gift we all have been given. This gift which transports you; this gift that transports us and that has the ability to transport us farther than you might think.

This consciousness is now encased in your body. This consciousness can be projected. To be specific, you all are projections of consciousness. Consciousness is the core field of everything. There is no reality without consciousness. You are all projections of consciousness on a certain physical plane.

Your consciousness projects onto other planes as well. You are not aware of this at the moment. But let me tell you, your consciousness is not engaged in your body. Even on your plane, your consciousness can reach far out beyond your body’s borderline. Always be aware of this.

Later

“I” (Hans Bender) come into physical union [with the FEG medium] to explain that the spiritual land is not an afterlife land. It is not a land of the deceased. It is a land of the living. We talked about that before but I want to talk about that again today because I know that we have certain of you here that work or are part of association, churches or societies …

When we came towards you in the mist of the eighteenth century, we wanted to give you the knowledge about bodily survival to expand your mind, to enable you to step backwards to see the bigger picture. Consciousness was not given to you to walk alongside your flesh after years of living on the physical plane. No, the gift of consciousness was given to you to play a responsible part in the huge creational plan; the huge creational path on which every step would lead you closer towards what you would call creator.

Unfortunately, those of you who could explore the spiritual realm, this unbelievable realm of all sorts of life, are misled because the institutions, the educators make the spiritual land into a survival camp, so to speak. Spiritualism is survivalism today. In reality mediumistic efforts can actually only be evaluated by communication from the brother, mother, aunt or an uncle talking to those who are left behind.

Now let me tell you something. We know how much it can hurt to lose someone. When I was on your plane, I also lost someone. I know how that can feel but the point is that it cannot interfere with the creational plan and that is a part of our existence and our birth. Don’t waste what was given to you by staying with the grief. Don’t waste your time.

Do you know what the greatest pain of those who have transferred to the spiritual realms is? The greatest pain is seeing you in an unfinished grieving process; to see you not realizing that you are part of a bigger plan. The pain becomes unbearable when we consider that those who have transferred step onto a plane on which they feel immediately reunited with you.

You can’t feel it, but it is actually the case because that which you call the spiritual realm is the location from which your existence is projected into the physical world. When a relative or a friend is gone and arrives on that plane, he becomes reunited with you, and you become reunited with him. You cannot always feel it in your physical shell. Sometimes you smell something or you see something and you feel that the one you have lost is actually very, very close to you.

The plane on which we exist lies above the timeline that organizes your lives in the physical. It tells you when to wake up and when to go to bed. When to eat and when to go to work. We live above that timeline. We live in a state of constant and eternal clarity, but what happens is that, those who have transferred to that plane should be projected into new existences of life. But, can be bound [by your grief]. Love is a strong bond and can hold back [those who have transferred]. You can hold back your loved ones. You can hold them back from development when you don’t finish processing your grief.

Take a step back and see the whole picture. Consciousness was not given to you to die away with your body after seventy or eighty years. Consciousness is the ultimate vehicle that transports you through the dimensions and enables you as a free spirit to enter the depths of the cosmos and to gain the knowledge of universes within seconds, so don’t hold back. Don’t let your love hold back your loved ones. Make your love let your loved ones go on.

This is my message.

Later

We are sometimes asked what makes a good medium and usually we like to answer two things. First, what is the meaning you are usually expecting? This is what he or she wants. Getting knowledge from a higher organized plane of existence; maybe the plane you call the afterlife or the spiritual plane? The problem is that we on other organized lands cannot directly communicate with you. We must grade down [our energy] to do that, but we can communicate with you.

The problem is that we are talking about the level from which psychic structures emerge. It has to do with the problem that a higher organized reality, and a parallel-organized physical plane can’t be described with the terminology of your plane. That means every idea you make about the prefield [etheric energy field representing the physical?], every image you make for the prefield, even if it is an image of the afterlife; these are earthly images. These are earthly ideas. They follow the laws of psychical structure. You are hindering yourself by projecting such ideas within your mediumistic world. You will only receive what you project, when you project these physical ideas into where you want to get higher organized information this can happen.

So, get rid of those ideas and open yourself freely and be ready to receive what valuable information might come from these planes and don’t follow institutionalized dogma as long as you want to evolve personally. If you want to be part of an institutionalized church, yes then follow their dogma. If you want to evolve, then open your mind. Forget everything that was told to you. Make yourself empty. Make yourself a vessel so that whatever might come from there will be of value. So, get rid of all these earthly ideas. They cannot fit a higher organized plane of existence. They can never be described in earthly terms.

The second thing we like to answer is [to say] what the medium is actually learning when he encounters the cornucopia of creation that is in the different lands of existence. He becomes humble, humble towards creation, humble towards every creature of creation.

When people ask me what shall I be, a Spiritualist or a Buddhist, we tell him, it makes no matter if you are a Spiritualist or a Buddhist. Just be a good man. Just be a good person. Don’t be involved in politics or these different belief systems. Only gain true compassion between men. Make yourself a free spirit with true compassion because the true compassion gives you the key of happiness on the plane you are living on. True compassion; just be a good man.

