Full Length Woods-Greene Leslie Flint Direct Voice Recordings

[Matty Mo]

So since I'm a new person on here please forgive me if I introduce any topics that have already been discussed ad nauseam previously. One such topic is the Full Length Woods-Greene
Leslie Flint Direct Voice Recordings I've been listening to recently.

From what I've gathered these are supposedly actual recordings of people who've died and are now on the other side. They communicate through a former medium, George Woods, but it is mentioned that the medium really doesn't even speak, the words come out of thin air essentially.

Being that I am skeptical of many mediums and their claims this one really has me puzzled. I've listened to several of the so-called voices on the other side and it would be fascinating, based on what they are saying, if this were all true. From a skeptical standpoint my first question is why do these recordings seem to be so hidden? I've not yet found any of the recordings on You Tube or other well known sources and there seem to be very few sites dedicated to these recordings. It's almost if it's a DVD easter egg for people interested in metaphysics.

I also wonder with all of today's technology and supposed mediums, why hasn't something modern like this surfaced? Perhaps it has but I just don't know about it? From a skeptics view, if they ever listened to these they would easily write them off as some person outside the room speaking or a speaker in the room, etc.. However, from what I've read, these were recorded under multiple circumstances and at multiple venues, sometimes on short notice so these supposedly couldn't be rigged? I also know they've bound and gagged Mr. Woods on several occasions as well as putting something on his throat to see if his muscles were moving, indicating he was making the sound.

Most of the speakers sound so intelligent and seemingly touch on many things the average person would not or could not elaborate on. There's very few pauses in their speaking which leads me to believe there is no breathing going on from "said" speaker(s). I've read about a few people trying to debunk this as most of the male speakers sound the same. Yet, I've also read that the spirits coming through obviously can't speak so they are transmitting thoughts through Mr. Woods so they would all sound somewhat alike.

So what say you AL forums? Is there more to this that would prove it valid and, if so, why is it so seemingly out of the spotlight? I will continue to listen to the recordings, one such site linked here --> http://freewebs.com/afterlife/flint/flintrecordings.htm

For the time being, however, I would love to get some other's insight on this. Was it all just a big hoax? Typically if one types in something like "The Scole Experiment" and then types fake or hoax behind it in an engine search there are multiple pages debunking aspects of it. I've found nothing on these recordings trying to debunk them! Even skeptoid has nothing on this and they seemingly debunk everything. Okay, I''ll be quiet now and I welcome all your input, thanks ahead of time for any comments you may have.

[mac]

That's a long, involved posting. As perhaps the only Spiritualist here I'll touch on points from the Spiritualist perspective. That's 'Spiritualist' with an upper-case 'S' to signify UK Spiritualism rather than 'spiritualist' or even the US Spiritualism scene.

I haven't seen the movie clip you've referred to but as a general comment Direct Voice won't find the medium's voice involved. Physical mediumship is not my specialty so a Google search about that and about the direct voice is far more likely to be of detailed help than I can. I can say, though, that it's one aspect of the evidential mediumship which is less common now than it once was but it was never very commonplace.

I have no doubts about authenticity although not every claim is authentic or has been authenticated! The Scole Experiment is something I've written about before as I was a 'member' of the NSSF from its beginning to its ignominious end. I'd say that if you're going to try to get your head around all the aspects you've mentioned in your posting you'll need to spend a very great deal of time and effort. It's doubly difficult as these issues are mostly historical. Direct Voice Mediumship was always rare and is even more so now. I don't know if it's been authenticated that it is Leslie Flint communicating through this George Woods person. It's far from uncommon for all manner of claims to be made that so-and-so is communicating through such-and-such medium but those with experience know that spirit-communicators may masquerade as well-known individuals. Great caution is needed if one is to avoid being misled by Astral deceivers....

Other forms of physical mediumship are almost as rare as direct voice, being more the province of closed home circles or working groups. All that results in it being difficult to get to see examples. There are physical mediums around - Kai Muegge or Warren Caylor - for example but why would one want to visit a seance other than to witness phenomena? The phenomena in themselves are not an indicator of survival and without evidence what value has an alleged medium?

One might justifiably think that with the plethora of modern electronic recording devices it ought to be comparatively straightforward to capture HD video and clear digital sound tracks to seances. Folk like myself have been making these points for many years and we're still waiting for satisfactory explanations why it's just not happening. That said I have no doubts about survival and communication and have been writing on these subjects for too many years, elsewhere as well as on this website.

