Posted on 09 December 2019, 9:47

When my wife said not long ago that I should try to communicate with her after I die, I pondered on what I might be able to do or say that would be evidential to her.  I told her that I am not sure how much I’ll remember or how much of that I would be able to get through a medium or otherwise.  Based on psychical research, it’s usually a matter of the communication being by ideas and symbols and then converted into language by a medium. The ideas and symbols are often misinterpreted. 

A few days after my wife made the request, I was attempting to clear much of the clutter in a closet, some of it old photos and papers inherited from my parents after their transitions.  I came upon a letter I wrote to them in 1958 from Quantico, Virginia.  I told them of attending a football game with two friends and then finding my car would not start after the game, requiring a new coil to be installed by a mechanic dispatched by Triple A. However, I have absolutely no recollection of the game, the friends, or the car problem.  I attempted to dig into my subconscious for some recollection of them, but I was unsuccessful. There were many other things in that and other letters my parents had saved that I could not recall.  However, I do have flashing memories of little incidents here and there, many of them seemingly as insignificant as that football game and car problem.  Why remember some and not others?  I searched for an emotional aspect in those I could remember and found little or none in most of what I do remember.

During my youth, I attended dozens of baseball games, from New York to San Francisco.  Yet, there are only two memories in my brain from all those games – two very vivid mental pictures.  One is getting the great Jackie Robinson’s autograph as he approached the clubhouse from the parking lot.  As Robinson was a boyhood idol, I can understand recalling that one.  However, the other memory has long mystified me and suggests some kind of precognition.  It involved another player from the Brooklyn Dodgers, Don Newcombe.

It was a hot July day in 1949 at the old Polo Grounds in New York with the Dodgers playing the New York Giants. I was 12 at the time and was seated in deep centerfield with my seven-year-old brother. Newcombe had just been called up from the minor leagues by the Dodgers a week or two earlier and I had never heard of him until that game, which, I believe, was only his second game in the majors.  When he left the game about the seventh inning, he departed through the centerfield exit to the clubhouse, right below me.  I remember reacting with a thought, “Wow! What a big guy he is.” For some mystifying reason, I took a mental snapshot of him, one that I can still picture very clearly and sharply, more than 70 years later. 

I was up close to many other standout ballplayers during my youth, filling an autograph book with 50 or more names, some now legendary.  But I have retained no such mental snapshot of any of them, only Newcombe, who, unlike Robinson, was not one of my favorites. That snapshot of Newcombe resurfaced in my consciousness every now and then over the next 45 or so years,  and then around 1994, a friend called me at work. Knowing that I was an old Dodgers fan, he said he was accompanying Don Newcombe to a talk he was giving to a local Alcoholics Anonymous group and wanted to bring him by my office the next day.  Newcombe and I had a long talk about the old Dodgers and I told him about remembering that 1949 game, which he did not seem to have a particular recollection of. We met again on another occasion to continue our discussion.

I remain mystified as to why the mental snapshot of Newcombe (below with me) on the field is the only one from so many games of baseball that I held on to. If it had not resurfaced in my consciousness over those 45 years before meeting him, I might understand it, but it was a recurring picture over those 45 years, a dozen or more times, and precognition is the only thing I can come up with.

Just a few days before writing this, a friend invited me to a pre-Christmas luncheon and his email invitation to me and several others asked that we come prepared to relate a memorable Christmas story.  While I’m reasonably certain I enjoyed every Christmas of my youth, I could recall no particular moment and had no particular mental snapshots of anything worth relating.

All that makes me wonder how effective I would be if, after death, I try to communicate something evidential through a medium.  What might I remember that would be very evidential to my wife?  If I do remember it, will the idea be properly interpreted and symbolized by the medium? Will I remember our unusual bank account password?  If I do remember it, will I be able to somehow get it through to the medium?  There is no symbol for the password.

