Disclaimer: I'm going to write as if the events in the book really happened. I'm not saying that I believe they really happened, or that I disbelieve them. I'm being neutral here. I'm writing as if the events really happened because it's easier to write that way than to throw scare quotes around everything.
So, the premise of this book is that the author, Joe Fisher, became deeply involved in spiritism. Spiritism, loosely speaking, is a body of practices that arose in the 19th century related to contacting spirits. Spiritism involves the use of things like Ouija boards, cards, mediums, and so on.
(One thing I found very interesting was the fact that spiritism became popular around the same time that Romanticism became a formidable component of Western art. Spiritism, from that perspective, is a reaction against the Enlightenment. You could see it as the collective psyche reassuring itself of the existence of an afterlife, or of "other planes" that were not beholden to the eye of Enlightenment rationalism. For my part, I don't see this as a bad thing, so much as unnecessary. We found out during the 20th century that much of this world is not readily quantifiable, with the failure of the social sciences.)
The primary mode of contact with spirits in this text is the use of a medium. A medium is a person who enters a trance state and allows a spirit to speak through them. The author is adamant that he really spoke with discarnate entities, speaking through mediums. So far as I can tell from a quick websearch, Joe Fisher did not suffer from any major mental illness. He appeared to be quite sane, although he did eventually commit suicide. Plenty of sane people kill themselves, however.
That being said, the author entertains several possibilities. Fisher does retain a certain amount of skepticism, to his credit. He asks if the discarnate spirit guides could be simply the mediums putting on a persona. He dismisses this possibility. He also asks if perhaps the spirit guides could be parts of the mediums' subconscious minds. He dismisses this possibility as well. He claims that the guides must truly be discarnate entities (that is, entities lacking physical bodies) because they gave him information that the mediums would have no way of knowing. The reader may review the text and judge this for themselves. For my part, I'm not totally convinced. A well-read person could have known much of what the spirit guides related to Fisher. On the other hand, while it wasn't impossible for the mediums to know all the things that the guides spoke through them, it certainly does seem unlikely.
This points to a thorny issue with the paranormal, which is the standard of evidence. What counts as evidence, and what counts as proof? I distinguish "evidence" from "proof" like this: if you were in the same room as a person who was murdered at the time they were killed, then that's (indirect) evidence that you killed them. We know you were there. But if I see you stab them with my own eyes, then that's proof. Evidence makes it more likely that something is true. Proof compels you to believe that it's true.
If a spirit guide speaks through a medium, and the spirit guide can speak Greek, but the medium can't speak Greek, then is that evidence of the existence of a spirit guide? Is that evidence that the spirit is real? A true believer will say that it not only counts as evidence, but as downright proof. But a die-hard skeptic would say no. The skeptic would say that the medium may secretly know Greek. And since the medium might know Greek, we must assume that they actually do. The fact that the spirit spoke Greek doesn't prove anything. In fact, it's not even evidence.
The true believer could argue that the skeptic is rejecting the paranormal a priori, which skews the skeptic's standard of evidence. The true believer would assert that, unless we have reason to think that the medium is lying about knowing Greek, we must assume that they're telling the truth. If there is no evidence that the medium knows Greek, then we must assume a spirit was speaking Greek through them. The skeptic could reply, paraphrasing Carl Sagan, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The true believer could assert that speaking Greek out of nowhere is extraordinary evidence. The skeptic could say it's not extraordinary enough, and demand levitation or prediction of tomorrow's winning lottery numbers.
(The reveals the subjective underbelly of such discussions: how "extraordinary" does it have to be?)
Me? Well, if my hypothetical friend took up channeling, and began to speak Greek out of nowhere, I would be astonished. I wouldn't uncritically assume it was a spirit. On the other hand... What if a skeptic came to me and said, "Your friend was just lying. Really, he's been studying Greek for years. He'd been hiding it this whole time". I don't know if I would buy that, either. I suppose I would count this as evidence (although not proof) of the existence of spirits and the reality of mediumship.
This book is quite tragic, and not only because the author committed suicide. During the course of his paranormal investigations, the author falls in love with the spirit of a deceased Greek woman named Filipa. He falls deeply in love with her, to the point of obsession, and a large part of the book consists of Fisher running around Greece, looking for evidence that Filipa existed. In the end, he concludes that Filipa was lying the whole time. She's a real spirit, but she was lying about being a deceased Greek woman who was deeply in love with him. It's similar to the stories you hear about men falling in love with anime girls or literary characters. Just sad to read about.
Ultimately, Fisher concludes that the spirit guides are real spirits, but not benevolent ones. Instead, they're a metaphysical scam, an attempt by either demons or ghosts of humans to deceive, mislead, and destroy the living to satisfy their own malice. It's a sad story all around, because the author seems to have dedicated years of his life to investigating this sort of thing. It leads me to ask what his motivations were, and what drove him to spend so much time on the paranormal.
A determined skeptic can poke holes in much of what Fisher reports, but the book is at least useful as a mental exercise. It made me think deeply about what I believe and why. I'm accustomed to dismissing this sort of thing as hogwash, but the book was at least persuasive enough to make me throw brackets on my skepticism and ask me why I thought that way. To that end, I can definitely recommend to this anyone interested in the subject.
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