Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife Quotes
"I DON’T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts."
"Life as a comfortable, middle-class American ended two nights ago at Indira Gandhi International Airport."
"If Ian Stevenson thinks the transmigration of the soul is worth investigating, then perhaps there’s something afoot."
"The lanes are both the same. Whoever is slower pulls over."
"Rural India seems like a place where life is taken away too easily—accidents, childhood diseases, poverty, murder."
"In India, I’m finding, the answers do not always fit the questions."
"The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life."
"It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independently verifiable facts."
"How would the suddenly homeless soul get itself situated someplace new?"
"What happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale?"
"The notion is especially rickety when you consider that in many of Stevenson’s cases, the life recalled by the child is that of a close blood relative."
"If you are enough of a Hindu to view a falling rat as an auspicious event, are you too much of a Hindu to dismiss reincarnation—if indeed that is what the facts suggest you should do?"
"It is certainly possible that in among the reborn Veerpals and the long-lost Uncle Micks are true links and souls that have lived before."
"Macdougall weighed six patients in all, but only the first, the one described earlier, stands as a strong example of the phenomenon."
"Number 2 stopped breathing at 4:10 a.m., but the scale didn’t budge for another fifteen minutes."
"Number 3’s weight loss happened in two phases: a half-ounce loss at the moment of death, and then an additional loss of an entire ounce a few minutes later."
"The doctor makes several references to 'friction on the part of officials,' and states that only the first patient was run under ideal conditions, i.e., sans friction."
"PEGGY PEARL OVERSEES the Historical Collection of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where Franklin Fairbanks began manufacturing scales in 1830."
"MACDOUGALL SEEMED AWARE of his study’s weaknesses, and he encouraged others to try to extend and replicate his work."
"Not everyone in the soul-weighing business would agree with Macdougall there."
"Hardly ideal conditions for a test that requires concentration and enough quiet to listen for a heartbeat."
"If you can’t tell when the man died, you can’t very well claim that he lost a half ounce at the moment of death."
"In the end, Macdougall resorted to weighing some dogs on a scale he set up in his barn."
"My interpretation is that the mediums are just guessing, or the answer is biased by the medium’s own ideas of what the afterlife is like, or the questions don’t have enough emotional interest for the discarnate to give a strong answer."
"Yeah... but they’ve got their own clique going. They’ve got their own little deal going on."
"I don’t know if, like, she can and she chooses not to or what the deal is, but it’s like, no, not really."
"You own nothing, and you have no cares or obligations."
"The vigilant eye of the expert accountant and the driving energy of the strong executive have ample opportunity for exercise, the speaker said, although everything is on an altruistic basis…"
"Flowers do not fade. They melt and disappear."
"Stand back! All of you! I’ve got an Arthur Findlay box cutter!"
"I want to feel a presence, but mostly I just feel absence: of sound, of light, of the eerie effects I’d hoped for."
"You’re labeling," says Dr. Persinger. "Don’t label."
"About five years ago, for a period of several months, I would occasionally be awakened in the night by someone knocking loudly and insistently at either the front or the back door."
"I felt something get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall."
"It’s possible that the reason I’ve never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren’t wired for it."
"If your eyeball is dithering, the sides—the peripheral vision—are where it’s going to register."
"I think the experience is so ineffable that we just put whatever framework, whatever models and analogies we have, onto it."
"It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we come up with evidence that we do survive. I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we come up with evidence that we don’t."