3. SUPPOSEDLY LIVING AGENTS
VERSUS APPARENTLY DEAD ACTORS:
AN INTERVIEW WITH LOYD AUERBACH
Vortex: Hi, Psience Quest members, this is Vortex – one of the volunteer interviewers from our community. Today, I want to welcome a new interviewee in our gathering – Loyd Auerbach, a man of many skills and wide knowledge, who does have an evidentially supported right to call himself a “generalist”. He is a parapsychologist, as well having a background in anthropology, so he can provide us with something anomalous to think about. He is a mentalist/psychic entertainer (former stage magician), so he is also able to present us something amazing to surprise at. And he is also a chocolatier, so he can provide us with something luscious to feast upon. The latter talent seems to be a bit of a rarity in intellectual circles – educated people are useful when you crave a food for your mind and heart, but you’d rather prefer a less intellectually sophisticated yet labouring cook to make a food for your mouth and stomach as well. Loyd can work on both types of nourishment – but now, it is the mental provision that we would ask from him.
Hello Loyd, great to talk to you here!
Loyd Auerbach: Thanks for having me.
Vortex: From the start, this interview was supposed to be concentrated on the “ghost hunting” – this is, the spontaneous case studies and field investigations concerning the three anomalous psychic phenomena: apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists. It could turn into yet another standard interview for the novices in the subject that Loyd had given for many times already, with the reiteration of the common points of amateurish “ghost hunters’” misconceptions, such as overreliance on technology and underestimation of subjective experiences of the witnesses. Yet I decided that there is no sense in repeating common knowledge for the forum of people who are already quite knowledgeable in the topic.
So, the main theme of this interview would be a controversy that was one of the central for parapsychology – and for the psychical research that preceded it – from its very start. It is the debate between two basic interpretations of many psychic phenomena. The first is the post-mortem survival of consciousness (especially personal survival), which postulates the existence of immaterial conscious entities that can affect the physical (part of the) world - or, at least, the living people within it. The second one is the so-called “super-psi” (or, as it is a bit more precisely called today, “somatic psi” or “living agent psi”) that reject this notion in favour of attributing any psychic manifestations to the living people themselves, without invoking any kind of disembodied or discarnate minds.
But, I think, before turning to the main topic, we should start with some basic definitions, since even apparently knowledgeable people sometimes confused than they had to demarcate between different spontaneous psychic phenomena.
So, Loyd, these three phenomena – apparition, haunting, poltergeist. Can you please define them, once again, and explain how they differ between themselves?
Loyd Auerbach: An apparition (what most people call a “ghost”) is our personality (or spirit, soul, consciousness, mind or whatever you want to call it) surviving the death of the body, and capable of interaction with the living (and presumably other apparitions). It is pure consciousness. Apparitions are seen, heard, felt or smelled (thankfully, not tasted!) by people through the process of telepathic communication.
The model of an apparition is that it is consciousness without form. As the apparition has no form, and no sensory organs or normal ability to communicate, he or she essentially connects to the minds of living people. The apparition essentially broadcasts sensory information (what he or she looks, sounds, feels and smells like) to the minds of us living folk. Our brains/minds process the signals and add them to what our normal senses are picking up. Some people do better with visual input, some with auditory or other kinds of information. Some can process combinations.
But because they have no physical form, they are not seen with the eye or heard with the ears, and such. It’s why in a crowded room with lots of living people and a ghost some see the ghost, some hear him, some feel his presence, some smell his cologne and some get different combinations of those perceptions. And of course, lots of people in the room may get nothing at all. This is also why ghosts can’t be photographed – they don’t reflect light.
The term poltergeist can be traced back hundreds of years, but has come to represent something very different than the literal translation of the German word for "noisy ghost." In poltergeist cases, physical effects are the central theme, including movements and levitations, appearances/disappearances of objects, unusual behavior of electrical appliances, unexplained knockings and other sounds to temperature changes, with all combinations possible as well. Rarely are ghostly figures or voices seen or heard (though these are not out of the question, as my first case demonstrates).
The model we work from is called recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK. It is PK that happens without conscious control, and happens over and over. It doesn’t come from an apparition or ghost, but from someone living or working in the environment where the poltergeist outbreak is happening.
Like the poltergeist, the haunting relies on the living. Unlike a poltergeist case, where the phenomena are caused by the agent, a haunting is received by people. Hauntings actually show that we are all psychic receivers (clairvoyant) to some degree.
