My Heart Will Go On
FEBRUARY 8, 2008 TAGS:
By Natalie Pompilio
It seemed like a good way to prove that you go on after your last breath.
In 1946, Society of Psychical Research president Robert Thouless published two encrypted messages in SPR’s journal. Thouless was the only person to know the keys to the encryptions – two words in one case, and a short literary passage in the other – and his lips were sealed on the subject, while he was alive. Once he’d crossed into that Great Beyond, however, he wanted friends and colleagues to reach out to him, because that’s when he’d share the keys and that would offer evidence that he’d maintained his identity after death.
After Thouless died in 1984, about 100 possible keys were submitted to SPR. All yielded only nonsense. After more than a decade of trying, one SPR member reported he’d spoken with the disincarnate Thouless at least eight times — and Thouless had simply forgotten the keys.
Author Mary Roach tells this story and others in the peripatetic and funny Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Roach did reincarnation research in India, took medium classes in England, and spent time with people who sought proof of the afterlife with their eyes, ears and some very fancy machinery.
The book wasn’t a quest or a life-changing journey; instead, Roach says she was more interested in the people who sought proof, how they sought it, and how it changed their lives.
“I loved that whole notion of using science to prove something typically in the realm of religion and spirituality,” she said in an interview with Obit. “I didn’t expect it would be me, with a B.A. in Psychology, who would be able to solve the mystery of the ages for anybody. I didn’t so much expect to find an answer as to have a good time trying.”
Roach – who starts the book with the dedication, “For my parents, wherever they are or aren’t” – was raised Catholic and grew up with the doctrine of the good going to heaven and the bad to hell. But she is also a science junkie, a fan of Jane Goodall and of Jacques Cousteau. From them, she learned to look for evidence or proof, to study her subjects with a more critical eye.
“People want there to be mystery in their lives, but I’m comforted by science,” Roach says. “Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I’ve got.”
So began Roach’s adventures to test the assertions of scientists like Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who somewhat coldly noted, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
In India, she explored the premise that a kindergartener in one village was the reincarnation of a factory worker killed in another – and remained unconvinced, even though the boy had allegedly begun talking at a young age about people from a previous existence, had looked at a picture of the dead man’s child and called him “my son,” and had tried to kiss and caress the dead man’s wife.
Her experience at medium school was also disappointing. “Soul in a dunce cap,” Roach calls the chapter. “I’ve been very curious to find out how someone teaches a skill as ineffable and seemingly unteachable as spirit communication,” she writes. She finds the actual “take home instructions” rather vague: “Expand your energy. ‘Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.’ … I try, I really do, but I have no idea where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice I’m moving my ears.”
A medium who attempts to reach Roach’s mother comes up with a mix of hits and misses, the author writes, with “many of the hits being things that would fit a sizable percentage of the population (e.g. a cat in a sunny window, family gatherings being important.)”
At one point, though, the medium says she sees hourglasses and asks if Roach’s brother has one. In fact, he collects them. Roach was impressed, but also puzzled.
“Maybe that was my mother coming through. But what’s the meaning of it? Why would one of my brother’s hourglasses be the image she chose to present to me? Was she simply trying to prove she was there? Then why not deliver my birth date or the name of our street or any of the thousand things that would more clearly suggest to me that it was her?”
One experience that Roach found unnerving involved a visit to the Consciousness Research Lab in Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, where she allowed researchers to secure electrical leads to her head to test whether electromagnetic fields could generate a feeling of being haunted. Sitting in a soundproof room, she was sure she heard the repeated whoop-whoop of a police siren signaling for a car to move over. She was surprised when the researchers said there had been no such noise.
“I very distinctly heard that sound. But why would a police siren be coming from the afterworld? It was just eerie. It felt really spooky,” she says.
Maybe the Afterlife Police were telling Roach to pull over, slow down, not draw any firm conclusions. In the end, the afterlife remains elusive.
Still, the self-avowed skeptic, who jokes that a statue of “the Big Shrug” should be erected outside her office, says she is still unwilling to call herself an unbeliever.
“I feel even more strongly now that we don’t have all the answers and it’s arrogant, even with this glaring lack of evidence, to say we do,” she says.
Indeed, Roach has met dozens of people who’ve recounted stories of encounters with the spirit world or near-death episodes. Some told eerie stories for which there seemed to be no logical explanation. Others were so impassioned about their experiences, so convinced that they now knew what would happen when they died, that Roach found them compelling.
“The accumulation of all these stories gave me pause,” she says. “It’s not that it’s changed my belief system, but it’s made me leave my mind open more than the research that’s been done.”
Could those stories be true? Is there an afterlife?
“I don’t know if anybody wants the answer,” Roach says. “Somebody asked, ‘If you could know, would you want to know right now?’ And I said, ‘Only if the answer is yes.’”
Natalie Pompilio writes regularly for Obit. Her last piece was on death in Second Life.
