Family Survival Experiment – Seeking Methodological Criticism

Hello everyone!

I am new here, and I would very much appreciate some critical feedback on a long-term family experiment I am currently designing.

My interest in survival after death is both intellectual and deeply personal. The questions I am ultimately interested in are quite simple:

Do we really survive bodily death as the same individual person? Will we meet our families again, recognise one another, and be able to continue our relationships with the people we love?

I hope that the answer is yes, and I think there is interesting evidence suggesting survival. But I would like, if possible, to move from belief and hope towards personal evidence strong enough that I could reasonably trust it myself.

This is especially important to me because I do not want to wait until after a bereavement to begin looking for reassurance. I have older family members, some of whom are not in the best of health, and the prospect of future loss can already cause anxiety. I would rather prepare something together while we are all alive which might, many years from now, provide meaningful evidence if one of us dies before the others.

Precisely because the question matters so much personally, I want the experiment to have reasonably strong controls. I don't want to convince myself through coincidence, information leakage, cueing, overly generous interpretation or other normal explanations.

The basic idea

There would probably be five members of my family participating, all of us alive when the target material is prepared.
Each person would privately prepare a set of information containing:

1. A shared family memory

A real event known to several members of the family, described with specific identifying details — for example a particular place, unusual object, phrase, event and approximate date/year.

2. A genuinely private memory

Something autobiographical known only to the person writing it, again containing several concrete details that could later be compared with a purported communication.

3. An invented code

Each participant would invent and memorise a completely arbitrary codeword combined with digits, unrelated to birthdays, family history, places or anything else that could reasonably be inferred.

Examples of the form (not actual targets) might be:

GraniteSea1999

CedarWing6912

CobaltStar4578

4. Relationship-specific memories

Each participant would also choose one specific personal memory involving each of the other four participants.

Thus, if five people participate, each person would prepare four relationship memories in addition to the shared memory, private memory and code.
The two people involved would not have to choose the same event. For example, I might choose one particular memory involving my brother, while he independently chooses an entirely different memory involving me.

The purpose is to test not merely whether apparently hidden information can be obtained, but whether the communicator appears to retain autobiographical identity and memories of specific individual relationships.

Sealing and storage

Each participant would place his or her completed material in an individual sealed envelope, marked with identity and date.
All five envelopes would then be placed in a locked metal cash box or similar secure container. The box itself would be externally sealed with tamper-evident material and marked so that it is not to be opened until predefined conditions have been met.
One possibility is to divide custody — for example, one family member keeps the box while another keeps the key.
I am also considering creating a duplicate sealed set stored at another location, simply to protect against fire, theft, water damage or accidental loss over what could potentially be several decades.

Importantly, the box would not automatically be opened when somebody dies.
What would happen after a death?

After an appropriate grieving period, the surviving family members would arrange a predefined number of sittings with independent mediums.

Ideally:
• the mediums would have no contact with one another;
• sittings would occur at different times and preferably with geographically separated mediums;
• the medium would receive as little identifying information as practically possible;
• if possible, the medium would not even be given the deceased person's name;
• the medium would not be told that sealed memories or a code exist;
• the sitter would provide no confirming or corrective feedback during the sitting;
• remote audio-only sittings might be preferable to reduce visual cueing;
• every sitting would be recorded in full and transcribed;
• neutral responses such as “Please continue” would be used rather than confirming statements.

All sittings, including unsuccessful ones, would be preserved and reported so that the overall history of the experiment remains transparent and there is no selective reporting. However, I would not assume that failures by other mediums necessarily cancel out the evidential value of an exceptionally specific result from a different medium. These are partly separate questions: the complete series is relevant when assessing the experiment as a whole, while the evidential strength of an individual sitting should also be evaluated on its own merits.

This is one issue on which I would particularly welcome methodological advice. For example, if nine independent mediums produced nothing of evidential value but a tenth medium, under the same blinded conditions, produced several highly specific pieces of sealed information, I would not want either to hide the nine failures or simply assume that they automatically negate whatever evidential value the tenth sitting might possess.

The box would remain sealed

The sealed material would remain unopened while the sittings were being conducted.
Before any sittings begin, I would like to have fixed:

• the total number of sittings in the experimental series;
• what counts as a hit, partial hit and miss;
• how specific a memory correspondence must be;
• how accurately a codeword and its digits must be reproduced;
• how many independent mediums must produce corresponding information;
• the threshold that must be reached before the envelope may be opened.

