Paul Davids, on how Forrest Ackerman continues to communicate after death |321|

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Paul Davids, on how Forrest Ackerman continues to communicate after death |321|
by Alex Tsakiris | Jul 5 | Consciousness Research

Writer and filmmaker Paul Davids has documented over 100 after death communications with Forrest Ackerman.

photo by: Paul Davids
To paraphrase an old saying, “some of us go seeking after-death communication, other have after-death communication thrust upon us.” That’s the experience of today’s guest, Paul Davids who’s had an amazing string of after-death communication experiences with a long-time friend and Hollywood monster movie legend Forrest Ackerman. Paul goes about trying to unravel this mystery by taking a scientific approach and carefully eliminating every possible explanation before concluding this is a case of genuine after-death communication. But as you’ll hear in this interview, Paul’s work also demonstrates the limits of the kind of research:

Alex Tsakiris: You can keep your iPhone and all of that, as long as you accept the fact that your dead relatives might be listening in to your conversations and your iPhone might pop-up with a weird message from angels. That is a very different kind of science than we’ve come to accept. If anything, it’s really more of a magical worldview.

Paul Davids: That magic that you’re talking about had never happened to me until these incidents started happening after Forry (Forrest Ackerman) died. For those who haven’t read An Atheist in Heaven, the first incident happened during the week of Forry’s tribute. There have been over 100 since then.
 
Although I've followed this case from the start, wrote an article about it here:
http://www.watkinsmagazine.com/sci-fi-pioneer-returns-from-the-afterlife
and have read the book, I still found Alex's take on it worth hearing.
I'm not sure that Paul fully appreciated Alex's deep point that if Forrey's statement about 'dropping a line' was truly a kind of unconscious premonition from an atheist, then how much of our lives are fixed in advance?
Or more probably, just how dumb are we because we can't get our heads around the true nature of time?
Some of the phenomenal events like the CAPTCHA code spelling out Ackerman000 are remarkable.
I did try to contact the designers of this software to try to establish the odds or possibility of this word being spelt out by a random device but couldn't find anyone to give me the answer. But it must surely be a chance of millions to one.
 
Alex's question at the end of the interview:

What would you like to see science (however you define that) do to improve our understanding of after death communication?
 
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What would you like to see science (however you define that) do to improve our understanding of after death communication?

I have to say, this interview drove me nuts. Alex invites someone onto the show who has written a book, but then doesn't really conduct the interview in such a way that the author can say something about its contents. The story about the ink, for example, was started, but then interrupted, and we never found out what the heck it was. Instead, it became a meta-discussion about psi/spirituality that we've heard many times before.

Meta-discussions are all very well, but I'd like to see them focussed around the specific evidence that the interviewee brings to the table, which I actually would like to hear. Maybe Alex wasn't aware of what he was doing: maybe he already had some inkling of the evidence, but I didn't and still don't.

Nothing personal, Alex: I'm very grateful for your podcasts, but please try to put yourself in the place of your listeners, who may not be privy to information that you have or that you don't consider that important or germane to where you want the discussion to go. Then your question would become more focussed rather than generic and I might be able to say something interesting and/or relevant.
 
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I have to say, this interview drove me nuts.
Have to agree. I was waiting for a case study of events, but only got a general overview making it impossible to validate the impressive claims. It sounded as though Davids wanted to sell his book and film and this was a taster, or it was so famous that details were unnecessary and I'd somehow missed them.

I was a huge fan of Famous Monsters magazine as a kid and had quite a collection - I wonder what happened to them?
 
I really enjoyed the interview and could relate to the notion that there are patterns to our lives which seem to be circular rather than linear. It is certainly true for myself. In my one NDE, which happened at about age23, I was shown the future pattern of my life.... I had a few more mountains to climb, but would finally settle in a peaceful country place. And I saw an image of the area where I now live. Also, when I would have an OBE, I would notice that time seemed to stretch. While it felt like an eternity, when I looked at the clock when I returned, only a few minutes had elapsed.
 