This is my message.

Later

Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to remind you that you are in position of the creational tool that can transport you far beyond your mind’s ability. Don’t waste your time seeking for things that were taken from you by a natural occurrence. No, that makes no sense. Honor what you have been given. Honor your existence because you yourself will become creationists. The consciousness field I was talking about will gather information from all its sources. Consciousness is not one-dimensional. No, it is the spring; it is the source that feeds many, many rivers. It collects information from all these paths it has created, and once the time is right, the information density will be so dense that from the spiritual, things will shift into the physical and then a new world will be born on your behalf.

With this, I want to say goodnight. Of course what I have said raises many questions. I will send you into the night, dear friends. Every one of you will become new creational hosts when the consciousness field has been compacted to a certain degree of density; information compacted so dense that it shifts itself into the physical. A creation will occur then. Every woman and every man is a universe.

Good night Ladies and Gentlemen.

Mügge Session 2, 23 August 2013 Séance

When we talk about the spiritual land, it is important to know that there is not an afterlife existence. There is the space in which consciousness core fields are projecting onto different physical levels of existences. That means there is not an afterlife in the sense of a comparable existence to yours.

There are a myriad of possibilities. You will enter a stage that is totally indescribable in human terms and by human imagination. There is survival, and the “afterlife” as you are calling it, is not a place. The afterlife is a space you go into, at least for a short time. It is first, above the timeline. Second, it is a space where on a certain plane, and only for a certain time, all of us become one. From then on, the free spirit will be projected into new universes.

That is why it is so important to expand your feeling of responsibility towards your natural environment. Not only onto your own realm, because on that projectional path toward your physical existence, the consciousness field has produced uncountable effigies of you. Every thought, every action, every being produces multidimensional effigies of you on that projectional path towards your momentary existence.

This has to do with the question of why entities who have left the earth plane come back, and [the fact that] they don’t come back alone. They come back in a union of entities that are positive toward humankind. Positive in the first place because we come with our own interests. The ruthless behavior of humankind is not only affecting your own nature and your own existence down to a point. I don’t need to expand that. You all know how late it is. This ruthless behavior, that exploitative behavior of every resource in nature, exploitative behavior even towards your own kind not only destroys your values and your environment, it affects these parallel levels and dimensions that are connected with you as well. On some of them, this history of human kind has created real monsters; negative potentials, huge potentials with which you are connected; which will affect you.

I don’t want to make you frightened. Every one of you is watching the news, and every one of you may ask yourself from time to time how could that happen? Why were we not able to control that? Because, these huge potentials grow and grow, and yes, affect the dimensional planes. That is why I want to say that it is especially important that you consider your responsibility; that you comprehend that you are able to create reality. Your consciousness was not given to you to be encased within your physical body. Your consciousness reaches far out into the physical and onto the multidimensional [planes]. You can create and you can change and it is so important that you do because it is not only you who are affected. It is us as well.

That is what is coming toward you as an afterlife. [It is] only an intermediate stage from which a free spirit roams into the depth of the cosmos to swallow the knowledge of galaxies within seconds and carry on, on your creational path toward what we all call the creator.

(As published in the Summer 2002 AA-EVP NewsJournal.)

Many of our members have talked and written to us about a noise that is often heard right before an EVP message.  It appears before some of our own EVP.  It is a loud, or not so loud, click, pop, boom or crackling sound.  Some have described it as similar to the sound of someone keying a microphone.  One noted researcher likened the noise to a micro sonic boom.  When we are listening back to an EVP recording and hear this sound, we listen more intently to what comes next.  If you are one of the many people who have experienced this noise you know what I am talking about.

Not all EVP messages are preceded by this precursor, “popping” sound.  For us it is an occasional occurrence.  But when we hear it we are not unlike Pavlov’s dogs, ears perk up waiting for that reward.  The click, if there, means a reward of an EVP.  It, for us, usually signals a better than average EVP as far as loudness, quality and clarity is concerned.

Geoff Viney in his book Surviving Death, Evidence of the Afterlife discusses this mysterious sound in relation to other types of phenomena. [Please note that Viney reported that Peter Thorneycrof did the work in the RAF museum (below). We have subsequently learned that the work was conducted by his nephew, Ivan Spenceley.]

• In 1986 the downstairs rooms, in a farmhouse in England, were infiltrated with the voices of those who appeared to be former residents.  The voices were heard over several nights.  The voices began and ended with a distinct “click” as if a radio had been turned on and off.  Investigators looked for a receiver or a transmitter, but none was found.  Natural explanations for the phenomena were ruled out.
• In 1973 the owner of a converted lighthouse in Maryland repeatedly had his sleep interrupted by the racket of doors banging, furniture moving and footsteps.  A “clicking” sound preceded these manifestations.  Upon further investigation nothing in the area that the noises came from appeared out of place.  The building’s owner decided to try and record what he was hearing and left a tape recorder running.  The tape contained voices and extraneous noises.  Some of these voices talked about the treatment of injuries.  A local librarian helped research the home and to everyone’s amazement found that the building was used as a field hospital during the Civil War.
• The anomalous events centering on a World War II Lincoln bomber at the RAF Cosford Aerospace Museum were researched in 1990 by the British investigator Ivan Spenceley. The strange sounds of scratches, squeaks, girl’s voices, bumps and human sighs had been reported in the vicinity of the bomber.  The staff had seen phantom air crews and dramatic drops in temperature were reported.  Other phenomena included the movement of switches and the rotation of the wheels of the aircraft.  Thorneycroft saw moving points of bright light and also heard and recorded many anomalous sounds within the aircraft.  These sounds, which were most often mechanical movement type noises, were analyzed and it was found that they always began with a discernable blip on the tape similar to that produced by a sudden burst of static.

