Posted on 29 November 2010, 15:24

The line separating inspirational writing from automatic writing is often difficult to identify.  Generally, inspirational writing is said to be spirit-inspired and coming primarily from the subconscious of the person, while automatic writing is said to involve little of the person’s subconscious and to come primarily from a spirit communicator without too much interference by the automatist’s brain, conscious or subconscious.  As pointed out in the last blog entry here, Brazilian Spiritists refer to what most others call automatic writing as “psychography” and what most others call inspirational writing as automatic writing.  It is all very confusing, but there does seem to be a significant overlap between the two.  Suzanne Giesemann, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, calls her brand of writing inspirational writing, although from her description of it, some would call it automatic writing or psychography.  Perhaps they can be lumped together and called “mystical writing.”

“While meditating I ask my spirit guides to blend their energy with mine,” Giesemann explained to me by e-mail.  “I sit quietly and very often my right index finger twitches upward, indicating that it is time to write, that the spirits have something to say.  At other times I very clearly hear the words, ‘pick up your pen.’  (My strongest way of attuning to the spirit world is through clairaudience).” 

Words then flow from her pen presenting words and ideas which do not seem to be coming from her own mind.  “I am aware of each sentence or phrase as it comes through because I hear and write it, but it is immediately forgotten after writing it, for I am holding a passive mind focus to receive the words,” she further explains.  “If I stop to think about what I’m hearing, the flow stops.  My understanding of this is that the spirit writers (those who are giving me the words of the poetry or prose) blend their consciousness with mine, with my consent.  I surrender my consciousness and they let their ideas, concepts, and phrases flow through mine.”

Although she has been meditating for years, Giesemann did not begin to experience this mystical writing until shortly after writing The Priest and the Medium, a book published in 2009 about Anne Gehman, a very gifted medium, and Wayne Knoll, a Jesuit priest and professor at Georgetown University. The book tells of Gehman’s interesting paranormal experiences, including an NDE, and of Knoll’s struggles to overcome his loneliness and find companionship, and then how the two met and reconciled their views of God and the spirit world.
 
After writing the book, Giesemann took several classes on mediumship and an intensive course on the subject at Arthur Findlay College in England, then began developing mediumistic abilities of her own. 

“Check my homepage, http://www.SuzanneGiesemann.com and you’ll find I have a pretty straight-laced background: 20 years in the Navy, management consulting…You won’t find any incense burning in my home or catch me wearing any wrap-around tie-died skirts,” she writes at her website.  “The fact is, even I still have trouble seeing myself as the kind of person who would author a blog about talking to spirits. And others agree.”

When a business client heard about her book about the medium and the priest, he was somewhat taken aback, wondering if Giesemann really believed in “that stuff.”  Giesemann responded that she sure did.  “If he’d asked me the same question a couple of weeks earlier, I might have waffled,” she continues telling of her introduction to mediumship.  “That’s what I did when telling a former colleague that the spirit of his deceased daughter had come through in a reading I’d recently had with a medium.  The man was a retired senior naval officer who knew me back when we were both still in uniform.  I felt he would want to know that a medium who knew nothing about his family had brought up his deceased daughter’s not-so-common name in a highly-evidential context with no prompting from me.  There was no doubt in my mind that there’d been some real spirit communication going on, but I found myself apologizing to the man, lest he think I’d lost a few marbles since I left the Navy.”

After the conversation, Giesemann decided she needed to make up her mind:  either she believed in the spirit world or she didn’t.  “The truth is,” she continues, “since the death of my own step-daughter, I no longer believe, hope, or wish that our spirit survives the transition we call death…I know.  Others may think I’m a fruitcake or a New Age nut, but what others think no longer matters.” 

Giesemann’s step-daughter, Susan, was struck and killed by lightning on June 8, 2006. She tells of the signs received from Susan at her blog entry of June 20, 2009 and explains that her search for more answers about life after death began with that experience.  Her research led to meeting Anne Gehman and the book unfolded from hearing her story.

