Disappointing

Coming from a deeply religious background, I had my own biases, beliefs and definitions about the world around me which solidified my concrete sense of identity.
My willingness to question myself and be wrong about everything turned my world upside down and I found myself searching for every scrap of information available on the afterlife, spiritual world, God, frequencies, the state of our existence, etc.
Fascination with the deep spiritual encounters, sense of hyper-reality, oneness with the universe, ego-death, and awareness of spectrums of reality beyond our typical conscious awareness or ability to perceive encountered with psychedelics led me down a rabbit trail of open-minded exploration,

I found myself studying the works of Bruce Greyson and Eben Alexander, looking for verifiable research on such phenomena as NDEs, OBE’s and other ‘different spectrum of reality’ phenomena. I also read the holographic universe, which had it’s biases but shared great research on quantum studies and the possibility of an implicate order.

I appreciated that Eben’s experience was personal, but that it was something with verifiable factors that the scientific method could be applied to. He noted that he saw himself as more of a scientist after his experience.

This brings me to this book, ‘the science of channeling,’ which I read because of Eben Alexander’s name attached to it. I’d hate to think that my 2 cents would hurt the reputation if any work of passion; but I found this book deeply biased and unscientific, and that not because of the topic it addresses.
The author counts herself a channeller and presents her own experiences often as evidence and confirmation of points. Her deep bias (which she acknowledges at the beginning of the book) prevents her from presenting the information in an impartial way and providing room for scepticism/ other interpretation of evidence. The ‘science’ upon which this is based is very iffy. Very few contrasting studies or viewpoints are presented, and many ‘psychic’ or ‘clair’ phenomena are just assumed to exist rather than information being provided to validate their reality. She says how studies show ‘higher chances’ of certain outcomes, but often doesnt state the actual statistics.

She bases a lot of the text on studies of anecdotal evidence of a bunch of self-proclaimed channellers, most of whom are older women. We all know susie, the spiritual lady who says she’s an empath but has trouble managing the most simple aspects of her life, so it would be great if you could apply some type of science to these channelers to validate their claims rather than assuming they are what they say they are. Nevertheless assumptions are made, all of these claims are believed without hesitation, and conclusions are drawn about channeling based on their feedback, and then validated by the authors own personal experience.

She ridicules scientific establishments for rejecting her work, but has shown in this work that she is unable to practice impartiality when it comes to matters of personal importance.

This book could be a fine ‘how to channel’ book
Or even ‘the insights of channellers’

But it does injustice to it’s given title. I think it is unfortunate that Eben is adding his name to such things and it is certainly not healthy for his scientific credibility.

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