December 3, 2005

The Afterlife Experiments : Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death by Gary E. R. Schwartz, William L. Simon

BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP  (Dec 3, 10 AM)

MEETING PLACE: University Unitarian Universalist Society, 11648 McCulloch Rd: From University Boulevard go north on Rouse Rd. 1.0 mi; east on McCulloch Rd. 0.5 mi. QUESTIONS?: Contact Steve Hall, Program Chairman, University UUS Home Phone: 407-681-5066 I hope to see you there.

Book Description

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

Gary Schwartz, Ph.D., coauthor of The Afterlife Experiments, is professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery at the University of Arizona and director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory. In 2002 he received a $1.8 million dollars award from the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health to create a Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and taught there for five years. He later served on the faculty at Yale University. He has published more than four hundred scientific papers, co-edited eleven academic books, and is coauthor of The Living Energy Universe, and The G.O.D. Experiments (in press). He has been on Dateline, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Nightline, and The O’Reilly Factor.