The clicking noise associated with EVP messages has been the center of considerable conversation for quite sometime.  Perhaps this sound is caused by a dimensional breakthrough and is an artifact of spirit world energy entering the physical world.  The above stories might point to this type of answer.

Paolo Presi on page 3 of this newsletter reports on Carlo Trajna’s “Psychotemporal Model” in which “Psychic Time” flows differently from “Physical Time.”  Is this anomalous sound before EVP messages caused from a shift in time as the two aspects of reality link up?

Alexander MacRae used an oscilloscope in analyzing a well-known recording from the Palace Hotel.  When viewing this recording Alec noticed that the level of background noise (whistles, hums and buzzing which were side effects of the equipment) on the oscilloscope almost went to zero.  Three or four seconds after the background noise disappeared, a woman’s voice was heard to say “Now.”  Two seconds later, a male voice was recorded with a personal message for his sister who was in the audience.  Another few seconds passed and a female voice said, “Finish,” and then the background noise once again returned to normal on the oscilloscope.

Perhaps the precursor noise we hear on our recordings is similar to the word “Now” heard on Alexander’s recording.  It may simply be a signal or a cue for us to listen closely to what comes next.  Is this noise similar to our telephone ringing letting us know that someone is calling? Alexander’s recording may point to another possible fact, and that is that the entities need and gather all available noise and energy to get their message through to us.

Do those on the other side have equipment that they use to try and contact us?  Are researchers, indeed, hearing the keying of something like a microphone?  And are those on the other side doing this?  Several researchers in the past and present say that they have been in contact with groups on the other side that state that they have developed apparatus for communication with researchers on this side and that this development continues.

Previously published in the April 2007 ITC Journal, ©David Fontana – All Rights Reserved

Interest in Survival

I can never remember a time in my life when I was not interested in the question whether or not we survive physical death. It seemed to me, even as a very young boy, that this question was relevant not only to what happened when we die, but to the way in which we live our lives while on this Earth. If death was the end of everything, then life here and now was meaningless, a cosmic accident that led to nothing. On the other hand, if we survived, it meant we were part of a greater scheme of things, with this life only a stage on our journey, a stage in which our behavior determines what happens to us when we move on to the next stage. It surprised me that most people seemed not t o share this interest. At the church I attended everyone seemed to believe in an afterlife, yet to have little idea of what it was like. We were supposed to take everything on trust, and to look forward to a kind of vague afterlife in which (presumably if our voices were good enough) we joined a heavenly choir.

Although this seemed to satisfy most churchgoers I doubted if God really wanted us to stand (or sit) around simply praising him. Surely he would have far better things to do with his time than listen to us, and surely he would expect us to contribute more to the next world than just hymn singing. God would not have created us just to tell him how wonderful he is, since surely he must know this already. So although one could take the existence of an afterlife on trust it seemed to me as a boy that there could be no harm in wanting to know more about it and to find out what evidence had accumulated for it over the years. When I grew older and discovered psychical research I found that indeed a very great deal of evidence had accumulated, and once I became involved in this research I was fortunate to be able to come across similar evidence for myself.

Much of this evidence, both from the literature and from my personal experience, is summarized in my most recent book, Is There an Afterlife? Which brings me onto a further question, why isn’t this evidence more widely known and accepted? Let us take ITC as our example. The evidence for ITC has been growing steadily since Jürgenson’s pioneering work over half a century ago. As evidence, it has three unprecedented advantages which we can look at in turn.

The First Advantage of ITC

ITC evidence is evidence that anyone can try to obtain for oneself, directly and in the privacy of one’s own home. The equipment involved is easy to obtain and relatively cheap – a tape recorder, a microphone and a source of white noise – for convenience usually a radio tuned between two stations. A computer is also necessary if one prefers to record onto the hard disc instead of onto tape. One can work at one’s own speed and in one’s own time, devoting as little as a few minutes once or twice a week to the work. There is no need for a medium or for any previous experience. The only personal qualities that are needed are patience, commitment (it may be weeks or months or even longer before the first results are obtained) and an open mind. Working with one or two like-minded friends or family members helps to maintain interest and may produce quicker results, but this is by no means essential. Many people get on very well on their own.

