Leslie Kean's new Netflix documentary

I’ll reserve judgement on the physical mediumship but what I’ve seen so far is waffle, plus it appears to be done in complete darkness. This isn’t uncommon these days but it’s begging for accusations of fraud imho. Other than for the independent direct voice, I’d say physical mediumship in complete darkness isn’t a good source of survival evidence.

I don't have any insight or knowledge of mediumship, other that what I've read or heard second-hand. However, going off at a tangent, the subject of 'darkness as an enabler' interests me. There's one part of my house, a connecting passage, with no window. It of course has electric light. But I often walk through there in almost complete darkness - I know the way, with or without light. But an interesting thing happens. Often during the few seconds of my walk I enter into a deep state of meditation, without intending to. Sometimes I deliberately slow down my walk and linger there a second or two longer than necessary, before continuing to whatever place I was going. It almost feels like the most 'spiritual' part of the house, if I may use that word in a loose and flexible manner.

In ordinary circumstances, turning off the lights and sitting in the dark tends to make me feel restless or uneasy, but I don't get that feeling when I'm walking in the dark, I think because it isn't a self-conscious or contrived set-up, just something very natural.

I don't have any insight or knowledge of mediumship, other that what I've read or heard second-hand. However, going off at a tangent, the subject of 'darkness as an enabler' interests me. There's one part of my house, a connecting passage, with no window. It of course has electric light. But I often walk through there in almost complete darkness - I know the way, with or without light. But an interesting thing happens. Often during the few seconds of my walk I enter into a deep state of meditation, without intending to. Sometimes I deliberately slow down my walk and linger there a second or two longer than necessary, before continuing to whatever place I was going. It almost feels like the most 'spiritual' part of the house, if I may use that word in a loose and flexible manner.

In ordinary circumstances, turning off the lights and sitting in the dark tends to make me feel restless or uneasy, but I don't get that feeling when I'm walking in the dark, I think because it isn't a self-conscious or contrived set-up, just something very natural.

It’s certainly the case that darkness is required for many natural phenomena. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was problematic for physical mediumship in fact I’d accept that. That said, there seem to be many examples of people who demonstrated physical mediumship in some form of light, sometimes perfectly bright.

Despite largely positive reactions, I've already came across a very sloppy, very lazy attempt at refuting/debunking NDEs in episode 1 from a woman who means well but is woefully misinformed (and blatantly didn't watch the full episode):

First off, it's only 6 minutes long and she's clearly done virtually no research into this at all. She just responds with that loosely scientific DMT theory, even claiming its 'produced by the pineal gland', which isn't even what folks like Borjigin and Blanke claim anymore with their theory. You can find loads of articles on the front page of Google debunking her nonsense, and of course Nicholls' response.

No mention of Bruce Greyson, or Peter Fenwick, or their refutations, or veridical perceptions such as in the Pam Reynolds case. I seriously can't believe some people out there are so lazy and resistant to this that they resort to the laziest of cherry-picking and misinformation. 

She talks about how it doesn't make sense that Mary Neal could have been revived after 30 minutes by bringing up some diagram showing that 'after 30 minutes, cell death occurs' or something. Honestly.

I’ve spent the afternoon watching most of the series, for me, there are two episodes that really stand out, the first, which is about NDE’s, and the sixth, about reincarnation. The others were far less persuasive, perhaps with the exception of part of the fifth, where a doctor talks to elderly patients who tell of visions or dreams of meeting deceased love ones as they approach death. 

What really struck me, was the one about reincarnation. It was an emotional watch. Seeing this up to date film of the kids that grow up with these memories and how deeply they appear to have affected their current life. Dr Tucker seems to be a genuinely nice man with integrity. 

I can really see how we really need to have our past erased so that we can get on and live our current one without distraction. 

Emotion seems to be at somehow at the heart of these events. Maybe it’s just my own reflective phase that I’m going through, remembering my own ‘past lives’ within this current one, but this episode struck a nerve. 

It’s certainly the case that darkness is required for many natural phenomena. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was problematic for physical mediumship in fact I’d accept that. That said, there seem to be many examples of people who demonstrated physical mediumship in some form of light, sometimes perfectly bright.

