The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.
—G. K. Chesterton
Until quite recently, when I heard the words spirit guides (including the subset angels), I thought about Santa Claus and smiled. For me, spirit guides were like Santa Claus or other lighthearted mythical beings, such as the Easter Bunny. Most mature adults know that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny do not exist, and they apply the same reasoning to spirit guides and angels. This is what I was taught even as a child.
Moreover, the vast majority of scientists today hold the firm conviction that spirit guides and angels are silly fictions created by misguided minds. Scientists, as a general rule, are convinced that if an adult person believes in spirit guides or angels, he or she must be ignorant, illogical, foolish, or deluded, if not crazy. I suspect many of you would be so convinced, too.
There was a store in Kirkland, near Seattle, Washington, called Reasons to Believe, which sold handcrafted Santas, Santa carvings, Russian Santas, clay-sculpted Santas, Santa figurines, and Santa ornaments. The name of the store did pique my interest. After exploring the large inventory of artistic and mythical expressions of the Santas displayed in the store, I asked the owner point-blank if he believed in Santa Claus.
He said, “No, I don’t believe in Santa; I believe in the spirit of Santa.”
When I asked the gentleman to explain himself, he said that he believed in the idea of universal and responsible giving, reinforcing those principles, especially in children, and encouraging people to live their lives for the greatest and highest good, and then helping them make their dreams come true.
What an interesting and inspiring belief.
I realized that if someone had asked me back then, “Do you believe in spirit guides?” I could draw on the store owner’s inspiration and say, “No, I don’t, but I believe in the spirit of spirit guides.” Similarly, I would’ve said, “No, I don’t believe in angels; I believe in the spirit of angels.”
What I would mean by these statements is that I believe in the philosophy of universal caring and giving, of nurturing and protecting others, especially loved ones. And in regard to Santa, I further believe in the value of sometimes giving anonymously, and when possible giving in such a way that the recipients are not aware that they are receiving a gift. An example may help.
A former undergraduate student of mine, whom I will call Patricia, once confessed that during Christmas, when parking lots were packed, if a car filled with children was following her and a space opened up, she would sometimes intentionally pass by it, giving the space to the family behind her. The family never knew that Patricia was serving, in this instance, as an anonymous giver, an invisible angel, so to speak.
I have been forced to reexamine my past conviction that spirit guides and angels are like Santa Claus. In fact, as you are about to discover, I have begun a formal research project testing what is called the spirit guides hypothesis—the serious possibility that spirit guides, including angels, are as real as the light from distant stars.
Why would a responsible scientist reexamine his beliefs about the reality of something as farfetched as spirit guides and actually propose that formal research about them, or with them, is justified? The answer is simple: this is where the evidence is pointing.
For me scientific integrity means following the data where it takes you. It is my conviction that scientists have a responsibility to pursue the path revealed by their emerging data. This may require that we question, if not ultimately reject, fundamental assumptions and beliefs of our society as well as of our professional colleagues—as well as of ourselves!
My willingness to consider investigating the spirit guides hypothesis was stimulated by the fact that more than 80 percent of legitimate research mediums were telling me, often off the record, that they regularly communicated with spirit guides, including angels. Moreover, these “lab rat” mediums (as some liked to call themselves) were claiming that it was their spirit guides that helped them make contact with and obtain accurate information about deceased individuals
Often psychics use the terms spirit guides and angels interchangeably, though their precise meanings are not identical. Historically, angels have been described as spiritual messengers, typically in the service of the Divine, and have never lived in a biological form. Angels purportedly provide messages of guidance—usually for direction, prediction, and protection. Hence, angels are believed to serve as spirit guides. Some also claim that deceased people can function like angels, providing direction, prediction, and protection, which Susy Smith has demonstrated.
When I first heard the mediums’ claims about their purported spirit guides and angels, my instinct was to ignore them. I simply assumed, unfairly, that because mediums as a group are a little weird, by nature they hold bizarre, unfounded, and often foolish beliefs.
It was enough of an academic challenge to be open to the possibility of life after death and test the survival-of-consciousness hypothesis in the laboratory; I reasoned that were I to add spirit guides to the list of spiritual possibilities and begin a research program around this hypothesis, I would probably lose all scientific credibility, even in the eyes of parapsychologists!
The professional and personal challenge I faced, however, was that a lot of the research mediums whom I’ve worked with, along with their spirit-guide claims, deserved to be taken seriously.
Is it responsible to simply reject what they experience and believe because it is counter to my experiences and beliefs and puts me in scientific jeopardy?