Speaking of future coincidences, I went on holiday many years ago with a friend whose brother had recently died. We decided to cut it short, neither of us was in the mood, and return on the train. I had film in the camera and to use the last frame, pointed it out of the carriage window and took a shot of "nothing" so I could rewind and develop it when I got back. A year later I found myself living in a new area many miles from home, a place of which I knew nothing but was convenient for my partner's new job. Fast forward a decade, long after I'd left the house and I was going through my prints. I couldn't work out why there was a picture of my old road at the end of a strip of negatives of a long past holiday, or where the viewpoint was, or why it was slightly blurry.

Then I realised it was the throwaway shot from the speeding train. What are the odds?
 
What would you like to see science (however you define that) do to improve our understanding of after death communication?

I have to say, this interview drove me nuts. Alex invites someone onto the show who has written a book, but then doesn't really conduct the interview in such a way that the author can say something about its contents. The story about the ink, for example, was started, but then interrupted, and we never found out what the heck it was. Instead, it became a meta-discussion about psi/spirituality that we've heard many times before.

Meta-discussions are all very well, but I'd like to see them focussed around the specific evidence that the interviewee brings to the table, which I actually would like to hear. Maybe Alex wasn't aware of what he was doing: maybe he already had some inkling of the evidence, but I didn't and still don't.

Nothing personal, Alex: I'm very grateful for your podcasts, but please try to put yourself in the place of your listeners, who may not be privy to information that you have or that you don't consider that important or germane to where you want the discussion to go. Then your question would become more focussed rather than generic and I might be able to say something interesting and/or relevant.

I had the impression (possibly mistaken) that Mr Davids didn't want to give too much away, and wanted people to buy the book for all the details.

Still... Proof of the afterlife, right there in Hollywood... who would have thought it.
 
I have to say, this interview drove me nuts. Alex invites someone onto the show who has written a book, but then doesn't really conduct the interview in such a way that the author can say something about its contents. The story about the ink, for example, was started, but then interrupted, and we never found out what the heck it was.
Because I knew the details it didn't bother me but I was aware that Alex seemed to be diverting Davids away from explaining the ink incident - possibly to save time and get to what he thought really mattered which was the meaning of phenomena rather than its detail.
For a summary of the main phenomenal events you can read my magazine review piece about the book which I linked to earlier. This one:
http://www.watkinsmagazine.com/sci-fi-pioneer-returns-from-the-afterlife
 
What would you like to see science (however you define that) do to improve our understanding of after death communication?

I have to say, this interview drove me nuts. Alex invites someone onto the show who has written a book, but then doesn't really conduct the interview in such a way that the author can say something about its contents. The story about the ink, for example, was started, but then interrupted, and we never found out what the heck it was. Instead, it became a meta-discussion about psi/spirituality that we've heard many times before.

Meta-discussions are all very well, but I'd like to see them focussed around the specific evidence that the interviewee brings to the table, which I actually would like to hear. Maybe Alex wasn't aware of what he was doing: maybe he already had some inkling of the evidence, but I didn't and still don't.

Nothing personal, Alex: I'm very grateful for your podcasts, but please try to put yourself in the place of your listeners, who may not be privy to information that you have or that you don't consider that important or germane to where you want the discussion to go. Then your question would become more focussed rather than generic and I might be able to say something interesting and/or relevant.

Mysterious Universe did a podcast with Paul David not so long ago. I haven't listened to Alex's interview and cannot comment, but MU addressed lots of examples of this communication, and I got the impression it was the rehash of the book. I expect a movie to follow.
 
Now I don't remember if I heard about this in Alex's interview or another one, but Paul Davids had a UFO sighting at his home in Pasadena, California, on February 25, 1987 that had a big impact on him. I looked it up and it's a pretty strong sighting:

“My daughter screamed at me: ‘Daddy, get upstairs! I see a flying saucer!’” Even by phone, it’s clear that Paul Davids is almost reliving the event. On February 25, 1987, the author, screenwriter and producer was at home in his office, hard at work on the script for what would become Starry Night – his whimsical fantasy film about Vincent van Gogh.