After his death in 1925, Sir William Barrett, (below) a distinguished British physicist and a co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, began communicating with his wife, Florence Barrett, a physician and dean of the women’s college of medicine in London, through several mediums, including trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. He told her that he had to learn how to slow down his vibration in order to communicate with her.  “Sometimes I lose my memory of things from coming here,” he continued.  “I know in my own state but not here.  In dreams you do not know everything, you only get parts in a dream. A sitting is similar; when I go back to the spirit world after a sitting like this I know I have not got everything through that I wanted to say. That is due to my mind separating again.”

Sir William went on to explain that in the earth body we have the separation of subconscious and conscious and that when we pass over they join and make a complete mind that knows and remembers everything.  However, when he brings himself back into the physical sphere, the conscious and the subconscious again separate and he forgets much. “I cannot come with my whole self, I cannot.”

When Lady Barrett asked him to elaborate, Sir William pointed out that he has a fourth dimensional self which cannot make its fourth dimension exactly the same as the third.  “It’s like measuring a third dimension by its square feet instead of by its cubic feet,” he continued, “and there is no doubt about it I have left something of myself outside which rejoins me directly I put myself into the condition in which I readjust myself.”

At a later sitting, Sir William explained that when he was in his own sphere he would remember a name, but when he came into the conditions of a sitting he could not always remember it.  “The easiest things to lay hold of are what we may call ideas,” he communicated.  “A detached word, a proper name, has no link with a train of thought except in a detached sense; that is far more difficult than any other feat of memory or association of ideas. If you go to a medium that is new to us, I can make myself known by giving you through that medium an impression of my character and personality, my work on earth, and so forth.  Those can all be suggested by thought impressions, ideas; but if I want to say ‘I am Will,’ I find that is much more difficult than giving you a long, comprehensive study of my personality.  ‘I am Will’ sounds so simple, but you understand that in this case the word ‘Will’ becomes a detached word.”

Lady Barrett had wondered why he had identified himself as “William,” when she knew him as “Will,” and why he had called her “Florrie,” when he knew her as “Flo.”  He explained that it was a matter of being able to get certain names through a medium easier than other names. Much depended on the medium.
 
Sir William added that if he wanted to express an idea of his scientific interests he could do it in twenty different ways.  He could begin by showing books, then giving impressions of the nature of the book and so on until he had built up a character impression of himself, but to simply say “I am Will” was a real struggle for him.

Initially, Lady Barrett was skeptical and asked for proof that the communicator was her late husband. Sir William responded by mentioning a tear in the wall paper in the corner of his room and a broken door knob, both of which they had discussed a month or so before his death, and the fact that they had now been repaired.  This was especially evidential to Lady Barrett.

For further verification, Lady Barrett asked Sir William to tell her the circumstances of his death.  He accurately responded that he had died in the armchair in the drawing room as Lady Barrett accompanied a visitor to the front door downstairs.  She discovered his lifeless body upon her return.  Lady Barrett was certain that Mrs. Leonard could not have known such detail. Sir William added that when he passed over he had no pain at all and that he was at once met by his mother and father and others.

Not being able to think of anything that a medium might be able to properly interpret or symbolize, I told my wife that I might be at too high a vibration to effectively communicate with those at the earth vibration…or I could be at such a low vibration that I might not even realize I am dead, in which case I probably won’t be able to communicate at all.  If, however, I am at the right vibration and am able to remember the password and get it through, the skeptic will conclude that the medium successfully fished for it or even telepathically picked it up from wife’s brain.  So best not to even try.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.

Keith: I thought there had been successful experiments in “cross-correspondences” in after death communication, where there had to be messages through more than one medium in order for the whole meaning to be understood?

Perhaps I am remembering incorrectly.  Certainly, memory is a very slippery and unreliable thing, even within our earth lives.

However, I have received very specific messages from “dead” folk, including my mother telling me where her will could be found (not where it was supposed to be!).  These messages relied on clear memories of some kind.

Karen:  I cannot make any sense of what you have been saying about the vagus nerve, in particular its being “cut” at death.  I am both a medical professional and a little bit of a medium and medical intuitive, and I have never heard, seen, read or otherwise learned anything like this.  Where did you get it?

The comments about communication being based on love seem spot-on to me.  I’m sure that if Mike moves to the next world before his wife, he will be able to tell her something meaningful!

