About my book:- ‘The Living Dream.’ (The Truth About Mediums.)

I was born in the shadow of the then biggest factory site in the world, Imperial Chemical Industries Billingham in an area where men were sensible, immensely practical and who would have laughed at the idea of a life after death. My job as a Television Engineer also dealt with certainties where you cannot make things work with faith alone, you have to find the exact fault. Just because something sounds like a good idea, or we want it to be true, it doesn’t necessarily make it so but on the other hand, the fantastic, the unlikely and the unbelievable, can sometimes obscure the truth that lies beneath.

Are we like insects that live for a day, then gone, as if we never existed or, are we eternal beings with endless potential to love, to create and to explore? There’s a saying, ‘What you see is what you get’, but when you look at the world in a purely scientific sense that is not strictly true, it is more strange than Alice’s Wonderland and no less weird than anything we might image a heavenly world to be. The evidence suggests that we are part of something much more than a single human life, no matter how magnificent that might be.

It costs us nothing to dream, and it’s exciting to imagine the impossible, after all, this is how some of our most important scientific discoveries have been made. The seeds of this book were planted 35 years ago when I tried to reconcile what I was discovering about the tremendous amount of evidence for a life after death with living in the ‘real’ workaday world of hopeless scepticism. It has been what I can only describe as an amazing adventure full of hope supported by truly fascinating facts, but mixed with tales of fantastical and bizarre possibilities. It paints a picture of life in which we are the adventurers, and no matter how hard the journey, our companions in the unseen never leave us.

In the first half of this book I try to make the reader aware of how much evidence there is for life in other dimensions and what it might be like. I try to understand how apparently real and verifiable events blend with the imaginative and symbolic in what seems to be a kind of living dream. In the second half I use the words of the so-called dead, to answer the big questions including. – Why am I here; why do people suffer; have I been here before; where am I going and is there a God?

Mike Featherstone. BA Fine Art. Hons, May 2011

About the facts.

The scientific establishment assumes that death is the end, that it’s all in the realms of religious belief therefore there cannot be any evidence.  But assume makes an ass of you and me.  For almost 40 years I have looked into the possibility, the feasibility and the evidence for a life after death and I have put all of the evidence together in one book, ‘The Living Dream.’ It is a book to make the sceptics think but it is a book that no sceptic will ever consider reading.  I am therefore going to what they do, I am going to generalise and criticise them for their unscientific attitude and their lack of real research – or is it their unwillingness to say what they really think?

First let me comment on Darwin: In the minds of certain people the evolutionary process rules out any other factor such as intelligent design.  But I for one am not questioning the mechanics of evolution rather I find it hard to believe that what we see on the earth has not been woven into the programming in the first place.  And it is the countless billions-to-one chances that such a huge variety of species could evolve to become so complex in such a perfect environment like the earth.  Many of these living creatures use a technology that science cannot match.  I suggest that the laws were drawn up and the parameters set a long, long time ago and everything in our universe happens because of them.

And so there are two opposing views about the whys and wherefores of our existence and the stale mate would continue but the ‘Life after Death’ argument does not depend on evolution, however it came about.  It depends upon a myriad of personal experiences, researchers, books and testimonies.  But much of the most impressive evidence becomes hearsay once outside the Lab or Séance room.  Whilst there has been absolutely brilliant work done at one end of the scale and the other is filled with the deluded and maybe even a fraud or two – the middle portion contains a whole grey area of mainly sincere individuals who have had very fleeting experiences that they haven’t got the knowledge to explain or in the case of too many mediums they are just not very good at what they do.  Even the best mediums and psychics are subject to the vagaries of their own human mind.

And so my argument is thus.  Most of the sceptics don’t do any research, why should they waste their time anyway!  But we do not need every experiment to succeed, we are only interested in the ones that do.  I have hundreds of books next to me as I write – Most give really impressive accounts of, ‘Out of body experiences’ and ‘Séances’ in which all manner of amazing things happen including materialisations.  Of course anyone can write anything in a book but I defy the reader not to be impressed.  There are mountains of evidence out there of all kinds and some highly intelligent scientists that have had their scepticism challenged including the co discoverer of the evolutionary process, Alfred Russell Wallace..

