Truthiverse Episode 28 - Messages from the Dead: After-Death Communication (Part 1 of the Afterlife Series) By Brendan D. Murphy, truthiverse.com Everyone who says they don’t believe something they know nothing about are not only fools, they are ignorant fools. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Welcome to Part 1 of my Afterlife Series on Truthiverse. In this episode we look at Spontaneous After-Death Communication (ADC) An ADC is a direct encounter or communication with the deceased without using a medium. Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC) produced some of the earliest known Western writing on ADC in On Divination. ADCs are also not rare: As many as 75% of bereaved people are reported to have had visions of the deceased.1 Judy and Bill Guggenheim have conducted the largest study yet done on after death communication. During their seven year study, they interviewed 2,000 people from the US and Canada, ranging across the ages of 8 to 92 years, and collected more than 3,300 firsthand accounts of ADC. They conservatively estimated that, as of the mid-to-late 1990s, at least 50 million Americans had had one or more ADC, making them five times more numerous than NDEs. Apparently no profession has more ADCs than nurses. In On Divination Cicero reports an ADC in which the travelling companion of a man contacts him during his sleep at the inn they stopped at: “The innkeeper has murdered me, flung my body into a cart, and covered it with dung. Please, I beg you, be at the gate early in the morning before the cart can leave the town.” The traveller followed his friend’s instructions and made the macabre discovery, as requested. The innkeeper was punished in kind.2 This ADC is over 2,000 years old and produced veridical information and uncovered a murder that otherwise would have remained a mystery. Some ADCs incorporate apparent OBEs. An old case published by the Journal of the SPR in 1907-8 documented the experience of a pupil at a convent school in Belgium—quite a strange case indeed. While up a ladder doing some dusting, a girl dressed as a nun approached and beckoned her follow. She did, but was also shocked to see herself still on the ladder while following the nun to the chapel nearby. Kneeling in one of the pews, she is surprised by the appearance of her Uncle Oldham, whose face bore a “pained expression.” …he took my hand and said he had done something very wrong and that it would help him a great deal to have me pray for him; then he told me he had been refused by the woman he loved and that he had shot himself in his despair; after that he visited me every morning.3 The student then finds herself back on the ladder and seems unsure what to make of it all. However, she hears from her mother a few days later that her uncle had died suddenly. Returning home to visit, her mother confirms that Oldham had indeed shot himself on the Wednesday before the visitation occurred. The information obtained was 100% accurate and lends credence to interpreting the experience of the girl as an OBE featuring real contact with a discarnate human who intentionally sought her out. Common methods and types of ADC: Dream alteration (altering and influencing dreams already in motion). For instance, Jung’s father appeared to him in a dream six weeks after his death.1 Dream origination2 (initiating and creating dream sequences to interface with the sleeper’s mind). Both ADC and LBL research complement each other strongly on the point of dream manipulation by the deceased. Documented cases of people obtaining unknown information, including words in foreign languages, from dreams are plentiful. The ADC evidence indicates that not only do the deceased journey to our density (or close to it) to communicate via our astral dream consciousness, but that we can and do venture to their worlds in kind. This is one of those rare points that early theosophical doctrine might possibly be faulted on—they did not believe the paths of communication went both ways (at least, not once the deceased soul had ventured beyond the astral planes and into the “heaven worlds.” Following the preceding points, it virtually goes without saying that ADCs are common to both hypnogogic and hypnopompic states. During an OBE. Turning the television on and off. Turning lights on and off, or causing electrical surges that explode them (even on command). After Lindsay Cannon’s mother died, within 24 hours no less than eleven light bulbs blew in his house.3 Causing blackouts. Knocking highly meaningful photographs over. Stopping watches and clocks (usually at a highly significant hour), sometimes many at once. Alternatively, they may kick-start a long broken clock or watch into running again inexplicably. A sense of knowing (claircognizance) A felt sense of presence (clairsentience) Physical contact. Audible voice, whether internal or external (most cases are the former, indicating thought transference/telepathy and/or clairaudience). Direct phone calls, both to landlines and mobile phones (text messages are also an option). Through anomalous scents and aromas (flowers, perfumes, etc.) Full-bodied physical manifestation. Possibly the most amazing report of this I’ve seen (and I’ve seen my fair share) can be found in After-Death Communication by Emma Heathcote-James. There does seem to be a pattern around ADCs: most seem to take place either before or after the death occurs, or, there is a gap of weeks or months following death and their transitional phase into the spirit world before they return to communicate.7 There are documented cases of calls being received from a deceased person’s no longer active mobile phone, just as there are cases of phone calls to landlines that are not connected—the most impressive of these are those instants where there is clear and direct voice communication from the deceased person over the disconnected line—with witnesses present. So far, my investigation suggests that direct or telepathic voice communications from the deceased tend to be longer than those gained as EVP. Such mysterious communiqués become even more compelling if they can be independently verified by, for instance, a medium. Mid-reading with a bereaved woman who had lost her son, the famous Allison DuBois stated, “He says he still calls you on your phone.” The sitter immediately grabbed her purse and pulled out her cell phone. “I had to show her the text message that Brian had sent me after his passing. The message said that he loved me. Allison confirmed that he had indeed called me when he left the text message on my cell phone. This occurred three days after he had died. The message was not traceable.” Nine months later, “he text-messaged me again when my dad died. I believe that he was letting me know that he was around my dad. The calls would pop my son’s name up on the screen.8” Other forms of contact include anomalous scents—usually of flowers or personal perfumes or colognes—and even weather manipulation. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ husband—a (rigid) skeptic to the end—stated to his daughter that “if what your mother says is true, then the first snowfall after I die, there’ll be red roses blooming in the snow.” Sure enough, at his funeral, as friends and family stood around the gravesite, it began snowing heavily. Mysteriously, some anonymous agency had strewn dozens of red roses on the ground around the grave.9 There were indeed red roses blooming in the snow. It appeared he had held up his end of the bargain from the other side of the veil. Other ADCs involve highly unusual and/or meaningful contacts with certain animals, as if they were sent by the deceased to signal their presence and support. Using third parties such as a psychic, or another mutually known person to get a message through is another common method used by discarnates. Sometimes this means accessing the third party’s dreams and directing them to pass on a message to the target. Other times the communication is more abstract and requires some deciphering before the meaning fully unfolds. Still other times, the method is as simple as a direct physical (or quasi-physical) appearance or apparition to deliver the message to be passed on. Combination ADCs: There are many remarkable cases of sequences of different forms of communication initiated by the deceased, whereby they employ a string of different methods of gaining the attention of their target and delivering information, or even cleverly leading them to information or to carry out a desired task. One man had an amazing ADC contact with his deceased father, at the end of which, he was instructed somewhat cryptically to “count the days.” Several days later, the idea occurred to him to count the number of days his father had lived on Earth. The total was 16,305. “My father died at age 44, and I was also 44…I proceeded to count the number of days from my birth up until the morning of my vision. The sum total was 16,305 days, the same amount of days my father had lived!10” Many, if not all of these types of ADCs are known to occasionally occur on demand, or shortly after a request for contact (the previous case is one such example). Many ADCs occur on meaningful dates: anniversaries, birthdays, the date of the discarnate’s death—whatever it takes to get our full attention! A shrewd observer may note the amazingly diverse ways and means that our dearly departed have of getting our attention can actually be indistinguishable from commonly known poltergeist phenomena. Telling them apart can be tricky, and requires discernment and caution—with the understanding that possibly no definitive answer will be arrived at. An amazing ADC courtesy of Dr. Jane Greer in Hello from Heaven follows. On a Tuesday in the Spring of 1997, Stan received a call from an older cousin, a photographer working for a newspaper, who asked if Stan knew what his deceased father’s rank had been in the service in WWII. He did, and asked why his cousin wanted to know. “Because I think I have a picture of him here,” came the reply. Stan’s cousin had spent Sunday in the newsroom and found a copy of Newsday (not the paper he worked for) lying on an empty desk. Leaving work early, he took the paper with him but didn’t get around to opening it until Tuesday, when, perusing it, he saw a story about WWII and came upon the photo. Stan’s cousin sent him the article so he could see for himself. Verifying that the photo was indeed of his father, Stan called the article’s author who told him that the only picture contained within it was one of ships, nothing more. “No, I’m looking at it and it’s a picture of my father.” Further investigation revealed that this anomalous image had appeared only in that particular edition of the paper, and on a Tuesday no less—Stan’s father’s birthday!11 This is a truly remarkable “hello from heaven.” Greer, a classically trained therapist, managed to fill three note books with details of ADCs from her own mother in the first four years after her passing—and her father had them too. It is certainly noteworthy that data like Greer’s (and there is plenty of it from all around the world) powerfully supports the vast body of life-between-life hypnotic recall material of souls’ descriptions of how they subtly influence the energy of their loved ones to calm, support and reassure them in times of need on the physical plane. The LBL research is derived from many thousands of hypnotic regressions performed by practitioners like Joel Whitton, Brian Weiss, and Michael Newton and the many hypnotherapists using his methods. The near-total uniformity of the reports from thousands of people around the world from all walks of life with diverse backgrounds and beliefs is little short of astonishing, and I show this in detail in Book 2 of The Grand Illusion. Other after-death-communications are quite plainly aimed at intervening in a future course of events. Many have saved lives. A friend of Greer’s reported to her that in a dream she had been forewarned by her mother of being hit by a car. The very next day she was driving in the car with her granddaughter. When they pulled to the curb, the child immediately started to climb out the street-side door. Remembering her dream, Greer’s friend reached over, pulled the door shut, and instructed the child to get out curb-side of the car. As she did so, a truck smashed into their car from behind, and both the woman and child were thrown to the lawn. Had they been on the other side of the car they “both surely would have been killed.12” There a endless such cases of foreknowledge, illustrating over and over that, our “daimonic” or “higher self” aspects in the phase conjugate no-time realm of spirit (a.k.a. “implicate order” or “time-space”) have access to what we perceive as the yet-to-occur “future.” In the quantum holographic fabric of “reality” all in-formation from past, future, and present exists now-here. The altered state of consciousness known as being “deceased” allows access to the whole recording or timeline of someone’s life, from a bird’s eye view. Our friends and family in spirit know the likely “future” because, if they choose, from their reciprocal time-space realm they can see it, much as we can turn to the next page of the book we’re reading. Imagine if you could see all pages of the book simultaneously and you have a glimpse into what our discarnate friends in the realm of spirit can access. The transformational power of spontaneous ADCs is not to be underestimated. Many experiencers report similar after-effects to NDEers, including, perhaps most importantly, diminished fear of death, and the knowledge that human physical life is just one aspect of a larger continuum, an “unbroken wholeness,” as physicist David Bohm might have put it. Dr Louis LaGrande lists two benefits of ADCs as, a) the elimination of unnecessary suffering from guilt, anger, or depression, and, b) to help establish a new (expanded) identity.13 As a matter of fact, there are some ADCs that are virtually indistinguishable from NDEs—in these the experiencer is brought through a bright tunnel to meet loved ones who have crossed over. After the reunion they return to their bodies via the tunnel once more. In At the Hour of Death, Dr Karlis Osis found that, Most dying people report seeing familiar people who are already deceased Very often the friends and relatives in these visions express directly that they have come to escort them into the afterlife The dying person is reassured by the experience and expresses great contentment or happiness with the vision The dying person’s mood and even state of health improves until death occurs Experiencers don’t seem to be hallucinating or to be in altered states of consciousness—they are lucid and aware of their surroundings Belief in an afterlife is not a factor—experiences and reactions are basically the same regardless (in other words they do not result from preconceptions or conditioned wish fulfilment)14 In deathbed visions, discarnate relatives often appear with a being identified as an “angel” to escort the dying person into the hereafter.15 We will have to re-visit the angel idea and dissect it elsewhere, which I do in detail in the book. Induced After-Death Communication Induced After Death Communication (IADC) is a therapy developed by clinical psychologist Dr. Allan Botkin in 1995. Ostensibly, it allows the client to contact and communicate with deceased loved ones, and occasionally, others with whom there is perhaps unresolved emotional charge in order to heal grief, guilt and related emotions. The treatment is an offshoot of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy which was discovered in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro of California. Shapiro’s insight was that eye movements seemed to decrease the negative emotional charge associated with her own distressing memories. This epiphany led to the development of the trauma-resolving modality of EMDR, upon which IADC is based,16 only IADC goes one step further, evidently accessing the afterlife (or more accurately, allowing those in “the afterlife” to access us through our altered state). Botkin offers no explanation for the source of the phenomenon, insisting that primacy lies with the client’s perception of the deceased individual linked to their pain. Whether or not the client or therapist believe the phenomenon is “real” is not important, only that the perception occurs. The “contact” is said to occur at least 70% of the time, with profound results. We look at two such cases below. First, Botkin tells the story of Mike, a Vietnam veteran: Mike arrived in Vietnam a few days before his first major battle. The battle went on for some time and when his unit started running low on ammunition, Mike was intensely afraid they were all going to die. Just when it appeared all hope had faded, a helicopter arrived with supplies. As they were unloading boxes of ammunition, Mike looked up and saw a young enemy soldier running towards them. He could see his face clearly. Overcome with intense anger, he shot and killed him... He didn’t think much more about the event for the remainder of his tour. However, when he returned home, Mike experienced nightmares of the event that continued for the next 25 years. He repeatedly saw the face of the young enemy soldier he killed and began to wonder how old this enemy soldier was and whether he had a family who grieved his death. At times, he could retrieve his combat anger to justify the incident, but at other times he felt great remorse and sadness. “I just feel terrible. What I did goes against everything I have [ever] believed,” he said to me in my office. It was clear that Mike needed to confront his sadness by fully grieving the death of the person he killed. I performed the IADC procedure and he closed his eyes. He described what he saw. “I can see him, the young soldier’s face, but it doesn’t [look] like the face I saw in 'Nam and what I see in my nightmares. I see him smiling and happy.” Mike sat quietly for a moment, then opened his eyes. “He communicated to me that he was very content where he was, and he understood that I had to do what I did.” After a few minutes of describing what happened, he ended by saying, “I’m really surprised that the person I killed would have such feelings. This is really strange. I feel like he and I are not just OK with each other; I feel like we’re friends.” After that session, the look on the enemy soldier’s face before he died that had haunted Mike for over 25 years was replaced by the smiling and happy face he experienced in his IADC. He told me at the end of the session, “I’m trying to bring up in my mind the old image of his face I always saw in my nightmares, but I can’t.17” A two year follow-up revealed that Mike’s nightmares of the incident had vanished from that day on, and he felt only “an important connection” to the enemy soldier he had killed. It is worth noting that in the vast NDE and occult literature, discarnates who “cross over” properly appear to prefer not to dwell on the means of their passing and, depending on how long they have been in the afterlife, they generally appear to harbour few grudges (those who crossed over properly, and are not earthbound, that is). They much prefer to detail the wondrous nature of the realms they inhabit and the joy that it brings them. They seek to convey some sense of that joy and peace to us, however difficult or even impossible certain aspects of these realms are to articulate. Botkin’s methods seem to truly connect people with the deceased. Julia Mossbridge, for instance, encountered a deceased friend who appeared along with an unknown dog. Later she found out that her friend in spirit has a sister whose dog had died, and it was the same breed as the one in her vision.18 IADC works with people of all beliefs, including atheists and sceptics, so these encounters cannot be explained away by a priori bias. One such atheist was reconnected with his daughter who had died at age thirteen. After his IADC session, he told Botkin, “People don’t really die; they just take on a different form and live in a different place which is very beautiful.19 In an article by Michael Tymn on IADC, we hear from a former gunship pilot in Vietnam who had been struggling with PTSD after his treatments, who said that, “The quality and clarity of the images are much greater than in dreams. They are absolutely three-dimensional and they stay with you. You have to experience it to know what it’s like. It’s not like hypnotism. It’ll spook you but it is really something. The main thing is that it gives you closure, and life has more meaning after you have experienced these things. There is a sense of continuity.20” Providing closure, of course, is one of the main purposes of mediumship. The particular “channel” or method is not important, the