CHAPTER FIVE.
A SURVEY OF LATER SPIRITUAL, BIBLICAL FIGURES EVALUATED IN A MEDIUMISTIC CONTEXT.
Introduction. Chapter Five will continue the survey of biblical testimonies, which was commenced in Chapter Four . Chapter Four surveyed and evaluated earlier biblical passages while Chapter Five will explore and assess later biblical documentation and include those biblical descriptions pertaining to trance states. These later biblical writings will continue to be analysed with the assumption, which is held throughout this book, that psychical phenomena are facts that do occur today and have been reported historically, as evidenced in earlier Chapters. The later biblical records, which are discussed in this Chapter will be assessed as to whether they might also be classed as mediumistic experiences, which involves the recipient's experience-based belief that information is conveyed to them from otherworldly celestial beings or being. Having decided whether these biblical testimonies possess the characteristics and underlying signature of mediumistic experiences it will then be ascertained whether these mediumistic experiences had a spiritual focus. The following discussion will again explore mediumship in terms of a psychic faculty with accompanying psychic phenomena due to the contemporary categorisations, descriptions and explanations of the workings of mediumship frequently drawing upon and overlapping with, associated psychic phenomena. Furthermore, the boundaries between the above are frequently blurred in terms of the past and present experiential testimonies of experiencers. This is demonstrated by the fact that mediumistic experiences frequently overlap with knowledge of past events, (retro-cognition) and with precognition in which they prophesy future events. Sometimes, precognitive and retro-cognitive information is ostensibly conveyed by the non-physical communicator, sometimes the medium claims that they simply become aware of it. Consequently, mediumistic demonstrations of the receipt of diverse categories of insightful
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