RELUCTANT MEDIUM

Have you ever wondered what happens to your consciousness after your body dies? Probably most people wonder about that at some time. Most religions try to answer that question with various heavenly scenarios or hellish punishments and wars have been fought and people painfully put to death because of disagreements about religious beliefs and dogmas. Most people are not aware that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence documented over the past 150 years or more that consciousness continues to live after the body dies. Such evidence can be found in reports of near-death experiences of people at the brink of death or who have actually died and have been resuscitated; reports of past lives of children as young as two years old who claim to be reincarnated from a past life; hypnotized people who claim to remember a past life; and communications between the living and the dead through mediums who have developed skills of seeing, hearing and sensing departed spirits in their mind. Some people claim that they produce “automatic writing” actually done by spirits who use a medium’s hands to write. Others claim that spirits use their voice to speak and it is reported that some spirits use “direct voice,” speaking directly without the help of a medium. There are documented cases of spirits actually possessing the body of an individual for a period of time. Additionally, some people report seeing apparitions of deceased loved ones. Do you believe that spirits of the dead can communicate with living people? Pearl Curran thought she was communicating with a young woman who lived and died in the 17th century whose name was Patience Worth. Pearl Curran said she heard Patience Worth speaking to her in her mind and saw panoramic scenes which she incorporated into her writings. Patience Worth dictated many poems, several plays and novels to Pearl Curran all of which achieved a high degree of acclaim during the early 20th century. This book is written for people who already have some interest in or knowledge of Pearl Curran and are familiar with her life’s story but they may have been exposed to some information which was abbreviated or wasn’t always accurate and, in some cases, may have been untrue. I also suspect that there are many people who have not read anything about Pearl Curran, so I think I need to provide a little background about her, her supporters, her detractors and her muse, Patience Worth. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, because there are several very good biographical books, which I have used to write this book Pearl Curran never wanted to be considered a medium with a “gold shingle” in front of her house. She was reluctant to claim that title and pleaded with Dr. Walter Prince during his study of her relationship with the spirit, Patience Worth, to make sure that everyone understood that she was not a “medium.” However, by today’s definitions, Pearl Curran was a medium who communicated with a spirit, receiving dictation from her and transcribing that material into several novels, plays, and many poems, all of very high quality. Pearl Curran, received communications from Patience Worth for 24 years and transcribed what she received from Patience Worth until a week before she died of pneumonia in 1937 at the age of 54 years. Since Pearl Curran died, there have been several books written about her and many magazine and newspaper articles. Most of those articles were human-interest stories although one or two books and an article or two, attempted to psychoanalyze Pearl Curran in order to explain the relationship between Curran and Patience Worth as one in which a sexually-frustrated and would-be feminist, Curran, just drew upon her subconscious mind for all of the information purported to come from a spirit, Patience Worth, which Curran used to write novels, plays and poems. That was a difficult premise to prove since so much of the historical information, including cultures, languages, names and locations Curran wrote about could never be demonstrated to have ever entered into Curran’s conscious or subconscious mind through reading, travel or otherwise studying history or language. One cannot draw from one’s subconscious mind that which had never been placed into it, either consciously or unconsciously and no one has ever come forward claiming that they knew that Pearl Curran researched extensively the people, cultures, language and locations she wrote about. There are those who believe that Curran could have used extra sensory perception (ESP) or “Super-Psi”, which in this context might be thought of as a kind of super-duper ability to use psychic powers of clairvoyance and clairaudience to obtain information from other people, places or sources at a distance in space or time, e.g., ancient texts or books about cultures and language. ESP and Super-Psi in general are conjectural and esoteric hypotheses for philosophers to think and write about and are beyond any consideration in the case of Pearl Curran to provide even a hint of real evidence of an alternate source of the information obtained by Pearl Curran and used in her writings other than Patience Worth---a not-clearly-defined spirit entity. ESP and Super-Psi do not explain Curran’s ability, for impromptu “table talk” conversations around the Ouija board or her creative compositions---her poems, novels and plays. The enigma of Pearl Curran and Patience Worth remains unsolved after many years and most likely it will never be satisfactorily solved. Most of the explanations that have been offered are just conjectures at this time. They are opinions of people, myself included, who value their own opinion based upon their education to opine about such things, regardless of their area of specialization and expertise. Those opinions usually provide very little or no evidence to support their conclusions. I hope that the writing of Pearl and Patience will not disappear from the public mind and that people will continue to appreciate the writing of Pearl and Patience for its own value and quality, regardless of the source.