Communicating with the Dead (Original)

Is There Really Any Evidence for an Afterlife?
But as “evidence of an afterlife” these stories tell us little or nothing about what it's like in the other realm. Don’t bother looking for the Roy Ald book as it is so long out of print it doesn’t even show up in Amazon.Com as an “out-of-print” book. I got my yellowed copy at a used book store.

Also unavailable is another book I have that really got me thinking about survival of the spirit after death. This book is Life Without Death? by Nils O. Jacobson, M.D., a translation from Swedish published in 1971. It takes a much more sophisticated approach, connecting the paranormal with the idea of survival of death, but going beyond that to examine the meaning of consciousness and to formulate some theories on how survival works. The book examines possession, telepathy, reincarnation, astral travel, clairvoyance, and precognition, along with possible explanations of what might happen at birth and death. It looks at both unusual events of the sort reported in Roy Ald’s book as well as scientific experiments. It is an ambitious look at the whole subject.

Dr. Jacobson’s book covers a lot of territory, but some of the information jumped out at me. In one section, he talks about an experiment done a hundred years ago by Duncan McDougall with people who were dying. He placed their bed on a weighing platform and took measurements. As they neared death, they lost weight as was expected. But at the moment of death a sudden and unexplainable loss of 21 grams was registered. This held true for each dying person. These experiments have never been repeated (at least they hadn’t as of the writing of this book) and I have never seen a report of this experiment anywhere but in this book. In other experiments, people photographed or saw a misty substance above the dying person’s body, or saw a silver cord break. In other experiments I have read about nowhere else, Dr. Jacobson talks about strange voices heard on tape recordings that turn out to be messages from the beyond. This phenomenon was studied by Konstantin Raudive who published a book on it in 1968.

http://www.theseekerbooks.com/articles/lifeafter.htm