On July 12, 2009, Giesemann meditated and asked her guides to blend with her.  Sitting in the aft cabin of her sailboat, she had placed a notebook and pen on the desk in front of her.  “I felt very lightheaded and knew from recent experiences that there was a presence with me,” she recalls, adding that she then asked for guidance on a presentation she would be giving at a workshop that Saturday.  “I suddenly felt the need to pick up the paper,” she continues. “I placed it in my lap and wrote a few words.  Within seconds, words started flowing.  After a few sentences, I noticed that the words were rhyming.  I felt surprise and slight elation, for the lines had real rhythm and rhyme, yet there were coming to me without my thinking.  They came so quickly that I didn’t have time to THINK - I just kept writing and realized, ‘They’ve sent me a poet!’”  . 

Giesemann filled page after page without opening her eyes.  “I could tell as I wrote each line that it made sense and that it rhymed, but I had no sense of the words as a whole,” she further explains. “I intuitively knew when they had finished, so I laid down the pen.  And then I sat there and cried.  I hadn’t even read the words, yet I knew they were special. I knew I hadn’t written them from my conscious mind. It had taken no more than ten minutes to write all the words, and I could not have done that by myself.”  The words flowed (partial here): 

The world is ready for these your words.
They wait and listen with wings like birds.
For ours is yours and yours is ours.
Such is the greatness of the Great Spirit’s powers.

We love you all. For this we’ve come.
There is no rest ‘til the Spirit’s work is done.

After 369 poems – all of which are posted at her website – Giesemann was told by spirit that it was time for a “new phase.”  Beginning on August 1, 2010, she channeled a new energy.  “The voice told me that they were the collective consciousness of all my guides and that we were to call them ‘Sanaya,” she relates.  “I later discovered, to my delight, that Sanaya is a female Sanskrit name meaning ‘eminent, distinguished, and ‘of the gods.’  They told me that I should prepare to ‘write and write and write as Sanaya.’”

Sanaya has delivered nearly 100 messages of wit and wisdom to date, including this one:

The death of a loved one is a trying time for those on earth, no matter how enlightened you are. You share memories with the one who passes. You share love and concern. Concern yourself at this time with those who do not have the full understanding of this very natural transition. Concern yourself as well with yourself.

Share with others and remind yourself that death is a point of celebration for the one who will no longer have to bear the pain and darkness of life in the physical world. Know that they will be surrounded by love and loved ones who have preceded them. Life will be far easier now for them, and we do stress this word “life,” for life is indeed eternal.

Concern yourself far more with remembering the good times and know that you will share these again. Feel your grief, but do not become swallowed up in it. Allow yourself a period of sadness for the close contact you will miss, then pull yourself back to that place of love within yourself. Do this as a choice—for yourself—with your own thoughts. It is not necessary to suffer. Your loved one no longer suffers and would want you to know this. They look upon you with new eyes and wish you to know all is well. They are safe and loved in the arms of angels, and so are you, my friend, so are you. 

The other messages can be viewed at her web site.

Giesemann is convinced that the words are coming from spirit, not from her own mind.  “At first I thought I was making up what I was hearing until I noticed that the words were rhyming,” she stresses.  “I might be able to rhyme one or two phrases on the spot, but not verse after verse non-stop with such beautiful messages.  After a year of receiving poetry, the spirits now give me prose as well, for I finally know that I am not making this up.” 

She also points out that after channeling a message from spirit, she frequently finds the exact words or new concepts in her spiritual reading later the same day.  “This happens repeatedly—words such as “fear not the morrow,” which I would never use, and then within hours I come across the phrase in my reading,” she further explains by e-mail.  “I always ask to be guided to what I should learn through the books I read, so when I pick up a book I’m drawn to read and find there what came through in the inspired writing earlier that day, this is always very evidential to me that these are non-physical minds working with my mind and guiding me.  Additionally, I have had friends give me personal questions to ask of the spirit guides and poets.  The poems that result have revealed childhood traumas and other circumstances which I knew nothing about.  I recently sat with a friend who is going through difficulties.  She asked for advice and I had no idea how to help her.  I apologized for not knowing what to say, and we simply sat and prayed together.  I went home and sat in meditation and asked my guides for advice.  Their answer came in a full page of advice specific to her situation, stated in beautiful prose which I later shared with her.  She told me the advice was spot-on and brought her the first true peace she’d found in weeks.  I can take no credit whatsoever for that kind of writing.”

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.

Posted on 15 November 2010, 20:48

If there is some kind of Guinness world record for the number of books authored in a lifetime, Francisco Candido “Chico” Xavier must certainly hold the record.  A Brazilian who transitioned to the spirit world on June 30, 2002, Xavier produced 458 books with sales in excess of 50 million copies.

