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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
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Leslie Flint, circa. 1960
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Validity of the Afterlife Recordings Voices of the person in spirit presented on this Web site were recorded using tape recorders during sessions in which various people were present with the medium. The medium is Leslie Flint, called a "direct-voice medium" because the voices heard were purported to be directly from the deceased into air vibrations (audible voice), not through the medium's voice. The voices came through a voice box created in the air to communicate. If you are a Christian concerned about what the church seems to say about mediums and communication with the dead, read the explanation about Jesus and mediums. Before you listen to the recordings, read the constraints on how the voices were produced in the explanation of direct-voice mediumship. The explanation will appear in a new window. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evaluations of the evidence for Leslie Flint's recordings follow.
The Leslie Flint Recordings Leslie Flint, a medium during the twentieth century, was involved in thousands of experiences in which people spoke to deceased loved ones and the deceased responded in normal conversations. Their voices did not come through the medium's mouth or from any one else present. The people whose loved ones came through all expressed with certainty that the voices were their loved ones' and that they had had conversations with the real, living person, although they had been dead, at times for decades. The medium and many others before and since described a "voice box" that those in spirit used to communicate that was created just for the purpose and disappeared afterward. The sittings always occurred in the dark. Evidence for Their Validity
Leslie Flint described himself as the most tested medium in all of history. In one instance, "He held a certain amount of pink water in his mouth. Then his mouth was sealed by an adhesive strip. After the séance, he returned the entire amount of water--quite a difficult achievement!" (http://www.tanika.com/04-Mediums/flint.htm). The creativity of his testers was remarkable: "He was bound to a chair, his mouth sealed with tape. At other experiments he wore a throat microphone to detect possible vibrations in his vocal organs. He was observed through an infra-red viewer." At no time did sounds come from his mouth. In no tests by qualified, skeptical scientists, was anything found to be fake or deceptive. Quote from the Psychic News, February 14, 1948: Reports in detail one experiment where he conducted a séance with elastoplast pressed over his lips, bandages over the elastoplast and his hands and legs tied to a chair. The observers concluded that in spite of the above restrictions the voices were soon speaking with their usual clarity, even shouting. Some twelve persons in the room all heard more than enough to convince the most obdurate skeptic that the sealing of Mr Flint's lips in no way prevented the unseen speakers from saying anything they wished. At the conclusion of the experiment they found the plaster and the cords intact and undisturbed. Rev. Drayton Thomas of the British Society for Psychical Research evaluated Leslie Flint. This is his account: I placed over his [Leslie Flint's] tightly closed lips a strip of Elastoplast. It was five and a half inches long and two and a half inches wide and very strongly adhesive. This I pressed firmly over and into the crevices of the closed lips. A scarf was then tied tightly over this and the medium's hands tied firmly to the arms of his chair; another cord was so tied that he would be unable to bend down his head. His evaluation was that Leslie Flint had absolutely no part in producing the voices.
No speakers or collaborators were involved when the voices came. The sittings were held in hotel rooms, houses of strangers, foreign countries, theaters, halls, and a great variety of other places, sometimes set up on the spot so no one could have arranged for electronic devices of any kind to be installed. He travelled with various companions or alone, so no one was with him to create the voices. One expert who investigated Leslie Flint and thoroughly vouched for his authenticity was Professor William R. Bennett, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City. This is what he wrote about his experience in an impromptu setting arrangement with Flint: My experience with Mr Flint is first hand; I have heard the independent voices. Furthermore, modern investigation techniques not available in earlier tests corroborate previous conclusions by indicating that the voices are not his. But to be thorough, one should consider the possibility of live accomplices... This suggestion became untenable for me during his visit to New York in September 1970, when, in an impromptu séance in my apartment, the same voices not only appeared but took part in conversations with the guests (from Voices in the Dark, by Leslie Flint, 1971: 220).
Each group of people would assemble in the sitting room of Leslie’s London flat in anticipation. Deceased of all descriptions would come and talk to them, not only their relatives. It was as if there was a microphone in the spirit world and the spirit would stand in line waiting their turn to speak. Voices would come from all corners of the room and often several would converse at once, giving detailed descriptions of their life on Earth and other pieces of personal information.
