Suspended animation occurs when the breath stops owing to paralysis of the breathing centre
(asphyxia), in myocardial infarctions, in injuries resulting from accidents (traumas), in poisoning and after convulsions, etc. As Jean-Baptiste Dala-court[7] says, everyone who recovers from suspended animation testifies that during their temporary stay in 'the other world' they retained consciousness of a quite different kind from their 'living' consciousness. The other world is perceived as timeless, as a world of oscillations, harmonies and colours, as a world in which countless consciousnesses communicate with each other, carry on conversations with each other and, although incorporeal and without sensory organs, can see other people and swap memories with them. Everyone who has come back from the 'other side' has found their abrupt return to the harsh cold facts of mortal life burdensome and repugnant. Everything was so infinitely more beautiful 'over there'.
Doctors say that such descriptions by resuscitated persons are irrelevant and worthless as statements about 'another world', because levels of consciousness continue to function in the brains of those in suspended animation and dredge up into their consciousness illusory pictures of a fairy-tale world from the deeper brain levels.
If the doctors are right, I find it a terrifying idea. There am I down below in my wooden box; insects and worms are thriving on my flesh and my deeper brain levels are still active. How unpleasant! Who knows how long they stay active? Until the moment when conscious energies have been converted?
Thank heaven that would happen more quickly with a genuine death than in cases of suspended animation.
But what about the conscious
energies of people who have been dead for many long years?
This phenomenon fascinated the critical parapsychologist Dr. Constantin Raudive, born in Latvia in
1909, who left his home as a young man and studied in Paris and Madrid, where his meeting with Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) became a decisive experience in his life. (Ortega advocated the anthropological theory that the 'spirit' forms the core of personality.)
Raudive spent four years checking Jurgenson's claims. He had an absolutely sound-proof recording studio built and worked with magnetized records which even cut out the minimal background noise of microphones and cartridges. In 1968 Raudive [9] published the results of his experiments, which had all taken place under scientifically controlled conditions. Hundreds of observers confirmed the accuracy of his methods, among them figures such as Professor Hans Bender, Director of the Institut fur Grenzwissenchaften, Freiburg, the physicist Dr. G. Ronicke, Julian Blieber, PhD, Dr. Arnold Reincke, Dr. Hans Naegeli, President of the Swiss Parapsychological Society, Professor Atis Teichmanis, Professor Werner Brunner, a surgeon from Zurich, Professor Alex Schneider, St. Gall, Professor Walter H. Uphoff, Boulder, U.S.A., Dr. Jule Eisenbund, Denver, U.S.A., Dr. Wilhelmine C.
Hennequin, specialist in an-aesthesia, Dr. R. Fatzer, Wadenswill, Switzerland, etc., etc.
Constantin Raudive recorded 72,000 voices! Alex Schneider, Professor of Physics at the Eidgenossischen Technischen Hochschule, Switzerland, said on the subject: Provisionally physics has no objections to make to the voice phenomena. At all events we shall be waiting tensely for the result of further investigations, as they will enlarge our knowledge of electromagnetic radiation.
Anyone can hunt down voices in his own home without great expense. This is the rough recipe. You choose a time and a room with as little external noise as possible. Alone or with others you pick up the microphone and call on dead persons (or 'spirits') to announce themselves. The tape should be running.
You wait and repeat your appeal to those on the other side in half a minute. You wait again. You should not keep this up for more than half an hour.
You rewind the tape and if you have made contact, you hear hastily spoken words in different languages. The scraps of language received are babbled so fast that at first you have to take a good deal of trouble to pick words and sentences out of the confused mixture of your own voice, room noises and interference. Sounds, words and fragments of sentences are often hissed and sometimes only whispered. They are spoken by different voices.
You should write down what you pick up, because only then can you recognize languages, dialects and logograms. You get the best results if you play identified voices on to a second tape and cut out waiting periods, background noise, etc. in the process. I should like to destroy the hope that you can under-stand communications from the voices en clair, as it were. There is a lot of turbulence in the ether! Aunt Emma's great-great-grandfather follows close on the heels of Nietzsche, and soon after that comes the voice of Caruso or a dead friend. A characteristic feature is that no one voice lets another finish what it is saying. They must be a garrulous lot in the other world, too.