An article at vancouversun.com describes a talk given by skeptical psychologist Leonard George about his experiences taking a course in mediumship. During the course he seemed to communicate with his father, his spirit guides, and he was stunned by the accuracy of a reading he gave to another student. He felt his experiences were not scientific proof of communication with spirits, but they left him open to the possibility that “There is an unseen reality”.
(There is ample proof (more here and here) of communication with spirits and in light of that proof, it is reasonable to consider his experiences were genuine communication with spirits. His experiences are somewhat similar to my own experiences taking classes in mediumship.)
Excerpts from the article:
Leonard George, a skeptic, was convinced by his experiences that Spiritualists were sincere an not involved in fakery.
George, a self-described skeptical psychologist, is also aware spiritualism has often been linked with fakery and fraud. So he wanted to get to the bottom of things.
...
What did George end up discovering about modern-day spiritualism? The first thing he realized was that the New York spiritualists conveyed “100 per cent sincerity.”
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But the spiritualists’ high moral standards, and apparent complete rejection of trickery of any kind, did not begin to constitute any sort of scientific proof for George that they could speak to dead people.
He seemed to meet with his spirit guides:
“I had an experience of rising up. I was perched on a mountain and the lights were right in front of me. These lights communicated that they were my spirit guides. It was quite shocking.”
George seemed to communicate with his deceased father.
Following a sense of being buried alive, powerful images arose inside George of his father sitting on a marble bench; calm, talkative and reassuring. “It was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.”
He was stunned by the accuracy of a reading he gave to a classmate:
He did a reading for a female student whom he had never before met. In an altered state as he contemplated the woman’s soul, George sensed images of a short dark woman in a storm-tossed house covered with Christmas ornaments, whose name may have been Mabel or Annabel.
When George told the woman about the images that emerged during her reading, she responded that when she had been a child in the poor rural U.S., high winds would often knock out the family’s water supply.
So the woman would walk through the forest to obtain water from a black woman named Mabel, who decorated her house year-round with Christmas ornaments.
“When she said that my hair was standing up. It’s standing up right now,” George said, sitting at his desk. “It seemed so accurate to me. I didn’t have anything to say for hours after that.”
He seemed to realize there was something paranormal happening but did not consider his experiences scientific of communication with spirits. However the experiences left him open to the possibility that “There is an unseen reality".
He has not adopted spiritualist metaphysics since his summer apprenticeship as a medium. And he did not come away feeling he had “scientific proof” humans can psychically connect with people, including beings in an afterlife.
But that doesn’t mean he is not open to the possibility. “There is an unseen reality,” George said confidently.
“But I’m not committed to what spiritualists say it is.”
He was, however, convinced most spiritualists are having meaningful experiences that provide what he calls “personal proof” of another realm. These experiences tend, he noted, to make them more confident and resilient than most people.
It is not unreasonable to say these experiences are not scientific proof of communication with spirits. However there is ample proof (more here and here) of communication with spirits and in light of that proof, it is reasonable to consider his experiences to be genuine communication with spirits.
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