In haunting cases, people report seeing (or hearing or feeling or even smelling) a presence (or several) typically engaged in some sort of activity. It could be a man's figure walking up and down the hallway, or footsteps heard from the attic, or a man and woman physically fighting until one is dead, or even the sounds of two people making love coming from an adjoining.
The events and figures witnessed in hauntings tend to be repetitive both in what's experienced and when they occur (at approximately the same time). Speaking with the "ghosts" tends to do no good, because they just continue to go about their business, as though you're not even there. In other words, they’re essentially holograms instead of conscious beings capable of interacting.
Hauntings, also called “place memory” by those in my field, seem to be some kind of environmental recording of events and people. The house or building or land somehow records its history, with the more emotion-laden events and experiences coming through "louder" and "stronger." That people mostly report negative events and emotions (around suicide, murder or other violent crimes, or emotional fights) is likely due to a reporting artifact rather than any unbalanced ration of negative to positive events – people experiencing something negative are more likely to report it or ask for help.
You might think of a haunting as a loop of video or audio tape playing itself over and over for you to watch. Trying to interact with it would be akin to trying to interact with a show on your television --- you can turn it off or change the channel, but I wouldn't expect the actors to suddenly stop and talk to you directly.
Vortex: Thanks, Loyd. Now, before turning to the conflicting explanations of these phenomena by parapsychologists, it would be useful to quickly refute the common objections by the skeptics.
The basic objection is effectively a simple rejection, without debate, of any case studies and field investigations as “anecdotal evidence” – an evidence that is supposedly “unscientific” and has no real value.
What can you answer to such extreme skeptics, Loyd? What is the scientific status of field investigations? What reliable knowledge can they provide?
Loyd Auerbach: Are we to throw out the evidence in cultural Anthropology? Case study work in Psychology? Much of other social science?
A good deal of Social Science is based on reported experience and observed behavior.
If an amateur astronomer sees a comet, but does not photograph it – even if it’s witnessed by one other person – are we to throw out that observation as not to be believed, because it IS anecdotal evidence.
Parapsychology is NOT a physical science. It is a social science, relying on human subjective experience. That’s what we’re researching, after all.
Fieldwork in many fields – and that includes field investigations in mine – has one major problem: control of the environment/physical variables. The real world is not a controlled environment, consequently there’s a limit to what level one can be “scientific” (as in experimental science).
However, we can take the experiences of people and the data gathered from field investigations – of which we have over 130 years worth – and glean patterns and create models and hypotheses, some of which can be and are brought into a controlled environment. Findings of controlled laboratory studies can be applied then to people’s experiences/observations in the field.
Vortex: There are also skeptics who are slightly more moderate and do not dismiss the spontaneous cases out of hand. Instead of it, they try to attack the witnesses and their experiences, using one of three standard skeptical responses. The first one is “hallucination”, the second is “misperception”, the third is “fraud”.
Loyd, can you explain us how one can identify the cases that cannot be rebutted by either of the three common dismissals above – and how these factors may sometimes indeed contribute to people’s faulty judgments, including in the cases of apparent psychic phenomena?
Loyd Auerbach: Apparently hallucinations are common to a large majority of human beings, even so-called “mass hallucinations” (the “explanation” applied when multiple witnesses see the same apparition at the same time). I would love to see the data supporting that. If it exists. Which is does not, by the way.
Misperception IS indeed an issue. My background in magic and mentalism – especially from performing to actual audiences (book learning on the subjects is not enough) – plus what parapsychologists have learned since the beginnings of psychical research, have pointed to a great deal of misperception or mislabeling of observations and experiences. That’s why a parapsychologist/psychical researcher, when investigating a reported apparition, haunting, or poltergeist case, must look not only at the over case but at every individual piece of the reported experiences and the actual environment in which they happened. Even in the cases I would consider “best evidence,” I’ve often found some of the events included in the reports to have other explanations (mostly due to misperception, or natural or man-made circumstances that are outside the experience and educational base of the witnesses).
This, by the way, is one major difference between the “ghost hunters” and others in the so-called “paranormal community” and parapsychological field investigators. We question everything, and we look for alternative explanations (usually there’s more than one given there are often multiple non-paranormal, but mislabeled, events/experiences).
Vortex: OK, so much for the skeptics – let’s leave them aside from now on, and move to our main topic: survival versus super-psi debate.
