„…I don’t think about convincing people or even converting them. I see my work mainly in passing on what I have researched. Those who are ready for it will believe me. And those who are not will want to argue with the most unbelievable reasoning and know-it-alls.“
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
This is dubious and yet only money-making!
There is a business model behind it.
The mourners are just having their money taken out of their pockets!
A study in which the participants have to pay something? Normally studies are free of charge and participants even get money.
I worked in applied research for many years, among others at the Fraunhofer Institute. All research projects are paid for out of state funds, because research costs money. Test persons and employees only receive money and a salary because they have applied to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with research proposals. Only when a research proposal has been accepted because it is a promising project the research funds do flow. Unfortunately, there is no pot of money for research into spirituality or the spiritual world, which means we have to finance our study ourselves. The two mediums from our EREAMS study do this full-time, that means they earn their living with the afterlife contacts. Offering the sittings for free would be tantamount to a loss of earnings. Would our critics be willing to give up their own salaries for their private research? Why do you think Biontech did not give away its vaccine for free? Research costs money. If someone were willing to give us research money, then the sittings would be free from now on.
I would also like to distance myself from the accusations of profiteering. Anyone who has ever written and published their own book knows that you certainly don’t get rich doing it. You have to be an idealist. By the way, Ms. Rode and Ms. Schlömer were already very well booked long before I published the EREAMS study, they would not have needed it at all. I have a lucrative job as a professor, but I risk my reputation and my professional career if I go public with such spiritual topics. I actually have 20 years of professional life (and secure salary) ahead of me. Does anyone really think I need to risk all this to earn a few dollars on the side? If it was about the money, I would have kept my mouth shut and continued with my professorship and software development, which is far more lucrative and, above all, safer.
By the way, I sacrificed my free time for my scientific work on the investigation of afterlife contacts as part of the EREAMS study, and I have a large family, animals, a house and a job. I could use my time in other ways. I haven’t seen a penny for my efforts in relation to the conduct of the study, I do it on a voluntary basis. I spent almost four years writing the study and my book, and if I add up what I might earn from it one day, I end up with an hourly wage in the cent range. Yet I and the two media are being accused of exploitation and dishonourable intentions, which is not fair and also completely inappropriate. The countless positive messages I have received since the publication of my book, in which grieving people thank me for my work, that they were able to experience comfort and healing, shows me that our path was not wrong.
How was it ensured that the medium did not research in advance (hotreading)?
Especially regarding my own story with Joma, I keep getting messages where people believe that the mediums might have researched me in advance, that, for example, a connection to my daughter and from there to Joma was made via my Facebook or Instagram account. At the time, I did not have a Facebook or Instagram account, my daughter is not on Facebook and her Instagram account was set to „private“. But even if not, should the medium have searched all the subscribed channels of all my daughters and relatives to see if there was anything noticeable about anyone? Joma, by the way, did not have an Instagram account and even if she did, should she have posted a photo on her account of her own accident? Such attempts at explanation and accusations are so bad that I am almost ashamed to comment on them here. Sometimes I wonder how naive and stupid people must think I am. By the way, I didn’t book an afterlife contact with the medium, but an aura reading, when I registered I only gave my phone number and my first name.
In my lectures I also always go into the topics of hot- and coldreading, there I explain that researchable information is worthless anyway. Something you can find somewhere in the social media is completely without value in an afterlife contact. That is why in our study we especially focused on highly specific evidence that the medium could not possibly have known (e.g. family secrets). The registration for a sitting was done through a portal, the participants often even registered with a false name or through a friend, the mediums sometimes give up to 16 sittings on a weekend and receive the name and time of the participant only one day before. How is the medium supposed to manage to prepare for each individual in such a short time by doing research? I am a scientist and I know what to do to rule out trickery. I have specialists at my side, we have evaluated 500 sittings and the results are clear. You can be sure that we did not approach the evaluation in a gullible, clumsy or naïve way.
That is not scientific, because otherwise the EREAMS study would have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, right?
