Product Description

John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson are just a few of the prominent American mediums who have been accused of being frauds. But what if a respected scientist challenged them to make contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions? What if the results not only stunned a skeptical scientist but also offered astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death?

Risking his academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz asked well-known mediums to become part of a series of experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. This riveting narrative, with electrifying transcripts, documents stringently monitored experiments in which mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues.

Here are the results that awed sitters and researchers alike: a revelation about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Forced by data to abandon skepticism, Schwartz presents this amazing account of his groundbreaking work, compelling from first page to last.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67753 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Schwartz (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 lab's findings. Of particular fun are the session transcripts, which include running commentary provided by lead investigators. (One sitter describes a medium's 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.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Schwartz has long been interested in the possible survival of consciousness after death. With Simon's assistance, he reports on his and fellow psychologist Linda Russek's 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 Russek's 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
John Edward

host of "Crossing Over with John Edward"

This book is an absolute must-own and must-read for anyone who struggles with faith, love, death, and aspects of divinity.

James Van Praagh

spiritual medium, and author of Talking to Heaven

Science meets Spiritualism in this extraordinarily precise and detailed chronicle of experiments, proving once again that the consciousness survives physical death. It is one of the most important books written on this subject.

Deepak Chopra

Gary Schwartz applies procedures of experimentation that no honest skeptic could argue with.

Customer Reviews

Recommended
Dr. Schwartz has worked with noted mediums such as George Anderson, John Edward, and Suzanne Northrop, as well as mediums with shorter professional practice.

His work is often cited as something that might approach a scientific "proof" of afterlife, mediumship contact, similar to what Dr. Ian Stevenson performed in his work related to the topic of reincarnation associated with the Univeristy of Virginia.

Great book for scientific evidence to the paranormal
This book shows how hard it is to scientifically prove that there is an afterlife, but they do it well and the book was very helpful for my niece and myself to understand the paranormal.

Scientific Evidence of our Life after Death
What is valuable about this book is that two very skeptical scientists decided to try to prove that there is an after life and that souls on the other side can communicate with us here and now if we listen.

As a practical engineer who only gets paid if what I design works, I was impressed with the design of the experiments (that proved for me that people like John Edward are the real deal) and also with their reluctance to tell people what they were doing until they could not ignore the results.

Their work validated what I knew was true in my heart and soul.......it pushed me to begin energy healing studies and training.

Of course, some of my family still think that I am crazy, but now my 84 year old mother has let go of her fear (really uncertainty) about death, as I have, which is very liberating.