A recent study led by Durham University showed why a few people adopt spiritualist beliefs and engage in the practice of “hearing the dead.”
According to the study, published in the journal ‘Mental Health, Religion and Culture’, spiritualist mediums could be more susceptible to immersive mental activities and weird auditory experiences early in life.
Mediums who “hear” spirits are said to be experiencing clairaudient communications, instead of clairvoyant (“seeing”) or clairsentient (“feeling” or “sensing”) communications the study found.
According to a survey conducted by the researchers of clairaudient spiritualist mediums from the Spiritualists’ National Union and 143 members of the overall population within the largest scientific study into the experiences of clairaudient mediums.
The research is part of Hearing the Voice that is an interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
A characteristic linked to immersion in mental or imaginative activities or experience of altered states of consciousness is what the researchers found, these spiritualists have a proclivity for absorption.
The experiences of unusual auditory phenomena, like hearing voices that often occurs early in life are more likely to be reported by the mediums. According to the researchers, many experience absorption or hearing voices encounter spiritualist beliefs for searching the meaning behind, or supernatural significance of, their unusual experiences.
Spiritualism is a religious movement
Spiritualism is a religious movement which is based on the idea that human souls continue to survive after death and communicate with the living through a medium or psychic.
In Britain, interest in Spiritualism is increasing with several organisations supporting, training, and offering the services of practising mediums. The SNU claims to provide at least 11,000 members through its training college, churches, and centres.
The researchers through their study, gathered detailed descriptions of the way that mediums experience spirit ‘voices’ and compared levels of absorption, hallucination-proneness, aspects of identity, and belief within the paranormal.
The study has found that 44.6 per cent of spiritualist participants reported hearing the voices of the deceased daily, while 33.8 per cent of them reported an experience of clairaudience within the last day.
About 79 per cent of the massive majority suggested that experiences of auditory spiritual communication were a part of their everyday lives that are happening both once they were alone and once they were working as a medium or attending a spiritualist church.
Although spirits were primarily heard inside the top (65.1 per cent), 31.7 per cent of spiritualist participants said they experienced spirit voices coming from both inside and out of doors the top .
The researchers say their findings suggest that it’s not giving in to social pressure, learning to possess specific expectations or A level of belief within the paranormal that leads to experiences of spirit communication.
Dr Adam Powell, in Durham University’s Hearing the Voice project and Department of Theology and Religion the lead researcher, said: “Our findings say tons about ‘learning and yearning’. For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to form sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences also because the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practising mediums. “But all of these experiences may end in more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing within the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough.”
Dr Peter Moseley, the co-author of the study at Northumbria University, commented, “Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they’re often then able to control. Understanding how these develop is vital because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too”
Durham’s researchers are now engaged in further investigation of clairaudience and mediumship, working with practitioners to realize a fuller picture of what it’s wish to get on the receiving end of such unusual and meaningful experiences.