Claudio,

I should have clarified that there are different types of skeptics.  There are those who accept psychic phenomena as genuine but do not accept the spirit/survival hypothesis.  See my blog next Monday for further discussion of this.  Thanks.

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<If, however, I am at the right vibration and am able to remember the password and get it through, the skeptic will conclude that the medium successfully fished for it or even telepathically picked it up from wife’s brain. >
Mike, this means that Skeptics believe in telepathy!
That’s look very unscientific!
)))

Michael,

Keep in mind that while Dr. Richet accepted the reality of materializations he did accept them as spirits of the dead.  He took them to be manifestations produced by the medium’s subconscious.  I’ll be discussing Richet and his views more in my next blog post next week.

Eric,

It is my understanding that we remember everything, the good, the bad, the neutral, after we die, but how we then process them depends on our level of spiritual development.  The spiritually developed person will have already recognized his wrongs when he transitions and it will be a positive experience.  The undeveloped person will remember his wrongs at that time and will somehow have to overcome them.  Of course, it is more complex than that, but if you have already recognized the misguidance by your early family, I can’t see that such memories would be a problem.

Michael (Tymn) How right you are about the great scientist Charles Richet. He witnessed the same thing at I did, full materialisation phenomena. Richet made the following statement: “Full materialisation phenomena must take rank as a scientific fact.”

Dear Michael Tymn and all correspondents, 

I take it the comment I am responding to is Michael Tymn’s own, or Michael Roll’s. I am not clear which it is. The commentator addresses Keith with remarks about mothers and churches. Such thoughts evoke horrendous memories for me, too. So-called Christian parents misled me throughout childhood and adolescence, and terrified me, too.

(I believe ninety-nine in a hundred people who call themselves Christians have TOTALLY failed to perceive the gospel, the good news, and have instead either espoused or rejected various legalistic fables, falsely purported to be the Christian truth - but that’s a topic for another time.)

My family of Christian impostors did not believe there is a hell, but did believe in god the severe judge. They wrecked my life, several times over, being the main cause of timidity, dogmatism, secret terror, poor social skills for decades, failure in business and academe, poor choices of marriage partner and missed better opportunities . . . there’s no need to go on. Spiritualism was pronounced evil and delusive, yet was not of the Devil because he was a fiction. Inconsistencies were explained away by naive dogmatisms. As I say, no need to go on. 

The subject of Michael (Tymn’s) original article - and very fruitful for thought it is - was the matter of memory, which led to the idea of our time being consolidated in the next universe up, with its FOUR dimensions of space and one of moment-by-moment “time”. Time has become spatial, ever-present, as Sir William Barrett tries to explain through his medium.

My thought here is that I would love to shed the terrible memories my parents caused, which still spoil my life, and live my opportunities of decades ago unadulterated by their poisonous thought. There’s one girl I remember whom I would like to go back in time to meet again. Back in the early sixties I paused to help her very shy close friend to solve HER psychosocial problems, with which I gently but strongly empathised, before approaching the girl I really wanted (who, I heard later, very much wanted me), and that good motive cost me the girl I wanted. Perhaps it has cost her a great deal too. But in a timeLESS life that lies in our small-world future, even that lifelong sadness won’t matter. Love, not law (nor religious lore) will prevail. 

Eric Franklin

Keith, My computer is not working. thanks for your email. I first found out about this from the reference that has already been given – Arthur Ford’s book. The bit about rotting in the flames of hell forever was taught to me at school. This applies to every person who makes contact with ”dead” people. All Christian priests teach this because they know what we know, whenever we make contact with “dead” people then the massage is always the same, “There is no place here reserved for Christians or anybody else, every person survives the death of their physical body.”

Thankfully my mother was always able to give me the antidote to Christian propaganda. My first day at school I will never forget. My Christian teachers told me that there is an invisible God in the sky who is going to forgive all the rotten things that I do on Earth. I could not wait to get home and tell my mother about this. Mother went crazy and read the riot act to me. She told me that during my stay on Earth that I am responsible for everything I do. I took notice of my mother, not my teachers.