But the record may require an asterisk, because Xavier was not really the author. “…if I were to say these books belonged to me, I would be committing a fraud for which I would have to answer in a very serious way after I left this world,” Xavier is quoted in a recently-released book, Chico Xavier: Medium of the Century, authored by Guy Lyon Playfair, a long-time investigator of psychic phenomena.  (The book is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.com.uk)

Xavier, who dropped out of school at age 13, gave credit for the words in his books to various spirit entities.  His books, which included literature, history, science, and Spiritist doctrine, were published with the phrase “dictated by the spirit of…” on the title page.  Moreover, Xavier donated the royalties to charity, living his entire life on a very modest government income and pension.

Most people familiar with mediumship would call it “automatic writing,” but Brazilian Spiritists call it “psychography.”  As Playfair points out, Spiritists make a distinction between the two, holding that automatic writing comes from the subconscious and psychography from a separate entity.
 
So famous was Xavier in Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world that he was honored with a stamp on April 2 of this year, the 100th anniversary of his birthday.  In his home state of Minas Gerias, he was voted “person of the century” in 2000 by readers of a major newspaper there, beating out an aviation pioneer, a former president of the country, and the legendary soccer player, Pelé.  More than 120,000 people lined up in a queue over two miles long to file past Xavier’s coffin and 30,000 joined in the funeral procession.

In 1932, when he was just 22, Xavier produced a 421-page book with 259 poems, signed by 56 poets, many of them famous when alive in the flesh. It became a best-seller and convinced many Brazilians that consciousness survives physical death. Playfair mentions that the poems were clearly in the individual styles of the deceased poets.  “Moreover,” Playfair offers, “if you are thinking of faking a Shakespeare sonnet, you must do more than imitate the poet’s style.  You must get across an idea, an image, that elusive ingredient that makes a poem something more than the sum of its words.”  This was clearly the case with the Xavier-produced poems.

Xavier explained that he always felt an electrical sensation in his arm when he was taking dictation and that he felt his brain had been invaded by some indefinable vibrations.  Interestingly, D.D. Home, the famous 19th century medium known for his levitations, wrote that he experienced an “electrical fullness” about his feet when the spirits were raising him from the ground.

“To produce automatic writing, the spirit simply makes contact with the medium’s frontal lobes and right hand, leaving the rest of the brain and body free,” Playfair sets forth his understanding of the phenomenon.

In addition to the books, Xavier also received many evidential messages.  One of them was even accepted in a court of law and a couple of others influenced court decisions.

Patience Worth
A somewhat similar case of automatic writing began in the United States when Chico Xavier was only three years old.  It involved a St. Louis, Missouri housewife, Pearl Curran. First from a friend’s Ouija board, then a pencil, then a typewriter, flowed the writings of a person identifying herself as Patience Worth, a 17th Century English woman.  Over a period of 24 years, Patience Worth dictated approximately four million words, including seven books, some short stories, several plays, thousands of poems, and countless epigrams and aphorisms.

Like Chico Xavier, Pearl Curran had only an elementary school education. In some of her scripts, she used Anglo-Saxon words that are no longer part of the English vocabulary; yet, researchers were able to confirm that these words did exist at one time, although it would have been virtually impossible for Curran to have come upon them.  Critics compared her works to those of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spencer.

W. T. Allison, professor of English literature at the University of Manitoba, observed that Patience Worth dictated words found only in Melton’s time and some of them had no meaning until researched in dialectic dictionaries and old books.  Allison, who closely observed Curran, reported that in one evening 15 poems were produced in an hour and 15 minutes, an average of five minutes for each poem.  “All were poured out with a speed that Tennyson or Browning could never have hoped to equal, and some of the 15 lyrics are so good that either of those great poets might be proud to have written them,” Allison offered. He went on to say that Patience Worth “must be regarded as the outstanding phenomenon of our age, and I cannot help thinking of all time.”

When a philologist asked Patience how and why she used the language of so many different periods, she responded: “I do plod a twist of a path and it hath run from then till now.”  When asked to explain how she could dictate responses without a pause, she replied: “Ye see, man setteth up his cup and fillet it, but I be as the stream.”
 
