Updates

Recently I've been re-editing "In Another Life," resolving some lingering technical problems and just bringing the whole film further into line with expected broadcast quality. Of course, as I do that, I am re-experiencing the content as well, though I'm not changing any of that. I see, once again, that everything is there for a reason; and I see that the motive behind it is to reveal the truth about reincarnation. I did want to press home a point, or several related points--but my "agendas" are transparent and there is no manipulation of the evidence.

Last night I had some time on my hands, and had occasion to watch two of three programs in the A& E "Mysterious Forces Beyond" series on "Death & Paranormal," bundled on a DVD I'd purchased some years ago. These two were on "Reunions with the Dead" and "Reincarnation." And I saw, with much greater clarity, that they are propaganda, driven by a well-known skeptical organization, which is credited at the end of each program.

In earlier Updates, I would have gone through each program and analyzed them in turn, showing precisely why I say this. But I feel I've done that until I'm blue in the face; and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it, or what good it would do. For example, the "Bridey Murphy" case is cited, and it is dismissed as having been debunked. It wasn't debunked. The debunking was dishonest; it was the "unripe" state of society in the mid-1950's which allowed the dishonest debunkers to get away with it. Society at that time was, in effect, eager to accept any excuse to dismiss it. I could go through the comparisons of what the debunkers claimed versus how their claims were refuted--but it's all been done in the re-issue of "The Search for Bridey Murphy."

Besides, Victor Zammit in Australia is doing a magnificent job of defending sincere investigators of the afterlife from cynics. And I'll just emphasize the distinction one more time, that a skeptic is an unconvinced seeker of truth; whereas a cynic is locked in a death-grip with his own view, whether it is true or not. A skeptic is skeptical precisely because whether or not a thing is true matters so deeply to him, that he will not accept anything as true unless it is proven to be so. A cynic, on the other hand, is so attached to a particular viewpoint that he will gladly depart from the truth to preserve it.

Skepticism--true skepticism--is a path toward truth. You know what that makes it? A religion. Cyncism, then, will readily be seen as a distortion of the religion of skepticism; just as fundamentalism is a distortion of the religion of Christianity. And these two groups are, as it happens, the primary opponents of the concept of reincarnation. Not, as it appears, because it is false--but because it is true.

That throws us back to the need for discernment. And that skill is developed over many incarnations. Which throws us back to reincarnation. The irony emerges, then, that a cynic of reincarnation cannot become a true skeptic except through the wisdom gained over many, many reincarnations, which process he does not yet believe in.

When I watch one of these documentaries, which is presented as factual reporting rather than as propaganda, and then compare it to my own, mostly unfunded efforts, I see what a production budget can do. My host sits in a livingroom chair, and never appears in the program after the opening (because he lost interest in the project and I couldn't afford to pay him).* Their host walks about in a sort of quasi-Egyptian ruin with mists and dramatic lighting, reappearing to introduce each new segment. In the credits of the A&E programs, you see a list of the contributing crew that goes on for quite some time. And at the end, the skeptical organization, which so far as we know may have lent not only so-called "experts," but also funding.

When I say these programs are biased, how can I convey just how biased they are? And to whom? Let's suppose that there has been some awful plague, and the only way to save the population is to put everyone in suspended animation until it dissipates. So everyone is put to sleep; but there are a few people here and there at any given time who are ready to wake up and can safely do so.

So a wake-up gas is pumped into the atmosphere--but you only want to wake up certain people. How?

There must be people whose job it is to make sure that everyone who is not ready to wake up, stays safely asleep. So another gas is designed which is selective. It works on everyone who isn't ready to wake up. Both gases are now pumped into the atmosphere at the same time. But the wake-up gas is far more potent than the gas putting people to sleep. So a large quantity of the sleep gas must be manufactured, and that project must be very well-funded. The wake-up gas project requires relatively little funding. Only a small quantity is needed to wake up the people who are its targets.

So I think that's something like what we have here with these two documentaries--the A&E effort and mine (for example). "A word to the wise is sufficient" expresses exactly the same principle. In short, it takes a high-powered, well-funded, heavily-biased program to snow the masses; but a barely-funded program created by one person with two helpers is enough to convince any sincere person thinking deeply about the subject.