I just came upon an interesting and applicable quote of Dr. Charles Richet in a book just released by White Crow Books:  “Charles Richet: A Nobel Prize Winning Scientist’s Exploration of Psychic Phenomena” by Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D.

Richet is quoted, in part: “The mind can work without the assistance of consciousness; very complex intellectual processes take place unknown to us, and a whole world of ideas vibrates in us of which we are unconscious. Probably no remembrance of the past is completely effaced; consciously we forget much, but memory forgets nothing; the mass of past impressions is retained almost intact, though consciousness of them has vanished….”

Much of interest in the comments here.  And thanks Mike for quotng from the Lady Barrett.  Back in my collecting days that title was particularly expensive and I never did see a copy.
But let me add this:  human consciousness ahd changed radically since the times of the folks you quote.  Trying to assess the relative success of communications from the old spiritualism is just short of a pointless task.  Try, for example, giving up your attachment to evidential spiritualism.  It was based on the “rational analysis” function of the brain, useful back then but worn out now.  Most folk can now operate on intuition, which is a function of the Buddhic body, which the increase in vibration over the last several decades has given us all access to.  The Buddhic body, beyond that of the astral and mental, just knows without the intervention of doubt.

Dear Michael Tymn and all,

My view completely coincides with your own, (ie Michael (Tymn’s), ‘seeing’ of the meaning of Barrett’s explanation. He has to communicate in only three dimensions from a consciousness in four, (a consciousness that involves SIMULTANEOUSLY our time-based subconscious, consisting largely of memories, ie past times, and imaginative creations-in-thought, ie the future) just as a map of mountainous territory communicates its full shape to the viewer. In the map, three dimensions are depicted using only two, with conventional symbols, eg contour lines, to indicate the missing dimension of height and depth. Such mappings abound. (Even wholly within our physical world there are such mappings, even in engineering.

The so-called Gresley-Holcroft derived valve motion on steam engines produces, ie “maps”, three motions from a mechanism of only two; but this is no more than a gross-world analogue of the translation of dimensions that is evidently involved when the spirit world communicates with ours.)

What Barrett says in the passage I noted and quoted is clear, direct evidence, in my view, of exactly this four-spatial-dimensional conscious life, and his resulting understanding of the difficulty he himself experiences when attempting to convey an impression of HIS moment-by-moment consciousness of his WHOLE, UNIFIED consciousness, past, present and future, ie subconscious and conscious together-as-one-experience.
(This is, I think, an example of what Gebser would call ‘consolidation of time’, with Heidegger agreeing.)

We do not have that consolidated awareness of time that Barrett has, and Heidegger and Gebser intuit. Barrett has it, and cannot communicate it adequately. BUT IT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE SHOULD EXPECT TO BE THE CASE ONCE WE GRASP A FEW PRINCIPLES OF EINSTEINIAN RELATIVITY. THAT is what is so reassuring to those who are trying to find real evidence of a life-filled spirit world and our own ultimate timelessness of Being-there. Here, to my own delight at least, WE HAVE IT in Barrett the physicist’s testimony.

I hope one or another phrase of the above result of (my) struggles with recalcitrant language will illuminate the minds of those who have patience with my words and strive to understand.

Eric Franklin

Keith, I have Beatrice Houdini’s statement in front of me. It was witnessed by a journalist, a scientist and a friend of Mrs. Houdini.
Beatrice Houdini was told by priests that if she did not renounce her statement that she had received the message from her husband “in its entirety, and in the agreed upon sequence” then she would rot in the flames of Hell forever.
There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules when it comes to making sure people never find out that we all have a soul that separates from the dead physical body. It’s all to do with money.

Eric,

Thank you for your post and the clarification. I believe Barrett’s comment about the conscious and subconscious uniting after death and again separating when he re-enters the earth vibration to communicate makes much “sense,” although it is only evidential in a very indirect way.  I don’t know how direct evidence of it could ever be obtained. 

Relativity theory is so complex that it is difficult for many to wrap their brains around it and then put language to it.  That’s probably why few people comment on it.