The medium could not have created the voices, nor could an accomplice, because they varied so in quality between men, women, young people, speakers with accents, British speakers, Southern American speakers, and a great variety of others. Also, the witnesses attested that the voices came from all parts of the room, not from any individual. They usually came from the direction of the medium, but the medium was often gagged as a test, and at least once, a throat microphone was placed tightly on his throat to detect any voice. None of the hundreds of tests by witnesses sitting next to the medium or in front of the medium showed any voice coming from the medium. And in any event, it would have been impossible for anyone to create the great variety of clearly different voices...
It was a remarkable feat for the people no longer using bodies to create a voice box and attempt to mimic what they sounded like while still in a body on Earth decades or centuries before. The ectoplasmic voice box has not a molecule of the long-dead throat disintegrating in a grave somewhere. And yet consistently, those who knew the deceased said the qualities of the voices matched the people who had died. A small number of speakers chose to alter the quality (as did Rudolph Valentino who had a squeaky voice in life but has a masculine voice when speaking in a seance). We don't know why a few chose to change their voices, but we do know that they often remark about how extremely difficult it is to come back a century after death, recall the voice others heard, and duplicate the voice using an ectoplasmic voice box created on the spot. In a demonstration before 75 people in New York City, a man known on Earth as Carl Schneider spoke. At first, no one responded, but a member of the audience finally spoke up and stated that he knew a Carl Schnieder and that the voice was unmistakably his. It had all the intonations, qualities, and mannerisms he recognized as Carl Schnieder's. However, as far as he knew, Schneider was still among the living. The next day, the person attempted to call Schneider, only to find that he had committed suicide a year earlier. The seances had thousands of such voices, recognizable by those who knew them on Earth. Dr Aubrey Rose, OBE, CBE, one of the most brilliant lawyers in England, attended many sittings with Leslie Flint and claims that through Flint he received “the most detailed evidence of survival of the individual beyond this life.” In his autobiography, The Rainbow Never Ends (2005), Rose states that his investigation into the afterlife began when he heard a tape recording of a voice re recognized as that of deceased Judge, Lord Birkett, speaking through Leslie Flint. Rose became a close friend of Leslie Flint and went on to become a spiritual healer himself. Dame Ellen Terry, the Shakespearean actress, came through in a Flint seance. A portion of that recorded seance in 1964 follows. Beside the seance recording bar is the sound bar for a recording of Dame Ellen Terry while she was alive, portraying Portia in the Merchant of Venice in 1911. The ectoplasmic voice box makes a small difference in quality and other details and the recording isn't using Ellen Terry's long dead, disintegrating voice box. Listen to the intonations, even though in one recording she was speaking openly and in the second appearing in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice onstage. The intonation and mannerisms that come from her conscious mind are identical. The later recording, in 1964, of the deceased Ellen Terry, uses a better recording device than the 1911 recording of the living Ellen Terry...
The recording was also sent to some friends in London who had a record made by Ellen Terry to use in comparison with the recording and their own recall of Ellen Terry's voice. They compared the voice on the record with the voice on the tape and reported, "They are identical."
Anyone who listens to the recordings cannot believe them to be staged frauds. Human beings can judge when someone is speaking from the heart, with personal conviction. The speakers on recordings of the seances are speaking with the energy and fervor that can only come from real people. No one could consider that they have been scripted and rehearsed, that some person or group of people had such genius that they could create the personalities, portray them in voice, and keep the affair a secret over decades, repeating the impossible feat in thousands of events before large and small gatherings of different people. You can judge the veracity of the speakers by simply listening to some of them. Listen to Ted Butler's description of what happened to him in the days after his death, or to Al Pritchatt's account of his death on a battlefield of World War I. You will hear real people speaking about what actually happened to them. Nothing in their messages suggests insincerity or deceit; all of the other recorded voices have the same candid, genuine quality. If actors had agreed to engage in fraud and create these remarkable characters, we would have to wonder how they managed to project their voices so clearly and audibly into the area around the medium when skeptics had the medium bound and gagged and were anxiously watching for fraud. Then, what happened to these hundreds of talented actors since the recordings were made? How is it possible that they've all kept silent about their subterfuge all these years, en masse? It would require an incredible conspiracy to even manage such a feat, but to keep it all secret with hundreds of participants who received no money for their efforts would be simply impossible. The recordings could not have been created by fraud.