To live after death means there must be a real place.  During the annual Reith lecture Chief astronomer Martin Reece admitted that there could be another universe just millimetres away from the one that we see.  The anecdotal evidence tells of many of these invisible worlds sitting side by side in exactly the same space like the broadband signals on the Internet.  Some are said to be physical worlds where people live and die others are spiritual worlds. The great leap is of course to suggest that mind can detach itself from the body and become conscious in these other places.  The answer to that proposition is the Out of Body and Near Death and experience.  In the latter a study has shown that those blind from birth are able to see and tounderstandwhat they are seeing whilst out of the body. In many other case histories quite a few who left the body unexpectedly, or at will, saw this world as smoky and insubstantial, like the beams of a projector in a smoky cinema (Remember them!)  Walls might appear to be like glass and yet the place to which they travel was solid and real.  Small details seem to indicate the authenticity of many experiences at a time before the sea of information in which we now live, existed.

In conclusion I would say that scepticism is healthy but so many things point towards a life after death that it needs a more far-fetched theory to explain them away.

Even over the last few years the world has transformed into something our ancestors could never have believed. – I suggest that existence is infinitely more complex and technical than we could ever imagine.

A Brief Moment in Time.

I listened to fast pace of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin very loud in the car; the unexpected twists and turns; loud; soft; fast; then slow; like life itself with constantly changing emotions: – Peaceful; shocking; exhilarating; inspiring. – I thought of the musicians and their years of training all acting together to produce the magnificent sound that the composer wanted to create. Then suddenly I imagined that they were not flesh and blood but robots frantically living out their lives in this tiny fraction of time before eternity engulfed them and even the memory of their wonderful work faded into nothingness.  For that is how many people think of the human race.

The Case Against Dawkins – In Brief.

Even if the step by step evolution of the human body can be demonstrated it does not explain how the design came about so perfectly. The overwhelming evidence that points towards the survival of death, a life beyond the physical senses seems to have been ignored.   This suggests existence that can be better explained by physics; that matter is like broadband with countless numbers of places seen and unseen, including the physical universe, existing in the same space but on different frequencies. These would be real places where mind can live and even explore before death. This is not just a fanciful idea but is supported by many scientists who have applied the scientific method to all kinds of strange and common phenomena. Mainstream science arrogantly dismisses these findings without having any knowledge or experience to support its beliefs.

Evolution.

When Darwin published ‘The Origin of the Species’ it seemed to many people that God was dead but in reality the theory of evolution merely proved that the story of Adam and Eve was never meant to be taken literally. What it doesn’t explain is that the chances of a random process producing such an amazingly well-designed, well-balanced and beautiful world is statistically so unlikely that it still leaves us with a mystery. According to Professors Hoyle and Wickramsinghe:-

“Once we see that the probability of life, originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate .”

(Hoyle / Wickramsinghe ‘Evolution from Space.’ Dent.)

In considering other possibilities however, there are so many theories about almost every subject, incredible coincidences woven together with a plethora of misinformation; it’s not surprising that people are sceptical. Believing that the moon is made of green cheese doesn’t make it so nor does a declaration of faith in the teachings of one’s beloved religion. When I try to repair a complicated piece of equipment like a television receiver, it simply will not work until the exact fault is found, with belief you can make the facts fit your own theory. I always believed faith was for fools but after thirty seven years of research I now have far more respect for those who have that strong inner conviction, except when it leads them into grasping at all sorts of stupid ideas like killing and maiming people in order to get a good place in Heaven.

The belief of the scientists.