What does peer review actually mean? If you want to publish your research results in a renowned journal, they have to be submitted to a small group of experts in the field (usually professors) for peer review. The aim is to convince the review team, gain scientific reputation and make the results accessible to the public. There are many areas where peer review works excellently; I myself have my own publications with peer review, I know the procedure. But peer review does not have a monopoly on knowledge. There are areas in our reality where we cannot reach with our current science (e.g. love or transforming science). Just because something is published in a peer reviewed journal does not mean that it is the truth, it just means that the findings presented fit the scientific paradigm. In 2010, for example, 24 scientists led by Craig Venter published an article in the renowned journal Science claiming that artificial life had been created, which later turned out to be completely false and exaggerated. Nevertheless, this paper was accepted as part of a peer review.
Peer review only makes sense if the study fits into the reviewers‘ world view. What are the chances that I would be successful with six materialistic reviewers with my study on otherworldly contacts, that would bring down the materialistic worldview.? That would mean that these experts would have to give up their own worldview, which will not happen under any circumstances. Peer review is great, but only as long as you fit into the existing paradigm. Unconventional thinkers and revolutionaries don’t stand a chance. In my opinion, peer review is only necessary if the topic can only be understood by experts in the field. For example, if you publish something in the field of quantum mechanical processes, you need specialists to be able to assess the content. But the EREAMS study is so simply structured that anyone can understand it without prior or specialist knowledge. Very simple questions are asked, e.g. about clear evidence or perceived comfort. There is nothing really complicated about it, so I cordially invite every single person in the world to be their own expert and simply make up their own mind. I am completely transparent about our study design and methodology and everyone is free to decide for themselves whether our procedures and conclusions are comprehensible and coherent.
Even if the EREAMS study was in a journal, who could I reach with it? In July 2018, a positive peer-reviewed study on psi abilities was published for the first time in the American Psychologist, one of the most prestigious psychology journals in the world (Cardeña, Etzel: The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena. A Review. American Psychologist 73. Juli 2018, S. 663–677). This official journal of the American Psychological Association is highly respected. Yet no one in the public noticed, this news should have been on the front page of every daily newspaper, but it was deliberately kept small. I also believe that most people would not even know how to obtain such a journal. By the way, not only my book costs money, journals cost money too! After all, I want to reach people who are in deepest grief. Other scientists and their judgements do not interest me. I do not strive for reputation, otherwise I would certainly not go public with something like this. The quality of a study in the field of spirituality cannot be linked to a peer review process and which renowned experts in the field of afterlife contacts should there be in the world? I have no other option than to describe my research and methodology transparently and publish it through my own channels (books, articles, YouTube, lectures).
The results of the study cannot be falsified. Where is the information on significances, hypotheses and p-value?
The people I really want to reach with my book don’t know much about hypothesis testing and dry statistics. That’s why I decided not to go into the details that scientists might want to see in my book. It was more important to me to present the results in a way that is comprehensible to everyone. Nevertheless, I have also set up hypotheses in the background and tested them by means of a hypothesis test (χ2-adaptation test). For this purpose, I formulate a null hypothesis (H0) that represents the current, materialistic and customary view of such sitting conversations, excluding all supernatural explanations. The null hypothesis generally states that no effect or desired relationship is apparent. I also formulate the alternative hypothesis (H1), which describes an effect that differs from the null hypothesis. It assumes telepathic communication between medium and deceased or between medium and sitter. For the null hypothesis, I then determine which results we would most likely have to expect, after which I compare the expected with the determined results. The aim is to reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis based on the measured values.
Details on the hypothesis test
Before I check the values for significance using the χ2-adjustment test, I would like to briefly explain the concept of statistical significance. The result of an investigation is considered significant precisely when the probability that it is a purely random result does not exceed a certain threshold value. A common threshold value for this in science is the significance level α=5%. So if we had 100 participants in our study, this would mean that from a statistical point of view there would be a significant result in five of them, although in reality this is not true (because e.g. chance helped). The smaller the significance level α is chosen, the more unambiguous the results must be in order to be allowed to reject the null hypothesis. A small α-value is therefore a quality criterion for the quality of the results. I have decided to set the significance level α for this hypothesis test on the highly specific evidence to a value of 0.1%, with which we even exceed the usual level of scientific studies by far. For the calculation of the so-called empirical χ2-value, we obtain a value of 1,734.675 for our data. If this value now lies above the associated threshold value from the χ2– distribution, the result is considered highly significant. This is absolutely the case with our data, we lie with our empirical χ2-value with a significance level α=0.1% clearly above the threshold value from the χ2-distribution of 16.266.