Thanks to all for the interesting and informative comments so far.  I’ve also received a couple of email asking for the title of the Barrett book.  It is “Personality Survives Death,” first published in 1937 by Longmans, Green and Co. Strangely, no author is listed on the cover or title page, although it is otherwise made clear that Dr. Florence Barrett, i.e., Lady Barrett, the widow of physicist Sir William Barrett, was the author. 

Concerning Richard’s question or comment relative to how another language comes through in English, it is my understanding that the communication is by ideas and not by language; therefore, the idea comes out in one language even if the discarnate communicator and the medium speak different languages.  However, I think it works differently in the direct-voice type of mediumship, the original language actually coming through.  The direct-voice should not be confused with the trance-voice type.  They are two very different forms of mediumship. The best examples of the direct voice are with mediums Etta Wriedt and George Valiantine.  Put their names into a search in the archives at left and you can find more about them, including the famous Confucius communication that was interpreted by Dr. Neville Whymant.  Or check out the book “Psychic Adventures in New York,” by Neville Whymant, published by White Crow Books.

I very much appreciate the various thoughts and ideas offered in the above comments and also look forward to Keith’s next You-tube.

Very interesting subject. You have the mediums in England and Scotland, we in Switzerland have them too. Communication with dead persons works through loving words. When I do it, I turn down my mind and search the vibration of the sender. Then it flows, my brain just receives the words. There is no need for a code word. Once I saw that a kitchen towel was liftet up and fell to the floor. So I sat down and listened… One can also ask the person one feels who she/he is and she/he will answer. Or ask if she is the sister of my mother and so on.
I keep reading your posts and learn from you.

Dear Michael Tymn, and all correspondents,

Perhaps I should add to my earlier comment, for clarity and accuracy, that by 1925 many physicists (and Sir William Barrett was a physicist) had espoused Relativity Theory, but many were still failing to understand the General Theory. But many simultaneous, or concurrent, universes can be expected on the basis of the Special Theory alone (and Newton himself would, if present in our world during Einstein’s time, have accepted the Special Theory without hesitation. his own theories being relativistic in nature.)

My point was that I think William Barrett made his remarks via a medium to describe his own experience of BEING THERE, being ALIVE, in the next world, and that that world is one of FOUR SPATIAL dimensions, plus (probably) one of ‘time’, whether with conscious awareness of Einstein’s theory, learned back on Earth in previous years or not. Barrett’s explanation is very welcome and very convincing whether he was communicating with Einsteinian relativity in his conscious or subconscious mind or not. And his testimony is very welcome because it fits so neatly with terrestrial hard science, not only with the softer sciences and/or mere emotion and hope. In short, his communication of his conscious ideas is highly evidential.

I am puzzled, though, that no-one responding to Michael Tymn’s blog responds to my mention of relativity. Very odd.

Eric Franklin

What a fascinating blog. I hadn’t considered that the conscious and subconscious split when we incarnate here. I love the thought that they reunite again when we go Home.

I am also interested, depending on the medium, of how the dead find it easier to deliver impressions rather than details such as names. That makes sense to me.  And, thoroughly looking forward to watching Keith P’s Youtube video.

I just now went back and read the very first Blog and was beyond surprised to read about a DISBELIEF in re-incarnation on our current Earth Plane, especially since re-incarnation has been “proved” (to my satisfaction!) And, since it is spoke of by minds such as Seth, a personality in Spirit, through Jane Roberts. But, as J. Krishnamurti suggests, there is much can only believe TENTATIVELY! So I am now fond of stating that, “I tentatively believe, etc”.