The Second Advantage of ITC

The second advantage of ITC is that, as the communications come through electronic media rather than through the mind of a medium, they are unlikely to be influenced in any way by human thought. It is true that some critics suggest that psycho-kinesis (PK) from the living – the supposed ability of the mind to affect matter directly – may be responsible for impressing the communications on tape or onto the radio waves, but we have no evidence that PK can produce anything approaching the extensive messages that have been received by ITC researchers. In addition, some of these messages contain material that was unknown to the researcher at the time, rendering it doubly unlikely that the latter was in any way responsible for the phenomena. Thus the belief that the human mind is not responsible for ITC communications seems well founded. In addition, since it is clear that electronic media can hardly obtain material telepathically from the researcher or clairvoyantly from the environment in the way that the medium can, it is fair to say that ITC effectively disposes of the SuperESP (or SuperPSI) hypothesis, the idea that all survival-related messages come psychically (albeit unconsciously) from the living rather than from the deceased.

The Third Advantage of ITC

The third unprecedented advantage of ITC is that when results are obtained a permanent record of them is created. Psychical researchers have long sought for what are called PPOs (‘Permanent Paranormal Objects’), objects that are obtained paranormally and that remain in existence as good evidence for anyone to see and examine. ITC presents us with just such objects in the form of recorded communications apparently from the deceased. Of course, it has to be provable that these recordings are paranormal if they are to qualify as PPOs. Anyone who is sufficiently dishonest or foolish can fake voices on tape or through the radio and claim they were obtained paranormally. It has to be demonstrated beyond doubt that the recorded voices cannot be explained by normal means. There are two methods for doing this, the first of which applies only to the Direct Radio Voice (DRV) and the second of which applies both to DRV and to EVP.

In the first method the voices are either received under conditions that rule out any possibility of fraud (the experimenter receiving the voices knows fraud is not involved, but it is not easy to convince a skeptical scientist of this!) and in the second method the voices themselves are acoustically analyzed to see if they show characteristics that differ significantly from the human voice and that cannot be imitated correctly by faking. Neither of these methods is particularly easy to implement. To achieve the first, one needs to have independent witnesses who ideally provide their own equipment (tape recorder, tapes, radio, microphone etc.) and have full control of it throughout. Furthermore the possibility that transmitting devices are hidden nearby for the purposes of faking voices needs be ruled out by holding the experiments in a neutral venue – which raises a problem in that successful ITC results appear to depend upon a special relationship between the communicators the experimenter, the equipment and the location, and moving to a neutral venue may thus disrupt this special relationship and prevent good results. Consequently a better procedure is to use one of the highly sophisticated devices currently available that tests for the presence of spurious radio signals while the ITC experiment is taking place (although even here it is important that such tests are carried out and recorded by the independent witnesses). If financial concerns rule out the possibility of obtaining such devices, an alternative way of guarding against spurious radio transmissions is to provide two radios, both tuned to the same frequency, on the grounds that if communications are received through one radio and not through the other then this supports the claim that no such transmissions are being received. As a further precaution both radios can be tuned to frequencies forbidden by law to amateur radio operators (see September 2005 ITC Journal, pages 38 to 56, and April 2006 ITC Journal, pages 68 to 69 for details of these frequencies). Again independent witnesses would need to be present to confirm everything is done correctly.

Failure to provide all these elaborate and expensive precautions allows hardened skeptics to claim triumphantly that they have discovered how the ‘trick’ is done. The absurdity of such a claim is all too obvious, but hardened skeptics are far more interested in discrediting ITC than in absurdity. The difficulty involved in providing these precautions means it is virtually impossible for most people to set up skeptic-proof experiments. In consequence – and rightly – they are far more interested in convincing themselves than in convincing skeptics. Nevertheless such experiments are vital and will be set up in due course; the expertise exists, it is only the funding that is lacking. In the meanwhile, all those working on ITC can use the simple experiment that I have tried in two of Anabela Cardoso’s DRV recording sessions, i.e. to ask the communicators to repeat phrases after me. Anabela had no idea on the first occasions that I had even thought up such an experiment, so our successful results ruled out any possibility of subterfuge. Obviously an independent witness should ideally again be involved, and an experiment of this kind can even be tried with the tape recorder (EVP) method. When using this method the request for repetition should come from the independent witness and at an unspecified time, and the tape should then remain under his or her control until it is rewound and played back. Hopefully an ITC voice will be heard repeating the words concerned.

The second of the two methods for demonstrating beyond doubt that recorded ITC voices cannot be explained by normal means, the acoustic analysis of the ITC voices, looks much simpler at first sight, and has the added advantage that it can be used both with DRV recordings and EVP recordings. A further, and particularly important advantage, is that the analysis can be carried out and confirmed any number of times by skeptics themselves (assuming they have the expertise and the appropriate software). Again however there are problems, the most important of which is that the equipment required to carry out the analysis is expensive and highly specialized, and can only be operated by an expert and appropriately qualified acoustic engineer. Anabela and I are currently conducting research of this kind as part of the Oliver Knowles Research Project with the help of acoustics expert Daniele Gullà (see Gullà’s paper in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Survival/ ITC for details of the acoustic analyses used), and hope to be able to publish results soon, but the need for professional software and for the involvement of a suitably qualified acoustic expert means that it is not the kind of work accessible to most people.

