Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,4

given to the living by their forebears, as a matter of respect. As we dig deeper into the religious concepts of eastern origin, we find such a constant interplay between the living and the dead that one understands why some Asians are not afraid to die or do not take the kind of precautions western people would take under similar circumstances. Death to them is not a stranger or a punishment or a fearful avenger of sins committed in the flesh.

In modern times, only spiritualism has approached the subject of the dead with a degree of rationalism, although it tends to build its edifice of believability occasionally on very shaky ground. The proof of survival of the human personality is certainly not wanting, yet spiritualism ignores the elements in man that are mortal but nonphysical, and gives credit to the dead for everything that transcends the five senses. But research on ESP has shown that some of these experiences need not be due to the spirit intervention, although they may not be explicable in terms of orthodox science. We do have ESP in our incarnate state and rarely use the wondrous faculties of our minds to the fullest.

Nevertheless, the majority of spiritualist beliefs are capable of verification. I have worked with some of the best spiritualist mediums to learn about trafficking with the “other world.” For the heart of spiritualist belief is communication with the dead. If it exists, then obviously spiritualism has a very good claim to be a first-class religion, if not more. If the claim is fraudulent, then spiritualism would be as cruel a fraud as ever existed, deceiving man’s deepest emotions.

Assuming that the dead exist and live on in a world beyond our physical world, it would be of the greatest interest to learn the nature of the secondary world and the laws that govern it. It would be important to understand “the art of dying,” as the medieval esoterics called it, and come to a better understanding also the nature of this transition called death.

Having accepted the existence of a nonphysical world populated by the dead, we next should examine the continuing contacts between the two worlds and the two-way nature of these communications: those initiated by the living, and those undertaken by the dead.

Observation of so-called spontaneous phenomena will be just as important as induced experiments or attempts at contact. In all this we must keep a weather eye open for deceit, misinterpretation, or self-delusion. So long as there is a human faculty involved in this inquiry, we must allow for our weaknesses and limitations. By accepting safeguards, we do not close our minds to the astonishing facts that may be revealed just because those facts seem contrary to current thinking. If we proceed with caution, we may contribute something that will give beleaguered humankind new hope, new values, and new directions.

RETURN FROM THE DEAD

Nothing could be more convincing than the testimony of those people who have actually been to that other world and returned “to tell the tale.” This material substantiates much of the phenomena that has made itself known to many in personal encounters, and also with the help of competent psychics and mediums.

While evidence of communication with the dead will provide the bulk of the evidential material that supports the conditions and decrees existing in that other world, we have also a number of testimonies from people who have entered the next world but not stayed in it. The cases involve people who were temporarily separated from their physical reality—without, however, being cut off from it permanently—and catapulted into the state we call death. These are mainly accident victims who recovered and those who underwent surgery and during the state of anesthesia became separated from their physical bodies and were able to observe from a new vantage point what was happening to them. Also, some people have traveled to the next world in a kind of dream state and observed conditions there that they remembered upon returning to the full state of wakefulness.

I hesitate to call these cases dreams since, as I have already pointed out in another work on the psychic side of dreams, the dream state covers a multitude of conditions, some of which at least are not actual dreams but states of limited consciousness and receptivity to external inputs. Out-of-body experiences, formerly known as astral projections, are also frequently classed with dreams, while in fact they are a form of projection in which the individual is traveling outside