My recent posts on Osama bin Laden and the afterlife raised an issue for me that I've been aware of for some time. When I consider evidence for the afterlife in general, such as accounts provided by mediums, near-death experiencers, or even hypnotically regressed subjects, I often find the material plausible and illuminating. But when I ponder the fate of specific deceased individuals, whether bin Laden or people I've known in my personal life, it all starts to seem a bit unreal to me, and I find myself asking: How much do I believe this stuff, really?
Years ago I read an essay by Joseph J. Stefula, Richard D. Butler, and George P. Hansen on a controversial UFO case. The essay concluded that the UFO investigators weren't actually serious about looking for evidence that would cast doubt on the case, and didn't take the actions that people who genuinely believed these claims would have taken. They behaved more like participants in a role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons. The roles they played added drama and interest to their lives, and they were unwilling to lose the fun and excitement of the game by subjecting it to reality-testing.
I have to wonder to what extent my own interest in the afterlife fits this description. Certainly I've detected this mindset in some other people who've offered evidence for life after death. For instance, I've written about the peculiar claims made by Mark Macy in his book Miracles in the Storm and the (in my opinion) inadequately supervised materialization experiments conducted with David Thompson. Then there are historical cases such as William Crookes' investigation of Florence Cook or Baron Schrenck-Notzing's investigation of Eva C. (a.k.a. Marthe Beraud), which seem to bear every indication of a shared fantasy, a sort of folie a deux between researcher and subject. This is just another kind of role-playing.
It's fairly easy to see the role-playing or shared-fantasy aspect of cases like those listed above, but how about the stronger cases? Here it's much more difficult to dismiss the phenomena as imaginary. I'm thinking in particular of the decades-long investigations of Gladys Osborne Leonard, Leonora Piper, and Eileen Garrett. Unfortunately all these cases were current many years ago. Piper and Leonard were active around the turn of the last century. It's impossible to reconstruct the atmosphere of those tests with complete certainty.
Did Charles Drayton Thomas accurately report the book and newspaper tests that seem so convincing, or did he (perhaps unconsciously) fudge certain details or stretch the facts to make the predictions fit? The predictions were sent to the Society for Psychical Research as soon as they were recorded, but how carefully were they reviewed, and to what extent did biases and predispositions on the part of the examiners affect their conclusions?
Were the famous "cross-correspondences" as meaningful as the dedicated researchers believed, or did the researchers dig out isolated scraps of information from a mass of extraneous material in order to construct an apparent correspondence after the fact?
Even the impressive R-101 case is open to criticism, since Eileen Garrett's sessions with Oliver Villiers weren't recorded verbatim, but were written down immediately afterward by Villiers, who was trusting his memory.
I'm not saying that these objections are fatal to these cases. I do think, on balance, the pro-afterlife interpretation of these and similar investigations is more plausible than any skeptical alternative. But I can't rule out the skeptical alternatives altogether.
What I wonder is if my reluctance to pursue doubts on this subject is prompted by a subconscious desire to continue the role-playing persona I've created for myself. Some people might ascribe this reluctance to fear of personal extinction at the moment of death, but I think it's more likely to be fear of the extinction of a persona that has become part of my ego.
Consider this: If I were fully and unflinchingly convinced of life after death, wouldn't I expect the AWARE study to yield solid hits? Yet I'll be very surprised if any of the participants can accurately describe even one of the hidden images. So how confident am I? Do I think the evidence will always fall just short of being conclusive? And if so, is it because the universe has been set up this way to keep us in perpetual doubt, or is it because of a fundamental weakness in the evidence itself?
Don't get me wrong. I think there is more than enough evidence to justify — but not to coerce — a belief in life after death. I think the strongest cases, such as those listed above (and there are quite a few others), are extraordinarily difficult to explain without the hypothesis of an afterlife. Still, increasingly I'm aware that my interest in this subject is based, at least in part, on the enjoyment of contemplating something outre and unconventional. I've created a persona for myself, and I play a role appropriate to this persona.
Actually I think we all do this. The hard-nosed skeptic is playing a role, too, and so is the person who is too "practical" to be interested in things like spirituality. Maybe we can't help but role-play all the time, and Shakespeare was right when he wrote that all the world's a stage. Our best hope may be to become more aware of the artificiality of the roles we play, and of the insubstantiality of even our most cherished convictions.