I will take your word for it that your experiences were true, insofar as you felt them or lived them. However, I do not grant that the individuals doing the 'reading' were actually in contact with spirits or the supernatural in any way. There is much in life that is unexplained, mysterious, puzzling, or downright weird, but that doesn't prove an afterlife. I used to be fascinated with stuff like this, less so these days since the advent of 976-read hotlines, Miss Cleo, 'Crossing Over' etc etc. In my opinion, all such are an attempt to commercialize and capitalize on peoples' beliefs, needs, and sometimes just plain gullibillity, or even curiosity.
I used to love to watch shows like 'In Search Of', hosted by Leonard Nimoy. It was a show that focused on such unexplained or (currently) unexplainable phenomena. Things like spontaneous human combustion, near death experiences, UFOs, etc. I still remember an episode of that show dealing with a place in South America where giant pictures had been drawn in the ground. The culture thought to have drawn them were very old, and long gone, and nobody could explain how such a society could have drawn such large pictures accurately, that were only visible from the height one could achieve in an airplane or hot-air balloon. One of the reasons I liked the show so much was that they investigated things fairly scientifically, with some objectivity. You just don't see that kind of programming today, its all designed to 'hook' you now...though I did recently see an episode on the History Channel about the real story of the Amityville Horror which was interesting, and presented in a way that didn't insult your intelligence. Rule of thumb though, if it involves money changing hands, its fake.
One of the things people most often point to when trying to provide evidence of an afterlife is near death experiences, and the frequency with which people reported seeing a 'bright light'. At first this was completely unexplainable, but science has come a long way since these experiences started happening more frequently (is worth noting that it became much more common with the advent of modern surgery and anesthesiology). Experiments have shown that the most commonly reported effects of an NDE can be reproduce by a variety of methods, including ketamine doses and electro-stimulation of portions of the brain. I couldn't find a reference to it, but I also remember hearing or reading once that the bright light survivors of an experience of this nature often report, is actually something akin to the eyes in the last state of 'turning off', like the way an old tv set will shut off with a flash, which becomes a slash of light on the screen, fading to a pinprick.
