New Books and Media

From the publisher’s website: Reports of physical mediumship go back centuries, and physical mediums such as D. D. Home, Franek Kluski, Leslie flint, and more latterly, David Thompson, are becoming household names in psychical research. Experiments such as Scole and Professor W. J. Crawford’s Goligher Circle have demonstrated that physical psychic phenomena does indeed exist. One medium not so well known in the West is Australia’s Stan Walsh. Stan was arguably that country’s most talented physical medium during the early part of the 20th century. His mission began in 1919 when he and a group of friends got together in a Melbourne suburb and tried to communicate with the spirit world. In 1927 L.C. Danby joined the circle and became a regular sitter for many years. This book is his account of those years, and the incredible mediumship of Stan Walsh. Leslie Charles Danby was born in Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1899. At the age of 19, he became an entertainer in vaudeville, appearing in theatres all over Australia and New Zealand. At that time, he was a self-confessed atheist. He married a soubrette (singer/dancer), Winnie. While Winnie was giving birth to their first child, both Winnie and the baby girl died. Les was devastated. Whilst sitting at his young wife’s graveside at St. Kilda cemetery, contemplating what type of headstone to buy, he clearly heard his wife’s voice say, “Don’t bother dear. I am not there.” This first experience of clairaudience shocked Les. He mentioned it to a trusted friend, who in turn revealed he had started going to a spiritualist circle where the medium went into trance and channelled souls who had passed over, providing the sitters proof of survival. He suggested Les attend the next meeting. To Les’s amazement, Winnie came through, speaking of personal things only he could possibly know. That evening changed Les Danby’s life forever.

From the publisher’s website: Induced After Death Communication (IADC) is a therapy for grief and trauma that has helped thousands of people come to terms with their loss by allowing them the experience of private communication with their departed loved ones. This is the definitive book on the subject. Botkin, a clinical psychologist, created the therapy while counseling Vietnam veterans in his work at a Chicago area VA hospital. Botkin recounts his initial—accidental—discovery of IADC during therapy sessions with Sam, a Vietnam vet haunted by the memory of a Vietnamese girl he couldn't save. During the session, quite unexpectedly, Sam saw a vision of the girl's spirit, who told him everything was okay; she was at peace now. This single moment surpassed months—years—of therapy, and allowed Sam to reconnect with his family. Since that 1995 discovery, Botkin has used IADC to successfully treat countless patients—the book includes dozens of case examples—and has taught the procedure to therapists around the country.

From the publisher's website: People everywhere carry with them extraordinary, deeply comforting experiences that arrived at the moment when they most needed relief: when they lost a loved one. These experiences can include clear messages from beyond, profound and vividly beautiful visions, mysterious connections and spiritual awareness, foreknowledge of a loved one’s passing—all of which evade explanation by science and logic. Most people keep these transcendent experiences secret — deathbed experiences, Nearing Death Awareness, and shared death experiences. Individuals and families guard them for fear they will be discounted by hyperrational scrutiny. Yet these very common occurrences have the power to console, comfort, and even transform our understanding of life and death.