Of course, the working hypothesis could also have been falsified in our study. If the expected values had been confirmed or even developed in the direction of „no highly specific evidence“, the null hypothesis should not have been rejected.
There is no objective verification at all, all findings of the study are purely subjective.
Subjective experiences or subjective verification are based on one’s own feelings and offer a wide scope for interpretation. Personal feelings and individual perceptions are definitely not useful criteria for validity. But through the study design in our EREAMS study, we leave this area of subjective perception, as it is not about sensations, but about clearly physically verifiable facts from the messages passed through. The following example makes it clear that we have left the level of subjectivity:
„The medium told me that my son was going to show her his funeral. His favourite teacher was also there and he was wearing an orange jacket.“
There were about 500 people at the funeral and the parents did not know who their son’s favourite teacher was. They asked the classmates about the favourite teacher. Then they asked the favourite teacher about the clothes he wore to the funeral. He replied, „I wore an orange jacket.“
In order to get the needed information about the favourite teacher and the orange jacket, other people not involved in the mourning process had to be interviewed, who finally confirmed the highly specific information about the favourite teacher and the colour of his jacket. In my opinion, the quality of such messages meets all the criteria for objective verification.
This can all be explained by cold reading, testimonial and witness psychology and memory research.
Cold-reading is the term used to describe techniques used to obtain information about a stranger unnoticed during a conversation in order to give the impression that the information was obtained through extrasensory means. For this purpose, assessments of appearance, jewellery, clothing, age, gender, etc., but also non-verbal communication and linguistic expression are used. Well-known techniques are, for example, the Barnum Effect, Shot-Gunning or Rainbow Ruse, in my lectures I present these strategies in detail. In my interviews but also in my book I describe examples of highly specific evidence that neither the medium nor the sitter knew about and could verify at the time of the sitting (e.g. the two equestrian tournaments won by Joma). Sceptics seriously believe that such messages can be explained by cold reading or psychological procedures. I am very curious about this explanation. With the techniques mentioned, it is NEVER possible to even begin to justify highly specific information and information that can only be verified later.
Whoever goes to a medium believes in it anyway. It’s clear that such results come about.
In my book I explain in detail why this is not true. In brief, I would like to tell you about participants who did not believe in the survival of souls at all, i.e. absolute sceptics. There are various reasons why a sceptic goes to a medium, for example, a man had to promise his dying wife that he would go to a medium after her death. He said he didn’t believe in it at all, but out of love for his wife he went to a medium anyway. Not only him, but ALL the other hardcore sceptics were absolutely convinced in the end, they gave the best values and best messages in the questionnaire. That is, the biggest sceptics left the best ratings, whereas those who were already convinced were often a little disappointed, because they came with too high expectations. A sceptic has no expectations and this is often very helpful for a wonderful afterlife contact. We were able to show in our study that it has no influence on the result how much one was already convinced beforehand. The only decisive factor is the quality of the messages and the highly specific evidence. Moreover, how should one’s own positive attitude and „belief in a medium“ be able to explain evidence that can only be verified afterwards?
Our psychological psychotherapist Kathrin Stephan has been caring for grieving people for over 20 years, our mediums have given over 10,000 sittings, also from my own experience I can only tell you, there is no one more critical than orphaned parents. Do you think these people suddenly become naive and stupid and so gullible out of a longing that every cheap comforting phrase is taken as proof? These people don’t want to deceive themselves, they want to find the truth more than anyone else. I’m sorry, but anyone who says otherwise cannot have been in the forefront of dealing with these people. By the way, in our study we made a precise distinction between those who were already convinced beforehand, those who thought it was possible, those who were sceptical, those who came only out of curiosity, etc. All these things had no influence on the outcome of the sitting and the highly specific evidence. 71 sceptics took part in the study and 83% of this group said that they had received highly specific evidence that the medium could not possibly have known, another 14% said „rather yes“, none said „rather no“ and only two persons said „no“, there was no such evidence.
