Author: Alberto Toscano File Type: pdf

Author: Gary E. R. Schwartz File Type: pdf An esteemed scientists personal journey from skepticism to wonder and awe provides astonishing answers to a timeless question Is there life after death? Are love and life eternal? This exciting account presents provocative evidence that could upset everything that science has ever taught. Daring to risk his worldwide academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, along with his research partner Dr. Linda Russek, asked some of the most prominent mediums in America -- including John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson -- to become part of a series of extraordinary experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTSThis riveting narrative, with its electrifying transcripts, puts the reader on the scene of a breakthrough scientific achievement contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions. In stringently monitored experiments, leading mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of sitters who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. The messages that came through stunned sitters and researchers alike. Here, as they unfolded in the laboratory setting, are uncanny revelations about a sons suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a mans lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouses death. Dr. Schwartz was forced by the overwhelmingly positive data to abandon his skepticism, reaching some startling conclusions. Compelling from the first page to the last, The Afterlife Experiments is the amazing documentation of groundbreaking experiments you will never forget.From Publishers WeeklySchwartz (The Living Energy Universe), director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona, proposes working with a group of top mediums who have consistently received messages, supposedly from the dead, to investigate whether or not there is indeed life after death. Armed with consummate authority (e.g., logic, scientific research and the focus of a recent HBO documentary), the book progresses through the labs findings. Of particular fun are the session transcripts, which include running commentary provided by lead investigators. (One sitter describes a mediums performance as dead on.) That their data will convince readers, the authors believe, is a foregone conclusion [E]ven skeptics will begin to evolve as a result of these findings. Yet the story comes off like high-grade magic or a splendid infomercial. Despite the reliance on experts (such as magicians, scientists and videographers), the narrative has the suspect tone of a sideshow barker. All the same, Schwartz embraces an admirable passion for curious knowledge and adamantly resolves to uphold his survival-of-consciousness hypothesis until research proves otherwise. 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From BooklistSchwartz has long been interested in the possible survival of consciousness after death. With Simons assistance, he reports on his and fellow psychologist Linda Russeks increasingly scientific experiments to determine whether consciousness survives death--experiments that HBO publicized in a program that unfortunately downplayed the science in them. The second and third experiments involved some silent-sitter time, when the spirit mediums involved had to make observations without being able to ask questions, and also wholly quiet times. The results, particularly of the second and third experiments, showed definite examples of precognition and surprisingly accurate observations by the mediums. Lengthy presentation of some of the sessions with the mediums figure in the text, and 90 pages of scientific reports demonstrate the scientific foundation for Schwartz and Russeks work, as does their earlier book The Living Energy Universe (1999). The Afterlife Experiments should provoke considerable discussion, which, once the reactions of those who refuse to look at the data are discarded, should be of value for further investigation in this controversial field. William Beatty American Library Association. lt