Loyd, can you provide us with some kind of short survey of this more-than-a-century-old inner conflict in the psychic researchers’ and parapsychologists’ communities?
Loyd Auerbach: Assuming you’re talking about the Survival vs. Super-Psi debate, and by short survey you mean a quick summary, the debate in parapsychology has to do with the question of the source of information from apparently discarnate entities. On the one side is the concept that some part of human personality/consciousness survives the death of the brain/body and is still capable of interacting with the living and the physical world.
On the other side, it is the psi of the living that mimics the apparent survival of consciousness in the mode of delivery of the information, whether through mediums, personal interactions with apparitions, or reincarnation cases (especially those of children who remember previous “lives”). The latter has been called “super-ESP” – since it’s mostly information-related – though we tend to use “super-psi” as the apparent survival situations/experiences do occasionally involve physical effects/psychokinesis. The “super” prefix was added to differentiate from the typical ESP experiences and abilities (even those of psychics) mainly having to do with the depth of information that can come through in mediumship, apparitional encounters, and reincarnation cases.
Basically this is a debate between those who accept that consciousness (in part or more) can exist independently from the brain and those who consider that all survival-experiences can be accounted for by the psi of the living.
Some available articles on Survival & Super-Psi are:
Survival or Super-Psi by Braude http://www.sgha.net/library/jse_06_2_braude.pdf Survival vs Psi by Beischel & Rock http://www.windbridge.org/papers/JP73BeischelRock2009.pdf
Survival Versus Super-Psi by Hornell Hart http://www.survivalafterdeath.info/articles/hart/superpsi.htm
Super-psi and Survival by Sudduth http://michaelsudduth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/jse_23_2_sudduth.pdf
Psi vs. Survival study by Rock, Beischel & Cott http://windbridge.org/papers/TPR13RockBeischelCott2009.pdf
Vortex: And you, Loyd – where do you stand in this conflict, on whose side? What is your position on survival of consciousness, especially personal one?
Loyd Auerbach: I fall on the Survival of Consciousness side.
Vortex: So, now we can turn to the more specific points of the controversy.
Probably the most classic form of “living agent psi” models is telepathy-centered one. The proponents of it like to point to the well-known phenomena of so-called “crisis apparitions” – and apparition-type manifestations of living, not dead, people, who are usually in a kind of severe distress or lethal danger in the moment of manifestation.
So, it seems that at least some apparitions are certainly not ones of discarnate spirits, but of people who are alive – even if definitely far from being well. So, what about the apparitions of people who are already dead at the moment of manifestation? Can it be a telepathic signal from someone who is still alive, such as a grieving close relative or a mourning good friend?
Loyd Auerbach: It’s certainly possible, but more likely the percipient becomes aware of the death (through real-time psi/clairvoyance) because of the connection to the deceased, and creates the image/perception of the deceased to ease the “news.”
As for apparitions of the living, there are other cases besides crisis apparitions (where people seem to “project” themselves to the awareness of others due to being under extreme trauma or duress). There are cases in which individuals having an out of body experience are perceived (usually seen and heard) by those the OBE traveler is “visiting.” In some of these cases, the individual having the OBE reports visiting the person (or persons) perceiving them as an apparition (sometimes not even knowing it’s an apparition until the individual vanishes), the report coming before the confirmation from the percipient.
This is not to say that this can’t be some kind of telepathic projection rather than something actually leaving the body. However, several talented psychics studied for OBEs talked about the something as being part of their consciousness only, and that it’s a very different experience than telepathically connecting with others.
Vortex: Let’s turn to hauntings, then. What is this “place memory”? Is it some kind of immaterial imprint, a nonphysical trace left on objects, like a marks of water on wallpapers? If it is so, may it be described as a connecting nod to some form of “psychic reservoir”?
And, if some kind of “psychic reservoir” is real, can all apparitions be reduced to some kind of transient, situational hauntings, to impersonal “recordings” that only seem to act in a personified manner, representing the opening of the “reservoir” for an observer?
Loyd Auerbach: As I’ve mentioned above, somehow the environment (and specific objects) retain information which people can access. The “how” and “what” of the “recording medium” are still open to much speculation, though I do believe it’s all a physical thing (in that magnetic fields, for example, are physical things). How we pick up and process the information might be purely biologically based or may be psi related entirely (or a little of both).