If consciousness is primary and exists independently of the brain, where is it in coma or general anaesthesia?
Well, when one is in deep sleep, in a coma or under general anaesthesia, one is still alive, i.e. our consciousness exists in symbiosis with the physical body. As long as we are alive, our consciousness is firmly connected to our body (keyword silver cord). Thus, our waking consciousness makes up only 5% of our actual consciousness. Most of the information lies in the depths of the unconscious or subconscious, so to speak. If we do not equate consciousness with the soul, then we can gain a better understanding of it through the various soul bodies. Even in anaesthesia, the subconscious remains active. Consciousness does not sleep. This also explains, for example, why some people can see themselves from the outside while lying on the operating table in an anaesthetised state. The astral soul body, which contains thoughts, emotions and the blueprint of the physique, is about 30 cm outside the body. This is also where, for example, the decision takes place as to whether this information can/may not enter the waking consciousness. Interestingly, in hypnosis sessions these experiences can actually be recalled, although they were not remembered in everyday (waking) consciousness. A physical restriction definitely also has an effect on consciousness. Only when the body has died does the bond between the physical and the soul dissolve. However, there are also many reports of people (e.g. by Dr Eben Alexander) who were in a coma and were absolutely conscious. Just because you can’t remember anything after an anaesthetic, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that you were really unconscious during it. In the end, it is always about learning and soul growth, but if everyone who was under anaesthesia became aware of their immortal soul, then these would be experiences that this person is not necessarily supposed to have, because they may not be part of their life plan.
I have a problem with the fact that we, from a dimension of purest love, have to come here to learn suffering so that we can enjoy love all the more?
From a human point of view, I also have my problems with that. If it were up to me, I could do without all the bad experiences, but the soul obviously looks at life from the spiritual world with different standards. The idea of good and evil, care and cruelty and all other dualities is a purely human construct. In the spiritual world, non-duality prevails, i.e. what we humans perceive as good or as terrible is of equal value from a spiritual point of view. I explain this in my book. I don’t claim to have an answer to everything, often our human mind will not be sufficient to understand why some things are so. But in the end, in my opinion, it always has to do with the fact that we gain experiences here that we cannot acquire on a spiritual level in this way, but which are obviously desirable for a soul.
Everyone who is in contact with the spiritual spheres feels love, but our life circumstances or fates can lead us into tribulation and separate us from the spiritual planes. Not everyone is granted to become „enlightened“ or to receive a connection to higher spiritual levels, perhaps the person has written on the life plan to experience what it is like to live in absolute isolation or without friends, family and love. It’s not about making everyone happy and always getting a happy ending, that’s a typical human view. It is about experiences and soul growth, and it is not always about one’s own soul, sometimes souls agree to be victims or perpetrators to help another soul have the respective experiences.
What happens to such bad souls as Hitler or other mass murderers?
I am actually asked this question very often. I already gave an answer to it for the most part in the previous question. I think it is also decisive which actions in a person’s life arose from his free will and which actions were firmly on his life plan. Things that were planned in the life plan happen in consultation with the souls involved, and these can also be bad things from a human point of view (e.g. murder). These deeds are not held against a soul. However, if a person acts according to his free will, i.e. he would have had a choice and decides to do bad things, then he will have to reflect on these deeds in the context of a life review and also experience them from the perspective of the victims in order to learn. There is no punishment from my point of view, the biggest punishment is that you also live through these situations from the other perspective and feel ashamed of it. I recommend a recorded live talk on this topic with the medium Bettina Suvi Rode as a guest of Imke Hausner: Good Souls – Bad People? A live talk with Bettina Suvi Rode (German Language).
Open patterns
I received a message from a sceptic who took up the example with the two number ones from my otherworldly contact with Joma. He called it an open pattern. This pattern offers so much room for manoeuvre that I could simply interpret things into it that suited me. For example, the two ones could also have stood for the telephone provider „1 and 1“.
