Crossing Over Read online

  But beneath all that respectability was a maverick waiting to break out. In the early 1980s, Gary became captivated by the research of a British biologist named Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake had come up with something called Morphogenic Resonance Hypothesis. Boiled down, it’s all about how he thinks memory is stored in the universe. As his theory goes, anytime any form comes into existence—even words that are spoken—it leaves an imprint and joins the imprints of everything that has come before. And all of it becomes easier to create in the future because it’s already there. Pretty far-out stuff, even for a professor of biofeedback.

  Gary spent the next few years conducting experiments to test Sheldrake’s theory. One of them explored how language evolves, and hypothesized that words repeated over and over through the centuries have an energy that becomes part of the universe’s stored memory. Gary got a prestigious award for his work in 1986, which made the pages of Time magazine. But Ivy League academics being what they are, some of his fellow professors were less appreciative of his ingenuity than others. “Some of my colleagues at Yale thought it was terribly creative,” he says, “and the other ones thought it was just terrible.” And that’s how Gary wound up in the desert. He loved the Southwest, but more important, he found the University of Arizona a more welcoming place for independent thinkers such as himself. He moved there in 1988, and since then, the university has created an internationally known Center for Consciousness Studies and a program in integrative medicine run by mind-body health guru Dr. Andrew Weil. They even gave Gary his own fancy-sounding lab. He named it the Human Systems Energy Laboratory.

  That’s Gary’s baby. He and his colleagues began doing research in mind-body medicine, “energy medicine,” and, eventually, the thing that really got his juices flowing: “spiritual medicine”—research into the possibility that there is survival of consciousness after physical death. “When people ask what I do, I say we work in three controversial areas,” Gary says. “One is merely controversial; the second is very controversial. And the third is super-controversial.” Survival of consciousness is not an issue considered by many serious scientists, but it’s one Gary has been thinking about for nearly twenty years. He actually wanted to try to figure out the answer—and prove it scientifically.

  Back at Yale in the early ’80s, Gary had begun ruminating on the whole idea of universal memory—the theory that everything is alive, eternal, and evolving. He had theorized that anytime two things share energy and information, they become a “feedback system.” Whether it’s the hydrogen and oxygen that make up water, two strands of DNA, two heart cells, two people, the earth and the moon—these “systems” are exchanging information and energy that becomes a permanent part of the universe. It accumulates over time and turns into memory. To Gary, this theory predicts everything from cell memory—for instance, the confirmed cases of heart-transplant recipients experiencing personality changes that match their donors—to near-death, out-of-body experiences, and ultimately, the survival of consciousness after death. The essence of the theory is that there’s no such thing as true death—of anything. Only transition.

  “This would be terribly controversial, to put it mildly,” Gary says. “So I didn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. In fact, I didn’t tell anybody about it.” He wasn’t even sure if he believed it himself. It was an elegant theory, but it didn’t fit with the assumption he’d grown up with: that death is The End. He wasn’t sure he would ever take this idea out of its box in the basement. At least not as long as he wanted to keep his career. And then this private, purely professional interest converged with something very personal.

  In 1993, Gary went to a conference and found his soulmate. Her name was Linda Russek, and she was a fellow psychologist, living in Boca Raton, Florida. A few weeks later, Gary went to Florida to visit Linda. Gary recalled that at four in the morning as she drove him to the airport, she asked him a question that nobody had ever asked him before. She said, “Gary, do you believe in the possibility of survival of consciousness after death?” The reason she was asking was that her father had died three years earlier. “Do you believe that my father can still be here?”

  Linda’s father had been a very well-known cardiologist—he had run the annual meetings of the American College of Cardiologists for twenty-three years, published two hundred papers, and edited seven books. And he did clinical work with his daughter. “Linda had a very, very close relationship with her father,” Gary says. “When he died in 1990, Linda went on a scientific and metaphysical quest to see if she could prove whether he was still here.”

  When Linda asked Gary if he believed this could be possible, he asked her if it mattered what he thought. “Yes,” she said, “because you’re a serious scientist. And if you believe it, then you have to have a reason, and probably a good one.” Gary told Linda that it so happened that he had thought about this a lot, but for reasons of self-preservation had kept it to himself. “I don’t know if my logic is correct,” he said, speaking these words to a colleague for the very first time. “I don’t know if nature works this way. But based on what I know about physics, chemistry, and biology, I think it’s very plausible that survival of consciousness can exist.” Linda wanted to know more. Gary promised that when he came back in a couple of weeks, he would tell her the whole story.

  Part of the reason Gary didn’t tell anyone about his theory was that he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. He could imagine people’s reactions, because he was coming from the same place. “The way I was raised, there was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and life after death. It was a fantasy, it was stupid. I was raised to believe ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My parents both died when I was at Yale in the 1980s. I never thought twice about whether their ‘soul’ would continue. Even though the theory says it would. So as a scientist, the theory led me to believe it was plausible. As a person, I was educated to believe it was impossible. So I guess I was an agnostic. I didn’t know.”