[Editor: See Computer–Based Analysis of Supposed Paranormal Voice: The Question of Anomalies Detected and Speaker Identification for a related article by Gullà] )

Why the Struggle for Acceptance?

In view of these three major advantages, which potentially put ITC in a particularly favorable position when compared not only to other forms of research into survival but all other forms of psychical research, why is it still struggling to gain acceptance outside the circle (admittedly a large and growing one) of those who have experienced results at first hand? The answer is that it shares the opposition that exists towards all forms of survival research. This opposition comes primarily from four groups which we can look at in turn.

Established Science

Typically scientists claim they don’t find the evidence for ITC or for survival in general convincing, but the truth is they have never studied this evidence and show little sign of wanting to study it. Lack of knowledge of a subject is acceptable – most scientists find it difficult to enough to keep abreast of advances in their own field and can hardly be expected to wade through the extensive data on survival of death (I have over 600 books on the subject), but what is not acceptable is lack of knowledge that dishonestly claims to be knowledge. Thus we still hear top scientists maintaining in the media that no properly conducted studies have ever found claims for the existence for survival or for psychic abilities to be anything other than nonsense. Such behavior is not only misleading but very poor science. A cardinal rule in science is that you don’t pretend to knowledge that you do not have, particularly when you know that your views carry weight with both colleagues and laypeople. The complexities of modern science and the aura of infallibility that surrounds it mean that many people take the pronouncements of eminent scientists on trust, wrongly believing that such is their distinction in their own fields that they must know what they are talking about when they pronounce on any subject.

The main reason for this uninformed hostility on the part of many scientists towards psychical research is the belief that if psychic abilities exist and if the mind survives death (and is therefore non-physical) many of the most fundamental laws of science would have to be re-written. This claim is of course absurd. The known laws of science have their own range of convenience within which they work perfectly well, and far from challenging them the existence of psychic abilities and of a non-material mind simply adds a new dimension to our understanding, just as quantum mechanics adds a new dimension to Newtonian physics. This fact leads me to suspect that behind this hostility towards psychical research and survival lies the fear that if such things are true they challenge the supremacy of material science. Instead of being the final authority on life and death and everything else, material science simply becomes the science of material things. Many scientists appear to resent the idea of the physics/chemistry/biology triumvirate being dethroned in this way, forgetting that science is really about the search for truth and not about the protection of authority and status.

Parapsychology

The second group against which research in survival has to struggle is parapsychology – the very subject that should be most identified with survival research. As Edgar Muller put it in the last issue of the ITC Journal (September 2006) “… survival [research] has a low status within parapsychology. It seems that most parapsychologists endeavor to avoid being connected with the topic.” The reason is of course that parapsychologists believe psychical research will never be accepted by established science if it involves itself in hauntings, séances, mediumship, poltergeist phenomena and anything that goes on outside the laboratory – most particularly research into survival. This attitude dates back to Professor J. B. Rhine, who was one of the principal founders of parapsychology, and although more than 25 years have passed since his death parapsychologists still insist on clinging to it – in spite of the fact that the subject is still not accepted among scientists regardless of the extensive range of positive results obtained by it (see e.g. Radin 1997 for an excellent survey). Even demonstrating an interest in the subject risks blighting the career of even the most promising young academic. Sadly it has to be said that the consequence of the efforts by parapsychologists to appeal to established science has therefore not been scientific acceptance. Instead it has been the diversion of attention away from the very subject, survival research, that helped inspire parapsychology in the first place.

Professor William MacDougall, who established what became the parapsychology unit at Duke University with Professor J. B. Rhine in charge, believed like the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) that mind is non-physical. MacDougall, who served as SPR President in 1920 and whose book Body and Mind remains a classic study of the mind-body relationship, put it that although the SPR takes no formal position on such issues its principal aim “is to obtain, if possible, empirical evidence that human personality may and does survive in some sense and degree the death of the body,” and adds that “A considerable mass of evidence pointing in this direction has been accumulated” (MacDougall 1928 page 347). MacDougall also insisted that his own theory of the mind-body relationship, which he called Animism, “is the only psycho-physical hypothesis which is compatible with a belief in any continuance of human personality after death” and points out its relevance “[now that] for the first time serious attempts are being made to discover empirical evidence of such survival; and the fact that these attempts seem already to justify hope of their success ….” (ibid page 202).

Most parapsychologists seem to have forgotten – if they have ever read – MacDougall’s wise words. And even those parapsychologists who do show some interest in survival research seem to incline towards the view that communications from the deceased can best be explained by the SuperESP theory mentioned earlier. However, not only do results show the inadequacy of this explanation in the context of ITC, it is unconvincing even when applied to mediumship. The notion that mediums may, unconsciously and while deceiving themselves that the deceased are responsible, be capable of hunting through living minds and through the environment for information associated with the deceased even though they have no clue where to look and no emotional connection with the people or the information concerned stretches credulity beyond the bounds of possibility (I have set out these arguments and others more fully in Fontana 2004 and 2005).

