Posted on 15 December 2014, 10:00

Suicide is one subject on which spirit messages coming through various mediums all seem to agree. While there are some conflicting messages relative to suicide by terminally-ill people, the messages overwhelmingly condemn conventional suicide. They strongly suggest that the individual who hopes to escape from his or her problems here in the material world does not do so.  That does not mean that the person finds himself in “hell,” as some religions teach, or even experiences a “fire of the mind.” Much seems to depend on the motivation, the degree of despair, and the overall mental state of the individual at the time he or she attempted the escape from this world.  The important point is that nothing is gained by the suicide and it may even set the person behind in his or her spiritual evolution.

One such message was communicated through the trance mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard by Claude Kelway-Bamber, (below) a British pilot killed during World War I.  Claude told his mother that nothing can kill the soul.  “You see, therefore, a suicide, far from escaping trouble, only goes from one form of misery to another; he cannot annihilate himself and pass to nothingness,” Claude said. He further stated: 

“I know now the whole mistake lies in looking upon death as the end of ‘activity,’ with a renewal at some indefinite date, whereas as a matter of fact it is an incident only, though a very important one, in a continuous life.  Your feelings, your memory, your love, your interests and ambitions remain; all you have left behind, and even that which one cannot at first realize, is the physical body, which proves to be merely the covering of the spiritual to enable it to function in a material world.  Man truly is a spirit and has a body, not vice versa.
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“I have told you that I, in common with hundreds of other men here, go down to the battlefields to help to bring away the souls of those who are passing out of their bodies.  We are united for the work, having ourselves endured the horrors of war.  Spirits unused to it cannot bear the terrible sights and sounds. We bring them away so that they may return to consciousness far from their mutilated physical bodies, and oh, Mum, I feel quite tired sometimes of explaining to men that they are ‘dead’! They wake up feeling so much the same; some go about for days, and even months, believing they are dreaming.

“Death works no miracle, and you wake up here the same personality exactly that left the earth-plane.  Your individuality is intact, and your ‘spirit body’ a replica of the one you have left, down to small details – even deformities remain, though, I am told they lessen and disappear in time.

“People with narrow, set, and orthodox beliefs are puzzled by the reality, the ‘ordinaryliness,’ if I may coin a word, of the spirit world.  If it were described to them as ‘flashes of light,’ ‘mauve and sapphire clouds,’ ‘golden rivers,’ etc., it would more readily approximate with their preconceived ideas.  They require ‘mystery’ about the future life.  I often laugh when I hear them complain they can’t believe in ‘solid’ things like houses, and gardens in the spirit-world…

“The first time I was sent down to help our enemies I objected but was told to remember they were fighting for what they believed to be right and in defence of their country, too.  I saw rather an interesting meeting between an Englishman and a German who had killed each other.  They met face to face and looked at each other steadily.  The Englishman held out his hand.  His erstwhile enemy, taking it, said, ‘What d—- fools we have been!’”

At another sitting, Claude had this to say:

“I have often heard people ask why God permits wickedness.  If it were impossible for man to sin, he would no longer be a free agent but an automation.  As man is on earth to learn his lesson and develop his soul, he must have his mettle proved.  There would be no good without evil.  Contrasts exist and are necessary; just as day and night, wet and fine, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, are only realized and appreciated through their opposites.”
That communication was set forth in Chapter Three of my most recent book, Dead Men Talking.  In Chapter Two, another fallen World War I warrior, Bob Boylan, in communicating with his mother via the automatic writing form of mediumship, also mentioned suicide.  He said, in part:

“Warn all with whom you talk against suicide.  I do not gather from what I hear that curses afflict any poor soul that makes that mistake.  But the self-inflicted death disarranges and delays the plans that are being shaped for the individual.  Every detail of life is worked out with a thoroughness only possible in spiritual geometry.  A sudden break necessitates rebuilding the whole theory.  It may require skill for you to tell what you have to tell and yet restrain broken-hearted ones from throwing themselves across the invisible line.  Of course, they want to rejoin their darlings.  But that will be later.”

According to Jane Katra, Ph.D., (below) those messages, or at least one of them, may have prevented a suicide a hundred years after they were communicated.  Jane was one of several people who were to receive a review copy of Dead Men Talking.  Just before the book was released during July, I informed Jane that White Crow Books, the publisher, would be sending her an advance copy.  “While I was anxiously awaiting for my copy of the book to arrive in my Eugene, Oregon post office box, I received a message on my answering machine from my friend in Durham, North Carolina thanking me for sending her a book,” Jane picks up the story.  “I called her back to tell her that I hadn’t sent her any book, and she promptly responded, ‘Why, of course you did! Your name was on the label!’ She then told me that she’d opened the book and read on the first page (to which she had opened the book) about how ‘Suicide doesn’t help at all’ because ‘The character we form here, we take with us, we cannot get away from it.’  She knew at once that she was to make a phone call and read that passage to her friend who had told her that she was planning to kill herself.  The book’s messages from the dead prevented the woman’s suicide. All three of us believe that the book was mysteriously sent to North Carolina to save a life!”

Jane later determined that when she was attending a conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies in North Carolina some years earlier, she had asked White Crow Books to send her a supply of a book she had co-authored with Russell Targ, The Heart of the Mind, to be sold at the conference.  To avoid shipping the books from her home in Oregon to the conference in North Carolina, she asked that White Crow mail them to her in care of her friend in Durham.  The Durham address went into the White Crow computer as Jane’s and that is how Dead Men Talking found its way to the friend’s house.

Coincidence?  Possibly.  Spirit-directed synchronicity? You be the judge. 

An interesting You-Tube talk on suicide by Dr. Carla Wills-Brandon can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi33RXRWFLk

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die is published by White Crow Books. His latest book, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife is now available on Amazon and other online book stores.
His latest book Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I is published by White Crow Books.

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Next blog post:  December 29

In things like that, there are no coincidences!

Great post, Michael.

In some non-Western cultures, most notably Japan, suicide does not carry the same moral stigma it does in Western countries. During the second world war, for example, literally thousands of Japanese officers committed ritual suicide in response to military failure.  There is a great deal of evidence to support the view that your immediate experience upon passing over has a good deal to do with cultural conditioning and cultural expectations.

I have always been suspicious, for this very reason, of standpat moralising which takes a “one size fits all” mentality which is one of the symptomns of the Judeo-Christian conditioning I had in my earlier years.  I suspect that much of the popular moralising against suicide reflects the inherited Judeo-Christian bias of many afterlife researchers, particularly in the United States.

Greetings from Sydney,  Rex.

Yes!  suicide does not warrant ‘hell fire and damnation’ as certain txts would have us believe But it does not alter the person’s position, the same problems are ‘over there’ as those they tried to leave behind. Bishop Pike;s book about the suicide of his son makes that quite clear. Not only this book , of course, but many others. However my understanding is that there is no punishment for the suicide, but just opportunities to work out the problems. In the case of a painful terminal illness, I cannot see a problem.