Still, this newly-edited version of "In Another Life" will be relatively close to the quality of the A&E production, despite my budgetary limitations. Eventually the "plague" will pass and all those people will have to be awakened. We don't know if the time is near or far; but the general opinion of those who have studied the world's spiritual condition is that it is near. So, "In Another Life" will be ready.

If you look at the history of reincarnation being introduced into mainstream society, you see certain "blips" on the radar screen. Bridey Murphy got people's attention, and was shut down with unfair debunking and propaganda. Dr. Ian Stevenson's research impacted the scientific community and was similarly dismissed. In a related arena, medium John Edward demonstrated communication with people in the afterlife state daily, in front of a nationwide audience; and then, similarly, was dishonestly discredited by a blitz of propaganda. Next, Carol Bowman got the Leininger case out in front of the nation on ABC's "Primetime." Most recently, the Leiningers themselves published a book about their son's case called "Soul Survivor," and this, too, has been hitting the national news. It has not, to my knowledge, been debunked yet, though I am quite sure they are trying.

So, I'm just musing. Someday people will look back at the A&E program and see clearly just how biased it was; and they will wonder how it could possibly have been broadcast as straight journalism. It will be laughable. It will evoke the same reactions that we have today when we see those drawings of sailing ships going over the supposed edge of the world.

Publicly engaging in the effort to change this state of affairs has, I think, cost me my business and my career. The response to "In Another Life" was not nearly robust enough to give me a career in that direction; but it was enough to destroy the one I had. I began that documentary as a personal creative project back in 1997; I had no intentions of getting into the fight to reveal the truth of reincarnation to the public on an ongoing basis. If I thought I could become anonymous on the internet now by simply pulling the website, I would probably do it, simply because I have to earn a living, and no-one has stepped forward to fund my efforts. But I can't--I tried it once. Six pages of links come up when my name is Googled--and those who don't have some stubborn reason to deny it, agree that everyone Googles your name when thinking about doing business with you or hiring you these days.

Unfortunately, I'm not retired like Victor Zammit. Or, at least, not voluntarily. So for the next year or two I have an archiving project to do; after that, I don't know what's going to happen. Really-speaking, I had thought I might get invited to lecture a bit at colleges or to open-minded groups; I had thought "In Another Life" might be broadcast more than just the one time. Some 70 copies of the program have been sold to universities or university professors.** The website gets approximately 240 visits per day, despite it being what one of my colleagues calls the best reincarnation website in the world. It consistently ranks around page 4 for keyword "reincarnation" on Google, and languishes at about page 10 on Yahoo (where for years it was the very first link). I've done my personal best to optimize it honestly--I won't do anything dishonest or insincere, like trading reciprocal links with websites I can't fully endorse or that aren't even relevant to my topic. Repeating the word "reincarnation" several times at the opening of the home page was about as far as I was willing to go in that regard.

And yet...just about the time I think it's a complete failure, I get an e-mail from someone thanking me profusely for the work I'm doing, or expressing interest in seeing the program broadcast. Or someone will mention that they, and their friends, regularly check the "News" page to see what's been added recently. Even this "Updates" page--which also functions as my "blog," started before the word "blog" was invented--seems to have a fair number of visitors.

So is it doing anything, or not? Is it reaching anyone; is it moving the mass consciousness at all? Is it having any effect?

There's no way of knowing. I do my best; Victor Zammit does his best; Carol Bowman, and many others, do their best. We simply put the truth out there where those who want truth--those who don't want to be put to sleep by the "gas" of shows like one sees on A&E--can find it.

*My host also briefly mentions his own past-life memory experiences, which wasn't scripted nor planned--he was the only one who answered my ad and it turned out he had had them, so we agreed he should mention them in the introduction.

**It should be a clue to anyone who's paying attention, that a program which is purchased by 70 universities, but almost entirely rejected for public broadcast, must be ahead of its time, and that this is not simply due to technical considerations or editing style.

Music opening this page: "High Landrons," Eric Johnson (Ah Via Musicom album)
All I can say is, if you have a chance to see Eric in concert, don't pass it up...
sell the car and hitch to the concert if you have to.