Sunday, January 01, 2006

Words of Wisdom from the Other Side

Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, has some excerpts publicly available.

One describes what is perhaps the world's most pointless psychic experiment, conducted by Dr Gary Schwartz to determine what Heaven is like (apparently all those who have passed over end up in Heaven, there never seem to be any voices saying "God, it's hot in here!" or "Where's the airconditioning?"). I mean, regardless of what the dead say, how does anyone tell if it's accurate or not?

Julie Beischel, who conducted the 'experiment' posed 32 questions to 2 'discarnates' via 4 mediums (one of them being our old favourite Allison "World's Only Real Psychic" Dubois). When asked if they eat, the answers were pretty much randomly "Yes" and "No". Her explanation:
"My interpretation is that the mediums are just guessing, or the answer is biased by the medium's own ideas of what the afterlife is like, or the questions don't have enough emotional interest for the discarnate to give a strong answer." Which more or less covers all the bases.

Exactly. Though the probability of those explanations declines exponentially after the first one or two... Here's a hint, Julie. Before you pretend to be a scientist or conduct an experiment, you might like to read up on the Principle of Parsimony.

Some other highlights of Heaven which we all have to look forward to:
Q: How is the weather?
A: It's Florida without the humidity.

Q: Is there music?
A: Yes. She whips out a xylophone and goes, bum, bum, bum bum bum. And I also get The Carpenters.

Q: Are there angels?
A: Yeah, ... but they've got their own clique going. They've got their own little deal going on.

And the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, courtesy of Allison "World's Only Real Psychic" Dubois (and, by definition, it must therefore be true):
To the formal study data, I feel I must add one last statement about the afterlife, passed along to me by Allison DuBois, who received it from an unnamed discarnate during a private sitting: 'I can wear pleated pants now.'"

On second thought, EoR suspects all these 'discarnates' actually ended up in The Other Place.

1 comment:

  1. Pleated pants! Duane Dibbley? Whatever that place is I want a reservation for The Other One.

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