Well, the two single number ones were shown to the medium immediately after the riding and when Joma’s mother then confirms that she won first place twice in an equastrian tournament shortly before her accident, then I find this far more plausible than that the two ones were randomly inserted into the session by the medium as an open pattern in the hope that I would then interpret something suitable into it. We also have a wealth of other examples that speak quite clearly against this attempted explanation. Example:
„The medium told me that my son was going to show her his funeral. His favourite teacher was also there and he was wearing an orange jacket.“
There were about 500 people at the funeral and the parents did not know who their son’s favourite teacher was. They asked the classmates about the favourite teacher. After finding out, they asked the favourite teacher about the clothes he wore to the funeral. He replied, „I wore an orange jacket.“
The information about the favourite teacher and the orange jacket was so highly specific that it definitely could not be an open pattern.
A medium does not communicate with the deceased, but with a kind of spiritual database.
The claim that the information comes from an information field or a spiritual database is also discussed in my book; Thomas Campbell, for example, also claims this. But anyone who has ever been in contact with the soul of a deceased person, as I have, will never consider a dead database as a source of information. A sitting is not only characterised by the quality of the information in the messages, the greatest and most important thing in such a contact is the love between the bereaved and the deceased. No database in the world is capable of storing such love, for what reason would a database do such a thing? And if a database were able to store love and feelings, then it would be alive and a database is not alive. Love is not information! Love only exists, when counsciousness is alive. Also, as a medium, you perceive that you are being touched on the body. Why would a database do that?
The deceased still have their own wishes and needs, which they also communicate to the medium, it is not only data from the past and the life of the deceased that is reproduced, but also current and future things from the life of the bereaved. Why should a database be interested in continuing to accompany a bereaved person? What sense should love have if it ends up in a database?
A sitting is not only characterised by the pure transfer of information, but rather by the indescribably deep love that comes with such a contact. Many clients even report having actually felt their deceased during the sitting with goose bumps or touches. Databases or information fields cannot do such a thing, nor can they simply filter out of themselves exactly THE appropriate events and facts from the hypothetical billions of records of the deceased’s entire life and transmit them by push message, which a survivor would then find to be an evident proof. This requires consciousness and intelligence. The only permissible, logical and also obvious conclusion is that this information must obviously have come from the deceased from the spiritual world, because no one else but the deceased himself can know these facts, and no one else can filter out and name exactly THE crucial information and no one else can have such a great interest in presenting this evidence.
Why should there be an infinite love between souls if all that remains in the end is information? No, it cannot be a database, love is not information!
A medium does not communicate with the deceased, but with demons or with evil spirits.
Why would an evil spirit or demon do that? Why would he help and comfort the bereaved? What interest could such an evil spirit or demon have in this? Imagine that in your human life here on earth you receive a letter from your mother. This letter clearly shows your mother’s handwriting, the letter smells of her perfume. She writes that she loves you and she tells you about common experiences that only she and you know about, she even tells you about family secrets that you can only partially confirm through further research with other relatives. It is obvious that this letter actually comes from your mother. Who else would be interested in sending you such a letter? Of course, the letter could also be forged, after all, it could have been sent by anyone in the world who investigated your mother’s life and soul with detective-like meticulousness and, on top of that, was excellent at deceiving the handwriting. If you like, you can believe that, but I prefer to stick to the obvious, because why would someone go to all this trouble to deceive the surviving relatives and then get nothing in return? Who has the greatest interest in being recognised? Who has the greatest interest in proving themselves so that the bereaved can experience comfort and healing? And who, among the countless aspects of a human life, knows exactly those that could then be presented as clear evidence for the bereaved? It is the only permissible and also obvious conclusion that the deceased himself must be the source of this information. By the way, a sitting is not only characterised by the quality of the information in the messages, the greatest and most important thing in such a contact is the love between the bereaved and the deceased. Anyone who, like me, has only once experienced this indescribable connection full of love with the consciousness of a deceased person would never consider an evil spirit or demon as the source. In my perception, evil spirits and demons are the products of human patterns and energies as well as of some religions.