[Matty Mo]

Wow, thanks for your input Mac. You clearly are a highly intelligent individual that has spent many years surrounding these subjects. I hope to continue to learn, since I'm only 40 I hope that I have many years left to do so. I don't believe I will ever find 100% truth in anything I seek, however the endeavor of learning is worth more to me than any straight truth. Thanks again for taking the time to read my lengthy post and to take the time to reply so eloquently.

[mac]

Wow, thanks for your input Mac. You clearly are a highly intelligent individual that has spent many years surrounding these subjects. I hope to continue to learn, since I'm only 40 I hope that I have many years left to do so. I don't believe I will ever find 100% truth in anything I seek, however the endeavor of learning is worth more to me than any straight truth. Thanks again for taking the time to read my lengthy post and to take the time to reply so eloquently.

Thanks for the compliments but really I just approach issues systematically - it's not intelligence.

But you're right that I've spent some time in 'the spooks' as the Spiritualist church meetings were often called here in the UK. (I'm not a church-goer incidentally) My 'awakening' came at age 37 and I reached 65 this past May, 28 years since our son died and life changed immeasurably. I guess you could say I'm a grandaddy on a lot of the websites to which I contribute and although I try not to be ageist I've found a marked difference between 'speaking' to folk of my generation - the baby-boomers - and those just a single generation back, as yourself. There's an even more marked difference speaking to those who arrived via bereavement and those who are just seekers... But that's another story.

You mention finding 100% truth and that's a hard one to define. Do you mean 100% of all there is to know or 100% certainty about just a single issue - or something in-between? I'm all for learning and there are ways which can avoid blind alleys to some extent. One must choose for oneself but always there are others whose experiences may offer a worthwhile direction for your consideration.

I never give advice but my suggestion would be to try to avoid spreading yourself too thinly across too many topics. I understand if there's a temptation to try and grab all you can because many subjects are interrelated and/or overlap - and are intriguing! Finding out about one thing can get you wondering about another without properly understanding the first. Been there, done that, had to retrace my footsteps.

You've made a solid start and there will be other members here (and elsewhere if you choose to look) who will present alternative perspectives, while this website is one whose focus can help avoid distractions.

good luck!

[Matty Mo]

100% truth regarding certain aspects of our existence is what I meant to convey, great question. Thanks for the tip on limiting my scope on my quest for understanding. I've always been curious but the past 6 months I've been like a man on fire.

It seems like when I look behind one door for answers I find a room with 10 additional doors to open, each of them have 20 additional doors to open, and so on and so on. It can all become a bit overwhelming so all advice is appreciated.

Thanks again for your advice, sharing some of your background, and your modesty. I look forward to future conversations on the forum with you and others.

[Roberta Grimes]

Dear Matty Mo, most of us upon coming across various new bits of the extraordinary phenomena that make up the afterlife evidence have had the same sort of reaction that you are having: we wonder why the heck all of this is not common knowledge. There seem to me to be two sets of reasons: one set is based on this level, and the other in what we call the afterlife levels. But it certainly is frustrating! Knowing all the manifold good that could come to humankind if only most people knew what we know, sometimes I have felt like standing on rooftops and shouting some of what I was learning and simply not worrying about being thought a fool - I just wanted to get this information to so many people who so desperately need it!

First, a general statement: It is very, very difficult to do any sort of work between levels of reality. This level is on a different set of energy frequencies from those that are occupied by the dead, so even to communicate at all is like your channel five newsman trying to chat directly with your channel seven newsman while on-air. Just about impossible! But the dead are more aware of us then we are of them, and have been so down through all the millennia, and over time they have developed methods of communicating with us. Some are the simple signs that the dead give us - messing with electricity and butterflies, etc. - but especially since the mid-nineteen century, teams of the dead have been eager to do more. Thomas Edison and others have been trying to develop a direct telephone, for example, which would be the holy grail of communication. But the problem is that the dead need living collaborators, and there have been very few living people who were willing to devote the time and attention that actual collaboration with the dead requires.