What is mentioned in this article is why Sir William Crookes worked with a materialisation medium - Florence Cook. I also worked with a materialisation medium in 1983. The medium was in a deep trance and did not witness my father making direct contact with me.Using family codes that only me and my father knew, my father proved to me that he had survived the death of his physical body in 1967. My father was a professional cricketer. He was with me, in his etheric body, when my son, Lawson Roll, played for England young cricketers at Lord’s

I, an American, live in the Philippines with my Phil wife. Some months ago, a measles epidemic came through, and one of my wife’s sisters lost a 4 year old boy. I Channelled him and he spoke to several of us in attendance IN ENGLISH! (I also had one of those “dreams” but not a dream and my wife’s recently “dead” father spoke to me about a controversial family matter, IN ENGLISH!) i wonder how that works, but it does. The young boy, among other things, explained that he seized the first chance he go to RETURN TO SPIRIT (Our True Home) because, he was supposed to be born A GIRL. He said he wanted to return, and, to the same mother. She had given him excellent treatment as a mother! So no wonder! But, where and how the translation (if it is like that at all) takes place, and, in the subject or the medium, I don’t know and have not read commentary on that. That happened periodically during my long career as a touring psychic counsellor.  RLV

Yes, memory in our earth life is a tease. Like you, I can recall scraps of impressions from long ago, of things absolutely insignificant. Far more has vanished like a ghost. Before she passed over, my mother saved a family diary from 1962 (she kept one every year starting in ‘53) and left it for me. I read it with amazement. By and large the parts about me were like an account of someone else.

They say memories are all filed away somewhere in the brain, capable of being brought to vivid life by electrically stimulating the proper areas. I’d love to try it. My experience with hypnosis has been, I have to say, a dud for evoking memories. I don’t count fantasies that have to be “interpreted.”

If we accept what appears to be a consensus of mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife, the life review includes everything we ever did. If so we’ll relive each moment—not an especially appealing prospect, though presumably useful in our spiritual evolution.

There’s another kind of afterlife memory that becomes increasingly important as I age. I wouldn’t call my life successful, but I take some comfort from the fact that I believe I’ve grown to appreciate some of the glories of this world: literary style, music, architecture, so much in the arts.

The other day I was at the (Smithsonian, U.S.) National Gallery of Art looking at some paintings by Rembrandt. I’d seen them many times before but, as always, they were not only shockingly vivid in technique but profound portraits of a soul.

Can such perception, and so much else that has enraptured and raised my awareness, be lost when this body and brain waste away? No. It cannot be. Otherwise what’s a life, and an afterlife, for?

Michael,
It could be that after one transitions over to another reality nothing or no person from one’s previous life on earth will be of much importance. The interest will be on what one has learned during that lifetime, not on people or things.  One will probably be so overwhelmed by what is experienced on the “other side” that one’s life on earth will fade in comparison.  Earthly relationships will no longer seem as important as they were during the life just experienced and it may be that there will be no desire to make any contact with those ‘left behind’.  Some people who report an NDE say that they had no wish to return to their relatives including spouse and children, people with whom they had a meaningful loving relationship,  knowing that they will live out their lives as they were meant to and that their own spirit will go on to other things and perhaps other lifetimes with other people.  - AOD

Mike My father was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.  I remember my 12th birthday when he bought a tele-vision and brought it home to our upstate NY modest house.  Kids from the neighborhood gathered at the front door peering in to watch the TV.  On it was a baseball game where the Dodgers were playing the Yankees.  It was 1954 and I believe the Dodgers won.  Once I got a bit older I realized the TV set had been for my father not for my 12th birthday!
Re memory when we go to the other side - In my latest book I speak about the vagus nerve being the conduit for electromagnetic energy into and out of our body.  One thing about the vagus it is used by the stomach to tell our brain 80% of what goes on in our bodies.  And when we leave out body the nerve is cut at the stomach and the neck and it goes up with our etheral body (see page 139 for this illustration) I believe this is where memory is stored in this cord - whether it’s the silver cord or part of the vagus is the silver cord I’m not sure.  But 80% of what happened in our body has to have something to do with memory.  Thanks again for your wonderful emails.  Blessings Karen

Dear Michael Tymn,

Thank you for another interesting blog.

I have previously said that Einstein’s theory of relativity (special relativity, general relativity being unnecessary to invoke for this matter) gives scientific ground for at least the possibility of other universes right here, interwoven through our own but not communicating with it, in which Beings could be alive.

