Communications
from the Dead?
JULY 1, 2019 BY DAN PETERSON
***
A few
days ago, I found myself looking up the Wikipedia entry on the Swedish actor
Max von Sydow. (I’ve been aware of him since I first saw him in Ingmar
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal during my late teens.) I
found what I was looking for, but I also found this intriguing and rather
mysterious passage:
[Von]
Sydow is reported to be either an agnostic or
an atheist. In 2012, Sydow told Charlie Rose in an
interview that Ingmar Bergman had told him he would contact Sydow after death
to show him that there was a life after death. When Rose asked Sydow if he had
heard from Bergman, Sydow replied that he had, but chose not to elaborate
further on the exact meaning of this statement. In the same interview, Sydow
described himself as a doubter in his youth, but stated this doubt was gone. He
did not elaborate on what he did not doubt anymore.
(For the
relevant portion of the interview with Charlie Rose, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKpQlx79fmU.)
***
While on
that note, here’s a passage from one of my unfinished manuscripts:
Other
accounts speak of knowledge being conveyed that only the dead person could have
known. One of the Guggenheims’ informants, for instance, relates a story
in which her deceased husband told her the location of some badly needed cash.[1]
The ancient Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (d. 43 B.C.)
recounts an anecdote about a murder that was solved when the victim appeared
during the dream of a friend and supplied the details of the crime.[2]
A very interesting subcategory of such narratives involves a deceased friend or
family member warning of danger or of an unrecognized health threat.[3]
A friend at the university where I teach tells, for example, of her
two-years-dead mother (whom I also knew) coming to her in a dream—the only time
she has ever dreamed of her mother—and telling her “You have cancer.”
Although my friend had recently been tested and found to be fine, new tests
confirmed the diagnosis, and early detection saved her life.[4]
A remarkable instance of much the same thing was related to Osis and
Haraldsson. According to the account given to them, a seven-year-old boy
had been hospitalized in critical condition with a mastoid infection.
Unfortunately, he was rebellious. He refused to take the necessary
medications, and resisted the nurses at every turn. Suddenly, though, he
had an experience, as he believed, with his deceased uncle, who had worked as a
physician on that very hospital floor and to whom he had been close.
The boy
insisted that Uncle Charlie came, sat beside him, and told him to take his
medicine. He also told the boy that he would get well. The boy was
very sure that Uncle Charlie had sat in the chair and told him these
things. After this experience, the patient was cooperative. He was
not excited, and he took the deceased doctor’s “visit” as a matter of
course. The next morning, the boy was much better—a dramatic change had
occurred in his condition.[5]
The
phenomenon of “after-death communications” is surprisingly widespread, even
among unbelievers and skeptics.[6]
According to a survey conducted by the prominent
priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley under the auspices of the National Opinion
Research Center, 42% of American adults claim to have been in contact, in some way
or another, with someone who has died. The figures are even higher in
certain subcategories of the population. Studies suggest that somewhere
between 50% and 74.4% of widows claim to have had some such experience.[7]
A lower but still significant figure has been found in surveys of the general
European population, many of whom claim to have been fully awake during their
encounter, unaffected by drugs, and, sometimes, not alone in their perception
of the presence of a deceased person.[8]
Such results cannot simply be waved aside.
Still,
despite their commonness, and despite the fact that many stories of after-death
communication involve multiple witnesses, they remain anecdotal.[9]
[1] Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello
from Heaven!, 42. Other, similar, stories can be found at pages
243-256; $also the rather different case summarized at Raymond Bayless, Apparitions
and Survival of Death (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1973),
185.
[3] Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello
from Heaven!, 42, 257-270. See, too, Harold B. Lee, Stand Ye
in Holy Places (1974), 139. [See original.]
[6] $See, for example, the anecdote related
at Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello from Heaven!, 329-330; also$
Lee Nelson, Beyond the Veil, vol. 2 (n.pl.: Cedar Fort, 1996), 11,
55-57, 91-92, 111;$ Lee Nelson, Beyond the Veil, vol. 3
(Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 1990), 36, 103-104, 121, 138-142. In some
of these encounters, multiple persons had the experience either simultaneously
or serially, and/or seemingly corroborating details were noted. Still,
the evidence, though derived from varied sources, remains anecdotal and
unconfirmed.
[7] See American Health (January-February
1987) [See original]; Sherry Simon-Buller, Victor A. Christopherson, and
Randall A. Jones, “Correlates of Sensing the Presence of a Deceased
Spouse,” Omega 19/1 (1988-1989): 21-30; Torill Christine
Lindström, “Experiencing the Presence of the Dead: Discrepancies in ‘the
Sensing Experience’ and Their Psychological Concomitants,” Omega 31/1
(1995): 11-21. Scott H. Becker and Roger M. Knudson, “Visions of the
Dead: Imagination and Mourning,” Death Studies 27/8 (2003):
691-716, closely examines a quite untypical case of such perception from an
“archetypal” and “non-dualist” (that is, non-literal) point of view.
[8] Erlendur Haraldson, “Survey of Claimed
Encounters with the Dead,” Omega 19/2 (1988-1989): 103-???.
[9] For stories of shared experiences with
deceased friends or relatives, see Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello
from Heaven!, 285-300. On pages 296-298, the Guggenheims offer
accounts in which animals appear to respond to visits from the dead;$several
such cases appear throughout Bayless, Apparitions and Survival of Death.
[Sally Taylor.] On page 290???, they illustrate the apparently greater
openness of children to “after-death communications.” $Bayless, Apparitions
and Survival of Death, 84, 185, reports two cases in which a deceased
mother appears to return to check on or comfort a child. [Gus.]
No comments:
Post a Comment