Is there more to life than the physical universe and is it feasible that we can survive death? At this point most people will start to think in religious terms but religion has thrown a smoke screen around the truth which seems to be responsible for a mind set in science that is just as fixed in belief as the people they criticise. It is a belief that survival just isn’t possible, anyone that says otherwise is wrong and all research on the matter is misleading: But there are those who have the knowledge to take the opposite view. Professor Archie Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy atGlasgowUniversityand former President of the Society for Psychical Research, is quoted as saying that,

‘The scientific proof is so clear that only the ignorant, the intellectually arrogant, or those hide-bound in prejudice could doubt it.’

(Cris Johnson.SPR. ‘Psychic News.’July 20^th1996.)

What we have to remember is that no matter how brilliant scientists are they are discovering what is already there and they can’t even make a worm or a blade of grass. In other words there is an intelligence that is infinitely greater than theirs and yet some people are happy to credit that intelligence to mere chance. In years gone by men talked of the ‘creation’ as though they could see the hand of God in the world: the artist, the designer, the planner, the creator. To the modern mind very much concerned with the nuts and bolts of the thing, that may seem childish and ignorant, how much more reasonable to believe that the universe, our world, our beautiful landscapes, created themselves by trial and error. But why should matter create anything that is so organized? If you throw a few colours on to a palette and mix them up the chances are you will end up with a muddy brown; to create a picture of beauty requires skill and experience.

The strangeness of Reality.

Everything is in perfect order; everything is in its place but imagine if flowers sprouted eyes and watched you watching them or if Elephants could speak. Humans could have had the head of a crocodile or the neck of a Giraffe. We marvel at the aeroplane whilst a bumblebee buzzes by, hardly noticed, a small, heavier-than-air machine, with the gift of free will. Should we be happy to accept that the world as we see it now came about by pure chance? Could it be that the genes are evidence of a highly sophisticated programme that is shaped by the environment?

Consider the tree, the reverse of our lungs, was it designed as part of our life support system or to add beauty to the earth? – Perhaps it was after all simply a response to its environment. How would we feel if a tree uprooted and walked away, an object that in human terms is dead, grown from dead matter, suddenly becoming alive before our eyes? Of course a tree was never designed to do that but the human being was, why should the dead earth give birth to a living, thinking creature that can become separate and move about where it will and is able to know that the mighty universe exists?

A human being is a complicated machine and whilst it takes a factory full of skilled men to build a comparatively simple motorcar, the body builds itself, changes its size and replaces every cell so that over a period of time nothing of the original is left. It mends its own punctures and reproduces itself, the nerves are wired like a telephone exchange, the immune system operates like a video game and the skeleton is a mechanical marvel. Even the simple act of walking was not duplicated by a machine until 1997, and this was only achieved by using very complicated engineering and electronics. This sausage on legs, this walking bag of bones and chemicals, is controlled by the brain, – a highly advanced computer – a sophisticated cauliflower! The camera impresses us but we take for granted our eyes grown like fruit on a bush; there is even a television picture inside our heads. And all of this was in already in existence when dinosaurs roamed the earth many millions of years before television was even thought of, the sheer sophistication of so-called primitive animals came home to me as I saw the immense speed and skill with which a big cat chased it prey.

There are faces we may hate and faces we undoubtedly love but that face, which so represents our individuality, is composed of functional gadgets just like any motorcar. The eyes are to see with, the nose and mouth to breathe in the gases to keep us alive in this bubble of air that surrounds us. The mouth takes in fuel and like the ears is part of the communications system so that we can share our thoughts with each other. The body is a vehicle in which we drive around and we can love a car pretty much in the way that we can love a face. Its appearance may attract us but the human face becomes inseparable from the personality. The Disney artists are masters at making objects appear life-like, the candlesticks, the tea cups, the milk jug are all endowed with their own personality, just like the human body, a sophisticated puppet, an object brought to life but by what? If the human being is only a mechanical man and nothing more it should be possible to build a computer which is alive. A computer however has in fact no more intelligence than an ordinary flashlight but if it could be programmed with the right responses so that it displayed all of the reasoning power of a human being, how would we know the difference? Perhaps we are after all just clever machines, a race of robots living in a macabre fantasy world sprung up from the dead earth and clinging to every second of life, before we return to a terrible life-less eternity. If that were true, all the dreaming, all the hoping, all the theories and all the faith in the world would not make it otherwise.