„I have never heard of a medium say that a spirit contact cannot be made with a deceased person because they have just reincarnated and are now living on earth.“
I also explain this in my book, here is the short form. One must not equate the incarnated soul of a person with his total soul, which always remains in the spiritual world. It is never the whole soul that incarnates, but always only aspects of it. The Arthur Findlay College explains this very beautifully with a model of bread dough and recently Pascal Voggenhuber published a video with billiard balls about this topic. When a person dies, his soul returns to his total or oversoul and merges with it. The aspects that made up this person will never again incarnate in the same constellation, they remain eternally in the total soul in the spiritual world. Therefore, this individual can also always emerge from the total soul again during an afterlife contact and communicate with a medium. When the total soul decides to incarnate again, other, new aspects of the total soul are selected and a new individual soul emerges as part of the total soul. This new soul always has a connection to its total soul and thus also has access to emotions and memories from previous incarnations.
The media Nina Herzberg and Bettina Suvi Rode have colluded.
I can assure you with absolute guarantee that Nina Herzberg and Bettina Suvi Rode do not know each other and certainly do not cooperate with each other. How could one imagine that in practice? Nina only knew my telephone number and my first name, did she then simply contact all the media in Germany on the off chance and inform them about what she had told me, so that in the case that I actually went to a second medium, they could then tell me the same story? Nina and Bettina were already full to the brim with clients, seminars, trainings etc. already before this video and my book. They certainly have better things to do than to follow up on every client and bombard colleagues with information. In the interview with Mr. Huemer I tell about an advertising e-mail for a reincarnation seminar, although I don’t remember exactly whether it was actually an e-mail, a newsletter or an advertisement on a website. For months I googled spiritual topics on the internet, I visited hundreds of websites on these topics, I contacted people via forms. How quickly one has signed up (even unintentionally) for a newsletter, whoever uses certain search terms on Google will sooner or later get suitable advertisements. So I certainly didn’t fall for a scam. But even if it were, the story with Nina and Bettina and the exact same message has absolutely nothing to do with my EREAMS study. The scientific evidence for afterlife contacts was not provided by my personal experience with the two mediums, but by the 500 participants in the study about highly specific messages, some of which could only be verified afterwards.
Statements on quantum mechanics regarding matter, space and time are just esoteric gibberish!
Some people criticise that the topics about matter and quantum mechanics do not fit into the overall concept of my argumentations, that even wrong interpretations have been made. In particular, the statements that „matter is not material“ and that quantum mechanics has shown that „neither space nor time exist“ were denounced. The sentence „matter is not material“ did not originally come from me at all, but was coined by none other than Hans-Peter Dürr, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and long-time companion of Werner Heisenberg. Harald Lesch and Josef Gaßner also mentioned chapter 2.3 „Mass – matter is not made of matter“ in their book Big Bang, Universe and Life. I am obviously not alone in my view and am in very good company. Last but not least, Einstein’s formula e = mc2 shows us that energy is the same as mass. A few years ago, the Higgs field was detected in the particle accelerator in Cern/Switzerland. This was one of the greatest milestones in research in recent years. This is a force field that is equally effective throughout the whole universe. Calculations have shown that the Higgs field in interaction with the gluons and up and down quarks in the protons and neutrons means that these particles must be massless. This means that the entire mass of an atom consists solely of motion- and binding-energy. Therefore, it is not nonsense, but fact: We are 100 % pure energy!
I cannot at all share the view that quantum mechanical experiments cannot be fully explained and that I would therefore rather have left out my discussion of them. It is precisely where there is still new knowledge to be discovered, where there are inexplicable phenomena, that one must take a special look and not look away, as is demanded. My interpretations of the double-slit experiment and the entanglement of photons in the quantum eraser are not „esoteric gibberish“, but a serious and scientific examination of this subject. These experiments show clearly and without doubt that our understanding of space and time is reduced to absurdity. We may not understand why it is so, but it is fact and experimentally proven that there is a reality in which space and time as we know them do not exist.