Summary: Interview with author, scholar, and psychic medium Dr. Julia Assante challenges our fear of death. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Julia Assante author of, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death. During the interview Assante talks about the effects of technology on spirit communication: Alex Tsakiris: Let’s face it, we love this materialism we’re wrapped up into. We love our computers—we love our Internet, our Google, our Skype. So whether we wind up merging with the machine as Kurzweil predicts, it’s hard to deny this trajectory of technology. Dr. Julia Assante: I think we should really enjoy being in physical life. I think our technology is, in fact, the chief art of our era. And technology is also training us to think outside of the box, to think in terms of interdimensionality, and to think in terms of communicating with consciousness in other dimensions. If you think, for instance, of the telephone that was an astounding invention when it was presented in Philadelphia by Alexander Graham Bell. He used Hamlet’s soliloquy, talking to a skull of all things, to demonstrate the phone in public. People were nervous and frightened. They thought he was conjuring ghosts. So that kind of technology alone allows our paradigms to open and include discarnates, invisibles, crossing distances, all that kind of thing. The Internet is even doing more with the idea of cyberspace and collapsed space. I think that our use of electronics and digital systems are causing us to become more sensitive to subtler and subtler electrical impulses so I think technology is not at conflict with the so-called spiritual but is working with it as an analogy and as a training ground. Dr. Julia Assante's Website Play It Listen Now: Download MP3 (46 min.) Read It: Today we welcome Dr. Julia Assante to Skeptiko to discuss her new book, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death. Dr. Assante is an Ivy League scholar in ancient Near East studies and--here’s where things get really interesting--a longtime practicing psychic medium who even while pursuing her Ph.D. at Columbia was talking to the dead. So Dr. Assante, welcome and thanks so much for joining me today on Skeptiko. Dr. Julia Assante: Oh, thank you for inviting me. It’s a great pleasure. Alex Tsakiris: Your book has received very high praise from the likes of Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Larry Dossey, who also wrote the Introduction, and other notables. So first of all, congratulations on this fine book. Dr. Julia Assante: Well, I’m really honored to have these people, and even Deepak Chopra whose endorsements are very restricted. He’s only allowed to do seven a year so I’m very privileged. Alex Tsakiris: Fantastic. Let’s jump into the book. From your website, www.juliaassante.com, you write, “Just as trillions are spent fighting aging and death, ten trillion has already been spent making atomic bombs to inflict death on someone else. This seems right to us (and here’s what I love) because we view death as life’s greatest failure. And we view life, no matter how devalued, as superior to death.” Talk a little bit about that. Dr. Julia Assante: You know, we are in the grip in our society of this fear of death. Partly it’s the fault of the news and entertainment industry, certainly the medical industries, and even government. Anything you can really name. Any institution. Even the way we teach what humanity is supports the fear of death. We have these ideas that that’s the one thing we most want to avoid in life rather than it being a natural cycle, rather than it being something that you could embrace, like other creatures on this planet, that furthers the growth of the psyche. We will fight that growth; we will fight it to the teeth. All the expressions like “He fought cancer” and “A long battle against cancer,” all this kind of stuff,