Established Religion

The third group that has traditionally opposed survival research, established religion, should in theory also be among its strongest supporters. Established religion has across the centuries typically equated communications from the beyond with the powers of evil arguing, attributing them to impersonations by demons. The justification for this point of view is sometimes said to come from Exodus Chapter 22 Verse 18 of the Bible when Moses informs the people that one of God’s ‘social ordinances’ is that ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. However, the word ‘witch’ seems to have been chosen by the translators to satisfy their own prejudices, as the Latin word is veneficus which is more correctly translated as ‘poisoner’. Even King Saul (Samuel I Chapter 28) who banished all those with ‘familiar spirits’ (spirit guides) from the land pays a visit to one of them himself when he wants to consult the spirit of Samuel to tell him the outcome of his impending battle with the Philistines Samuel duly appears and tells Saul in no uncertain terms that he has lost favour with God and not only will he be defeated he will perish along with his sons in the battle – all of which turns out to be correct.

Saul’s loss of favor with God – together with the Bible’s account of his generally shabby behaviour during much of his reign – hardly suggests he is a suitable role model on how to treat those with ‘familiar spirits’ (i.e. spirit guides). Given therefore that there seems no Biblical objection to ‘familiar spirits’, we are driven to the conclusion that the attitude of the Christian churches (Catholic and Protestant alike) towards converse with the departed stems more from a threat to the authority of the priesthood than from anything else. I am not arguing against religious belief, which is an essential part of human nature, but it seems clear that the teaching which claims that the priesthood are the intermediaries between man and God and the only key holders of the Kingdom of Heaven has been an important obstacle to interest and research into survival. Far from being Biblical, the beginnings of this teaching stretch back to the decision by the Emperor Constantine to make Christianity the state religion of Rome, and thus were always more political than religious. The result of them is that we in the West lag far behind the cultures of the East, whose psycho-physical systems such as Hinduism and Buddhism have extensive and detailed teachings both on survival and on the nature of the afterlife.

The General Public

The fourth group, the general public – particularly the general public in Britain and in the USA – do not so much oppose survival research as show little interest in it. We are in fact the only generation in which the subject of death has been so widely ignored. Right through to the mid 20th Century and World War Two people lived with the reality of death. In the earlier part of the Century large numbers of children died young, and even for adults death was a constant companion. In the 16th Century scholars kept skulls on their desks as momento mori, and in Britain the Victorians and Edwardians in the 19th and early 20th Century frequently wore lockets containing tresses of hair from deceased loved ones. Catholic countries had their Day of the Dead on November 2nd, and this is one of the few remembrances that are still observed. Apart from this, the reality of death is largely ignored. In earlier times people fell sick, declined and for the most part died at home, and the tragedy of death was forever present. Advances in medical care and public health mean that we are the first generation in recorded history insulated from many of the reminders of our own mortality. Together with the growth of consumerism and the prevalence of materialistic philosophies, this has led to a general resistance to any talk of leaving this life and of what might happen next. There is also a failure to recognize that belief in an afterlife does not distract us from trying to improve this life. Instead it gives this life meaning and purpose and increases our awareness of its sacred nature and of the need to cherish the physical world and the opportunities it gives to us.

Conclusion

We have reached a point in human history where many people now realize that science cannot provide us with answers to life’s fundamental questions, that we have pushed consumerism past its sustainable limits, and that materialism does not provide the route either to individual happiness or to a future for our planet. Together with the advances currently being made in survival research – and particularly in ITC – we may find that opposition from the four groups we have identified begins to weaken, meaning that at the very least the results of research into survival will begin to be taken more seriously. The problem may then be that parapsychologists, recognizing the importance of the PPOs produced by ITC, may attempt to claim the subject as their own and to take much of the credit for its development. We can but wait and see.

References

1. Fontana, D. (2004). Survival research: opposition and future developments. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 68.4 (877), 193-209.
2. Fontana, D. (2005). Is There an Afterlife? Alresford: John Hunt.
3. MacDougall, W. (1928). Body and Mind. London: Methuen (7th edn.).
4. Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe. San Francisco: Harper Edge.

This is part of the Implicit Cosmology essays associated with the Trans-survival Hypothesis. It has been incorporated into a book titled Your Immortal Self. Some potentially important changes have likely been made to this essay for the book. As such, please consider this essay an early draft.
     Is the metaphysical approach for you? Please read my comments here before getting very far into this essay.

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Abstract

A hypothesis is proposed to explain why multiple face-like features are often found in individual frames of recorded video-loop noise.

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Introduction

In the video-loop technique for visual ITC, a video camera is pointed toward a video monitor and the output of the camera is connected to the input of the monitor so that the camera “sees” what it has just recorded. A person might expect the resulting optical noise to look like the “snow” seen on an unassigned TV channel; however, in at least some configurations of equipment, the resulting noise has the appearance of patches of light of different brightness rushing toward the viewer from the center of the screen. Some of these will have color if a color camera and TV are used. See the examples under the ITC Tab.)