It seemed like a good way to prove that you go on after your last breath. In 1946, Society of Psychical Research president Robert Thouless published two encrypted messages in SPR’s journal. Thouless was the only person to know the keys to the encryptions – two words in one case, and a short literary passage in the other – and his lips were sealed on the subject, while he was alive. Once he’d crossed into that Great Beyond, however, he wanted friends and colleagues to reach out to him, because that’s when he’d share the keys and that would offer evidence that he’d maintained his identity after death.
After Thouless died in 1984, about 100 possible keys were submitted to SPR. All yielded only nonsense. After more than a decade of trying, one SPR member reported he’d spoken with the disincarnate Thouless at least eight times — and Thouless had simply forgotten the keys.
Author Mary Roach tells this story and others in the peripatetic and funny Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Roach did reincarnation research in India, took medium classes in England, and spent time with people who sought proof of the afterlife with their eyes, ears and some very fancy machinery.
The book wasn’t a quest or a life-changing journey; instead, Roach says she was more interested in the people who sought proof, how they sought it, and how it changed their lives.
“I loved that whole notion of using science to prove something typically in the realm of religion and spirituality,” she said in an interview with Obit. “I didn’t expect it would be me, with a B.A. in Psychology, who would be able to solve the mystery of the ages for anybody. I didn’t so much expect to find an answer as to have a good time trying.”
Roach – who starts the book with the dedication, “For my parents, wherever they are or aren’t” – was raised Catholic and grew up with the doctrine of the good going to heaven and the bad to hell. But she is also a science junkie, a fan of Jane Goodall and of Jacques Cousteau. From them, she learned to look for evidence or proof, to study her subjects with a more critical eye.“People want there to be mystery in their lives, but I’m comforted by science,” Roach says. “Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I’ve got.”
So began Roach’s adventures to test the assertions of scientists like Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who somewhat coldly noted, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
In India, she explored the premise that a kindergartener in one village was the reincarnation of a factory worker killed in another – and remained unconvinced, even though the boy had allegedly begun talking at a young age about people from a previous existence, had looked at a picture of the dead man’s child and called him “my son,” and had tried to kiss and caress the dead man’s wife.
Her experience at medium school was also disappointing. “Soul in a dunce cap,” Roach calls the chapter. “I’ve been very curious to find out how someone teaches a skill as ineffable and seemingly unteachable as spirit communication,” she writes. She finds the actual “take home instructions” rather vague: “Expand your energy. ‘Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.’ … I try, I really do, but I have no idea where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice I’m moving my ears.”
A medium who attempts to reach Roach’s mother comes up with a mix of hits and misses, the author writes, with “many of the hits being things that would fit a sizable percentage of the population (e.g. a cat in a sunny window, family gatherings being important.)”
At one point, though, the medium says she sees hourglasses and asks if Roach’s brother has one. In fact, he collects them. Roach was impressed, but also puzzled.“Maybe that was my mother coming through. But what’s the meaning of it? Why would one of my brother’s hourglasses be the image she chose to present to me? Was she simply trying to prove she was there? Then why not deliver my birth date or the name of our street or any of the thousand things that would more clearly suggest to me that it was her?”
One experience that Roach found unnerving involved a visit to the Consciousness Research Lab in Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, where she allowed researchers to secure electrical leads to her head to test whether electromagnetic fields could generate a feeling of being haunted. Sitting in a soundproof room, she was sure she heard the repeated whoop-whoop of a police siren signaling for a car to move over. She was surprised when the researchers said there had been no such noise.
“I very distinctly heard that sound. But why would a police siren be coming from the afterworld? It was just eerie. It felt really spooky,” she says.
Maybe the Afterlife Police were telling Roach to pull over, slow down, not draw any firm conclusions. In the end, the afterlife remains elusive.
Still, the self-avowed skeptic, who jokes that a statue of “the Big Shrug” should be erected outside her office, says she is still unwilling to call herself an unbeliever.
“I feel even more strongly now that we don’t have all the answers and it’s arrogant, even with this glaring lack of evidence, to say we do,” she says.
Indeed, Roach has met dozens of people who’ve recounted stories of encounters with the spirit world or near-death episodes. Some told eerie stories for which there seemed to be no logical explanation. Others were so impassioned about their experiences, so convinced that they now knew what would happen when they died, that Roach found them compelling.“The accumulation of all these stories gave me pause,” she says. “It’s not that it’s changed my belief system, but it’s made me leave my mind open more than the research that’s been done.”
Could those stories be true? Is there an afterlife?
“I don’t know if anybody wants the answer,” Roach says. “Somebody asked, ‘If you could know, would you want to know right now?’ And I said, ‘Only if the answer is yes.’”
Natalie Pompilio writes regularly for Obit. Her last piece was on death in Second Life.
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Walt wrote on February 10, 2008 8:12am
'If the answer was yes, I'd like to know right now.' [Report Comment]
