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Research – Letter from Survival Researchers
A Letter on the Importance of Research
We, a group of scholars and scientists who have carefully studied the scattered, empirical evidence for the possibility that people may, in some form, have some kind of survival of consciousness after physical death, agree on the following five points:
(1) The answer to the question of whether we survive bodily death in some form is of enormous importance to science, indeed to all fields of knowledge, and an answer, even if only pointing strongly in one direction or the other rather than being conclusive, will usually make a great deal of difference as to how people live their lives.
(2) Rigorous scientific research in parapsychology has now established that people sometimes show what are called psi abilities, conventionally termed “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” “precognition,” and “psychokinesis.” (There may be other psi abilities, but they have not been as rigorously documented as these four.)
(3) Although there are grounds for philosophical differences, some of us feel that psi abilities do not fit in with current, conventional materialistic views of the nature of human consciousness, views which are frequently used as a basis for denying the possibility of survival a priori or the worthwhileness of research on the possibility of survival. Thus the existence ofpsi abilities creates a general scientific but indirect basis for the possibility (not “proof,” but possibility) of some aspect of consciousness surviving death.
(4) Direct studies of survival (mediumistic communications and reincarnation memories, e.g.) to date do not prove survival in any absolute sense, but they do make a significant case for it.
(5) There is sufficient evidence that we believe we need extensive, well-funded and sophisticated research on the survival issue. Current resources available for such research are, given the complexity and importance of the topic, negligible.
To promote such research we have created this web site. As limited time and resources allow, we will post various scientific and scholarly articles relevant to the survival question to this web site.
Robert Almeder, Georgia State University
Carlos Alvarado, Parapsychology Foundation
William Braud, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Stephen Braude, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Emily Cook, University of Virginia
Hoyt Edge, Rollins College
Arthur Ellison, University of London
Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia
Michael Grosso, Jersey City State Collete
Erlendur Haraldsson, University of Iceland
Arthur Hastings, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Jon Klimo, Rosebridge Graduate School
Melvin Morse, University of Washington
Peter Mulacz, Austrian Society for Parapsychology and
Border Areas of Science
William Roll, West Georgia University
Charles T. Tart, University of California at Davis
Colin Wilson, Author and Lecturer, England
Sylvia Hart Wright, Professor Emerita, City College of New York
Nancy Zingrone, Parapsychology Foundation
