What if you could have a scientific reason to believe that what you already know in your heart is true? The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life after Death (Pocket Books) by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., offers such a gift to those who know that life is eternal, that the soul survives the death of the physical body. Professor at the University of Arizona, Dr. Schwartz and his innovative double-blind experiments have attracted a lot of attention. His methodology removes all skeptical objections to survival research except one: that he does such research in the first place.

As a scientist, Dr. Schwartz likes to develop hypotheses and test them. He believes that his work offers evidence supporting the hypothesis that living infoenergy systems, once created, continue indefinitely, that is, that there are eternal souls. He doesn’t say that he has “proofs” of life after death. How can you show another person, he asks, that you love a particular person? Not by what you say, nor by what you do, because those words and actions may be motivated by something more than love. You just “know” inside that you love that particular person, but how do you “prove” it to another person? That is a problem. Another problem is this: How do you know that you are correctly interpreting what you experience as “love”? Maybe it really is something else. Dr. Schwartz replies that the scientific process allows us to infer the existence of things we cannot directly detect, to affirm the existence of the invisible, such as gravity. Science also allows us to evaluate interpretations of our experience, reject some interpretations and allow others to remain viable.

We all know that mediumship experiments cannot “prove” the existence of life after death, because there are too many alternative interpretations of the data. For one, perhaps the medium, or psychic, has tremendous clairvoyant abilities and can simply “know” the answer to any question posed, without having to receive information transmitted by an actual spirit from a deceased person. This “Super Psi” hypothesis is almost impossible to disprove. The double-blind experiments that Dr. Schwartz reports provide evidence of “anomalous information transfer,” to be sure, but no experiment can absolutely “prove” that the information is coming from non-material souls. Instead, Dr. Schwartz considers the details in the information exchanged. For example, when a medium conveys some information from the deceased to the seated relative, the spirit often corrects the medium, jokes and interacts with the medium. If the medium simply collected information and was not in actual dialogue with an intelligent being, this type of event would not occur. The bottom line is that the simplest explanation for all the data is that the anomalous information transfer comes from living souls. So he has the scientific data that allows us to believe what we already know to be true. So what?

Gary Schwartz has a grander vision than proving that life survives death. His research has provided reason to suspect that love is behind it all. It is love that motivates the transfer of information, the communication between the loved one in spirit and the loved one in the physical body. Sir Isaac Newton, the man who discovered gravity, declared that this attractive force that existed between all things in creation was a manifestation of God’s love. In other words, Newton equated gravity with love. Love is universal energy, says Professor Schwartz.

Love puts a human face on energy; in the info-energy systems we call souls. He also points out that it is love that motivates most of the communication between the psychic medium and the information and energy system, also known as the soul. In many cases of his experiments, the spirit communicated information that had less to do with the experimental requirements than with the communication of love to the living relative. As much as a spirit may have shown motivation to help make the experiment successful and conveyed the required information, there would be other communications that were motivated by the spirit’s strong desire for the living relative to know the love that was still emanating from the deceased relative. to the living

As Dr. Schwartz tells the story of how he became involved in this research, it was his love for a colleague’s love for his deceased father that inspired him to investigate the afterlife hypothesis. There was intellectual curiosity, but perhaps not enough to justify the criticism that such research would generate among his colleagues. It was love that prompted him to action. As a bonus to the success of his experimental design in demonstrating the feasibility of a scientific exploration of the question of survival, his work clearly revealed the eternal presence and infinite power of love to unite creation, making communication and communion not only are possible, but vital. to life itself.