22 August 2010

Grave News

A reader at Melbourne University has pointed to Electronic Voices: Contact with Another Dimension? (O Books) by Anabela Cardoso, described as -
This is the story of a normal woman who experienced the impossible: objective contacts with another dimension through loud and clear voices received by electronic means during Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) experiments. 
Dr Cardoso, a senior diplomat, describes the astounding experiences that transformed her life since she started ITC research in 1997. She presents extracts of conversations with her deceased loved ones and other personalities who insisted that they live in another world. 
The level of agreement between communications received by the author and concepts, even words, recorded by other experimenters from Jürgenson and Raudive to contemporary operators, constitutes compelling evidence of the reality of the next world that awaits us all. As communicators from Timestream told Dr Cardoso: The dead pass through here, you pass through here!. Electronic Voices breaks new ground in the literature providing details of audio contacts, recorded under controlled conditions, with beings in an evolved dimension, which they describe as another space, beyond time. This evolved dimension of life corresponds to an evolved state of consciousness in the cosmic evolutionary sequence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is endorsed by Ervin Laszlo, the Akashic Field guru and World Futures 'Global Evolution' editor, who states -
Anabela Cardoso, one of the foremost researchers of communication with entities that are no longer living in the familiar form in this world but are alive nonetheless, has written a book that merits being number one on everybody's reading list. It addresses the question that is the deepest and for ordinary mortals (who may yet prove to be more than mortals) by every count the most important; and she addresses it with remarkable acuity, modesty, and in the light of unquestionably convincing evidence.
Sorry, I'm inclined to regard the "unquestionably convincing evidence" as something that can indeed be questioned, that may not be convincing and that may not indeed be what an Australian court would consider to be credible evidence. 

Cardoso, like Laszlo, has founded and edits a journal -
Anabela Cardoso licentiate in Germanic Philology, Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University, Portugal and Doctor of Public Service (Honoris Causa by Roger Williams University, Bristol, R. I., USA. A Portuguese career diplomat since 1976, Dr. Cardoso was the first woman to hold a diplomatic post outside her county. A former member of the SPR, Dr. Cardoso's long-standing interest in questions related to consciousness research led her to start experimenting with ITC (Instrumental Transcommunication). In 2000 Dr. Cardoso founded the ITC Journal which has an Editorial Board of internationally recognised scientists and researchers of the paranormal. Dr. Cardoso is a regular contributor to the Journal and to other international psychical research publications and has given presentations on ITC and her work internationally. In the year 2005 Dr. Cardoso founded the ITC Journal Research Centre, in Spain where she currently lives. In 2007 she was awarded research grants by two international institutions.
Cardoso had received a grant in 2005 -
Anabela Cardoso and David Fontana have been awarded a grant of £8,500 ($15,400) for research into Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC.) The grant, funded by Mr. Oliver Knowles and administered by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London, is for the study of ITC as it pertains to the vibrational aspects of paranormal phenomena. 
As reported by Cardoso and Fontana, "In sum, the proposal involves two main initiatives which it is hoped to carry forward concurrently. In one of them, samples of the voices received by Anabela and by up to five other leading researchers (already selected) will be submitted for acoustic analysis by acoustics expert Daniele Gullà and his team at Il Laboratorio in Bologna, Italy, a laboratory that specialises in the technical investigation of paranormal phenomena, and to an independent international laboratory that will be blind to the paranormal origin of the voices. 
The purpose of the analysis will be firstly to identify the acoustic characteristics of the voices in order to study the way in which their acoustic vibrations may differ from those of normal human voices, secondly to study the acoustic differences, if any, between EVP voices and DRV voices [DRV = Direct Radio Voice], and thirdly to study the acoustic differences, if any, between the voices received by different experimenters. In addition, if recordings made by communicators when alive are available, we hope to have these acoustically analysed in order to effect comparisons between their human voices and their ITC voices."
The legitimation of what in my opinion is generously tagged as "parascience" (including messages from the dead via valve radios or spiritual typewriters, remote healing, telekinesis and reincarnation) through the establishment of journals, conferences, research centres, grants, and endorsement by likeminded authorities is a fascinating process. 

 From the perspective of an avowed sceptic it is also all rather sad and can be construed alongside classic studies by Max Weber, Norman Cohn and others regarding religious belief and authority systems, works that for me are more persuasive than social constructionist studies such as Frames of Meaning: the Social Construction of Extraordinary Science (Routledge, 1982) by Harry Collins andTrevor Pinch. Authority and legitimacy are constructed but some things - despite claims by devotees of L Ron Hubbard, Bhagavan, Targ and Blavatsky - are not.