Those rules could not be changed after the results begin arriving.

If the predefined threshold were eventually reached, only the envelope belonging to the deceased participant would be opened. The envelopes belonging to the four living participants would remain sealed and unread for possible future use.
The opening would preferably be filmed, and the original target material would then be compared with the complete verbatim transcripts of the sittings — including both hits and misses.

How high should the evidential bar be?

I don't think it should be either too low or unrealistically high.

It should be demanding enough that an apparently successful result cannot easily be explained by chance, information leakage, cueing or overly generous interpretation, while not being so rigid that genuinely remarkable but imperfect evidence is automatically discarded.
I am therefore also considering whether it would be better to define different degrees of evidential strength beforehand rather than treating every outcome simply as either “proof” or “nothing”.

The difficult problem: survival versus other psi

This is one of the areas where I would particularly value the opinions of people here.
Even if a medium accurately reproduced information from the sealed material, I realise that this would not automatically establish that the information came from the deceased person.

At least several competing explanations would need consideration:

• chance/coincidence;
• cold reading or sitter cueing;
• deliberate or accidental information leakage/hot reading;
• telepathy from a living sitter or another living person;
• clairvoyant access to the sealed target itself;
• broader living-agent psi or “super-psi” explanations;
• survival and genuine communication from the deceased.

Consequently, I do not want to reason:

“The information was anomalous, therefore it was necessarily a spirit.”

What interests me is whether the overall pattern could eventually favour the survival hypothesis over reasonable alternatives.

A possible competing-source test

I have also considered an optional control aimed particularly at the sitter-telepathy problem.
A living sitter could deliberately memorise and concentrate upon a false memory and false code, while the deceased person's genuine target remained sealed and unknown to the sitter.

If the medium repeatedly reproduced the false information held strongly in the sitter's mind, that would support sitter telepathy, cueing or another living-source explanation.

If instead the medium produced highly specific information corresponding to the genuinely sealed target that nobody present knew, that would argue against simple sitter telepathy — although I realise it would not eliminate clairvoyance of the target or more expansive super-psi hypotheses.

I would be particularly interested in suggestions for improving this part of the design.

What the experiment is — and is not — intended to test

I am deliberately keeping the central question fairly narrow.

I am not trying to establish an entire theory of the afterlife, its structure, mechanism, “planes”, or metaphysics.

The main question is whether evidence can be obtained suggesting the continued existence of the same recognisable individual, retaining:

• autobiographical memory;
• distinctive personal information;
• memories of relationships with particular surviving family members.

Nor would a negative result prove that survival is false. It would simply mean that this experiment failed to provide convincing evidence under these conditions.

Why do this if survival experiments already exist?

I certainly don't imagine that I have invented the idea of testing survival through sealed information, codes or controlled mediumship. I know that related ideas and experiments have a long history.

Existing research may provide important evidence and, perhaps even more importantly for this project, methodological lessons.

But previous experiments cannot provide quite the same kind of personal evidence as information prepared by my own family while we are alive and potentially communicated back after one of us has died.

So I am not trying to reinvent survival research. I am trying to learn from it and apply the best lessons I can to a long-term personal family test.

What I would particularly like you to criticise

Before my family actually prepares and seals anything, I would very much like people here to try to find the weaknesses in the protocol.

In particular:

• Where could information leakage occur?
• Is the blinding sufficient?
• How should hits, partial hits and misses be defined without subjective interpretation?
• How should the number of sittings and stopping rule be determined?
• How should unsuccessful sittings be taken into account when assessing an exceptionally strong individual sitting, without either ignoring failures or allowing them automatically to “cancel out” strong evidence?
• What would constitute a reasonable threshold for opening the envelope?
• Is the codeword useful, and how should imperfect code matches be scored?
• Would separate inner envelopes for different target types improve the design?
• Is there a better way to distinguish survival from sitter telepathy, clairvoyance or other living-agent psi?
• Are there historical or modern experiments that I should study before finalising this?
• Is there some obvious flaw that I have simply failed to notice?

I am particularly interested in criticism from both survival and psi perspectives. If apparently successful results could still be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance, super-psi, information leakage, cueing, chance, flexible scoring or weaknesses in the experimental design, I would much rather identify those problems now, before my family prepares and seals anything, than discover them twenty or thirty years from now.

Although I am designing this primarily for my own family, I have also wondered whether, after the methodology has been thoroughly criticised and improved, the basic protocol could become a simple model that other interested families could independently adapt.