  When Gary went back to Boca Raton two weeks later and explained his theory, Linda got all excited. But on this she wasn’t exactly a dispassionate researcher. She wanted to believe. She told Gary he had to start working on this—it was too important to hide away like some horrible family secret, simply out of professional trepidation. Linda was like a lot of people in her need to know what had really become of her dad, and to stay connected. But the scientific investigator in her wasn’t content to hope he was still around, or even to see if she could connect with him herself, or through a medium. She wanted Gary to change the focus of his work. In essence, she wanted him to scientifically prove to her that her father had not disappeared from the universe. And she would help him.

  “So put yourself in my shoes,” Gary says. “You’ve just met this very special person who’s asking you to do research in an area you know is very controversial. You’ve never done any work on it. You know your colleagues would prefer you do this research somewhere else, preferably on another planet. She says, ‘Gary, you’ve got to help me.’ ” Gary didn’t only fall in love with Linda. “I fell in love with Linda’s love for her father. And her dream to know scientifically one way or the other if her father was still here. So I looked in her eyes and I said, ‘Okay, Linda, I’ll help you, but under one condition: We don’t tell anyone.’”

  Linda moved to Arizona, and over the next few years, they began quietly exploring the big question. Gary recorded Linda’s brain waves while she tried to contact her father. He put special high-frequency microphones around her, capable of recording sounds that vibrate four times higher than anything the human ear can hear. “To see if there was anything in a high-frequency range that might occur when a deceased person was in the area.” No wonder he made Linda promise they wouldn’t talk about it with anyone. As a scientist, Gary feels uncomfortable talking about these early, informal experiments, but says they were “suggestive enough to lead us to continue.”

  In 1995, Gary and Linda met a woman named Susy Smith, a prolific writer of books about par
apsychology and the creator of a foundation for survival-of-consciousness research. She is said to have had a forty-year connection to her deceased mother. Then Gary and Linda met their first medium, Laurie Campbell, a homemaker from Irvine, California, who volunteered to participate in their research. Gary and Linda were also finishing a book, The Living Energy Universe. They were finally coming above ground.

  One day in late 1998, Gary got a call from Lisa Jackson in New York. She told him she was working on a documentary for HBO called “Life After Life,” and that it was going to be a serious examination of spirit communication. Gary is no fool. The only thing that had held back his research in survival of consciousness was money. The National Institutes of Health were not going to be writing him a check anytime soon so he could do experiments with people who talk to dead people. To get funding to research that, you’d pretty much have to be a psychiatrist studying schizophrenia. So Gary saw an opportunity. If you’re really interested in the science of spirit communication, he told Lisa Jackson, if you really want to do something serious and special, then you should fund what would be the first-ever laboratory investigation of psychic mediumship. All we would need are the mediums. Lisa’s response: What if I could deliver the top mediums to your lab?

  When I called Gary Schwartz, I expected a short conversation that would most likely be followed by a call to Lisa politely declining her invitation to participate. If his proposed dead-or-alive test was any indication, he was probably a little too academic for my tastes. And I wasn’t sure he wasn’t just out to discredit us—although, why would he bother? That wouldn’t exactly be seen as bold, ground-breaking work. But what happened was that we wound up spending two hours on the phone, in a very intense discussion and debate about the afterlife, our connection to it, and what might be provable. Gary later said that both Suzane and I really grilled him to make sure he didn’t have some hidden agenda. He survived very nicely—he was just as passionate about exploring our world as we were about living it. Gary was very open, very receptive to ideas. And I felt that he was coming from the right place. He was extremely sympathetic to what it’s like to be challenged in your work at every turn, accused by some of being a fraud. He said he wanted to assemble a “Dream Team” of mediums for the first-ever scientific peek at the other side.

  “Here’s the metaphor,” he said. “Michael Jordan is one of the all-time great basketball players. Do you know what his average accuracy is shooting from the floor?” I had no idea. “Around 45 percent. In a good game, he might get 60 to 70 percent. So how can somebody who’s on the average missing more that 50 percent of his shots be a superstar? The answer is that he’s got to be better than everybody else. And just because he misses a lot of his shots doesn’t mean you don’t count all the ones he’s made. It doesn’t mean you chalk up his dazzling plays to luck. So the first thing is if we’re going to look for a Michael Jordan in the mediumship world, we’re not expecting you to be perfect. In fact, you can miss more than 50 percent of your shots. More than that, we know that on some days you can be good, and other days not so good. So we aren’t going to pick on your errors.”

  Suzane had the same conversation with Gary, and the same reaction. We both called Lisa Jackson and said we would go to Tucson. We wouldn’t do the dead-or-alive test, but Gary seemed eager to hear our ideas. Great, Lisa said, go out there and figure it out. Just make sure that whatever you decide, it’s for HBO.