Now, some answers to your questions, from my perspective:

Why has nothing modern like direct-voice mediums surfaced? Mediumistic ability of every type seems to be latent in all of us, since our minds are part of Mind and entirely open to it. But we are so limited and distracted by our being in material bodies in this material world that very, very few people ever have been able to develop these skills to the point of being able to produce direct-voice communications and other physical phenomena. My particular pleasure in doing this research has been the deep-trance mediums of the early twentieth century, but to develop their skills required of most of them years of practice sitting in silent darkness so only a handful have ever been developed worldwide since the advent of the radio. With all of today's electronic distractions, it is hard to imagine that any deep-trance or direct-voice medium ever will develop again.

Why do these recordings seem to be so hidden? They aren't really hidden; it is just that few people know about them. There is a difference! In fact, there is so much afterlife evidence of so many different kinds, and all of it so entirely consistent, that to those of us who know about and study this evidence it often seems that nearly everybody is swimming in afterlife evidence just as a fish swims in water, immersed in it but still ignorant of it because it is the very element of our existence. True, our two most trusted institutions - mainstream science and mainstream Christianity - have entirely failed us where the afterlife is concerned, and that seems tragic to me (although it may not be - see below).

Debunkers. Ignore them. Flat-out, in-their-face ignore them for the useless and counterproductive distractions that they are. I have spent a lot of time studying debunker literature, and have come to the conclusion that there is not and never has been a debunker who was interested in investigating and understanding anything, but rather they all have an agenda which is based in ignorance and laziness. The general debunker method is not to study anything, but rather just to pick out some aspect of an afterlife-related phenomenon and try to show some way that it could be produced which does not involve human survival. They then claim that they have debunked the whole phenomenon (NDEs, OBEs, or what have you). This is flat-out nonsense, of course! Using their methods, I can debunk the theory that you are a real person by showing that a computer could have been programmed to put together the words in your posts, so therefore you are not real. Flat-out ignorance and stupidity!

Being skeptical. The polar opposite of debunkers are open-minded folks who look at afterlife-related phenomena with a "show-me" kind of skepticism. A lot of these phenomena are easy to fake, and those of us who are caught up in this work soon learn to be highly skeptical of mediums of all kinds and any new phenomena that we might come across. That is healthy! In fact, some of the best researchers in this field down all the years have been honest skeptics who set out to investigate some subset of the vast array of afterlife-related phenomena and found that it seemed to be based in fact, and then went on from there. That is the difference been a genuine skeptic and a debunker: skeptics are intellectually curious and rigorously honest, while debunkers are neither.

Was it all just a big hoax? No. As best I have been able to determine, Scole was a genuine collaboration between a team of dedicated living researchers and a team of dead scientists. Direct-voice communications of the Leslie Flint variety are possible and extraordinary, although direct-voice mediums are rare. There have been a lot of hoaxes, but to perpetrate a hoax requires a motive and that is generally going to be the urge to make money on an individual basis. No entire field of phenomena is going to be coordinated well enough for the whole thing to be a hoax! So simply look at all these phenomena with a healthy skepticism and you will soon learn to pluck the wheat from the chaff. As the great researcher William James famously said, in order to disprove the theory that all crows are black, it is necessary to find only one white crow. And today the white crows fill the sky!

Effective communication across the frequencies is extremely difficult, which seems to be the primary reason why these truths have remained so well-hidden for so long; but there is another explanation as well. Our minds are part of eternal Mind, and the universe apparently exists as our school, and until very recently we have probably been kept in ignorance of what is actually going on so we would take our school and our lessons seriously during the brief few minutes of eternity that we spent here, before for each of us that schoolbell rings. For a long time, as I did this research, I worried that I was uncovering and divulging things that were supposed to be kept hidden, and thereby committing some great cosmic sin. Now, though, I have come to believe that the only reason you and I are so curious and the evidence is suddenly so much more available is that humankind is now supposed to learn the truth. And you and I have been assigned to uncover it. Welcome to the best hobby on earth, dear Matty Moe!

[Matty Mo]

Wow, Roberta, thanks so much for taking the time to review my post and to respond so in depth. You are definitely an asset to these forums which is probably one big reason you're an admin. Regarding your comment, "For a long time, as I did this research, I worried that I was uncovering and divulging things that were supposed to be kept hidden, and thereby committing some great cosmic sin." I have felt that way at times, as if I should be concentrating more on my life and doing good things to help others, be a good father/husband/friend, etc. Then I realized that I am already trying to do these things and my quest for knowledge is only an additional layer I've added to this blessed journey called life.