There is a lot of belief and folklore about a “psychic reservoir” which many have called the Akashic Records. Whether this is or is not the case is difficult to even tease out of typical haunting or psychometry experiences.
As to apparitions being reduced to “recordings,” the difficulty here is that a recording does not interact or behave in reaction to what we, the observers, say or do. While simple one-sided conversation bits can convince observers that someone’s actually present, as in some fun voicemail responses (with appropriate pauses) one can set up to make a caller thing you have actually answered the phone, beyond the typical salutations we all engage in the recordings fail.
Nor do recordings learn, unlike in some longer term apparition cases where encounters from one year to another can include conversation from the apparition that refers to visitors who previously conversed with that apparition.
The late William Roll did come up with a super-psi model in which such things can be accounted for, as long as we include the unconscious of the living witnesses.
Simply put, the place memory provides the pseudo-apparition to the perceptions of the witnesses. The unconscious of the witness processes the information and essentially creates both the perception of the apparition and the illusion of interaction. If more than one witness is present, their minds may act in telepathic concert. Any conversation (from the living’s perspective) is added to the place memory so that future witnesses pick up not only the original imprint of the person represented by the apparition(who was alive at the time of the “recording) but also any additional interactions by other living witnesses.
It’s almost like making the environment, coupled with the brain/mind of witnesses, work something like the USS Enterprise’s holodeck (from Star Trek: The Next Generation).
Vortex: Let’s now turn to the most novel challenge to the pro-survival position – the “precognition-only” model, represented by people like Edwin May and Eric Wargo.
To be short, his position may be described as a “radical embodiment” model, where all apparently extra-sensory or telepathic signals is a precognitive messages from the recipient himself / herself in the future. They are empowered enough to become noticeable to the recipient-in-the-present by the rewarding experience in the future, such as the disclosure of emotionally significant information pointing to the supposedly afterlife-connected source of apparition- and haunting-type experiences.
In my own view, Eric’s model is not sufficient to explain all evidence for telepathy: there is a lot of experiments demonstrating precisely synchronous psychosomatic correlations between spatially separated subjects – simultaneously manifested psychosomatic changes that are too strictly exact in time, too closely similar in nature and too successfully repeatable when retried to be explained precognitively. Yet, it does provide a genuine additional challenge to a pro-survival assessment of survival-suggestive data.
Personally, I think that Eric’s precognitive model might be, to some extent, used for hauntings. I always felt uneasy about the notion of “place memory”. It seems to me to be a form of reification – a faulty description of immaterial phenomenon as a material thing, an untenable substantialisation of the mind. The notion of the “place memory”, if taken literally enough, either turns the psyche into a kind of invisible grease that can leave equally invisible stains on physical objects it comes into contact with, or personifies inanimate buildings and sites like houses or battlefields, providing them with memories of their own.
I suppose, Loyd, that you do not subscribe to the literalistic notions described above. I think we both agree that psyche is not a sticky substance (it is hardly a “substance” at all) and houses, even haunted ones, have no memories (only their inhabitants and visitors have). You have learned Eric’s ideas about the haunting phenomena; what are your own ones? How, in your view, haunting may work? I understand that for now any answer would be speculative, yet I want to know what kind of provisional interpretation you prefer.
Loyd Auerbach: First, I see no issue with a future discovery that events are encoded somehow into the environment. After all, we manipulated magnetic fields to record on media, and even encode using laser/optics. Physics has only relatively shown that information can be transferred via quantum entanglement (albeit very little info).
The question as to how humans can decode such information is next. Biological, perhaps – after all, we have magnetite in our brain tissue, as shown by CalTech in the early 1990s, and we may indeed have a true magnetic sense. Otherwise, there’s the psychic perception of information, which does not rely on telepathy.
Precognition of the feedback one gets can certainly account for a number of survival-related instances, but hardly all. Mediums often provide information unknown to the sitter which the sitter may later verify without ever letting the medium know. In psi research, parapsychologists do not always provide specific feedback to participants – even if they do very well. In the Star Gate program, the CIA and other agencies tasked the remote viewers with locations and situations for which they did not get feedback, other than the positive feedback of those agencies coming back for more on new tasks.
That’s not to say precognition is only limited to the feedback we get in the future. Plenty of predictions exist for which the events did not occur until the person having the precognitive insight was deceased. Of course, if one believes in Survival we can circle back to the telepathy-with-one’s-future-self (albeit a discarnate version of the person).