Prompted by her family’s surprising, profound experiences around the death of her father and her sister, reporter Patricia Pearson sets out on an open-minded inquiry, a rare journalistic investigation of Nearing Death Awareness. Pearson discovers that roughly half of bereaved people, as well as nurses, hospice workers, soldiers, and others who constantly observe the dying, have had intimations of enduring bonds that can radically help people to process their grief and their fear. Opening Heaven’s Door offers deeply affecting stories of messages from the dying and the dead in a fascinating work of investigative journalism, pointing to new scientific explanations that give these luminous moments the importance felt by those who experience them. Pearson also delves into out-of-body and near-death experiences, examining stories and research to make sense of these related but distinct categories that shed light on Nearing Death Awareness. Countless people experience these coincidences when a loved one dies, while others experience such visions while they are dying themselves. These phenomena point toward a larger spiritual reality, and the reality of life (or something else) after death, yet are ignored in a cultural framework that dismisses anything that cannot be explained by the physical brain. But by dismissing or discounting these occurrences, we hamper our own healing. Challenging current assumptions about what we know and what we are still unable to explain, Opening Heaven’s Door is a groundbreaking, beautifully written exploration that will forever alter your perceptions of the nature of life and death.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: In this, the first biography and personal memoir of Wolf Messing to appear in the West, Tatiana Lungin limns a revealing portrait of one of the greatest psychic performers of the twentieth century. Born a Polish Jew near Warsaw, Messing ran away from home at the age of eleven and soon discovered his psychic gifts. Supporting himself by performing mind-reading acts in Berlin theatres, at fourteen Messing was sold by his unscrupulous manager to the famous Busch Circus. In no time Wolf gained an international reputation as the world’s greatest telepath as he toured the capitals of Europe. In Vienna Messing met Albert Einstein who brought him to the apartment of another admirer of his abilities, Sigmund Freud. His touring days ended abruptly in 1937 when, after Messing publicly predicted the downfall of the Third Reich, the Nazis placed a sizable bounty on his head. Summoning all his hypnotic powers, he escaped capture by the Gestapo and fled to Russia. In the USSR Messing’s displays of telepathy, uncannily accurate predictions, and psychic crime solving gained him a rare celebrity status. While most parapsychologists were forced to conduct psychic research in secrecy, Messing thrilled audiences in packed theatres across the country. His fame was all the more amazing coming as it did in the Marxist society dominated by Joseph Stalin, the man who had officially abolished ESP. Even Stalin himself was intrigued by Wolf’s ability to influence thoughts at a distance, and devised a number of unusual tests of Messing’s powers. The stories of how Messing successfully took on Stalin’s challenges to hypnotically elude his personal security force, and even commit psychic bank robbery, are colourfully related. As Messing’s long-time friend and confidante, Lungin draws from personal notes, conversations with Wolf, and reports of other eyewitnesses of his performances to chronicle Messing’s incredible life and career. At the same time, she provides an inside look at parapsychology and psychic research behind the Iron Curtain.

From the author’s website: Unlock the mysteries of life after death and explore the enlightening discoveries of a private investigator’s 15-year investigation. This book is a comprehensive resource answering 150 of the most crucial questions about what happens when we die.

Now you can delve into the life-changing insights we learn from near-death experiences, after-death communications, spirit contact through mediums, past lives, past-life memories, past-life and life-between-lives regressions, out-of-body experiences, soul pre-birth planning, deathbed visions, dream visitations, shared-death experiences, and so much more.

Whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, curious about what happens when we die, or pondering your own mortality, this book will leave you feeling less fear about death, inspired to live a more loving and purposeful life, and comforted by new thoughts about your loved ones in the afterlife.

From the publisher's website: Contemporary parapsychology tends to be preoccupied with ESP (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition) and psychokinesis. In contrast, this cutting-edge anthology assembles an international team of experts from the fields of psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience to examine critically what is referred to as the survival hypothesis: the tentative statement or prediction that some aspect of our personhood (e.g., consciousness) persists subsequent to the death of the physical body.The appraisal of the survival hypothesis will be restricted to the phenomenon of mediumship; that is, humans who ostensibly communicate with the deceased. The book has been divided into four main sections: Explanation and Belief; Culture, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy; Empirical Approaches; The Present and Future. The issue of postmortem survival is supremely relevant to us all because the human encounter with death is, of course, a certainty.

From the publisher’s website: A hard-nosed, logical, and skeptical non-materialist metaphysics according to which the body is in mind, not mind in the body. The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects.

From the publisher’s website: How does it feel to live in a ‘haunted home’? How do people negotiate their everyday lives with the experience of uncanny, anomalous or strange events within the domestic interior? What do such experiences reveal of the intersection between the material, immaterial and temporal within the home? How do people interpret, share and narrate experiences which are uncertain and unpredictable? What does this reveal about contested beliefs and different forms of knowledge? And about how people ‘co-habit’ with ghosts, a distinctive self - other relationship within such close quarters? This book sets out to explore these questions. It applies a non-reductive middle-ground approach which steers beyond an uncritical exploration of supernatural experiences without explaining them away by recourse only to wider social and cultural contexts. The book attends to the ways in which households in England and Wales understand their experience of haunting in relation to ideas of subjectivity, gender, materiality, memory, knowledge and belief. It explores home as a place both dynamic and differentiated, illuminating the complexity of ‘everyday’ experience - the familiarity of the strange as well as the strangeness of the familiar - and the ways in which home continues to be configured as a distinctive space. Contents: Approaching the ghost. Part I Spaces and Times of the Haunted Home: The material uncanny; The temporalities of the haunted home. Part II Strategies of Cohabitation: Embodying, domesticating, gendering the ghost; Strategies of distance and communication. Part III Belief, Knowledge and Experience: Knowledge and uncertainty; Belief, evidence and experience; Conclusion: the liminal home/self; Appendix: the households; References; Index. About the Author: Dr Caron Lipman is Research Fellow at the School of Geography, University of London, UK.