Families could prepare and seal their own private targets without ever sharing those targets with us or with other participants. People who eventually conducted such tests could exchange experiences about procedures and about mediums willing to work under blinded, no-feedback conditions, while the actual target information remained completely private.

My goal is not to create a perfect philosophical proof of survival. It is to make a private family experiment as methodologically strong and future-proof as reasonably possible — so that if something remarkable does happen many years from now, I can have reasonable confidence that I have not simply fooled myself.

Thank you very much for reading this rather long post. Any criticism, suggestions, relevant research or attempts to “break” the protocol would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

A couple of very high-level rather than detailed comments.

It seems you are proposing a test of mediumship. I would point out that this is not the same thing as testing for survival. Also it seems to me that there are a great many assumptions about the nature of any hypothetical afterlife, how things work there, such as the nature of time, what aspects of the universe would be seen as important and which would be irrelevant.

One example, the use of a code such as CobaltStar4578. This sounds like the sort of thing which could be a computer password (not a very strong one) or possibly a username. These things are very much on our minds in the present day. That is, rooted in a very narrow cultural environment and timescale. Not at all universal, such as something which might be of interest to anyone at any time in history. Perhaps I'm alluding to something like a Jungian archetype, at least in nature.

Well I guess my gut feeling is that you've set yourselves a very difficult task. Certainly a hundred or so years ago people also attempted similar experiments, at least broadly as a concept. I do feel some of the details might just be too much, in that the 'afterlife' might have a different perspective and different interests and goals. Whether the goals of the afterlife overlap a little or not at all with your goals is a question I would ask.

Perhaps also, if mediumship is the area you intend to concentrate on, maybe there is no need to wait, there might already be someone who has passed on who might be available to connect with. Also, there are other ways to approach survival research such as after-death contact (directly, without the intervention of a medium).

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and comment, and apologies for the delayed reply. These are exactly the kinds of high-level objections I hoped people here might raise, because they concern some of the assumptions underlying the whole design.

Your first point particularly interests me:

“It seems you are proposing a test of mediumship. I would point out that this is not the same thing as testing for survival.”

I think I understand the distinction you are making, and in one sense I agree completely. Even if a medium, under well-controlled conditions, produced information corresponding very specifically to material that had remained sealed, that would establish an anomalous acquisition of information before it established the source of that information.

This is actually why I included the section about survival versus other psi explanations. If a medium somehow produced something as specific as the actual code, together with accurate autobiographical and relationship-specific information, I would still want to consider alternatives such as telepathy from a living person, clairvoyant access to the sealed target, broader living-agent psi or “super-psi”, as well as survival and communication from the deceased.

In other words, I certainly don't want to reason:

“The information was anomalous, therefore it must have come from the deceased.”

But I would be very interested in hearing more about why you would therefore describe this as a test of mediumship rather than a test relevant to survival.

What kind of experiment would you regard as a genuine test of survival?

Is there a design which, in your view, can distinguish survival from mediumistic psi or living-agent psi substantially better than the one I have proposed? Or is your point more fundamental — that no mediumistic experiment can establish survival as opposed to demonstrating anomalous information acquisition, because alternative psi explanations can always be constructed?

If the latter is your position, I would be especially interested in what kind of evidence you personally think could discriminate between those hypotheses.

I may also be misunderstanding the distinction you are making, so I would be interested if you could clarify something else. You say that testing mediumship is not the same thing as testing survival, but you also suggest later in your post that I might try mediumistic contact with someone who has already died.

If successful mediumistic communication cannot in itself constitute a test of survival, what additional feature would, in your view, turn such a test into a genuine survival test?

I agree that merely obtaining anomalous information through a medium would not establish survival, because telepathy, clairvoyance or other forms of psi could potentially account for the information. That is precisely one of the problems I am trying to address in the design. But if mediumship cannot, even under tightly controlled conditions and with identity-specific information, provide evidence bearing on survival, what kind of experiment do you think could?

And if you suggest trying contact with someone who has already died, how would you design that in a way that gives comparable evidential safeguards to information deliberately prepared, documented and sealed by a person while still alive?

My thought in designing the experiment was not that a single correct codeword would equal “proof of survival”, but that the overall pattern and character of the information might eventually make one explanation more reasonable than another. This is also why the experiment includes autobiographical memories and memories of specific relationships rather than relying solely on hidden information.