Life after Death. – The Evidence.

As if our universe wasn’t remarkable enough we have to remember that the whole thing is constructed out of light and has no more substance than the picture on a TV screen, we the room the street outside, the world, the universe are little more than three-dimensional shadows, we live in a sea of strange forces and energies. Infra red and ultra violet waves, Radio, TV and phone signals drift though unseen, unfelt and unnoticed. Mankind has crossed the oceans and discovered new and exciting lands; he will one day travel to the stars. Could it be that there are worlds beyond the senses, not billions of light years away but in our own back yard fixed silently in space, unseen, unfelt and unnoticed by all but a few individuals that have tuned into these other dimensions sometimes at a moment when their own body had ceased to function and was literally dead to this world, unable to communicate, or think, or see or hear? From their vantage point up near the ceiling they see and hear very unusual occurrences in the operating theatre, or as they hover above  the crash scene and they can see the grieving relatives in another place. Subjects describe going to a vividly real world filled with light, they meet people they know, sometimes they are not aware that, that person has died – In short there is powerful evidence that can only be explained in one way.

When the blind see.

In a study by Ring & Cooper, subjects, blind since birth, were not only able to see in vivid colours, they could both recognise and had the words to describe who and what they saw: This was totally different to their dreams in which they were still blind.

(‘Mindsight.’ Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper. I Universe 2008.)

How can we in one dimension prove the existence of another without relying totally upon the human mind which is so capable of weaving fantastic stories? Contrary to popular belief there has been a tremendous amount of scientific research into the subject and this has been totally discounted by the scientific establishment. It is the elephant in the room; it is the subject that can only be referred to in terms of utter denial.

The Mediums.

And so whilst countless numbers of people have all kinds of experiences which suggest the existence of other dimensions it is to the mediums we must turn for they have spent a lifetime struggling with a view of existence that is at odds with everyone else.

The Society of Psychical Research.

In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was formed, it had a membership list that read more like a copy of ‘Who’s Who’ and included some of the most eminent scientists and scholars in Britain. TheSPRhas the highest possible reputation for care and honesty and they have been known to reject a whole series of apparently genuine séances because of the most far-fetched possibility of fraud at one sitting, in fact people often sarcastically called them, ‘The Society for the Suppression of Evidence.’ Eventually some of the most sceptical, even hostile members were satisfied that life-after-death was the only answer that fitted the facts.

The Cross Correspondences.

There are many ways in which mediums have been used to bridge the dimension gap. Mediums are mostly associated with giving messages and this activity has been the subject of countless studies. For some 30 years messages were given through automatic writing to mediums in different parts of the world ending with the request that they send them to theSPRand signed ‘FWH Myers.’ (A Greek scholar and founder member of theSPR.) These Cross correspondences were complicated Greek texts that had meaning when fitted together.

The After-Life Experiments.

In 2002 Professor Gary Schwartz of TheUniversityofArizona, previously of Harvard and Yale, published ‘The Afterlife Experiments,’ which tested four mediums including television’s John Edwards. Overseen by a committee of friendly sceptics including magicians, messages were given through intermediaries so that no audible clues could be given and were compared with placebo readings. – They were then marked for accuracy. One of the names given ‘Talia’ was extremely rare; the messages were lively, topical and factual giving every impression that the communicators were alive and kicking.

Voices in the dark.

Of course this is no surprise to me after 37 years of listening to mediums but, though messages can be a very powerful indicator that our relatives are still around, seeing and hearing are still thought of as being the ultimate in proof. Leslie Flint couldn’t enjoy a film because of the voices that would annoy other patrons in the cinema. In his séances famous people including ‘Dame Ellen Terry,’ ‘Oscar Wilde’, ‘Rupert Brooke,’ ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ and ‘Cosmo Gordon Lang’, the former Archbishop ofCanterbury, used to speak, their recognisable voices coming from mid air. Leslie, the most tested medium around, was unusual in that he did not have to provide any equipment – Most of these kinds of séances use small aluminium cones with luminous tabs. At one end you can hear faint twittering, the sound of an un-amplified voice, at the other, a relative speaking to someone in the audience like Marie McGlynn, who at a Colin Fry séance on, June 17^th1988, laughed and joked with her husband Nick, a few hours after she had died.