“My daughter was in her room on the second floor. My son was home. She was nine. He was six,” Davids recalls. Perhaps understandably, his daughter’s initial flying saucer alert was dismissed out of hand, Davids envisioning a Good Year Blimp sailing blandly over the valley – he was far too busy for blimps. His daughter became hysterical. “She said: ‘Daddy, get up here! I mean it! It’s a flying saucer, I mean it! Get up here right now!’ He did as he was told.

Before that day, Davids had not been a believer in UFOs. “It wasn’t until the moment that I set my eyes on it that I took anything seriously about this at all. But when I saw it, my reaction was ‘Oh, my God.’” Davids and his children stepped out onto the roof together, awestruck. “It was there,” he says, “descending from a high dramatic cloud. It approached us when we were out on the roof. And then it hovered above our two front trees out over the road in front of our house. It was at least the size of the cockpit of a helicopter.”

Disc-shaped? I ask. “Yes. Absolutely classic saucer. Very clear. It was sort of a dull grey, and it had a dome on top meeting like an upside-down plate. No portholes. It did not make a sound.” Davids and his children watched the object for several minutes and felt that whoever was piloting it was staring right back at them: “It seemed to be aware of us by its movements,” he explains. “It took a position in a little space between the leaves of the trees, but there was still eye contact. It seemed deliberate, and it hovered there.” The object came to within 500 feet of their position before it “swooped down” across the valley. “Then, in the blink of an eye it was gone... It just wasn’t there anymore.”

Fate had dealt Davids his hand. “That was how it started,” he says, “that day, at four o’clock, my life changed.”

http://www.theufochronicles.com/2013/09/roswell-and-beyond-interview-with.html
 
Great interview and discussion Alex

Seems to me we dont need time travel etc to rationally explain the stamps or the throwaway comment by Forry that he would drop Paul a line
Remember, Forry is still 'alive' in spirit and has access to all the events of his own lifetime and perhaps to Paul's too
So he could be using that knowledge to set up synchronicities etc

The fact that a spirit can interact with this dimension to a sufficient degree as to cause physical changes, especially in electronic systems,
suggests to me that stable contact with the spirit realm by scientific instrumental means may be possible
Whether that would be desirable is another matter

For some people it might not be. They may want to cling to traditional beliefs
Or they may prefer to live their human life au naturel....in the wild, as it were
We all return to the spirit realm anyway; whether or not we believe in it
Some souls may not want that knowledge interfering in the human life they are living

I agree with Paul when he says the changes in mindset happen over generational time
We have to be patient and continue doing our best to contribute to those changes
and Alex and Paul both do a whole lot more than most
Thank you both
 
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The fact that a spirit can interact with this dimension to a sufficient degree as to cause physical changes, especially in electronic systems,
suggests to me that stable contact with the spirit realm by scientific instrumental means may be possible
Whether that would be desirable is another matter
Then there might be the question of just who or what was 'on the other end of the line', so to speak. Notwithstanding religious or scientific objections on the grounds of belief systems, it seems to me that one would still need to exercise human judgement in assessing the merit or otherwise of any such communication - I doubt that it could ever be a purely mechanical process. Perhaps the best we could hope for would be some procedure, whether natural (such as meditation) or machine-assisted (for example by sounds or magnetic fields etc.) to facilitate contact via the human mind. Indeed I think both are already currently practised.
 
Then there might be the question of just who or what was 'on the other end of the line', so to speak. Notwithstanding religious or scientific objections on the grounds of belief systems, it seems to me that one would still need to exercise human judgement in assessing the merit or otherwise of any such communication - I doubt that it could ever be a purely mechanical process. Perhaps the best we could hope for would be some procedure, whether natural (such as meditation) or machine-assisted (for example by sounds or magnetic fields etc.) to facilitate contact via the human mind. Indeed I think both are already currently practised.

Yes, it could be the Devil on the other end of the line :)
We have to exercise judgement in all communications; with people in this world or any other world
If spirits can manipulate aspects of physical reality, such as magnetic fields, then instrumental communication would be possible
 
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