The whole question what's necessary for mediumship to manifest ectoplasm makes me recall something Jeff Martel said about Reality ->

...It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who argued that, contrary to common belief, causality has no logical necessity. The real reason we expect a coin to fall to the ground when we toss it in the air isn’t that it logically must do so but that we have made a habit of believing that what goes up must come down. In truth, there is no reason whatsoever why specific effects must follow from specific causes. After all, it is perfectly possible to imagine a world where tossed coins simply float up into the ether, never to return. The fact that they haven’t in the past does little but explain our habit (mere habit!) of expecting things to keep going the way they have been until now.

So in reality, the outcome of every coin toss is unpredictable: maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. (NOTE: I realize I'm being flippant here, but bear with me.) The Real inheres in this unpredictability, this maybe. It points a strange, unknowable order that hides behind our preconceptions, habits, and judgements. In fact our habits— all the armature of culture — form a kind of veil to protect us against it...

...Picture the following scene, a cartoon cliché. You’re standing on a darkened street corner at night. Suddenly an immense form appears on the brick wall ahead, a terrible, monstrous shadow cast by something coming around the corner. When the creature casting the shadow finally appears, it turns out to be an inoffensive kitten. The whole thing was a trick of the light. 

Now, according to our conventional way of seeing things, the part of the scene where “truth" is revealed is the moment when the kitten shows itself. It’s at that point that you realize that the monstrous shadow was an illusion, that what was actually coming towards you was in fact the most mundane, benign, and knowable of God’s creatures. Yet if we entertain the concept of the Real I’ve just outlined, things change. The moment you were closest to “truth” — the moment you were most in touch with the Real — was in the interval during which you did not know what you were looking at. For then the monstrous shadow pointed you to a zone of potentiality with which you are not familiar, an open space between the little world you think you know and the big, real, unknowable world...

In tandem I was thinking of the Peer to Peer Simulation Hypothesis, how what the consensus reality is comes through the "summing" of all observers ->

Because different machines on the network represent the same object in slightly different positions at any given instant (with some number n of machines representing a given object at position P, some other number n* of machines representing a given object at position P*, etc.) a dynamical description of where a given object/property probably is in the environment will have features of a wave (viz. an amplitude equivalent to the number of computers representing the object at a given instant, and wavelength equivalent to dynamical change of how many computers represent the object at a given point at the next instant).

By a similar token, any particular measurement on any particular computer will result in the observation of the object as located at a specific point.

Any particular measurement on any particular computer will result in the appearance of a “collapse” of wave-like dynamics of the simulation into a single, determinate measurement.

However I'd make the amendment that the expectation of observers in an area "rig the dice", so to speak, possibly at an unconscious level as Wheeler's "observer participants".

So what's this all got to do with mediumship? I think that the requirements vary because the expectations vary, with the medium's expectations being most important of all.

It's not a perfect explanation, and there's probably lots to hash out....and it's reasonable for someone to think of this as excuse making in the same way one might dismiss "Trickster and the Paranormal" theories.

However there is a parallel case, that of shamanic healers. Some of these healers use magic tricks - in the sense of illusions with mundane explanations - to shift the unwell person's mind into a state of doubt about what's possible.

I suspect even those who are ardent skeptics that have been convinced had their observer participancy shifted at an unconscious level, given skeptics are some of the best at getting "negative hit" results in psychic testing.

It’s certainly the case that darkness is required for many natural phenomena. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was problematic for physical mediumship in fact I’d accept that. That said, there seem to be many examples of people who demonstrated physical mediumship in some form of light, sometimes perfectly bright.

The whole question what's necessary for mediumship to manifest ectoplasm makes me recall something Jeff Martel said about Reality ->



In tandem I was thinking of the Peer to Peer Simulation Hypothesis, how what the consensus reality is comes through the "summing" of all observers ->


However I'd make the amendment that the expectation of observers in an area "rig the dice", so to speak, possibly at an unconscious level as Wheeler's "observer participants".

So what's this all got to do with mediumship? I think that the requirements vary because the expectations vary, with the medium's expectations being most important of all.

It's not a perfect explanation, and there's probably lots to hash out....and it's reasonable for someone to think of this as excuse making in the same way one might dismiss "Trickster and the Paranormal" theories.

However there is a parallel case, that of shamanic healers. Some of these healers use magic tricks - in the sense of illusions with mundane explanations - to shift the unwell person's mind into a state of doubt about what's possible.