I do not have time to explain fully now, but the following, apparently quoted from William Barratt, seems to be his expression of the explanation.

*****************

When Lady Barrett asked him to elaborate, Sir William pointed out that he has a fourth dimensional self which cannot make its fourth dimension exactly the same as the third.  “It’s like measuring a third dimension by its square feet instead of by its cubic feet,” he continued, “and there is no doubt about it I have left something of myself outside which rejoins me directly I put myself into the condition in which I readjust myself.”

******************

The theory of relativity was still below the horizon in Barrett’s time, so he is not likely to be referring to the idea himself, though without Einstein’s name for it, but to his own EXPERIENCE, his own AWARENESS, in the world he inhabits after his death on Earth. If I am right, his description of his experience does seem to bear out exactly what would follow if Barrett is, at the time he communicates, in a locus of conscious existence (ie life) that consists STATICALLY of one more dimension than ours does. We have three static dimensions, and one transient one, respectively the three dimensions of space and the one that we experience as time.

Very interesting, and gratifying to me that my idea (I am sure many others have thought of it, but I have not heard it voiced by anyone else) may be correct.

Eric Franklin

When I had a session with Rev DeRay, an 80 some year old Spiritualist Medium, she went into trance, her usual entities came through and much happened prior to my “contacts” came in. My father, paternal grandfather spoke in their own voice that I was familiar with and we had conversation. There was no problem, no complexity.
Then my sister who died three years before my birth spoke to me in an adult voice. She was age 3 when accidentally run over accidentally as her/our father with backing out of my maternal grandparents’ farmyard.
My sister came in to assure me of certain things. She KNEW my life and my concerns about back then. All very simple, seemingly. She obviously had “grown up” in Spirit. All very clear and easy for an advanced Spiritualist Medium such as Rev DeRay.
That was during the latter part of the 1970s while I was in Psychic Development. As a psychic counsellor since that time, from time to time a person in Spirit will visit a client of mine and speak through me. I hear and repeat the “impression” of voice from Spirit. All seemingly very simple.
My point is, communication is, or seems, very clear and simple. And easy for a well-developed medium.

Dear Mike,
I love the topic of this post, most especially because I have been so surprised by the evidential ADCs from my transitioned partner Dr. Steve Baumann, and from my close friend Dr. Elisabeth Targ, both parapsychologists. Please know that they communicate to us with LOVE! The numerous examples of evidence they were able to impress upon mediums, who were then able to relay the ideas to me, always involved love: THEIR LOVE of something, some act of love that I had done for them, or some object he or she had appreciated for its beauty or that represented meaningfulness for THEM. I was always surprised by the creative examples my loved ones conveyed, because they were not at all what I would have chosen. They were examples of events that were MEANINGFUL for THEM. That’s why meaningless numbers designated by researchers don’t come through. The evidence comes through love and caring for people.

A very interesting piece, Mike, thanks. I am of course aware of Sir William, without having read his own writings. The problem of providing an identifiable message has been tried numerous times by different people.  Myers and Lodge both left sealed letters to be opened once a medium claimed to have received a post-mortem communicadtion identifying it, but when these turned out to be incorrect, the message was useless once unsealed. Robert Thouless of the SPR tried to provide a message published in code and requiring cipers that prevented their translation unless the ciphers were communicated from the other side. I thought the idea of giving a combination lock number was a good one. If the number communicated from the other side is incorrect the lock won’t open. So an incorrect try does not destroy the scheme. I thought this was thought up by Thouless too, but can find no reference to it. And then there was Houdini, who had an agreed code shared with his wife, Bess. Sundry mediums got it wrong until the the spiritualist pastor Arthur Ford came along and was correct, as confirmed by Bess in an affidavit. But later she changed her mind and declared that Houdini had still not communicated with her. Ford was declared a fraud since some of the code had been published in a book about Houdini a year previously, so he could have had access to it. But I have looked at this book and don’t believe there is sufficient information in it to enable Ford to have got the message right without supernormal assistance. I’m currently in the process of researching a Youtube video to be launched next year, entitled ‘Houdini vs Margery: Immmortality on Trial”.