Spirit Communication: An Investigation Into the Extraordinary World of Mediums, Psychics and the Afterlife

I am a spirit medium myself. I love reading and learning as well as teaching. This book has made an excellent companion to my research library as well as being a book that I just couldn't put down. Even I learned from reading this! Great for the begginer or advanced, it has been well researched and written. Also recommended for anyone interested on gaining a great insight on spirit communciation, and to know what happens after we die. It goes beyond that, as a great many things are explained here and the book covers a lot of ground. You will feel staisfied and feel like you have taken a mini course after reading this. The Spirit Garden: A Medium's Journey

When I first started reading about mediumship and spirit communication some 20 years ago, I struggled to understand what it was all about. The old researchers and other authors who observed the various phenomena usually assumed too much when it came to the reader's understanding of what they were talking about. It is clear to me now why the overwhelming evidence for the survival of consciousness after physical death produced by some very respected scientists and scholars of yesteryear has been filed away in dust-covered cabinets when it should have been embraced by both science and religion. It was simply too complex and few had the time to sift through it all and make sense of it. Most people aren't prepared to understand second year college algebra without taking first year algebra, but that's what many people do in attempting to understand spirit communication. I suspect that is what Professor Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, did when he looked into the subject. In an article titled "The Mystery of Consciousness" (Time Magazine, January 29, 2007), Pinker states that "attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks." If the good professor had started with this excellent introductory book by Roy Stemman, a veteran journalist, he might not have jumped to such a conclusion, although it is clear that there are some scientists and scholars who have their minds made up beforehand when it comes to paranormal phenomena and nothing will change their views. But for the open-minded person who is really interested in learning more about the subject, I cannot think of a better book to start with than this one. As the subtitle of the book states, it offers "a Comprehensive Guide to the Extraordinary World of Mediums, Psychics, and the Afterlife." More and more people are being made aware of spirit communication by popular television clairvoyants like John Edward and Lisa Williams, but few of those people seem to be aware that there are - or were - much more dynamic and evidential forms of mediumship, including full materializations, the direct-voice (actual voice of the deceased), and the trance voice. "It generally takes years of patience and regular weekly séances with the same group of sitters before the slightest signs of physical manifestations occur or the faintest whispers are heard," Stemman explains why we don't have very much of that dynamic phenomena of a century ago. "In our fast-moving twenty-first century, with its numerous distractions, there are fewer people prepared to sacrifice their time to develop such phenomena." Stemman discusses the various types of mediumship, including some of the most evidential cases of spirit communication on record, but he does not stop there as he also writes about spiritual healing, poltergeists, exorcisms, reincarnation and other subjects related to spirit. In his 50-plus year