For example, suppose a purported communicator repeatedly supplied highly specific autobiographical information, distinguished correctly between different surviving family members, recalled different experiences shared with each of them, and also produced information corresponding to something deliberately memorised before death and subsequently kept sealed. I would regard that as more suggestive of the continued identity of a particular individual than the bare retrieval of a hidden number or word.

But I realise that even such a result raises the super-psi problem, which is precisely why I would be interested in how you would try to improve the design.

Your comments about the invented code are also interesting. I agree that something like CobaltStar4578 is extremely culture- and time-specific and resembles a modern username or password. That is actually deliberate, although perhaps I did not explain its purpose sufficiently clearly.

The code is not intended to have any universal or archetypal significance. It is intended to be arbitrary, personally memorised, difficult to infer and fixed before death.

The question would therefore not be whether “CobaltStar4578” has any significance in an afterlife. The question would be whether the individual who deliberately memorised it while alive could retain and communicate that very peculiar piece of information after death.

In that respect, its lack of intrinsic meaning is partly the point. A more universal image or archetype might perhaps be easier or more natural to communicate, but I wonder whether it might also introduce much greater interpretive flexibility. Something like a mother, tree, journey, light, shadow, water, rebirth, etc. could arise in many contexts and might permit generous retrospective matching, whereas a bizarre arbitrary code would provide a much more stringent target.

However, you may be pointing towards an important weakness that I had not fully considered: perhaps arbitrary information of this kind would be unusually difficult or irrelevant to communicate through mediumship, even if personal memory survives.

Do you think that is what may be wrong with the code idea?

If so, perhaps one solution is not to remove the code but to retain several different types of target — which is what I was trying to achieve with the present design: an arbitrary code, a private autobiographical memory, a shared family memory, and relationship-specific memories. A failure on the meaningless code would then not necessarily invalidate striking evidence concerning personal memories and relationships.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on whether that combination addresses your objection, or whether you would construct the targets differently.
I also take your broader point that the experiment may inadvertently make assumptions about the nature of any hypothetical post-mortem existence — for example about memory, time, motivation and what a deceased person might consider important.

I don't think the experiment can avoid all assumptions, but I am trying to keep them as limited as possible. The intended proposition is approximately:

If personal identity survives bodily death, if at least some autobiographical and relational memory survives, and if the deceased person is able and willing to communicate through a medium, can information be obtained which provides evidence for the continued existence of that recognisable individual?

A negative result would therefore not mean that survival had been disproved. It would mean only that this particular experiment had failed to obtain convincing evidence under these particular conditions. The deceased person might be unable to communicate, unwilling to communicate, unable to remember or transmit the chosen targets, the mediums might be inadequate, or some assumption underlying the experiment might simply be wrong.

That distinction is very important to me.

I also like your suggestion that there may be something useful to do before any member of the participating group dies. There are already deceased members of the wider family, although of course they could not retrospectively have prepared sealed targets while alive.

I wonder whether sittings concerning an already deceased relative might nevertheless provide a useful pilot test of the procedure — for example, testing whether it is practical to conduct a sitting with minimal identifying information, no feedback, complete recording and transcription, and subsequent scoring of specific statements. I would not regard that as equivalent to the eventual sealed-target experiment, but it might expose practical weaknesses in the procedure long before the main experiment is ever needed.

There is also a reason why I think the prospective nature of the family experiment adds something that an ordinary sitting with someone who has already died cannot fully reproduce. With a deceased relative now, I can evaluate statements against things I already know or can investigate afterwards. But I cannot go back in time and ask that person, while alive, to deliberately choose, memorise, document and seal information specifically for a future test.

That is one of the safeguards I am particularly interested in preserving: the target exists before the death, its contents are fixed in advance, and the later scoring criteria can be established without knowing what any medium will eventually say.

Finally, I was particularly intrigued by your last comment:

“Also, there are other ways to approach survival research such as after-death contact (directly, without the intervention of a medium).”

Could you explain what kinds of after-death contact you have in mind here?

Do you mean spontaneous after-death communications/experiences reported by bereaved people, deliberately attempted direct communication, apparitional experiences, dreams, physical phenomena, instrumental approaches, or something else?

And, most importantly for what I am trying to accomplish, is there a way of incorporating direct after-death contact into a prospective controlled experiment with information fixed while everyone is still alive?

If there is a potentially better way to test the survival question without relying entirely on a medium as an intermediary, I would be extremely interested in considering it.