If I ever feel that I'm spending too much time on researching info, on our existence, I feel I could pull back quickly. If anything I feel my recent joy in learning has actually made me a better person overall. Less judgmental, more loving and understanding, and now more open to things than I've ever been. Even though I've always been interested in aspects of metaphysics I am not quite certain why I suddenly have just had an insatiable appetite for learning more? It's as if something has infused me with motivation to seek answers, just strange. Did you have a moment in time that you actively started seeking info, Roberta?

As always, great comments and I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to reply.

[Annie]

Hi Matty, I don't have time at the moment to read your whole post and everyone's replies BUT I wanted to say that you'll find tons and tons of Leslie Flint recordings right on the Leslie Flint website! There are so many there that I feel like I can't listen to them all in one lifetime. I also wondered why that website isn't more publicized. I think part of it is that it's non-profit, so they can't afford to. If they did it for profit, people would say that it was all phoney baloney just to make a buck. Leslie Flint never got rich off of his talent, even though he was offered to.

Why aren't there more mediums doing this? I get the impression that Flint really put a lot of time into sitting around, day after day, for a few hours, with nothing coming through until gradually some spirits started speaking through him little by little. It wasn't like he just sat down one day with a tape recorder and a bunch of voices started chiming in. Not only does it take a certain medium ability to do what he did, but lots and lots of time and patience that most people just don't have.

[Matty Mo]

Hi Matty, I don't have time at the moment to read your whole post and everyone's replies BUT I wanted to say that you'll find tons and tons of Leslie Flint recordings right on the Leslie Flint website! There are so many there that I feel like I can't listen to them all in one lifetime. I also wondered why that website isn't more publicized. I think part of it is that it's non-profit, so they can't afford to. If they did it for profit, people would say that it was all phoney baloney just to make a buck. Leslie Flint never got rich off of his talent, even though he was offered to.

Why aren't there more mediums doing this? I get the impression that Flint really put a lot of time into sitting around, day after day, for a few hours, with nothing coming through until gradually some spirits started speaking through him little by little. It wasn't like he just sat down one day with a tape recorder and a bunch of voices started chiming in. Not only does it take a certain medium ability to do what he did, but lots and lots of time and patience that most people just don't have.

Sorry to trudge up an old topic but as I like to get opposing viewpoints I was provided the following critique of Mr. Flint from someone who claims all he did was fraudulent. Anyone have any input on this, he had some valid points but he was also pretty condescending that if anyone believed in his practices they are/were idiots.

"I was also told by a rather famous medium who once attended a Flint demonstration, how new technology meant that there was an infra red viewer in use, and it well... it showed that it was no more than gimmicks being used. To this day I still try to convince the medium to reveal what he saw, but he fears the consequences of revealing the truth about one of spiritualisms most heralded performers, and the damage it would do to his own career and personal life.

It is not always about monetary gains, sometimes its purely about ego. Also you should keep in mind that by having a high profile meant he could give private 1 to 1 readings at a higher price

Flint was very careful not to allow filming of any kind in his act, this is of course why there is no film of him!

By restricting the recording to audio only, it made faking things so much easier.

Remember the likes of Helen Duncan were exposed due to their naivety when it came to photography and what it would actually show.

Flint was a fraud there is no doubt about that to any rational person, his impressions of Gandhi for example sounded nothing like the real person, the accent, the intonation etc was all wrong.

As you suggested earlier whenever a seance was being recorded that also left open the chance to play in pre recorded voices of the real people from when they were alive.

The saddest thing is that there are people today who still believe such a poor magic act is proof of real physical mediumship. People like that are beyond saving, it is part of their belief and to take it away would destroy everything they stand for. Close minded believes. True Believer Syndrome"

[Eli]

I'll try taking a few logistical points of view to debunk some of the arguments.

Firstly, although there is no film of him, people still saw him in person. I know for one, I would be dead pissed if I paid someone for their services and by watching, I could tell they were fraudulent (such as using pre recorded voices)
Also touching on this note, why would people pre record themselves? As far as I can tell, they were speaking about the afterlife (I've never actually heard any of them) why do such a thing when you were alive? Secondly, what are the chances of a family member picking the SAME medium you went to do these recordings? If people were paid to do this, I doubt people would take the offer, to not lead their loved ones on.

Is there ever a reason that he gave for doing audio only? I also find this quite troublesome.