2020-07-15, 12:28 AM
So gonna get into Trance Mediumship, but I do want to mention Braude's final conclusions for the Drop In section:
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Braude provides an introduction to Trance Mediumship which he defines as the medium's communicative bodily organs, if not their mind/brain/body entirely, being controlled what at least appears to be a discarnate entity. It's what we might usually refer to as possession.
He notes that beyond the factual knowledge provided by drop-ins, trance mediums give us the ability to also judge the degree to which the personality (mannerisms, dispositions, sometimes even vocal timbre, etc) of the seeming spirit matches the person who they claim to be in life.
An issue he notes is that there are times when seemingly weak cases have nuggets of really good evidence. Additionally some of the seemingly discarnate personalities are also able to provide anomalous information of living persons.
As Braude notes, there could be a mixture of causes going on here, from varieties of living agent Psi to the dead making use of their own Psi abilities. Regarding the question of subconscious Super-Psi, Braude quotes William James as to the implausibility of this issue:
That's it for the introduction, next will come the cases.
Quote:Although the best cases are by no means coercive, the evidence for drop-ins, overall, seems to strengthen the case for survival. Granted, we can’t conclusively rule out explanations in terms of motivated psi among the living. But as the challenges facing super-psi explanations mount, their antecedent plausibility decreases. Even if we grant that task complexity may be overrated as an obstacle to psi success, and even if we grant that what really motivates people may not be the concerns lying closest to the surface, drop-in cases make particularly good sense in terms of the ostensible communicator’s expressed motives for communicating. As a result, survivalist interpretations of those cases seem more parsimonious than their super-psi alternatives. As we observed earlier, anti-suryivalists need to explain why a séance participant used ESP to gather information about a person known to nobody present. They also need to explain why the communicator’s needs or interests are so much more clear-cut than those we could reasonably attribute to medium or sitter, even after reasonable probing. And of course, whereas communicators supply information they would be likely to know, living persons would have to derive that information from different and often (normally) obscure sources.
Braude, Stephen E.. Immortal Remains (pp. 51-52). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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Braude provides an introduction to Trance Mediumship which he defines as the medium's communicative bodily organs, if not their mind/brain/body entirely, being controlled what at least appears to be a discarnate entity. It's what we might usually refer to as possession.
He notes that beyond the factual knowledge provided by drop-ins, trance mediums give us the ability to also judge the degree to which the personality (mannerisms, dispositions, sometimes even vocal timbre, etc) of the seeming spirit matches the person who they claim to be in life.
An issue he notes is that there are times when seemingly weak cases have nuggets of really good evidence. Additionally some of the seemingly discarnate personalities are also able to provide anomalous information of living persons.
As Braude notes, there could be a mixture of causes going on here, from varieties of living agent Psi to the dead making use of their own Psi abilities. Regarding the question of subconscious Super-Psi, Braude quotes William James as to the implausibility of this issue:
Quote:The notion that so many men and women, in all other respects honest enough, should have this preposterous monkeying [subliminal] self annexed to their personality seems to me so weird that the spirit-theory immediately takes on a more probable appearance. The spirits, if spirits there be, must indeed work under incredible complications and falsifications, but at least if they are present, some honesty is left in a whole department of the universe which otherwise is run by pure deception. The more I realize the quantitative massiveness of the phenomenon and its complexity, the more incredible it seems to me that in a world all of whose vaster features we are in the habit of considering to be sincere at least, however brutal, this feature should be wholly constituted of insincerity.
That's it for the introduction, next will come the cases.