Racism, Classism, And Other Problems In Paranormal Experiences

I've been citing Gregory Shushan's comments on some aspects of paranormal phenomena that don't get discussed much and don't fit well with a lot of popular interpretations of the paranormal. I'll conclude with this post, in which I'll briefly refer to a variety of other examples that people can read more about in Shushan's book.

He often refers to separations of people in the afterlife according to their race, social class, and such in contexts like near-death experiences and mediumship (The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], e.g., approximate Kindle location 1962). He writes of how it was "common" for there to be racism in mediumistic messages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2096). Leslie Flint, a medium, claimed that in the afterlife, "Oscar Wilde lives a life of 'delicious sin' which in Heaven is 'natural' (ibid. 34, 82, 91-3, 102, 108-10, 112)." (1962) Shushan writes:

Racism, classism, and religious intolerance are disturbing trends in the pre-1975 narratives. This has some important ramifications for those who wish to view the afterlife descriptions as genuine, for they indicate either that the next world is truly a systemized bigoted realm, or that the spirit communicators were portraying merely their personal intolerant mind-dependent afterlife. However, the latter possibility is inconsistent with the recurring claim by the spirits themselves that death brings about spiritual transformation….The other possibility is that the information conveyed by spirits was filtered through the mediums' minds and thus overlaid with the institutionalized bigotry of their times….

In any case, we are left with a somewhat obvious conundrum: communication difficulties cannot explain why statements about the afterlife and its denizens could not be clear, specific, accurate, and consistent while evidential information [verifying paranormality] allegedly could. (2086, 2237)

Shushan often refers to errors and apparent inconsistencies among the phenomena, even inconsistencies within the experiences of one individual. At one point, he refers to "yet another contradiction" from a well-evidenced medium (1910). That medium, Geraldine Cummins, "also credited her communicators with some frankly ludicrous statements, such as that there are monkeys in the sun, according to the spirit of Sir Walter Scott." (1879)