Self Science and The Veritas Project

The Measurability of Accounting From The Dead
For my friend, Dr Coral Hull and our many exchanges on the Numinous.


In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
-William Blake

Changing the field of focus from The Global Consciousness Program at Princeton University, we now move Southwest to the University of Arizona, to encounter Dr Gary Schwartz, who, as the project itself describes, manages "The VERITAS Research Program of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health (formerly the Human Energy Systems Laboratory) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona was created primarily to test the hypothesis that the consciousness (or personality or identity) of a person survives physical death."

For several weeks now, I have to confess,in the moments when I was not occupied by the practical utilities of existence or the reflections of my own life in relation to my family, I kept hearing an insistent phrase opportunistically inserted in my mind when it was not so occupied.

Over and over, almost as if it were a mantra, I heard the phrase, "the well at the end of the world." I thought this obsessive phrase out of the air was intriguing as it was persistent...perhaps it would make for a good title for something or perhaps some sort of poem.

When I began this post whose subject came to me some days later, I found a synchronicistic echo hung in a retrocausal frame, which I was about to place on this wall for your consideration.

Some of you may already know what I did not, is that Veritas (meaning truth) was the goddess of truth, a daughter of Saturn and the mother of Virtue. It was believed that she hid in the bottom of a well because she was so elusive. Her image is shown as a young virgin dressed in white and for our purposes, at this point in our explorations,the truth may as well be a ghost, perhaps one that dwells within us. If there is a science of the self, when I lean over the edge of the well, all I see is a distorted ripple reflecting some distant light that provides my shadow.

In regard to the elusiveness of truth as applied to both the possibility of an afterlife as well as the veracity of mediumship, we find oddly enough, to some, a scientist involved in the daunting issue of measurability. One can view this measurability in terms of establishing a theoretical consensus in either personal or cultural terms.

To this writer, this project is certainly a refreshing change from chasing ghostly phantasms with flashlights in a ritualistic form of predation, despite the feigned and false pronouncements of "assistance" which are not only self proclaimed but without merit or efficacy as innovated rationalizations toward the production of adrenalin as an entertainment. To me this is a matter of valuation one must consider, not from our own perspective, but from that of humility in the face of mortality, particularly our own.

Roughly three years ago I had a spontaneous and massive heart attack, and as I lie prone on the stainless table, watching the banks of monitors, the bright operating theater lights, listening to the muffled dialog between physicians as if all this circulated around someone other than myself, I remembered the words of Ibn Al Arabi in regard to my former daily practice of The Remembrance of Death...it isn't the bad you've done nor the good you've done...its the many days when you did neither are the ones you regret as you walk into your grave. Time is counted.

One cannot discount oneself as an arbiter as well as an observer of published accounts or personal experiences. If one relies solely on either side of the demarcation between science and the metaphysical in all it's forms where it intersects the paranormal, one misses the full dimensions of either one.
From Ms.Goodfellow to David Ickes, one is submersed in a sea of bewildering incoherence when one compares these to...well, what?

One of the laments in the paranormal community is the lack of scientific inquiry into the many facets of the anomalous, which is simply not true. Science and the metaphysical as well as the paranormal all share one guiding principle in relation to one's participation with them, the search for truth. Your correspondent has personally determined that science and the metaphysical are not counter opposed as some would suggest.

However, one only has to read "Forbidden Science" by Jacques Vallee that the emergence of reorienting the theoretical postulates of science can be a daunting undertaking. One hundred years from now, I have little doubt that some of these scientific pioneers will have provided tomorrow's scientific and theoretical orthodoxy.

Many of the research papers associated with VERITAS are listed below can be downloaded by following the link provided on the sidebar.

Rock AJ, Beischel J, and Schwartz GE. (accepted). Thematic analysis of research mediums' experiences of discarnate communication. Journal of Scientific Exploration

Beischel J, Schwartz GE. Methodological advances in laboratory-based mediumship research. Proceedings of the Rhine Research Center 2007 Conference: “Consciousness Today,” March 23-25, 2007.

Beischel J, Schwartz GE. Anomalous information reception by research mediums demonstrated using a novel triple-blind protocol. EXPLORE: The Journal of Science & Healing. 2007;3(1):23-27.
View On-line

Beischel J, Schwartz GE. Are research mediums real? A triple-blind study of anomalous information reception. Toward a Science of Consciousness 2006, April 4-8, 2006.

Schwartz GE (with Simon WL). The Truth about Medium: Extraordinary Experiments with the Real Allison DuBois of NBC’s Medium and Other Remarkable Psychics. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company; 2005.

Schwartz GE, Beischel J. Survival is in the Details: Emerging Evidence for Discarnate Intention from Mediumship Research. 2005 Parapsychology Foundation International Conference, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 28-30, 2005. (Proceedings not yet published.)

Schwartz GE. 2003. How Not To Review Mediumship Research: Understanding the Ultimate Reviewer's Mistake.

Schwartz GE, Chopra D. 2002. Nonlocal Anomalous Information Retrieval: A Multi-Medium Multi-Scored Single-Blind Experiment.

Schwartz GE (with Simon WL). The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death. New York (division of Simon and Schuster); 2002.

Schwartz GE, Chopra D, and Grenard S. 2002. Evidence of Accuracy and Specificity for Long-Distance Mediumship: The “Double-Deceased” Multi-Medium Paradigm.

Mac Tonnies recently authored a incisive piece on the true nature of skepticism, wherein he wrote; "Skeptics are thinkers. Skeptics neither debunk nor believe -- unless they are able to establish that a given phenomenon deserves to be debunked. “Belief” is not a luxury the true skeptic can afford; the mechanics of skeptical thought are rooted in probability and open-mindedness. Being a skeptic requires courage and intellectual flexibility. What looks like a neat idea may turn out to be unsubstantiated nonsense; conversely, it might be the real thing."


From the metaphysical side of our equations, G.I Gurdjieff correctly noted that most people are neither skeptics nor self-motivated, and that many are easily duped. One is reminded of two of his Aphorisms,which were inscribed in a special script above the walls of the Study House at the Prieuré.
One is "Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself—only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity."
The other is directed to our subject at hand; "One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind."
In the intermediary position between birth and death, we assemble our experiences and equations in perhaps a quest not so much to determine what these phenomenon represent but what we are ourselves. In this, it is perhaps a traveller's tale best told on a journey between way stations.

"How much you have voyaged through the stages of created beings until you were generated as blood in your father and mother! Then they came together for your sake, either with or without the intention of bringing you into manifestation. You passed from being sperm; then you passed from that form to a blood clot, then to a tiny piece of flesh and then to bone. Then the bone was clothed with flesh. Then you were configured in another way and expelled into this world. You passed to infancy, and from infancy to childhood, from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to middle age, and from middle age to old age, which is the most despised age."
-Ibn Al Arabi

At one point in my life I underwent six months of therapy for having been the child who underwent certain traumatic experiences and during that time I was taught a visualization technique wherein I saw myself as that child and spoke to him as an adult, which was a very powerful healing process. As I write this I can only speculate that as I lie in some remote portion of a field, my grave marked by some headstone whose writing has long since worn away,what will I be saying to whom that I am now?



"The capacity for doing non-local and multi-process activities is just easier than when you are in the physical and located in a very specific place. That’s something that has been universally observed."
-Dr Gary Schwartz

Indeed.