The bright area in the center is the face of a woman. In the color version of this, you can make out red lipstick. A man’s face covers the right half of her face. He is looking toward your right. Nearly all of the medium-density areas around the two faces are other, less well-formed faces. (We apologize to those receiving the printed Journal as ITC pictures do not print well.)

The working hypothesis is that the patches of brightness in the looped video are areas of relative order that naturally form in chaotic noise because of a process known as stochastic amplification. In that process, a small irregularity in the uniformity of “baseline” energy can be amplified, and in video-loop ITC, those emergent splotches are often shaped like people.

Update: We have been working with the concept of intended order. This concept may be applicable to such phenomena as both audible and visible ITC, energy healing, meditation and morphogenetic fields. The standard model we are using is that trans-etheric influences are the expression of a personality’s intention. Physical people are personalities that exist in the etheric, but are able to inhabit the physical aspect of reality because of the physical body. In effect, people are all the same, but some may not have a physical body. In that way, all personalities influence the environment via intention. Personality brings intended order to chaotic environments.

Examination of individual video frames sometimes shows an astounding number of face-like shapes and some of them are sufficiently detailed to be arguably real faces. There are also examples of this in the Butler Galleries.

Recording ITC

The Techniques section has an article explaining how to record for these phenomena. Some people have had success with digital equipment, but we have not seen the detail exhibited by examples collected using analog equipment. For this reason, we recommend that anyone wishing to replicate this work should use at least an analog camera, and preferably an analog monitor. We use a Canon 8mm ES2000 analog camcorder with a Sony KV20TS32, 20-inch Trinitron color TV. We like using color because the resulting features often seem to have true color such as with skin tones. See the website for technical notes.

The key to recording video ITC is in establishing a display with a good balance of bright and dark areas. The loop tends to be a cycle from all black, through medium bright patches of color, to an all white and back again. The video is at about thirty frames a second, and a cycle from dark back to dark takes several seconds. We record for ten to fifteen seconds and may find thirty to fifty frames from that recording that need examining. Here is an example of a useful video loop:

Who is in the Video

You can see that there is no physical input to the system other than electricity and ambient light. It can be argued that there is no physical reason for faces to be in the noise, other than the occasional fortuitous arrangement of light and dark that might resemble a face. Certainly, there should not be faces with clearly identifiable red lips and eyes with pupils. Phenomenal faces are found in many different techniques, but all seem to depend on the transformation of visual energy. Moving water, light reflected from crystals, even audio spectrograms have produced features. Most visual ITC features are of strangers, but there are a few that have been recognized. For instance, using forensic software, a moving water feature taken by Margaret Downey has been favorably compared to a photograph of her long-transitioned great, great grandfather.

There are differences in clarity and detail amongst the different forms of visual ITC, but the common factor appears to be broad-spectrum optical noise and an active analog process such as an amplification circuit. This is the common factor for audio ITC as well.

Based on the Trans-survival Hypothesis, it is speculated that the features are formed by the amplification of a weak psi signal from the practitioner or an interested observer, by the action of stochastic resonance on the optical-frequency noise. We speculate this is a mind-to-mind exchange of information between the etheric personality of the practitioner and the communicating etheric entity. This is believed to occur in the etheric as a nonphysical process.

The information is then transformed into the physical aspect of reality by way of the person’s etheric personality-to-physical body entanglement, and expressed into the physical as a psi signal that represents the practitioner’s impression of what was experienced in the etheric.

While looking at this picture of the 2004 conference speakers, your attention is on Sarah Estep. For the moment, the others in the photo would make less of an impression in your mind’s eye.

The observed effect of one or two well-formed faces in visual ITC may be due to the practitioner’s attention on a specific personality in the etheric. However, there are apparently many other personalities present, of which the practitioner is only partially aware. These background personalities are therefore only poorly formed in the resulting ITC.

The group picture above is an attempt to show how we might be aware of everyone in the group, but our attention is momentarily on one person at a time. In this case, Sarah Estep is clearly imaged, and the other people are only vaguely noticed.

Of course, all of this is hypothetical, but so many poorly formed faces present in virtually every suitable region of optical noise, along with a few well-formed faces, argues that the practitioner (or an interested observer) is the channel for the information and the practitioner’s focus of attention determines what is communicated.

Update: Two theories are emerging as alternatives to stochastic resonance to explain image formation. Stochastic amplification may still be the physical mechanism, but the “small psi signal” may be more complex than previously thought. Examination of the essay on Etheric Fields will show that intended order may be a factor as the etheric personality (still via a physical person’s entanglement) influences the recording process’ formative field.

A second theory is that the faces might be apported from some existing media source. Distortions are evident in EVP that suggest a partially successful transformation of noise into voice and the same might be seen in visual ITC.

Both theories are new and require more vetting, so at this time (6/19/2013) it is best to suspend decisions until more information is available.