From the publisher's website: Talking With the Spirits is a cross-cultural survey of contemporary spirit mediumship. The diverse contributions to this volume cover a wide-range of ethnographic contexts, from Spiritualist séances in the United Kingdom to self-mortification rituals in Singapore and Taiwan, from psychedelic spirit incorporation in the Amazonian rainforest, to psychic readings in online social spaces, and more. By taking a broad perspective the book highlights both the variety of culturally specific manifestations of spirit communication, and key cross-cultural features suggestive of underlying core processes and experiences. Rather than attempting to reduce or dismiss such experiences, the authors featured in this collection take the experiences of their informants seriously and explore their effects at personal, social and cultural levels.

From the publisher’s website: This book investigates the wide range of near-death experiences (NDEs) of patients that Penny Sartori has encountered during her nursing career, as well as the hundreds of cases of people who have reached out to her over the years. Many people take near-death experiences at surface value and are misinformed about the full extent of this highly complex phenomenon. Dr Sartori argues that, by pathologising the NDE, we are missing out on vital insights that can empower us to live fulfilled and meaningful lives. Dr Sartori does not offer superficial physiological or psychological explanations for why these experiences take place. Rather, the crucial point of this book is that near-death experiences undoubtedly occur and have very real, often dramatic, and life changing aftereffects. Further to that, the wisdom gained during the NDE can be life enhancing and have hugely positive effects on those who don’t have an NDE – all we have to do is take notice of and hear what these people have to say. A greater understanding of near-death experiences can not only enhance the way in which we care for dying patients, but also revolutionise our current worldview. This book encourages readers to take notice of and incorporate the wisdom and powerful messages of near-death experiences into their own lives.

Review by Robert A. Charman.

From the publisher’s website: Ever since the dawn of recorded history, humans have reported encounters with an exceptional light which appeared to them to be different, more intense, and brighter than sunlight. Often, these experiences had a strong and lasting effect on those concerned, changing their lives completely. But what exactly did they experience? In which shape did the light appear? Did it come along with a message, and what could it possibly communicate to them? And why did it change in their lives? All these and many more questions require answers. This book faces those questions and offers the thoughts and feelings of more than 800 individuals reporting these experiences over a time span of 130 years. Light Changes explores ‘Seeing and Inner Sight’, myths, folklore, religion, philosophy, science, and in particular, psychical research, and offers clues into understanding how these important and meaningful encounters with light may affect us all. Annekatrin Puhle Ph D is a philosopher, health consultant, and psychical researcher in the area of exceptional human experiences. After receiving her doctorat from the Free University, Berlin, she worked at The Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Currently she is a guest lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, guest researcher at King’s College, London, and the author of several books and papers on apparitional experiences and healing. A sample chapter can be read here: Light Changes.

Review by Robert A. Charman.

From the publisher’s website: This book explores conceptions of the soul and the afterlife that are consistent with the findings of modern science. It approaches these subjects from many different angles: religious, philosophical, scientific, poetic, humorous, quasi-scientific, and even pseudoscientific (just to be fair). Many possible afterlives are examined, including physical resurrection (whether supernatural, biological or cybernetic in form), reincarnation, participation in a dream-like world or collective mind, and the persistence of recycling centres of pure consciousness. Philosophical, scientific and religious doctrines regarding the relationship between conscious minds and physical matter are reviewed. Centres of consciousness likely exist at many different hierarchical levels, from elementary particles, single neurons and organisms all the way up to supra-individual entities such as ant colonies or deities. Empirical evidence bearing on the nature of the soul and the afterlife is also reviewed, including that amassed by parapsychologists suggesting that some personality elements may survive death (as in the case of children who report memories of previous lives). The findings of modern neuroscience suggest that you cannot take it all (or even much of it) with you but you can at least take you with you.