How Spirit Guides and Angels Are Like Oysters
People sometimes experience distaste, if not disgust, when they eat certain foods or hear certain words.
Unless they had a positive experience with these foods or words when they were children, and were raised to develop a taste for them, they might experience them as foreign. Moreover, if in their formidable years, experiences with the foods or words were negative, they might have developed a strong aversion.
I do not like raw oysters—or cooked ones, for that matter. They look slimy and squishy, and I can literally feel sensations of gagging and nausea if I imagine eating them. My parents did not like oysters; they never served them at home or ordered them in restaurants.
Meanwhile, a close friend I’ll call Claire had been brought up by parents who loved oysters and shared their fondness for them with their daughter. Claire not only savors oysters, but I have on occasion endured hearing her slurp down raw oysters with a smile on her face (not mine).
Claire told me that her reaction to the concept of angels was like what I experience with oysters—an aversion associated with a “weird and icky” response (her description). What is curious is that Claire is a spiritual woman who deeply believes in God but finds the idea of angels fanciful. Her parents believed strongly in God and prayed regularly, but they questioned other spiritual premises including the existence and nature of angels.
What is equally curious about me is that I was raised on the South Shore of Long Island with parents who loved raw as well as cooked clams. Fresh Long Island clams were readily available in supermarkets and local restaurants, and I developed affection for clam dishes as well. Though my taste for raw clams was tainted by an undergraduate course in zoology, which required that we dissect them, I soon forgot the details of their anatomy. To this day I still enjoy baked clams and linguine with white clam sauce.
The fact that I had learned to develop a positive taste for clams and an aversion to oysters, and Claire had learned to develop a positive taste for God and an aversion to angels, illustrates how it is possible for us to develop prejudices and aversions that are based on experience rather than on the intrinsic nature and reality of the substances or concepts in question.
Do you like oysters? Do you like clams? Do you have an affinity for the idea of God? Do you have affection for the idea of angels?
Whatever your current tastes and preferences are for concepts like God and angels, the challenge raised here is for us to carefully reexamine our current attitudes and preferences about the existence and nature of a larger spiritual reality in light of the emerging new evidence. Science should not be about personal tastes—concerning physical foods or conceptual hypotheses; it should be about empirical evidence. I might add that this criterion, what constitutes evidence, might also be questioned to allow for an expanded vision.
First Reasonable Doubts about the Santa Claus Explanation of Spirit Guides
What I am about to share was not part of my formal research when the event happened; most of this information is public knowledge now, though, and I am simply recounting my biographical as well as autobiographic perspective. As it happened, the first person who forced me to reconsider my Santa Claus interpretation of the existence of spirit guides and angels was John Edward. The year was 1998. As I described in The Afterlife Experiments, John participated in three mediumship experiments in my laboratory before he became a celebrity.
John does not suffer fools lightly. He is a New Yorker, an Italian, and he works out regularly in the gym. He is a loving and caring man, but also logical and tough. John regularly gets specific and even rare information in his readings; his range of accuracy in laboratory testing was often 80 to 90 percent. Though John does not advertise this fact, he not only believes in but also regularly receives information, including personal guidance and direction, from a set of spirit guides that he calls “the Boys.” John was raised Catholic and was taught to believe in the existence of spiritual beings, including saints and angels.
For example, John’s decision to write his book Practical Praying was apparently inspired by the Boys. In a book review for the National Catholic Reporter in 2006, Retta Blaney wrote:
The idea, or “message,” for the book came from “the Boys,” his spirit guides, while he was on a book tour. “At that precise moment, the phone in my room rang,” he writes, explaining that it was his publisher asking if he could talk to him. “I told him to come on by, and I immediately started trying to figure out how to tell him what my spirit guides had just told me to do. I was sure that he’d say it was a crazy idea.”
I underscore the fact that this is more than John’s belief; this has been his ongoing personal experience for many years. In fact, it was supposedly the Boys who inspired John to call me in 1998 and tell me that I should write the book that became The Afterlife Experiments. John takes the Boys very seriously.
Though my knee-jerk response would typically have been to dismiss John’s experience with the Boys as nothing more than his imaginary playmates—I mean no offense to John here—the truth was that John is too seasoned, strong, responsible, and mature to fit the stereotype of New Age flake. Though I had no idea if the Boys were real or fanciful, my personal curiosity, as well as scientific responsibility, led me to ponder why someone like John would not only hold such a belief, but also regularly claim to have such experiences.