Perhaps the most difficult to bring in line with any model of precognition are the cases of children remembering previous lives, specifically those with intricate details and the subset of cases in which the current child has a birthmark (often large) directly relevant to the mode of death of the previous person.
Vortex: Loyd, now I want to ask you how, in your view, the results of “ghost hunting” type of the survival-suggestive research correlates with the other types of the same research – notably, the studies of near-death experiences and of apparent reincarnation cases? Can you see any patterns and regularities that can, in time, help us to form a coherent general picture of survival-related phenomena?
Loyd Auerbach: First, in field investigations we look at poltergeist and haunting cases, neither of which relate to actual evidence of Survival.
The only real relationship I see between apparition and NDE or reincarnation cases is that they all work on a continuum of evidence that consciousness, or some form of it, survives the death of the brain/body. Apparitional evidence relates more closely to mediumistic communication, especially in cases where mediums are brought in to communicate with the ostensible apparition.
Vortex: I want to add that the conundrums we face while trying to comprehend the disembodied existence is obviously tied to the fact that our language, our imagery and our symbolism are the ones of the embodied beings. When we try to predict or describe what it’s like to leave one’s (dead) body, we crush into the wall of the semiotics constructed during the bodily existence, and often have to speak metaphorically. So, I think it is a genuine difficulty for parapsychology to provide a technical description of the phenomena that lies beyond the standard sphere of technical discourse; its regular terminological reforms and conflicts clearly demonstrate this difficulty.
The same importance of embodiment can be observed in a sphere of sociality. Our sociality seems to have its basic roots in sensuality; the pleasant tactile contacts between infants and caretakers is the initial form of interpersonal interactions that open the doors to all the others, including the most distant and complex intercommunal relations on societal scale. Of course, the existence of telepathy may add yet another dimension to our social relations (and, I think, it does add such dimension), yet the sensual aspects of the initial socialisation are still crucially important.
Yet, in the same time, we have enough veridical evidence – and enough rational argumentation – to state that consciousness, as such, is something more than body; it transcends it, precedes it and outlives it. Some evidence and argumentation also strongly suggest that our core selfhood, our fundamental “I am”, is more than just an illusion, and may also persist beyond the short term of the bodily existence.
But what about the personhood – this is, the complex mental structure with which we associate ourselves during our embodied lives (except for quickly passing glimpses of apparently transpersonal spiritual experiences)? It is seemingly strongly connected with the physical, social and cultural environments where we found ourselves after our bodily birth. Can it survive the powerful separation from these environments that the biological death is?
So, Loyd – what, do you think, can we say about the potential afterlife, especially using a precise language of science? Do our personalities still remain after bodily death? Do our social relations, our symbolised thoughts persist after our physical body is dead and the context in which they were once formed is gone? What is your opinion?
Loyd Auerbach: We can say several things:
1) In cases of apparitions of the deceased, the communications/interactions with them indicate that at least for those (who claim) staying “here”
(not moving on to wherever/whatever “place” most people apparently go after death), the personality is relatively unchanged. It would appear these apparitions (often called “earth bound” or simply “ghosts” by mediums) can still perceive the world around them via psi. After all, psychic information comes to the living in the form of sensory information (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). They may be experiencing the world differently due to no longer having those primary somatic senses, but the way they process perceptions is still the same.
(not moving on to wherever/whatever “place” most people apparently go after death), the personality is relatively unchanged. It would appear these apparitions (often called “earth bound” or simply “ghosts” by mediums) can still perceive the world around them via psi. After all, psychic information comes to the living in the form of sensory information (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). They may be experiencing the world differently due to no longer having those primary somatic senses, but the way they process perceptions is still the same.
2) In the case of those people who have moved to “the other side” (mediums use the term “spirits” for these), mediums tell us they are essentially projecting back from whatever that existence is. Questions about that existence are limited by both our language and the ability of the medium to interpret the information they receive.
3) It’s almost certain “the other side” is nothing like the relatively consistent description we get from mediums all over. After all, you’ll be without a body in a realm that most likely doesn’t resemble what we know. Then again, who knows, after death as pure consciousness we may be able to truly “create our own reality.”
Personally, I believe the afterlife is more different than we can possibly imagine.
Vortex: Thanks for your answers, Loyd! So, it is all I wanted to ask you today. It was great to have this dialogue.
Loyd Auerbach: Thanks for pushing the deeper questions.
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