"You Cannot Die: The Incredible Findings of a Century of Research on Death"
Edited by Peter Shepherd
Personal development has, as one of its aims, to transcend the human condition. If consciousness is limited to one's current lifetime, and if one's only route to immortality is to reproduce one's genes and to try to make one's mark on the world for the benefit of future generations, then still these are worthwhile aims.
But if, instead, one's consciousness survives death, then the motivation to transcend the human condition becomes far stronger. One's personal development in this lifetime will affect one's situation in the after-life, and it will determine one's future - whether it be to reincarnate in this world (in a worse, similar or better condition than one is now) or to fulfill one's potential by moving on to higher purposes and responsibilities.
Frederick Myers recognized this as a critical question for all intelligent people and worked relentlessly to provide us with a solid proof of life after death.
1. Frederic Myers
Frederick Myers was a professor of classics at Cambridge University in England. He was born in 1843 and he died in 1901. One overriding interest characterized this man: a passionate curiosity about the meaning of human life. He devoted most of his adult years to trying to satisfy this curiosity, but he did it in a rather unusual way. He did not pore over theological writings and philosophical speculation. He felt that if human life did have a purpose, then it could be discovered in only one way: through the study of human experiences. This conviction led him, in 1882, to found the first Society for Psychical Research with some of his Cambridge colleagues.In particular, Myers and his associates wanted to know if human beings survived bodily death. If they did, then life in a body must have a discoverable purpose. Myers was a man of enormous energy and great intellectual ability. After twenty years of intensive investigation, he concluded that he had answered this question. He wrote a book about what he had learned that became a classic - probably the most important work ever written in this strange field - called "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death".
Myers had a strong interest in mediumship, and grappled to the end of his life with the problems involved in interpreting its results. The difficulties lay not with the limitations of the mediums' powers, but with their scope. When a medium became entranced, and a voice, remarkably like that of a dead person, issued forth from her mouth, claiming to be that person and showing an encyclopedic knowledge of that person's life, then it seemed to Myers that contact was being made with the dead. Or when a medium, in a half-trance, seemed to be talking to someone who had been in his grave for some time, and was able to answer detailed questions about his life, Myers at first reached the conclusion that the dead still live.
But his research, in the end, didn't turn out to be quite that simple. For he became aware of cases in which those attending a seance had been given such detail about a person they knew who claimed in the communication to be dead. Later, however, they would discover that he was still alive! And in a few cases, as an experiment, someone had gone to a medium and mentally concentrated on an entirely fictitious personality, only to receive 'communications' from that 'personality,' claiming to come from beyond the grave! In other words, when mediums went into trance states, they could at times pick up accurate information about living or fictitious persons telepathically and deliver it as if it came from the dead. In other words, the medium may be unable to distinguish between telepathic communication from the living and telepathic communication from the dead.
So this posed a problem. Mediums did not seem to do such things in a fraudulent spirit; they were sometimes unable to tell whether information came from the living or from the dead, but tended to make the sometimes false assumption it was from the latter. Myers never solved this problem during his life. What he did was even more impressive. He solved it after he was dead!