Many evaluated Flint thoroughly, using all manner of control. Professor William R Bennett, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Colombia University in New York City, tested Leslie Flint at length. After completing his exhaustive investigation, he thoroughly vouched for Flint's authenticity: My experience with Mr. Flint is first hand; I have heard the independent voices. Furthermore, modern investigation techniques not available in earlier tests corroborate previous conclusions by indicating that the voices are not his. But to be thorough, one should consider the possibility of live accomplices. This suggestion became untenable for me during his visit to New York in September 1970, when, in an impromptu séance in my apartment, the same voices not only appeared but took part in conversations with the guests. Another witness, Dr Aubrey Rose, OBE, CBE, one of the most brilliant lawyers in England, attended many sittings with Leslie Flint and claims that through Flint he received “the most detailed evidence of survival of the individual beyond this life.” In his recent autobiography, The Rainbow Never Ends (2005), Rose states that his investigation into the afterlife began when he heard a tape recording of a voice he recognized as that of the deceased Judge, Lord Birkett, speaking through Leslie Flint. As a result, Rose became a close friend of Leslie Flint and went on to become a spiritual healer himself.
This is the report of a deceased young man who spoke with this parents: He had initially appeared at a seance attended by Lord Dowding, giving his name as Peter William Handford Kite, and asking that his parents be contacted at an address he gave. The parents accepted an invitation to attend a second seance and for nearly forty minutes, Peter came through and in his own voice told them the following which his parents confirmed to be true:
The young man's parents affirmed emphatically that they had a conversation with their son. (http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/experiments/direct-voice/flint.htm)
The thousands of sessions, including hundreds taped for evaluation that are available today, contain a vast array of personalities, detailed personal stories, and insights about life and the afterlife that would require a genius greater than Shakespeare for the drama, Agatha Christie for the stories, Jesus or Buddha for the teachings, and Sigmund Freud for psychological insights. This remarkable savant would have had to repeat the feat of creating characters on the fly, impromptu, with no revision of conversation, concept, or thought. It would be simply impossible for any person or group of persons to create all of the personalities now on record in tape recordings available to anyone interested in listening to them. Several foreign and dead languages are among the conversations people heard during the sessions.
If a mythological world called "afterlife" were being created while the speaker was concentrating on the person's story, accent, gender, portrayal of life in the afterlife, and all of the other components of the sessions, we would expect inconsistencies and changes over the decades during which the sessions were held, purely by accident. Instead, the accounts are entirely consistent, demonstrating that the speakers were all describing the same foreign land. Not only that, but the descriptions are consistent with the insights of mediums recorded now in many books, such as The Supreme Adventure, Analyses of Psychic Communications, by Robert Crookall, (1961, James. Clarke & Co., Ltd.). Crookall's book is based on accounts from a variety of mediums. All of these reports, derived from a great variety of sources over centuries of time, are perfectly consistent in their descriptions of the same country in which the communicators live, called the afterlife.
In a court of law, we would look for some motive for actions intended to defraud. We would need to find a reason dozens of people would take extraordinary pains to hold thousands of contrived seances and create the over 120 recordings now in the Leslie Flint archives. The activities would have required the involvement of a great number of people if they were orchestrated and created as fraud. That would have required some reward, usually money, for the large number of people present at the seances. No money has been involved in the recordings in the Leslie Flint archives. No motive for them other than to provide them for humanity as records of people in the afterlife speaking has ever been present. These are descriptions of Flint's activities and those of the people who attended and recorded his sessions: Leslie Flint's mediumship lacked all traces of false romanticism, fantasy, daydreaming, or the exploitation of human grief and fear. The purpose of his séances was to search for truth and to spread the message about life eternal. (http://www.tanika.com/04-Mediums/flint.htm) Those present at most of the sessions were George Woods and Betty Green, who gained nothing from their volunteer efforts. They gave the tape recordings they made to the world, for free, to help humankind grow spiritually: . . . so began for George Woods, Betty Green and their reel to reel tape recorder a 15 year series of regular sittings with the independent direct voice medium Leslie Flint that culminated in over five hundred recorded first hand accounts from those passed on to the next stage of existence beyond the grave referred to by most as "death." As a reward for her efforts Betty Green presents these recordings to the world to enlighten mankind. They wrote, "These tapes of ours have no restrictions placed on them--they are for the world. Those lovely souls from the Spirit world have not come through just for our benefit, but to give a message to the world, and they are relying on us to pass that message on through the medium of the tapes, and they are determined that people should receive them."