Originally published in the Winter 2007 AA-EVP NewsJournal
©Alexander MacRae – All Rights Reserved

I have currently been writing something I titled, “Hearing with Templates” … For some years now, I have tried to deal only with the best obtainable EVP samples, disposing of the rest. I am aware that funny things can happen and I have attributed these to the very important subject of cueing errors. Working on the Bial Foundation project has forced me to take account of ALL samples recorded, the good, the bad and the downright appalling.

I was rather concerned lately to find that some of the samples I had selected seem to have changed completely while I was working on them. Taking a few days to do something else and then coming back to them, I found I was reporting some of them as something other than the original. Was this a matter of a time effect or a processing effect or what?

Some weeks ago I had sent out two of my local group to a couple of sites to do some recording and then taught one of them a little bit about analysis using Cool Edit Pro (now known as Adobe Audition). The other, Helen, a very perceptive person, asked almost immediately how it was that you could hear one thing at one time but then you could hear something quite different at another time—convinced then that the second version was the correct one. I mentioned cueing and tried to make it all seem quite normal. Earlier than all that, Edgar Müller had remarked in an email that different noise reduction levels could alter the meaning of what one heard. I did some experiments to investigate this point using normal voice and good EVP, which I will later refer to as “A-type” EVP.

My article on hearing with templates makes the point that what we hear is not necessarily the same as what we are listening to. And then the point is made that templates are used in all recognition processes, whether recognizing phonemes (elements of words); or patterns of phonemes which are words; or patterns of words which are phrases.

What you actually “hear” is the template. You can also hear all the other noises that are part of what you are listening to, but what you actually “hear” is the template that best fits the sound pattern.

If you listen to a sequence of phonemes that you have never heard before, for instance, “Gelarumipalat,” which is not a word in the languages that you understand, which does not have Latin, Greek or Germanic roots, what you will hear is a sequence of phonemes, pure and simple. If you listen to a recognized sequence of phonemes such as “angry,” you hear a word. And if you listen to a sequence of known words in a recognized sequence such as, “I am so angry!” what you “hear” is a meaning.

What you listen to and what you hear can be different things.

There has to be a distinction, therefore, between EVP that is so good it is close to normal speech in good listening conditions, we will call that A-type EVP; and EVP that is not that good, we will call that B-type EVP. They are both EVP but they have different behavioral characteristics.

With B-type EVP,

• different people may hear different things;
• what is heard using headphones may be different from what is heard using a speaker;
• what is heard when one is told what it is, may be different from what one heard before being told what it is; and,
• what one hears at one time may be different from what one hears at another time.

To the general public this PROVES that EVP is NOT real. Therefore, one should not expose the general public to B-type EVP.

Remember that normal hearing is also dependent on template-based pattern recognition.

The received wisdom over the years was that EVP is deficient in the relative energy level of consonants as compared with vowels, and as consonants are the main carriers of intelligibility, so EVP is less comprehensible. I went along with this explanation unexamined myself and even repeated it.

The world experts in this are in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London (UCL). The UCL people have been looking into the speech of people suffering from deafness or some neural/motor deficiency. This speech has consonants that are low or missing, thus reducing its intelligibility. Just like EVP one would suppose.

Let us make up an example. Suppose we have a stroke victim saying, “How are you now?” They might say, “OOOAAOW … AAARGH … EEE-UUU …. NNN N … …AAAAOOOOW….” Almost entirely vowel sounds, and very slowly. Where muscular dexterity is required as in the rapid transition from “n” to “ow” in “now” then there is a delay. However, this is not what EVP sounds like. The problem may not be the consonant/vowel energy ratio.

The UCL people have looked into cueing as an important factor in intelligibility, and they developed a method of manual cue enhancement in a recording. They tried this and indeed it improved intelligibility. However, automatic cue enhancement did not work.

Cues are taken as the regions of transition; the region where one vowel changes into another or into a consonant or the impulse and blank period on which consonant sounds are based. The reason for this is that the significance of a set of consecutive sounds depends on the sequencing, on the timing and so relative position in time. Cue is very important.

Here we should also note that the term “phoneme” is not entirely accurate. For example, when each is isolated out, the “a” at the beginning of the word “attack” sounds quite different from the “a” in the middle of the word. To describe this feature, the word “phoneme” is replaced by the word “allophone;” that is, a phoneme taking into account its phonetic environment.

Timing is crucially important, and just as you can have people who have trouble with the spatial sequencing of a written word, who are “dyslexic,” so also there seems to be a tendency for some to be “dyslexic” in terms of time sequences. Remember that in an audible communication system, the listener is also part of that system.

For some time, my opinion was that EVP was perhaps cue-deficient. My thinking now is that Type-B EVP has an over-supply of cues, and that due to the relative uncertainty or randomness involved in the EVP process, fortuitous transitions appear which can be taken as false cues, enabling more than one interpretation to be found.

Where more than one interpretation is found this does not mean that a correct interpretation does not exist. Although if two interpretations exist then both must be wrong is normal thinking. But that is not necessarily the case.

All sequence-significant hearing is template-based but some patterns are so uncertain that more than one template can seem to fit.

[Note that this explanation is not providing a reason to think that “B-type” EVP change in any way. Editor]