It is very understandable that we have questions about the afterlife and about where we ourselves will go at death and how, if at all, we can contact our departed loved ones. Very often our hectic lives do not allow time for reflection on such intimate and perennial questions.

It is for this reason that there are people who reach beyond the grave through fortune-tellers or psychics. For a growing number of people disillusioned with traditional churches, communication with the dead, under some form or other, has become a virtual religion.

Apparently, it does not occur to them that such practitioners can be false, taking advantage of their clients' curiosity or grief in order to get rich. Some of these practitioners can themselves be quite gullible, believing they are being used by separate, otherworldly entities; others do not realise that it is their own subconscious speaking, not some outside entity. A good number of practitioners need not be diabolical in their intent or simply a conscious fraud.

Trying to reach beyond the grave through a fortune-teller or a psychic medium is loaded with psychological and spiritual hazards. Xarabank's recent TV two-part programme on fortune-telling and ancillary practices in Malta convincingly revealed such fraudulent and evil practices.  The court rightly ruled that it is in the public's interest to know what is going on in Malta and that the exploitation of vulnerable people has to be made public and, if possible, eliminated.

Although it is laudable for there to be stiff opposition to and outright denunciation of objectionable practices, nevertheless it is unseemly to discredit all forms of psychic phenomena. In general, I believe there are a lot of things going on around us that we do not know or understand and which will make our present perception of the universe look hopelessly primitive some day. Hence, I concur with what Hamlet had to say on the limits of human knowledge: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

Karl Sagan, an American astronomer and popular scientist, who in his inimitable but sceptical way, frequently advocated the scientific method in his talks and writings, had this to say about extra-sensory perception: "At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computer (2) that people under minor sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images 'projected' at them and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation. I pick these claims not because I think they are likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support".  (The Demon-Haunted World: Science has a Candle in the Dark, Ballantine Books, March 1997).