Mrs. L. Piper was a gifted medium who also enabled voices of the deceased to speak. Dr. James Hyslop, a professor of logic and ethics at Columbia University, initially a skeptic, was converted to accepting the afterlife after he studied Mrs. Piper and she repeatedly produced high quality evidence for the afterlife. In Life After Death (1918) he wrote, I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the skeptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject. David Thompson is now conducting séances with direct voices and materializations of those in spirit in the presence of a variety of people with careful, rigid controls. One of those is Victor J. Zammit, lawyer and author of A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife... You can read the transcript of a reunion between a woman and her deceased loved one during a David Thompson seance and listen to the recording at this link: Sarah Montigue Keen was head of the Parliamentary and Legal department of the National Farmers Union of England and Wales, journalist, magazine editor, and secretary of the Society for Psychical Research Survival Research Committee. Keen investigated David Thompson's physical medium abilities on October 25, 2003, using tight controls that prevented the medium from uttering a sound or moving. In spite of the strict controls, the medium was transported, with the chair to which he was taped, to a different part of the room, the medium's cardigan was reversed on his body while the straps binding him were intact, and four distinctive voices were heard. You can read about the controls and occurrences at this link: Montigue Keen. H. Dennis Bradley, an Irish playwright and scornful skeptic of afterlife communication had two seances, one with medium George Valiantine and the second with medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. In the first, he spoke with his deceased sister. He called it the "most staggering event of my life." He wrote that "Doubt took flight when faced by an unchallengeable fact and the mind understood in a flash that what had hitherto appeared to be impossible was possible." You may read the entire account of his seances and reactions at this link: H. Dennis Bradley. Dr. Neville Whymant, a British professor of linguistics, was a specialist in languages who knew 30 languages. He attended a seance at the home of William Cannon, a New York City lawyer and judge, conducted by medium George Valiantine. In the seance, a man came through speaking ancient Chinese. Whymant knew modern Chinese and knew the literature of ancient China, so he was able to interpret it as perfect ancient Chinese. He learned that the speaker was Confucius, whose writings Whymant knew well. He asked the speaker, in Chinese, about poems people had puzzled over for centuries that Confucius had written. As Whymant began reciting the verses, the spirit interrupted him and finished the poems. Confucius then explained the errors in copying that had occurred after his death, solving the puzzles. You can read about the seance at this link: Dr. Neville Whymant
In the end, the most compelling testimony to their authenticity is that all of the messages are full of love, hope, and inspiration. They show no taint from the physical realm; no statements of anger, withdrawal, or desire for revenge. None of the negative emotions we live with daily are in the messages. Refraining from intruding such thoughts and statements is beyond any living human's ability. An account of such a message follows, written by Gordon Smith, who knew the deceased's mother personally: One young man who became a frequent communicator was David Cattanach, who had died at the age of 18. He made many visits to the Leslie Flint sessions over a period of almost ten years and spoke to his mother there. I know her personally and she is someone I would describe as very astute, someone who would not easily be fooled, especially when it came to her son, and she had no doubts that she was hearing his voice. In his earlier contacts, he spoke mainly to her, giving brief messages of comfort, but also describing his surroundings. At first these were of a fairly material nature, although filled with a sense of peace and contentment. But each time he managed to come through there was a new strength in his voice and brightness in his personality, and there was even a sense of his surroundings changing. In one of the later sessions, when one of the group asked him what it was like on the other side, David addressed the whole gathering. He started by saying that he could not conjure up the words to even begin to describe how beautiful it was there and that he felt alive in a way that he never had before. He went on to talk about how he had progressed away from the material world. He said that he was in a state of luminosity and wasn't aware of having a body anymore—he still had some sort of vehicle, but it wasn’t so important. In his new state he could expand his knowledge just by encountering another spirit. Everything that they knew was shared and so each grew in awareness. His knowledge certainly seemed to be vast as he continued to talk about his understanding of the spirit world he had become a part of. He described levels of consciousness that were wonderful and open to all to discover; he described death as a great adventure that none of us should fear; he explained that all levels of life were interconnected and that our Earthly level was the darkest of all, that we were limited in our understanding because of our emotions and that it was important for us to expand our consciousness beyond our limited vision of ourselves. In the last part of his talk he spoke to his mother, telling her that no matter how he evolved, they would always be connected. For her, the most marvellous part of these encounters was hearing how her son had grown over the years.
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