At a Stewart Alexander séance I saw trumpets flying about at tremendous speed, at one moment rapping on the ceiling then in a split second from somewhere else in the room. And if you think such a profound subject is demeaned by such party tricks it is merely a demonstration of power, rather like the prisoner who raps on the pipes to assure his fellow prisoners in the adjacent cells that they are not alone.

Tables in mid air.

When I was an apprentice Television Engineer I used to assembleSeymourfloating television tables – Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would actually see one float in mid-air at our small, weekly physical circle. I could also hear the raps of invisible fingers and actually recognise that they belonged to a lady, a man and a child. In spite of all my years of research the reality of this situation was very striking.

The ‘Dead’ return. – Seeing is believing.

The most unbelievable phenomenon but perhaps the ultimate for those who need to see to believe is full materialisation of the human form. In 1870 Mr William Crookes (Later Sir William Crookes president of the Royal Society.) was pressurised by fellow scientists into investigating the phenomena called Spiritualism because they were sure that he would expose it as a complete fraud. In the presence of the great medium D.D. Home he saw an accordion playing inside a cage and measured an unknown force on a plank of wood, all documented as with any scientific experiment: But his colleagues suddenly didn’t want to know. These experiments lead Crookes to work with a young medium calledFlorenceCook and to come face to face with a materialised spirit, Katie King, the daughter of the famed buccaneer John King. On one occasion to prove that she was not the medium in disguise, Katie agreed to stand in front of the gas burners. Like a wax doll she melted into the floor, an agonising experience for her, only to re-appear seconds later. Many years later Desmond Leslie described an Alec Harris séance in aCardiffsemi where a series of individuals kept appearing from behind a curtain fixed across the corner of the room of the stone cottage. It was only when one of these figures melted into the floor like ice cream then popped up again large as life, did Leslie realise what he was actually seeing.

Our Present Day Reality.

Despite all of the impressive evidence, the picture that unfolds in my book ‘The Living dream’ seems like an unbelievable fantasy but just a few decades ago the wonders of the age in which we now live were unimaginable and would have sounded just as fantastic. How many ideas that were unlikely when they were first thought of, are now accepted fact? – The man who suggested that Africa was once joined to America and that whole continents were on the move was laughed at and it was not until the nineteen sixties that this seemingly crazy idea was taken seriously. The possibility that we could see and hear people on the other side of the earth was in the realms of magic and superstition, now satellite television is part of everyday life. A beam of light can cut metal or send millions of messages whilst computers that can complete endless hours of calculations in seconds and once filled a whole room, can now be held in the palm of the hand. No one could have foreseen that there would ever be a moment when a mother would put her hand upon the chest of a stranger and feel her son’s heart beating or that someone could eat his breakfast with another man’s hand. Men have travelled to the moon and walked in space and have seen far into the distance of the mighty universe. – The list of wonders is endless and there are bound to be things that we have yet to imagine because mankind will keep on inventing and discovering therefore the world of the future is sure to be even more fantastic.

The universe is based on electronic principles and in a few short years we have seen what can be done using electronics – In the future I think we will find that almost anything is possible!

The Big Questions.

The question of survival leads to all sorts of philosophical questions the most quoted being, ‘Why are little children allowed to suffer?’ – ‘Is someone over there looking out for me?’ and ‘What is God and where did God come from? In my books ‘The Living Dream’ and ‘The Spiritual Life,’ (Both not yet published) I use the words of the so called dead to explain the big questions. The work of mediums has always been shown to be trivial, humorous and even fraudulent. – In truth what they do is extremely profound; they open the windows of heaven that we might peep through.

C  ‘The Living Dream’ – Mike Featherstone BA Hons, Fine Art. 2009.