Gary E. Schwartz - The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death

$25.00 U.S. $38.00 Can.

An esteemed scientist's personal journey from skepticism to wonder and awe provides astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death?

Are love and life eternal? This exciting account presents provocative evidence that could upset everything that science has ever taught. Daring to risk his worldwide academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, along with his research partner Dr. Linda G. Russek, asked some of the most prominent mediums in Americaincluding John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson to become part of a series of extraordinary experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife.

THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS

This riveting narrative, with its electrifying transcripts, puts the reader on the scene of a breakthrough scientific achievement: contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions. In stringently monitored experiments, leading mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. The messages that came through stunned sitters and researchers alike.

Here, as they unfolded in the laboratory setting, are uncanny revelations about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Dr. Schwartz was forced by the overwhelmingly positive data to abandon his skepticism, reaching some startling conclusions.

Compelling from the first page to the last, THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS is the amazing documentation of groundbreaking experiments you will never forget.

GARY E. SCHWARTZ, Ph.D., is professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona and director of its Human Energy Systems Laboratory. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University, he served as a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University, director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, and co-director of the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic. He has published more than four hundred scientific papers, edited eleven academic books, and is the co-author, with Linda G. Russek, Ph.D., of The Living Energy Universe.

WILLIAM L. SIMON is a screen and television writer and bestselling author.

[www.simonsays.com"]

Jacket design by Mary Ann Smith Cover photograph by Matt Lambert/Getty Images Author photograph by MotoPhoto, Tucson, AZ Copyright 2002 Pocket Books Printed in U.S.A.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright 2002 by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., William L. Simon, and Linda G. Russek, Ph.D.

Foreword copyright Deepak Chopra 2001. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-7434-3658-X

First Pocket Books hardcover printing March 2002 10 9876543

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For Howard and Shirley, Linda, Henry and Elayne, Susy and Sam

For Arynne, Victoria and David Sheldon, Vincent, and Elena

And for everyones loved ones, here and there, and all of us who care about compassion, wisdom, and truth.

In order to disprove the law that all crows are black , it is enough to find one white crow.

William James, M.D., psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)

There is a wonderful story about a guru and his cranky disciple. Both were getting on in years, and they happened to be sitting one afternoon in a cramped, dingy room waiting for someone to bring them food.

Why are you any different from me? the disciple grumbled. Were just two old men sitting here waiting impatiently for our dinner.

Thats true, the guru said.

We see the same room, the disciple went on. We live in the same world. Theres no difference at all.

The guru shook his head. You say we live in the same world, but we dont. Your world is private; no one else can enter it. It is made of personal memories, desires, feelings, and dreams. My world is not private but open to all. It is eternal and unbounded. Nothing exists in it that I claim as my own. Wherever I look I see love, trust, truth, eternity.

The disciple still complained. If your world is so much better than mine, why do you even bother to be here?

Because your world is only a dream, the guru said quietly. And it gives me pleasure when someone wakes up.

Although beautiful in itself, this story, which I have returned to a dozen times since I first came across it twenty years ago, underlines one of the great truths of spirituality. There is an absolute world that our world dimly mirrors. Saint Paul spoke of seeing this world as if through a glass darkly. That is, we can catch vague glimpses of it, but a full, clear view is rare. Only in flashes of insight, those moments called going into the light, do we escape our private world of sensation and memory. The rest of the time we seem to be satisfied with accepting very little that goes beyond the five senses.

Even so, a small band of people has never given in to ordinary reality. The great psychiatrist R. D. Laing referred to them as a motley crew of madmen: poets, geniuses, saints, and seersoutsiders whose perception is somehow skewed. We venerate such rebels of the soul, but we have also kept them at arms length because believing in the material world has become a sort of survival mechanism, identified with being sane.

Only in our lifetime have the keepers of reality come forward to challenge the accepted belief system. The majority were believers to begin with, individuals with a special sensitivity to subtle energies of various kindstelepaths, mediums, clairvoyants, mystics. But a few have been open-minded rationalists. Their strategy has been to apply the very rules of science to topple some of sciences most iron-guarded assumptions.

With his hypothesis of the living soul, Gary Schwartz applies procedures of experimentation that no honest skeptic could argue with. He doesnt start from an assumption that the subtle plane must be real, only from an openness that it might be. His specific interest in this book is to explore and answer questions about the afterlife, and in particular whether we can communicate with the dead.

I consider this visionary book a look-around at one of those high spots, a place where love and memory are bound together, where no one is ever lost to anyone else. A vast domain of knowledge is opened up by even the shortest visit here.

Deepak Chopra, MD

If it is real, it will be revealed.

If it is fake, well find the mistake.

Motto of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory