It came time to write the stories. They accumulated over a period of several years from Louise's adventures as a clairvoyant spiritual counselor. They had taught, enlightened, and fascinated her. As a seer who views timeless, spaceless dimensions, seeing beyond the boundaries of this physical world and it's reflections back again, life was beginning to make sense.
Some are content to let random pieces of life's puzzle jangle loosely in their pocket, without meaning. Louise has always been compelled to fit the pieces together, having an inner sense that if if she could just find the right perspective, a particular way of viewing things, this life could, and would, all make sense.
This impetus led her to reach beyond the five senses and develop gifts that have been a part of her from her earliest memories. As she honed and understood them better, it gave her—and continues to give—great pleasure to share them with others.
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S
ome who read this book (and many more who would never read it) will wonder about the experiences described. They are fascinating; they certainly seem like reports of available information which the informant has no physical way of knowing, of plausible memories of past lives, of communication with persons who are physically "dead." But such things don't happen in the world described by modern science. Do they?
This discrepancy between the world of science and the mysterious happenings we hear about - and, in many more cases than are commonly talked about, experience because "science says: it couldn't have happened. Yet these denied experiences are of the sort which persons in other "pre-scientific" societies held to be of the utmost importance.
Louise Hauck has done us a service with her "stories." We are tempted to believe in them. I would like to contribute a few thoughts as to why we might well yield to that temptation.
There is a public misconception about science, not shared by really good scientists: that is, that science describes reality. The activity of science is basically a way of understanding based on making models (e.g. H2), E=mc2) or choosing metaphors (e.g. electric current, stream of consciousness) to represent certain aspects of reality, and then testing those models and metaphors through empirical inquiry. We use metaphors to understand or communicate about the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. No one thinks that electric current is really some sort of fluid flowing down the wire, but the term represents certain aspects of the phenomenon in terms of something easily visualized.
In some respects science is like the well-known story about the blind men examining the elephant. Western science has been insistent that the "elephant" of ultimate reality is really "fundamental particles" and interacting fields. Eastern thought has held (much longer) that is consciousness. Modern quantum physics has examined the "elephant" in finer detail and decided there are no such things as separate particles, and no phenomena without observers. But we have tended to miss the real point of the story.
When the blind man feeling the leg claims the elephant is a tree trunk, and a second, feeling the tail, claims it is a piece of rope, both are using metaphors. Rather than argue over who is right, they need to explore together in what sense the elephant is like a tree, and in what sense like a rope.
Simple enough with elephants but the lesson has been harder to grasp with regard to science. Great mischief can result when the models and metaphors of science are mistakenly taken to be the "true" description of reality. Because when they are, then people feel a necessity to defend them, and to stamp out competing reality claims. Many of the conflicts in the history of science, as well as the conflict between science and religion, have been battles between groups who each insist that their metaphors are "really" how reality is.
As with the story of the blind men and the elephant, some aspects of experienced reality are like the world known to the physical senses; some are like our knowledge of ourselves as whole organisms. Some, however, are like our inner knowledge or our own minds. (For example, it has often been remarked that social insects such as termites display characteristics that suggest a "group mind" which responds as a whole to an intrusion, even though the individual insects could not be in physical communications with another.)
That implicit or explicit epistemological position of the "hard" scientist is that we know what we know through the empirical observation of quantifiable, replicable interventions in the physical world. A less positivist scientific attitude holds that reality has many aspects, and is never fully captured in any model or metaphor. Thus various kinds of metaphors may be employed, with appropriate ways of testing their fitness and range of applicability - since they each may help us to understand and communicate about certain aspects of a fundamentally mysterious reality.
Mainstream science, characterized by an obsession with predictions and control, has almost exclusively employed physicalistic metaphors such as "mechanisms," particles, waves, or fields. It has been very dubious about more holistic metaphors such as organism, personality, ecological community, or the Gaia metaphor for the Earth and its biosphere. Scientists have typically insisted that these whole-system descriptions can or will be understood in terms of their parts.
My own consciousness is my most direct experiencing of reality. Perceptions of the world through the physical senses are far more indirect, being mediated by the unconscious mind in ways only recently appreciated. Looking into my own mind, I find, first of all, that mind is not something that exists in the space-time world. To the contrary, my experience of the space-time world is constructed within my mind from vast numbers of physical sense perceptions.
Among the most fundamental aspects of consciousness are awareness, volition, and creativity. I find there are levels of awareness, from subliminal or subconscious, to what feel like "higher" or "supraliminal" levels. I also find that there are "partitions" in my mind; there are parts that seem somehow separate from other parts, what C.G.Jung called "autonomous complexes: - multiple personalities being an extreme case.
In my experience, consciousness is both something experienced and the experience - that which I consider my "self." Myself is that which thinks my thoughts, feels my feelings, participates in the choosing of my actions, generates my insight and my creativity. The self is surely real in some sense, for it has real consequences. For example, in the well-substantiate placebo effect, the fact that my self holds a belief regarding the medicinal qualities of a sugar pill results in real physiological effects, unrelated to the chemical composition of the pill. In the field of psycho-neuro-immunology the efficacy of the body's immune system appears to be affected by images and thoughts held in the mind of the self.
To some extent I am able to refer to specific processes or contents of consciousness - such as ideas, or images, or emotions - but these are never really divorced from the whole; the fundamental reality is that, as the quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger put it, "Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular." Consciousness is not something to be subdivided, measured, or quantified.
Even so, the "partitioning" of the mind produces apparent separation. For example, in research of hypnosis it appears that there is a "hidden observer," not accessible to ordinary conscious awareness, that does not believe the suggestions of the hypnotists which another part of the mind has so readily accepted. In dissociative experience, the conscious part of the mind is experienced as separate from the body and other aspects of the self. In the experience of creativity, the conscious ego-self becomes aware of products generated by some other, out-of-awareness part of the mind.
Those are some of the characteristics of our own individual consciousness; let us now try to think of nature using the metaphor of consciousness as experienced in the individual mind. Thus nature is experienced as one whole, with many aspects. Characteristic of the whole are awareness (pervasive consciousness) and volition (most evident in organisms). Like the multiple personalities sometimes found in an individual, there is an appearance of multiplicity - different organisms with different consciousness for instance - yet at another level consciousness is one.
Within this metaphor (making no ontological claim), things of the physical world are analogous to the images in a dream in the individual mind (images which in the dream state pass certain "reality tests" that they fail to pass in a higher state of awakeness). Within this metaphor it is not surprising that all organisms exhibit some characteristics or extent of consciousness, nor that "separate" organisms (like the cells of a slime mold, or the birds of a flock) seem to have a collective consciousness. Within this metaphor it is not surprising that the evolutionary process seems to show apparently teleological aspects, movement toward "higher" levels of consciousness, burst of "creative experimentation" (such as the bursts of new genera and even new phyla at certain geological periods). Within this metaphor the fact that a migrating bird "knows" its destination is less surprising, and we have less compulsion to search for a physical "mechanism." Within this metaphor one can easily imagine that the oriole's knowledge of nest-building resides in a sort of species-collective mind, "higher level" than the individual bird-mind (something perhaps like Rupert Sheldrake's concept of a morphic field built up through "habits").
Vast ranges of extraordinary human experience are far more easily accommodated in a consciousness metaphor than in the reductionistic metaphors of mainstream science. For example, research on creativity and intuition reveals interesting characteristics of the behind-the-scenes part of the mind. Not only does this part of the mind regularly come up with creative resolution to problems, aesthetic creations, and deep wisdom; it also on occasion has available to it knowledge which appears not to have ever been learned through the physical senses. Furthermore, the more it is trusted and turned to, the more competent it seems to become.
In research on cases of multiple personality disorder, the person's mind is partitioned more than with so-called normal persons, to the point that there may be a number of near-complete personalities with different self-identities, gestures, carriage, voice characteristics, memories, allergies, body chemistries, ocular characteristics, and so on. These different ego-states, which sometimes have no awareness of one another, may alternately take over the body and conscious awareness. They have different life histories, many or most of which appear to be related to early childhood sexual or physical abuse. But one - called the "inner-self helper"- is unique. It claims never to have been born, nor to die; when the physical body dies and decays, and the other personalities disintegrate, "I remain," it reports.
The research literature of parapsychology, and that of the earlier field of "psychic research" is full of apparent instances of telepathic communication, clairvoyant "remote viewing," psychokinesis, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences, all of which tend to leave the experiencer with the conviction that mind is more than simply brain functioning, and that personal consciousness in some sense can exist independently of the body and that it in some sense persists after physical death.
If one is entranced with the physicalistic metaphors or mainstream science, many of the above sorts of reports - like the anecdotes in this book - have to be viewed with skepticism; nay, with incredulity. They have to be the consequence of undiscovered "mechanisms," illusion, or fraud, since in that paradigm there is no other possible way of accounting for them. Within the consciousness metaphor, on the other hand, since one is imagining one universal mind (with levels and partitions), none of these kinds of reports has to be presumptively explained away. The reports need not all be accurate, but they are not intrinsically more mysterious than the more commonplace phenomena that go on within my own individual consciousness.
It is not really necessary to turn to the "outrageous" to make this point. Our everyday experiences of conscious awareness, memory retrieval, volition, intention, quest for meaning, aesthetic sense - none of these fit into the physicalistic metaphor any better than the most outlandish psychic phenomena. Scientists have attempted for generations to ignore that fact in the faith that some day everything in our mental and physical behavior will be explained through our knowledge of cranial neurocircuitry and the DNA. It is time to recognize the need for a different metaphor.
William James urges that scientists adopt a criterion of "radical empiricism," by which he meant that we should refuse to exclude from our scientific picture of reality any elements that are regularly directly experienced. Any class of inner experiences that have been reported, or of phenomena that have been observed, down through the ages and across cultures, apparently in some sense exist and have a face validity that cannot be denied. Such is the case with the kind of "stories" found in this book. It doesn't mean, of course, that one must believe any particular report; only that the entire class of reports cannot be denied simply on the basis that they don't seem to fit comfortably into the scientific world-view.
What I am arguing is that admitting the consciousness metaphor allow us to return to ourselves the authority to interpret our own experience. Although the present reductionistic science, based largely on a particle-interaction metaphor, continues to be useful for many purposes, it no longer need have the authority in our lives to imperiously insist that we humans are here solely through random causes, in a meaningless universe. We are free to explore the possibility that the highest human ideals are more than the capricious choice of a fortuitous product of physical evolution; that our consciousness and all of its products are more than the chemical and physical processes of the brain; and that the "stories" such as Louise Hauck relates here can be used to inspire and enrich our lives.
Willis W. Harman
Institute of Noetic Sciences
Sausalito, California
October 1992
Does time play tricks on you? Sometimes it feels like there isn't enough of it. Other times, it feels like it's not passing fast enough. Does time speed up when you're awake in the middle of the night? Does it disappear when you're having a good time?
It's true. Time is playing with you. It knows just when to sneak up on you, take you by surprise and when to run away. You are involved in an intimate relationship with time. It can dominate, frustrate, tease, dare, humiliate and control you. Time can run your life. It can ruin your life. But there's hope. It doesn't have to.
Your relationship with time depends on how you perceive it. The way you relate to time influences how it interacts with you. Like so many things in life, it gets easier to handle when you change your understanding of it. Perhaps the following ideas will help.
Time is an illusion. Time only exists in this reality because we experience it as linear and sequential. Events seem to occur one at a time, and one after the other. If you can step out of your current reality—as I do in consultations—you would experience all time (or no time) as coexisting.
Princeton physicist John Wheeler coined the term "black hole" to refer to collapsing stars that crunch not only matter but also the space around it, bringing time there to an end. "Time cannot be an ultimate category in the description of nature," he declares. "'Before' and 'after' don't rule everywhere."
I experience this phenomenon when I meet with clients. I'm able to go beyond time and view the past, present and probable future where all time is still—and already—occurring. Over the phone, I can "tune in" to clients anywhere in the world. I simply access a frequency that connects us and retrieve information from where their energy exists beyond time and the limitations of physical proximity.
In 1905 Albert Einstein presented his special theory of relativity, which holds that the measurement of time intervals is affected by the motion of the observer. Two years later a mathematician, Hermann Minkowski, proposed a new geometry that adds time to the three dimensions of space (height, width, and depth). This four-coordinate system—space-time—caught on as an efficient way to simplify Einstein's formulas.
An example of the idea of relativity is when you're seated in a train and notice that the train next to yours begins to move. It's quite disorienting. Is it moving or are you? You don't know until you see a third reference point, like the platform. That's relative motion.
In a similar way, time is relative. But there is no ultimate platform. We don't notice the differences because they are infinitesimally small. Time seems nonexistent when you're awake in the middle of the night because you lack a reference to where you are in it. There's no backdrop—people coming and going, variations in the sunlight outside—against which to gauge it.
I often refer to John Boslough's recollection of graffiti that he observed on a cafe wall in Texas: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." In his article "The Enigma of Time" (National Geographic, March 1990), he reminds us that children before the age of two have little sense of the passage of time and that it may have been the same for our early ancestors. Some scholars believe that people once lived in a state of "timeless present" with little or no sense of past or future.
He mentions an old Hopi Indian woman in northern Arizona, who talks of a close friend, dead for several years, as if he just stepped out the door. Hopi verbs make no distinction between past and present. All time runs together, something like an ever-continuing present. Clocks and calendars support the illusion that we live in a world of mathematically measured segments of time. But physical time is relative. It depends on things that happen—how we perceive them to be happening—in our outer world. Time is not happening to us.
It's one thing for me to do what I do and quite another for me to understand how I do it. For this reason I began to explore the concept of time. I needed to understand how it is that I am able to move into expanded consciousness and view clients' past childhoods, their past lives and their potential, positive future moments. I also needed to understand how I am able to access both the consciousness of souls preparing to reenter and the consciousness of souls simply presenting themselves from the Other Side, apparently existing and perceiving beyond time. Once I "tune in" to any of these "frequencies," I can move events forward and backward in time.
I started to understand that sequential, linear time, as we know it in this physical, third-dimensional reality is, like death, an illusion. Where Einstein's theory of relativity explains that "time is relative to where the observer is standing," I realized that I must be going to a frequency within myself that takes me to expanded consciousness, outside of this linear time framework.
When I experience "no time"—past, present and most probable, positive future—all exist in the now. I've trained myself to receive information only under these conditions. I do occasionally, however, get "bleedthroughs"—that is, when I encounter someone with whom, or find myself in a location where, I have a past-life (another time/space) connection. Then it feels as though I'm straddling two time periods simultaneously. (Sometimes people suspect or they fear or they hope that I'm "tuning in" all the time. I ask them, "Why would I want to do that?")
The future does not come after the past and present, and the past does not come before the present and future. It's all the same to me, the way these scenes appear. First, I relax myself and invite the client to join me in taking a deep breath. This gets us "in sync" with each other. Then I recite my invocation.
Then I take inventory of the scenes that start to appear to me. Next, I funnel the information down into a linear timeline: I place information about the present directly in front of me. The past—childhood and past lives—go to my left. Up to my right, I see souls who are preparing to reenter. Farther to my right is where I sort out the future scenes. Farthest in that direction is where I view souls—all of whom have gone to the Light—who come forward from the nonphysical dimension, from the "Other Side."
Even though I know that linear time is an illusion—and that it is all occurring at the same time—no concept is useful unless it proves to be relevant to my clients' lives.
The Body I Left Behind
Doris's mother stepped into her reading near its end, just as I was summarizing all that we had covered. She had passed over a year ago, and Doris confirmed many of the memories her mother projected, that it was indeed her mother. Then Doris became very determined with her questions.
"So what does my mother think?" Doris began, certain that her mother would know what she was talking about.
"About what?" I answered, still tuned in to her mother's thoughts.
"About what I did!" Doris exclaimed, sounding impatient that her mother and I weren't quicker contestants in whatever contest this was that she was trying desperately to lead us through.
"Well, I see that your mother carries memories of many things that you and she did together. What specifically do you have in mind?" I asked patiently, trying for clarification.
"The urn! About what I did with the urn!" Doris nearly shrieked, then smiled, sitting back on the couch, arms folded, looking very satisfied with whatever she had done.
Silence. I couldn't pick up on what Doris was looking for, or what she wanted me to relay on behalf of her mother. So I telepathically asked her mother to comment. The mother then showed me a scene of a cemetery with headstones covered with flowers. Then I caught her thoughts and related them to Doris.
"Your mother is talking about a cemetery, and..."
"Yes!" interrupted Doris, "I wanted Mother to be buried there, for her to be placed in a beautiful coffin at the cemetery! But my sister fought me about it, and went ahead and had her cremated without my consent!"
"Your mother wants you to know that she's not there," I tried to respond, but again she interrupted.
"Not where? So what does she think about what I did?" Doris insisted.
I paused a moment, trying to let Doris's questions and her mother's thoughts fall into some comprehensible order.
"Doris," I began gently, "your mother wants you to know that she is not in that body anymore. It doesn't matter to her what you did with the body. She didn't need it anymore."
Then Doris' mother projected another scene, that of a large dining room table with some sort of decorative arrangement in the center. I described it to Doris, and she jumped at it, now inching forward, saying, "Yes! That's what I did! I really showed my sister! I took mother's ashes from the vault and put them into a centerpiece, marched right over to her house, and said, 'There! You wanted mother in ashes, you can have her, right in the middle of your table to remember her by!'" Doris again pushed herself back on the couch, again looking very pleased with herself.
"Doris," I began again, "your mother is no longer attached to the body she left behind. It was only a vehicle that allowed her to function and move through her life here. Souls who come forward from the other side often comment on the lovely service that was given in remembrance of them, sometimes sending me the scent of the carnations or roses that filled the church. They want loved ones to know that they were also in attendance.
"After going to the light and experiencing a rest period, if needed, they are usually more involved with reflecting back on all they learned and experienced in this part of life, and with counseling concerning all that yet has to be experienced and balanced. Drama resulting from making final arrangements, how things are or aren't worked out, is really more engaging for the living."
I finished, then looked at Doris, who now sat on the edge of the couch with her head bowed. She was muttering to herself, "I still think that I did the right thing. My sister shouldn't have done that."
Such drama can keep a loved one busy during the grieving process until passage of time assists in the healing of the painful feelings of loss, or it can keep them from the feelings as long as they choose. Unresolved grief often transforms into anger, and family is the handiest on which to project it. As long as people stay engrossed in the resulting drama, they can effectively keep themselves from feeling the emotions that can move them through their grief. Or it can delay the healing of those emotions until the person finally becomes receptive.
I guessed that Doris was still too frightened to let herself feel the hurt from losing her mother. It didn't matter that she now had assurances that her mother still existed. She was still fixated on the drama with her sister. Fighting battles involving decisions about her mother's remains let her feel dutiful and devoted to her mother and kept her too busy to feel her own sadness.
I hoped that she would allow the feelings to move through her when she was ready, so that the unresolved emotions, held in her body, wouldn't be forced to turn inward and create illness for Doris. Then, again, each in one's own way, according to one's own, individual choices.
Mountain Man
I watched Richard drive into my courtyard, his big old Cadillac lumbering and maneuvering around the curve down into the parking area, then back around into a parking slot, gears shifting from forward to reverse, back and forth until the car was placed perfectly between the two white lines. He seemed to be taking his time getting from his car, and I watched him reach over into the passenger's seat and then turn back to open his door, pointing an imposing walking cane affirmatively to the pavement, before lifting himself out to make a slow but deliberate trip to my front stoop.
My first impulse was to run down the steps to greet him and take his arm to help him up safely. But I quickly stopped myself. There was something about the way he carried himself, with a proud dignity, rather than moving as though he would have preferred to have left his encumbered body behind in the car. He seemed to move it with reverence and high regard. So I stood at the top of the stairs and waited, probably feeling far more uncomfortable about whatever it was that inconvenienced him, than he did.
Reaching the curb, he smiled a greeting and introduced himself, then looked back down, sizing up the climb ahead. Then, with intense concentration, he slowly made his way up the stairs, grasping the handrail with his free hand with each hoist of his body. He was medium in height, very muscular and tanned, and looked to be maybe in his early sixties. I figured that his disability had to have been recent, or at least minimal, for his body to be in such excellent shape, with no visible loss of muscle from a long illness or convalescence.
I had left the front door open, and he took this as an invitation to go on past me, nodding and smiling again as he made his way into the house. I indicated the way up another short flight of steps and back to the left of the mirrored wall, into the family room off the kitchen. I saw him catch a quick glimpse of himself in the mirror as he walked by it, straightening his body and tilting back his head proudly, a momentary self-satisfied pose.
Finally, he settled himself down at the near end of my L-shaped couch, resting both hands on the bulbous gold knob on the one end of his carved wooden cane, now secured between his bent knees. He gave me a broad smile, his big brown eyes twinkling. Now he was ready to begin. When Richard started to speak, his voice cracked, sounding as if he were about to cry. We renewed our introductions, and then he announced why he had made the appointment. His daughter had come some months before for a reading, and had recommended that he try a session with me.
Richard explained that he had Lou Gehrig's Disease, a rare muscle wasting-disease, which had already affected his larynx. The disease, he explained, had forced him to open his heart, make amends for past abuses with his children, and point him towards a few self-realization programs, where he'd learned about the power of the mind over the body.
He looked directly at me with his warm, now moist brown eyes, and asked when God would take away the disease. He pleaded, "I've learned from my disease. Now when will God take it back!" I answered him gently that he would have it as long as he needed to learn from it. Richard did not seem to be stuck in a victim mode, and his question told me that he had already taken responsibility for his disease, but now was impatient to be done with it.
I offered to place a pillow behind his back for support and encouraged him to relax as I seated myself in a straight-backed chair, a comfortable distance in front of him. I took a few cleansing breaths, began to relax into my invocation, and then went deeper, starting to view all the scenes around him.
It's as if the information I view and understand through pictures, clairvoyantly, all exists in a dot. It's all there: strategic scenes from the past, present challenges, and future glimpses; plus an occasional disincarnate friend or loved one, or a soul in preparation for "re-entry" may transmit in on my higher vibrational frequency to pay a visit. It's challenging to retain all that I'm viewing in this first stage of a reading, then attempt to spread it all out to relate in linear form, while trying to include all the nuances and significant themes that are known to me the instant that I view the scenes.
I immediately saw an overlay of a past-life around Richard, a very alive, still-existing life experience. When I view a past life in a client's reading, I see a concurrent life space that relates in a specific way to what the person is acting out in his present life, at the time of the reading. In this particular overlay Richard was a robust peace officer in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800's, looking like a burly mountain man. I watched a side view of him stepping up and into the doorway of a building, set among several others on either side.
When I view this kind of scene, I'm tuning into a part or frequency of the client's consciousness that is operates through another co-existing physical form in a concurrent but different time period. I can telepathically connect with the thoughts of the person, operating through that "past" persona, then direct their thoughts back to me, to communicate with me about what's going on with him in that particular scene. Sometimes past selves turn around and face me, as if to have a chat, much like the way souls communicate who project themselves from between life spaces, or from future glimpses.
I started to describe the scene to Richard, and added, "I have to say, Richard, you strike me as a pretty 'macho' guy back there!" I hadn't intended this as a compliment, but he took it as such and, throwing his chest out, answered, "I know!" He himself had seen what I was describing, in some of his own meditations. I went on to view other overlays that dramatized a theme Richard continued to repeat, that of defining himself and his worth in terms of his physical brawn. I saw that in this life space he had excelled in athletics, as a welterweight in boxing and a black belt in the martial arts. I also viewed some past glimpses of him physically beating his children when they were young.
It seemed as if, in his own words, God was taking away that which he had made his God—his muscle—to which he had become extremely attached. When he could dominate or win others over using his physical strength, he held himself in high esteem. When he was defeated in strength, he felt less purposeful, less validated.
Richard had long ago divorced and had since married a woman whose weight had increased to obesity. He made no attempt to hide his disgust at what she had allowed her body to become.
In the following sessions, held over the next few months, I worked with Richard through meditations and astral projection exercises, to help give him a sense of his essence, the existence of his more total being, beyond his understanding of his physical body. At times I would feel we were really making progress. He seemed to radiate with joy at the realization that he was far greater than the physical body that, having served him so responsively, only temporarily housed his enduring and continuing spirit. Then, at other times, it was as if none of our work together had made any difference at all.
At the end of one particularly (I felt) successful session, he pulled himself up from the couch and readied himself for the walk down to his car. He turned to me, leaning on his cane, with a big grin. I mistakenly anticipated some sort of spontaneous testimonial. "Don't think I told you," he began, "about the other day on the freeway! Cut in front of this guy, and he edges me off onto the shoulder....I get out, and he starts to come at me, looks at my cane, and figures me an easy mark. Man," he beamed, "I knocked him flat."
The significant part about Richard's story came a year later. I hadn't seen him after that last session, and months later I received a call from his daughter, informing me that her dad had passed over. She said that she thought she believed that we don't "die," and that her dad still existed somehow, somewhere, but her faith had failed her. Hesitantly, she wondered if she might come for a reading.
Richard had no problem projecting himself into his daughter's reading. His big, beautiful smile and twinkling eyes made me smile. He transmitted several messages, and as I relayed them to his visibly moved, loving daughter. He applauded her for figuring out where important forms had been left in his desk, was glad that she had found his wallet under the living room chair—misplaced during his final days in bed at home, and allowed me to move into his consciousness to experience the sensations that were his, as he was passing from this dimension.
He had complete awareness of all that took place in the house and around his bedside (as well as of those who waited for him on "the other side"), even when he appeared to be losing consciousness. He knew that the lettuce in the refrigerator was going bad, and he had a keen understanding of who did or didn't understand what he was experiencing. "John knew, " he added. His daughter said that John was the mailman, who happened to drop in one day and stand by his bed. Richard conveyed to me that there was an almost telepathic communication or understanding with him and anyone else who was intuitively receptive, as Richard's life force was slipping away.
Finally, he turned to me, beaming, and announced, "Now I get it!" I knew from his thoughts, exactly what he was trying to say. Now he finally understood that he was more than the physical body that he had left behind. It was in the passing from the physical plane that he finally understood the lesson that he tried in vain to comprehend while fighting for his strength, while trapped in his failing body.
Proof of the Continuum
Over the years, I've read many people who come for proof that a loved one didn't die. Sometimes they come with an obsessive intensity, like the woman who came to ask about her deceased husband, Harry. I later found that this woman had experienced personal interviews with many notable people in fields specializing in the understanding and acceptance of death and the dying process.
Among them, she had met with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, noted psychiatrist and pioneer of valuable work with the terminally ill, and the developer of hospices. Those facilities provide an environment where the dying are fully supported in experiencing their last days as a fulfilling, enriching episode of life. They're encouraged to share and value that time without shame or denial.
My client estimated that she had allowed herself to go through the grieving process. It became clear, however, that she had yet to find any peace or acceptance about the loss of her husband.
As I tuned into her, Harry showed up immediately. He tried to project every possible memory he could come up with, to prove to her that it was indeed the energy she had known as "Harry." Memories are very alive and present when we're out of the body, because our perceptions aren't limited by the illusion of time being linear or sequential. He showed me a scene of how they used to watch TV and eat popcorn, tossing it in the air and trying to catch it in their mouths.
Harry transmitted a scene of the blue floral picture they had purchased, early in their marriage, and the imitation gold necklace he'd given her, which, he added—with all that he was learning in reviewing back on that life about fears of lack—if he had it to do again, would be a necklace of real gold! It felt like Harry was performing a three-ring circus over to my right, trying to help his dear wife from whom he'd departed accept that he, his energy, wasn't dead and buried in the ground.
None of Harry's feats seemed to convince her. At the end of the session, I understood why. "Well!" she started, as she watched me return to normal consciousness. Sometimes when I come out of it, my eyes are a little crossed; both my twin brother and I had eye operations for strabismus when we were little. Being in such a relaxed state and not fully operational in the body during readings, my eyes are sometime out of focus when I "return." A bit unsettling to my clients, I imagine, as I open my eyes, looking at them cross-eyed.
"Well?" I answered.
"Well," she repeated, "the Christmas after My friend Dorothy's husband died, er, passed over, he blinked the Christmas tree lights on her tree, at the exact time that he had died!" Suddenly it was clear to me that she was seeking the same kind of dramatic display of "proof" that her friend had experienced.
I asked her if she'd known Harry to have had a flair for the dramatic in life. "Oh no!" she replied, "he was the most unassuming, unpretentious man!"
"Then why do you think he would present himself other than how you had known him?" I finally asked.