My aim isn't to defend the present protocol at all costs. If there is a better way to ask the question — or if I am confusing a test of mediumship with a test of survival in some fundamental way — I would much rather discover that now, while everything can still be changed, than many years after the targets have been sealed.

Thank you again. Your comments have given me quite a few things to think about.

Just a brief follow-up, as I would still be very grateful for criticism from anyone else who has thoughts on the design.

The exchange with Typoz has made me realise that there are really two different methodological problems here, and I would especially appreciate suggestions concerning the second one.

The first is comparatively straightforward:

How do we make ordinary information transfer as unlikely as reasonably possible?

That includes fraud, prior research, accidental information leakage, cueing, sitter feedback, retrospective fitting and coincidence. My present ideas include minimal identifying information, no feedback during sittings, complete recordings and transcripts, independent mediums, predetermined scoring rules, and keeping the sealed material physically separate from both the medium and the sitting.

But the second problem seems considerably harder:

If apparently paranormal information were nevertheless obtained, how could we make the case that it came from the deceased individual stronger than competing explanations such as sitter telepathy, clairvoyance of the target, living-agent psi or some broader “super-psi”?

This distinction now seems very important to me. A medium reproducing a sealed code perfectly would be remarkable, but if clairvoyance is admitted as a possibility it might demonstrate paranormal information acquisition without identifying the source of that information.

Conversely, a communication displaying a coherent pattern of personal identity — highly specific autobiographical memories, emotionally significant memories involving different surviving family members, characteristic personal details and perhaps the arbitrary code as an additional component — seems intuitively more suggestive of survival. But I would like to know whether that intuition can actually be strengthened methodologically rather than merely asserted.

So I would particularly welcome concrete design suggestions.

Is there anything we could change before the targets are created and sealed that would make telepathy, clairvoyance or broader psi explanations less satisfactory in the event of a positive result?

For example, would it help to divide information into different classes according to who knows it — material known only to the participant who later dies, relationship memories independently known to particular survivors, and arbitrary information deliberately memorised by the participant? Would separate sealed compartments or independently controlled targets add anything?

Likewise, could the later sittings be structured more strongly — for example through proxy sitters, people conducting the sitting who do not know the target information, independent blind judging, decoy information, competing-source tests, or some other procedure?

I realise there may be a fundamental limit here. If “super-psi” is allowed to retrieve any information from any mind or location regardless of distance or circumstances, perhaps no finite experimental control can logically exclude it. But even if an explanation cannot be eliminated absolutely, can the design make it substantially less plausible relative to survival?

That is probably the question I am most interested in at this stage.

And more generally, if anyone sees anything in the present protocol that they would change before my family actually prepares the material, please do tell me. I would particularly appreciate specific suggestions — even apparently small ones.

Conversely, if parts of the protocol are already about as strong as they can reasonably be made for a private family experiment, that would also be useful to know. I am trying to distinguish between problems that can still be designed away now and limitations that are simply inherent in this kind of survival research.

I have some practical reason not to leave the preparation indefinitely — while at the same time I don't want to seal anything prematurely and discover later that an obvious methodological improvement could have been made beforehand. So this is the point at which criticism is especially useful.

Thanks again to anyone willing to try to break the design. 🙂

Hi @SeekingAnswers , thanks for reading and responding to my previous post.

I have to apologise to begin with, a lengthy post like yours is not so easy to respond to; smaller more manageable chunks are more inviting - that's just a weakness on my part rather than a criticism.

One the first main point on

“It seems you are proposing a test of mediumship. I would point out that this is not the same thing as testing for survival.”

... to expand on my meaning. The first difficulty is that using a medium as a link in the chain rather than aiming for direct contact with the deceased adds a layer of obscuration or filtration. Placing an additional layer like this is a bit like using frosted glass in a window or trying to see through closed curtains, it is deliberately placing an obstacle in the path.

Also, a medium may simply come up with nothing, or something generalised and ambiguous. At best, a medium will bring forth what they will, according to their own abilities as well as whatever conditions on the 'other side' allow or wish, not necessarily what you request.

I see a couple of possibilities, one that you don't retrieve anything meaningful. Another is that some fragments of information may appear, but the question of where it came from might be left unanswered.

