Now as you may or not may not know, Jeffrey Mishlove has won the first prize of half a million dollars for the Bigelow award.  Robert Bigelow donated the considerable prize money (extra to cover lots of runners up, too), for the paper showing the best evidence for life after death. 

Jeffrey’s splendid paper does indeed give lots of irrefutable evidence, which taken as a whole add up to a water-tight case.  Jeffrey makes much of the phenomenon of the black swan; that if one event cannot be explained conventionally, then we have to go further, considering other levels of explanation. This image was used in some of the other papers, too, pointing to the irrationality of accepting black swans in conventional scientific circles, but not accepting them outside this narrow paradigm.

I recently did an interview for Karen (Kat) Benson on her Realistic Spirituality You Tube channel.  In it she asked me how I journeyed from very convinced atheist to my present position, and I said that my between-lives hypnosis was very crucial.   Indeed it was, it gave me an experience of the beautiful realm that we visit after dying, unforgettably vivid and enthralling.  But there was something else I forgot to mention, something which really fits into Jeffrey Mishlove’s theory of the black swan. 

It is how you learn to be a medium.  In the very early stages of my journey, having heard about an extraordinary spiritual healing, I went to our local spiritual church, to see what was going on.  I went very much as an investigator; no way did I sign on completely with this.  I wanted to watch mediums doing their stuff, to see if I could discover how the fraud might work. 

A spiritualist church has notices, prayers, hymns, etc.  And then a medium is invited to take the floor.  I never knew who they were, to begin with, and I’d deliberately not talked to anyone there about my life.  I watched carefully as person after person was brought to tears, or joy or laugher by what the mediums said. I could not find any evidence of fraud.  One or two things mediums said to me I did not even know at the time, and had to check later. 

Then I tried the Development Circle, which the Church ran every other week.  This was about developing your mediumistic abilities.  I expected it might include neuro-linguistic planning, body language tips, how to plant seed phrases which might give the clue etc. 

Instead we are asked to meditate on love and compassion.  We asked for help (who from?  Our helpers, I was told).  We divided into couples and had a go. 

I had no idea what to do.   I decided to make up someone, just as I did when writing fiction.  I elaborated with as many details as I might for a character in one of my novels, and my partner said, ‘That’s my aunty you’re talking about.’

I was dumbfounded.  I’d described this middle-aged woman, with dark hair scraped back in a pony tail, rather mannish shoes, work clothes and a heavy apron.  My partner said she didn’t get the apron.  I elaborated a bit.  There’s a piano there, I said, but she’d not playing it.  ‘That’s right,‘ she said, ‘my uncle was the pianist.  We used to visit them often, and if we’d found any rabbits in the traps we took them – oh,’ she said, ‘That’s the apron she used to wear to clean the rabbits…’

Later I asked the medium who was instructing our group, if using my imagination, like writing fiction, was a legitimate way to access information.  He said that the psychic world will use anything it can to get through to us, weighed down as we are in our third density body and environment. 

The conventional explanation for mediumship is that it’s fraud.  A further level is that it’s telepathy (‘living agent’) some way of picking up what’s in our unconscious and talking about it, not necessarily about after death communication.  But if you think about the vast number of experiences and memories that furnish our unconscious, it seems very bizarre that exactly the right combination of clues should be picked up by the medium out of an entire person’s being, to prove there’s someone there. This is my black swan, the anomaly that can’t be explained away.  I’ve been a medium myself, and I know I wasn’t fraudulent.  It worked, in the mind of someone I didn’t know.  Not for a moment were we taught how to be fraudulent, how to make educated guesses, how to manipulate or deceive.  We meditated and prayed that we’d be able to help people.  And no one ever charged for this.  There was a £2.00 fee for attendance at the spiritual church.  That was all.

It’s not easy, being a medium.  I’m not very good at it.  If I wanted to make a living out of it, I suppose I might try to augment my small ability with a few tricks of the Derren Brown nature.   Most talented mediums don’t need to do this.   There’s a reality here, and a medium like Leonor Piper, who was investigated to the nth degree, was shown never to use fraud.  A genuine black swan, she was.  And so was my brief experience.