I suspect even those who are ardent skeptics that have been convinced had their observer participancy shifted at an unconscious level, given skeptics are some of the best at getting "negative hit" results in psychic testing.

It's odd to me that ectoplasm would be so unstable that you can't even expose it to light (or possibly other peoples direct awareness) yet its also so concentrated that its capable of causing burns and other physical damage. I'm incredibly sure that ectoplasm is just the physical substance of magic that I at the very least consider myself very well versed in. It certainly seems to have all the same characteristics, which is what makes this one aspect so odd.

Normally, in order to concentrate energy to enough of a degree that it could actually cause such damage it is almost by definition too stable for something as small as light, air, or other peoples residual energy focused through awareness to disrupt it to such a degree that it completely loses cohesion. It was true that the two most basic and automatic forms of energy effects were kinetic and thermal, which you could argue were both just kinetic. Because how magic largely worked, as far as I remember, and have experimented with here, is that the substance converts its own mass into the energetic effect you are trying to get. But a big part of making it practical was the ability to condense energy so that you could have a highly concentrated bundle of it that could be applied to a particular effect all at once. A huge part of proper condensation was making sure that your bundle of energy was highly cohesive, that it sticks to itself very strongly, resisting mundane (and sometimes not so mundane) environmental friction until you tell it not to. There's various ways to do this, such as using some of the bundle to create a membrane around the rest that both protects it from environmental friction and keeps the internal parts compressed. Which is the most basic form if you wanted to, say, throw a ball of energy at a target and then have it burst on that target and dump all its energy into it as either a kinetic or thermal effect. Since the force of it hitting the target would be, by design, more than the membrane could take, causing a collapse of the whole thing. You could think of it like a very thin walled glass ball filled with compressed gas. Depending how you tweaked it it could dump that energy out in various ways, either as a kinetic impact, heat transfer or many other things but that's beyond the scope of my point.

So I look at this whole conundrum of some mediums apparently having these very powerful effects, relatively speaking, but only in total darkness, yet others can do it in broad daylight and I'm trying to figure out what they would actually need to do in order to have such instability along with the kinetic power to lift objects and all that. So far all I can think of is that they, or the spirits claiming to do this, aren't actually trying to make the energy cohesive at all, they're just brute forcing it with raw willpower, just holding it there in that position unmodified. That's the only thing I can think of that might cause such high levels of instability and if that's the case then they're simply doing it wrong. Right from the start the thing that makes magic very powerful and useful is automation, manipulating the energy to react to various things in various ways so that it does what you want it to do without you needing to do anything yourself.

The only other possibility that I can think of is that there's something about the non-mundane environment that is very unstable, making it very difficult to properly condense energy, and I have a lot of reason to think that that's possible as well. But even with that it just seems odd, because if you could burn through that and concentrate that amount of energy anyways, then you should've been able to condense it as well and protect it from that inherent instability.

I suppose it could be part of the mediums own beliefs, which seems to be what Sci's quotes are alluding to, which could lead them to not attempt proper condensation or something. Which if true only proves further why people need to get rid of all religion and spirituality since those beliefs would be hampering their physical effects. Possibly supported by the fact that a good chunk of the evidential mediums that the Windbridge Institute worked with were atheists or otherwise secular as far as I remember.

There are certainly reports of ectoplasm being seen in good light, even occasionally in full light. I know someone who saw and handled it in decent red light.

There are certainly reports of ectoplasm being seen in good light, even occasionally in full light. I know someone who saw and handled it in decent red light.

Yep, and if its solid enough to be handled it shouldn't take too much imagination to figure out what else its solid enough to do, if you could control it.

See, I dunno, I feel like if it was that easy we'd have somethin by now. I'm always a bit skeptical of ectoplasm or physical mediumship

See, I dunno, I feel like if it was that easy we'd have somethin by now. I'm always a bit skeptical of ectoplasm or physical mediumship

Scepticism is prudent IMO. I don’t think anyone suggests it’s common or easy to demonstrate. In terms of “what we have” there is plenty of evidence of its existence from people who’ve studied the subject. Some of them highly qualified scientifically or of other notable standing. 

If you mean “demonstrated on BBC science programmes” I’d agree but to suggest there’s not “something” in terms of evidence for it is not accurate as far as I can see.

I do think that given the boggle-threshold challenging nature of it, and the implications for our view of the way the world works, it needs to be seen to be truly believed.