  When Suzane and I flew out and met with Gary and Linda, they seemed overjoyed to see us. “Most professional mediums are afraid of scientists,” he explained. “They think we’re out to debunk them.” Suzane and I wanted to start with the basics. Gary wasn’t going to prove any Morphogenic Resonance Hypothesis with us, but he could set up a controlled experiment and document in a systematic way that we were getting accurate information about someone we had never met. And that wasn’t a bad place to start.

  The test didn’t have to be that complicated: Just bring us into a room, one at a time, and have us read the same person—the “sitter.” Gary and Linda would take careful notes on the information, then debrief the sitter later and see how accurate we were. It would be up to them to come up with a way of collating, interpreting, and presenting the data. As one of the suppliers of the data, that made me a little nervous. Sort of like a hesitant sperm donor—I didn’t mind making the donation, I just wondered what they were going to do with it.

  I liked the simplicity of the experiment, but tossed out one more idea. It came from my medical background. “Why don’t we do EKGs and EEGs? Maybe we’ll find out something about our hearts and brains when we’re reading. We could put them on the sitter, too.”

  Gary and Linda looked at each other. “You guys would do that?” Linda asked.

  Lisa Jackson found the idea of measuring our heart and brain waves very exciting. She knew hooking up electrical leads to the brains of mediums would look great on film. Maybe they would discover something interesting. But even if they wound up being just bells and whistles for the camera, we were going to be part of a landmark event. Gary had a completely open field.

  Suzane wasn’t so sure about the high-tech gizmos. She hadn’t signed up to be poked and prodded like an alien in a secret Army lab after a UFO crash. When the TV producers had initially approached her about getting involved in the project, her first instinct was to turn and run. She didn’t feel that she had to submit to the indignity of testing to prove what she did. But they kept coming back, and eventually, after talking to Gary, she realized that this was a rare opportunity for our field. None of us likes to admit that we lose any sleep over the professional cynics who go on Larry King and say we’re ridiculous and so is anyone who believes us. But the truth is if we could go on Larry King and hold up a serious research paper documenting why they’re the ridiculous ones for being afraid to even take a peek, we’d all sleep better. It wouldn’t change how we feel about our work. But it wouldn’t hurt our cause. “For twenty-five years, I’m traveling around the country constantly asking people to trust their own information, trust their messages,” Suzane said. “How can I ask people to do that if I’m turning down an opportunity to do something that’s never been done before?”

  Suzane and I weren’t afraid to be put to the test, but filming the research for television did raise the stakes. We wouldn’t have any control over editing and presentation. And what if we had a bad day, or the sitter was uncooperative or was uninformed about the family tree? It could be a disaster—and not just for us but for the whole field. But the best-case scenario was exciting to think about. If it went well, millions of people would see, up close and for the first time, a legitimate university researcher delivering evidence of communication with the spirit world. I couldn’t help but think of Darth Vader, the lady in black at the Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica. Where’s the proof? You can’t prove this scientifically! You’re all stupid fools!

  The only thing left for Lisa to do was recruit a few more mediums, and a sitter or two. She called George Anderson. He quickly agreed. So did another medium, Anne Gehman. Gary also asked Laurie Campbell, the homemaker from California who had participated in his earlier studies. Suzane had only one point she wanted Gary to pay careful attention to. “All mediums work differently,” she told him. “I know you want a controlled experiment, but you have to give us license to work the way we work.”

  “We’ll let you play it your way,” Gary assured her. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make it possible for a phenomenon, if it’s real, to emerge.”

  I FLEW TO TUCSON straight from shooting the infomercial in Florida. Gary and Linda told us the plan for the next day: The five mediums would be brought into a room one by one to read the sitter the producers had recruited. The others would wait in a courtyard behind the lab. Inside the reading room, we would sit side-by-side with the sitter, a few feet apart and with a screen between us. We wouldn’t see the sitter before or during the reading. We would get only yes and no answers to the messages we
relayed. Both medium and sitter would be wired up to see if there was any correlation between our hearts during the reading. The mediums would also have electrodes attached to their heads to record brain waves. The cameras would record it all, and Gary and Linda would keep a careful list of every piece of information we generated. Eventually, the sitter would evaluate transcripts of the readings, and our performances would be compared to controls: sixty-eight people taking guesses. We all took a vow of secrecy during the experiment. We promised we would not say anything about our reading to the others.

  “Tomorrow, we are going to do something that has never been done in the history of science,” Gary told us in his most momentous-sounding voice as the HBO cameras rolled. “It’s never been the case before that a group of pioneer mediums are teaming together with a group of scientists in a university that really believes that any important question could be asked in an open fashion.”

  The next morning, we trouped into Gary’s little lab building to read our first sitter. Lisa Jackson had recruited someone from north of Tucson—as we found out later, a forty-six-year-old woman named Pat Price who had suffered through the deaths of six people close to her in the past ten years. Prior to our arrival, Gary and Linda had her fill out a detailed questionnaire about her losses. And that morning they had her sign a statement affirming that she’d had no contact with any of the mediums before the experiment.