John was too accurate and successful to be dismissed; he deserved being given the benefit of the doubt. For me, the deeply challenging question was not if the Boys potentially were real, but rather, it was how I would determine, scientifically, whether they were real and if they were the source of meaningful information and protection for John.
I had no idea at the time how I might address these or similar controversial questions scientifically.
However, that was then, and this is now. And the opportunity for researching the spirit guides hypothesis is upon us.
Some mediums and psychics are forthright about the role of spirit guides and angels in their lives; a few of them, such as Mary Occhino, even advertise this belief. I have already presented an example of Mary’s remarkable abilities as a research medium. I now turn to Mary’s defining belief and experience concerning her relationship with her spirit guides and angels.
At the time this book was written, Mary was the host of a highly successful three-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week call-in radio program on Sirius XM Radio titled Angels on Call. Mary chose the title because she was absolutely convinced that her success as a medium, a medical intuitive, and a psychic counselor was due to the fact that her angels were literally on call with her.
For more than two years, I have been doing a weekly half-hour science segment on Angels on Call. From time to time, Mary would invite people to call in and share personal experiences of guidance and protection that they believed involved spirit guides and angels. Mary claimed on numerous occasions that not only were her spirit guides and angels interested in our research, but also that they were ready to serve as spirit subjects in the laboratory!
It’s one thing for a highly gifted medium to claim that her abilities are facilitated by the active collaboration of her angels. It’s quite another for the medium to assert that her angels are willing to be tested to prove that they are indeed responsible for the medium’s success. And this wasn’t an idle claim; she was expressing it to someone who tests such claims continuously.
Talk about chutzpah or guts (or foolishness)—not only on Mary’s part but on the part of the purported spirit guides and angels as well. And like John, Mary is too accurate and successful not to deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.
If Mary and her angels are willing to participate in research, it seems that they should be given the opportunity.
On a few occasions, I have conducted exploratory personal investigations to see, for example, if a medium could read the mind of the experimenter. In one investigation, I tested a medium (who chooses to remain anonymous) to see if he could distinguish when the experimenter was thinking about someone who was alive versus someone who had died.
As part of the private testing, the medium was requested to identify the sex, approximate age (young or old), and status (living or deceased) of the person the experimenter was thinking about; I was the experimenter. The investigation was what is called a 2 x 2 x 2 design (half male, half female; half young, half old; and half living, half deceased). To my amazement, the medium was more than 90 percent accurate in making these judgments.
When I asked the medium how he did this psychic feat, he claimed he couldn’t do it; what he did instead was asked his spirit guides for the information!
Was this cheating?
I repeated the investigation, only this time I asked the medium to not seek the assistance of his spirit guides and angels, and try to do it himself. Under these conditions, his accuracy in reading the mind of the experimenter decreased to chance.
This proof-of-concept exploratory investigation does not establish the role of his spirit guides and angels in mind reading; the results could have been due to differences in the medium’s belief. In other words, if he thought he would fail, he would fail, because this was his belief.
This investigation raised questions: If spirit guides and angels exist, could they provide the medium with information he or she could not normally receive? If spirit guides and angels exist, are they asking to be validated, and do they want to be heard?
Being a die-hard agnostic, I strive to keep an open mind about such possibilities, despite my upbringing, acquired tastes and distastes, and prevailing scientific beliefs.
Are spirit guides and angels real? My intellectual response is, “I don’t know. Could be yes, could be no. Show me the data; I’m open.” My emotional response is more akin to my aversion to oysters than my fondness for clams. I would have been happy if some other scientists were systematically addressing the spirit guides hypothesis, but as far as I know, at the time this book was written, there were no established research laboratories investigating this hypothesis.
So why did I ultimately decide to bring this question into my laboratory? The Johns and Marys of the world, insisting that spirit guides and angels are real, were part of the reason. The other reason was that completely unexpected events happened in both my professional and personal lives to indicate that it was essential that this controversial hypothesis be given a fair and honest opportunity or chance to scientifically prove itself.
If spirit guides exist—whether they are literally angels or merely acting like them in the role of messengers—and if they can play a caring and protective role in our individual and collective lives, then maybe we should open our minds and hearts to what they are saying. If they actually know things we don’t, and they can see possibilities that are beyond us, it would be potentially self-destructive to ignore the information.
Given the present predicaments of humanity and the planet, it seems prudent for us to seek all the wisdom we can receive, even if this means developing new tastes—and even if they are squishy going down.