deceased just need to find a way to break through. The increased depth of meaning to life is a side-effect not only of IADC but successful mediumship readings, hypnotic regressions into past lives, transpersonal psychology, near-death experiences, and psychical research in general. Contact with other-dimensional realities has a way of profoundly expanding one’s sense of perspective. Hania Stromberg, an IADC therapist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities and has thus been able to share in some of the experiences of her clients. Shared internal perceptions by people who have not been hypnotised is a very powerful argument against the claim that people merely see what they want to see and it is all make-believe in the client’s head. In one such experience, a client was grieving the death of her mother, racked with guilt about not having fulfilled her obligations. As she was administering the eye movement, Stromberg felt a “presence” entering the room and then saw a woman in colourful dress and high heels. The woman, the client’s deceased mother, addressed the client by a special name of endearment and began discussing problems the client was having. After the session, Stromberg compared her notes with what the client related and all the details matched: the colourful dress, the high heels, the special term of endearment, the subject of the conversation. Clearly this method doesn’t just evoke personal hallucinations, these events are “inter-subjective,” or, by Bearden’s definition, consensus reality for the participants. Interestingly, Stromberg does not hear highly sensitive personal information coming through to the client—apparently it is screened somehow.21 Botkin rightfully dismisses the notion these experiences are merely hallucinations. He said; “Hallucinations generally have a very negative content, vary considerably in content from person to person, and are thought to be a symptom of a severe psychological disorder. It is clear, however, that IADC content is uniformly positive, very consistent in content from person to person, and very healing psychologically.22” Hallucinations (in the sense of mental dysfunction) are not regarded as healing. Botkin also adds that strong expectations or preconceptions going into IADC “interfere with the receptive mode.23” There are some parallels between encounters occurring through IADC and encounters that sometimes occur through lucid dreams. Interestingly, both share similarly profound healing qualities and the lucid dream encounters, like the IADC encounters, are often extremely vivid and realistic; much more so than regular dreams. Certain cases definitely give the impression the dreamer has indeed contacted the deceased24 in the time-space/reciprocal realms of the so-called astral planes. Like IADC, lucid dream encounters can resolve feelings of unfinished business and unhealed grief in profound ways. Further communication with the departed was pioneered by Dr Raymond Moody25 in the early 1990s when he re-developed the Ancient Greeks’ psychomanteum (in Greek, psychomanteion). This is a purpose-built laboratory using mirrors to facilitate the psychic process of connecting with discarnates (mirrors seem to act as “dimensional gateways”), part of which involves telepathically connecting to them. They are also known as “apparition chambers” for obvious reasons. Victor Zammit tells us: Moody has reconstructed the process with astonishing results—85% of his clients who go through a full day of preparation do ostensibly make contact with a deceased loved one—but not necessarily the one that they are seeking to meet (which weakens the case of anyone trying to argue this away as hallucinatory wish-fulfilment). In most cases this occurs in his specially build psychomanteum but in 25% of cases it happens later in their own homes—often the client wakes up and sees the apparition at the foot of the bed.26 Moody’s clients agree this contact is not hallucination—there is clear two-way communication, and even cases of physical touch. These are transformational events which alter the subject’s outlook on life and “leads them to become ‘kinder, more understanding and less afraid of death.27’” Having said that, during one of Moody’s early experiments on himself using the psychomanteum, his deceased Grandma not only appeared in the mirror, but stepped out of it and proceeded to chase him around the room, scolding him.28 It seems death is no antidote for a cranky grandmother’s wrath. Conjugating, Correlating, and Coupling with Casper The psi sceptics inhabit a monochromatic flatland of lilliputian-scale thinking, bereft of vision and imagination. - Brendan D. Murphy As I detail in TGI 2, not all souls cross into the afterlife properly. Those that linger and create disturbances on our physical plane are often referred to as “ghosts” (as well as poltergeists). However, not all such beings simply linger idly or meander aimlessly about their familiar haunts (pun intended). Some are known to attach energetically—somewhat like spirits channelled in mediumship sessions—to an unwitting human host. The difference is that they rarely leave by choice, and their presence is never helpful in the host’s life in the