Let me turn things in another direction and give some of my own experience or perspective. Firstly, why is any of this important or meaningful? I'm well into the second half of my life now. In my early adulthood, from the age of about 19 to 22, I had so many questions about life, existence, meaning. I didn't care at all about survival beyond death, that was a topic of only perhaps abstract or theoretical importance. What mattered to me at that time was living, at this very moment, here and now. I struggled with trying to carry on my daily existence, the quest for some reason why anything at all mattered. As things reached a head and pressure mounted, I reached some sort of breaking point and then suddenly, unexpectedly I understood I had a past life, a previous life. That fitted things into a much larger perspective. A past life meant I had already died, I was living now and it followed that I would also continue after this life too. Words are not sufficient to explain how that happened. It was so many years ago now that things which were intense and powerful then are more distant now.

As time went on, that period of my life was behind me, and years later I re-evaluated it all. I'd written things down, some of the extrapolations or attempts to fill in the blanks seemed likely mistaken. But the key idea was reinforced, I unexpectedly found more supporting evidence for the past life existence which surprised me but confirmed the main theme. Basically we are indestructible, though we can suffer harm and need to heal. I've often thought of this present life for me as one of healing, among other things.

To return to the original topic, contact with the deceased. They have come to me sometimes in dreams, sometimes during meditation, but always unexpectedly. People when they are alive have their own personality and character, everyone is different and we relate to them in different ways. Sometimes I've had physical touch, direct contact as we may do when alive. In this life we don't always communicate through words, the sense of touch is one way we connect with one another and that may happen after death too. But those are quite rare for me and always surprising, yet more powerful in many ways than any words could convey. Another person connects sometimes by moving objects such as books or ornaments. And noises, banging on furniture, those can be another type of communication.

There was one afternoon when I was rather casually trying a self-regression, basically listening to a recording of a hypnotic guidance tape and seeing what could be uncovered of any past lives. I'd had some previous experiences with this method though it had never been a primary approach, more of a pastime or curiosity than anything else for me. Anyway, on this particular occasion I unexpectedly found myself in conversation with deceased relatives and I spent the afternoon laughing so much that it was a joyful and memorable time.

Did I retrieve any bits of information during these contacts? No. It's like when you meet a friend - you don't spend the whole time interrogating them as to who they are. You just spend time together as friends.

Well, I'll bring this post to a close now. I'm aware that I didn't cover even a fraction of what you asked for. I may take another look some other time.

Hello again. Overall, my position is not that your proposed experiment is wrong or mistaken. It is that it is your experiment. People are different, and that is all to the good. I don't find it so easy to engage in the ideas at face-value simply because the method seems so difficult.

That is, there seems a large gap between how contact with the deceased may typically take place and the approach you suggest. A difficulty I perceive is the degree of emotional involvement and of human need at any point in time. What you or I or anyone else may need right now may not be what we find ourselves in need of at some undetermined date in the future.

One reason for suggesting to bring forward the mediumistic consultation to be soon, in the near future rather than postponing it until some far-off time is a practical one. Experience with what different mediums can bring forth, the type and manner of it would help to shape your experiment. It might even short-cut it by unexpectedly providing answers much sooner than planned.

However things in these areas don't work in a mechanical way like a machine, at least not one we grasp and understand. Let's say that for example you visit a medium in the near future and receive some various ideas but find them of no recognisable significance. It might turn out that some time later - it could be years - something the medium said suddenly makes perfect sense in the light of some new situation or knowledge you acquire.

Maybe I'm impatient. I want results and answers now, not later, simply because at a later time my questions and needs may be different.

Please don't take this as a discouragement. I like the thoroughness of your thought-processes and planning. Some parts I think are particularly good. Any nit-picking I've engaged in isn't really important and not a reason to dismantle the experiment.

One closing comment. I've expressed a view repeatedly on this forum and elsewhere that the here and now, how we live today, is the important aspect, since it is only at the present moment that we are actively involved, we are experiencing, making choices, acting on our decisions, it is the time now where things matter. Maybe I've become blasé about these matters because I found answers through painful experience long ago and now take many things for granted. For example I generally dislike the term 'afterlife' and prefer simply 'life', one reason being that the 'beforelife' also is part of the picture and is sadly neglected, but it is all just simply the same thing, life. I'm either preaching or philosophising here. Sorry about that.

One further thought. This may become untidy or messy simply because words get us in a tangle with associations and connotations. Nevertheless, the importance of prayer and of some concept of God in the fulfilment of our plans. One could express it as the power of thought - that's something else I've mentioned in the past, thoughts are a driving force which propel our path and can have far-reaching consequences. This means the need to choose how and what to think. I've wandered far from the original topic. However it seemed strange for me to omit to mention it somewhere.

With good wishes for your success.