long run. Case study: Tessa was a twenty-something, vivacious, tall, lean young woman. She worked for a package delivery company that enforced the requirement that their drivers must be able to lift a seventy pound (31.75 kg) package. Her mother, a practising hypnotherapist, completed one of the late Dr.William Baldwin’s Spirit Releasement Therapy (SRT) training courses and enlisted Tessa as a practice subject. SRT is a hypnotherapy method designed to facilitate past life regression and also the identification of attached spirits so that they can be released into the afterlife proper and un-burden their (typically unwitting) human hosts. Attached to Tessa, they discovered an EB (Earth Bound soul), a man who had died in his physical prime; he was strong and independent. Following the SRT procedures, the entity was released, more than willing to leave the body of the young woman and move into the light with the prospect of reincarnating again as a man, an idea that appealed to him. There was however, an unexpected side-effect of this “spiritual cleansing”: Without the strong energy of the attached male entity, Tessa was then unable to lift the heavier packages on the job and no longer fulfilled the seventy pound requirement. She soon found herself looking for a new job.29 Discarnate consciousness is merely another info-energy field, comprised of phase conjugate magnetic plasma (“magma”), possibly anti-matter. At base, it is all in-formation. The info-energy field of the discarnate entity couples or “correlates” with the field of the host (Tessa in this case), and, perhaps through constructive interference, the energies of the two beings are amplified, yielding Tessa’s extra physical strength. More simply, we might say the male entity’s info-energy field carried a software program called “strength,” which effectively was uploaded into the info-energy field (operating system) of Tessa, thus upgrading her own strength levels, somewhat like in a video game! As I have taken great pains to show in my books, what we call reality is merely consciousness imbued with fields of information. The bonding or coupling of subtle energy field (“mind”) with lower frequency “physical hologram” (body) is exactly what allows me to press the keys of my computer. Every physical action you take is a form of psychokinesis or “mind over matter.” There is nothing more extraordinary about a secondary spirit attachment than “primary” spirit attachment, that is, your own Daimonic consciousness “cyborged” to your physical body. Quantum theorist Amit Goswami’s hypothesis on channelling is along the same lines of what I am suggesting here, and he suggests that perhaps the “discarnate quantum monads add greater psychokinetic power to a medium via some mechanism of amplification…30” The discarnate entity’s “torsion field” must fall into phase (or “resonance”) with the living person’s field, creating constructive interference and thus “amplification.” In other words, the spirit entity becomes phase conjugate” with the incarnate human, allowing cross-talk between the two realities, meaning that someone like Tessa becomes a sort of walking portal for hyper-energies to manifest and express in what we call our consensus reality. Summary My research across many different fields over nearly 20 years has shown me irrefutably that our egocentric waking consciousness is but a small part of a majestic and mostly unknown infinite totality. The fragile egoic self is subsumed by larger, more expansive versions of self. It is impossible to convey just how much evidence there is overall for the primacy and survival of consciousness—even in a multi-part series, but if you were hoping that there is even more proof of the supremacy of consciousness, then rest assured, there is more to come. Book 2 of The Grand Illusion—which is technically the second half of Book 1—is probably the most comprehensive single exploration of the evidence for our post-mortem survival that has been produced. Depending on when you are hearing or viewing this episode, it may or may not yet be available, so be sure to check at brendandmurphy.com/tgi or jump on my mailing list to be notified. 1 Emma Heathcote-James, After Death Communication, 18. 2 Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello from Heaven, 10. 3 Green and McCreery, Apparitions, 30-1. 4 Heathcote-James, op. cit. 5 See Newton, Destiny of Souls, 27-8. 6 Heathcote-James, 107. 7 Ibid. 8 DuBois, We Are Their Heaven, 19. 9 Kubler-Ross, 276. 10 Guggenheim and Guggenheim, 289. 11 Jane Greer, Hello From Heaven, 75-6. 12 Ibid., 167. 13 Heathcote-James, 179. 14 See Heathcote-James. 15 Ibid. 16 Michael E. Tymn, Induced After Death Communication, Nexus Vol. 13, No. 5. 17 http://induced-adc.com/accounts.htm. - now at: http://www.induced-adc.com/experiences/ 18 Ibid. 19 Tymn, op. cit. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, 404. 24 See LaBerge and Rheingold, Lucid Dreaming, chapter 11. 25 See Moody, The Last Laugh. 26 See Zammit, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife, chapter 19. 27 Ibid. 28 Grosso, Experiencing the Next World Now, 229. 29 Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, 212. 30 Goswami, Physics of the Soul, 142.