According to Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, one of the scientists who studied the phenomena, Patience Worth’s writing “displayed original genius, enormous erudition, familiarity with literature and history of many ages, versatility of experience, philosophical depth, piercing wit, moral spirituality, swiftness of thought, and penetrating wisdom,” qualities and characteristics which were totally foreign to Pearl Curran.  Moreover, Curran was witnessed talking to people as she took dictation from Patience.
(For a more complete story on Pearl Curran, see The Mystery of Patience Worth in the Features section of this blog.)

Many psychologists and parapsychologists are grounded in materialism and unable to consider a spiritual explanation for automatic writing.  Thus, they contend that the automatic writing is coming from the medium’s subconscious mind.  However, they don’t really address how the information got into the subconscious in the first place.  Television was not yet a reality when Pear Curran lived nor for the first half of Chico Xavier’s life, so it is unlikely that the subconscious absorbed it from television programs.  Radio was in its infancy when Pearl Curran lived and it is highly unlikely she listened to many radio programs or read many books with 17th Century English.

Those who believe in reincarnation might explain Patience Worth as memories from a past life existing in Pearl Curran’s subconscious, but past lives would not explain most of the material produced by Chico Xavier as many of the spirits communicating through Xavier were “living” when he was born.
 
No doubt the subconscious mind does produce things we are not consciously aware of or thinking about, but to write it all off as coming from the subconscious seems like a real stretch.

William T. Stead, a famous British journalist who was a victim of the Titanic disaster in 1912, developed the ability to do automatic writing. In one of his books, Letters from Julia, he wrote that he could not believe that any part of his unconscious self would deliberately practice a hoax upon his conscious self about the most serious of all subjects, and keep it up year after year with the most sincerity and consistency.  “The simple explanation that my friend who has passed over can use my hand as her own seems much more natural and probable,” concluded Stead, who was observed by Titanic survivors serenely sitting in the smoking room and reading his Bible as pandemonium took place all around him.

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.

Posted on 01 November 2010, 22:27

It is doubtful that there will be a sequel to the new Clint Eastwood directed movie, Hereafter, but just in case there is I would recommend more depth by having some scenes and dialogue to enlighten the viewer as to what mediumship is all about.  The current movie doesn’t discuss this at all.  Here are some suggestions for the sequel. 

George (Matt Damon) doesn’t appear to really understand his gift of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and/or clairsentience.  So in the sequel George should seek out a much older and wiser person, perhaps an experienced medium, one I’ll call Leonore Leonard.  Here is how the scene might play out: 

George:  (shaking his head in frustration)  Mrs. Leonard, I don’t understand what’s going on.  Are these spirits I’m receiving messages from in heaven or hell?  Are they good or bad?  Some of my friends tell me that it is all the work of Satan.  My doctor says I’m delusional. 
 
LL:  George, first of all, your doctor is obviously grounded in materialistic medicine, so forget him, and your religious friends are no doubt reacting to mistranslations and misunderstandings of their good books.  You’ve got to begin by putting this religious idea of either heaven or hell out of your mind.  The spirits tell us that that there are many realms, many planes, many states, many spheres, whatever you choose to call them.  Jesus is quoted as saying there are ‘many mansions,’ but I’ve heard that the Greek word from which they got mansions could have better been translated to “abodes.”

George:  I didn’t know that.  How many planes or abodes are there?

LL:  Many spirits have said that there are seven with the seventh one being true heaven.  It sort of gives meaning to seventh heaven mythology, doesn’t it?  But I don’t think they are really numbered.  I believe the spirits just give them numbers to simplify things for us.  It’s like people being classified as lower, middle, or upper class here on earth.  There is no fine dividing line between the classes and it is not always clear when a person moves from one class to the other.

George:  That makes sense, Mrs. Leonard.  So, if we do number them, is the first one what religion calls hell?

LL:  That is my understanding, George.  They refer to those spirits on the first level as “earthbound” and tell us that often they don’t even know they have passed from the material world.  It’s like they are having a bad dream or nightmare.  It is a fire of the mind, so to speak.  I think that is where we get the fire and brimstone associated with the hell of religions. 

George:  But how can a person not know that he is dead?

LL:  My dear boy, do you know that you are alive when you dream as you sleep?

George:  Hmm.  Never thought about it that way.  So what spirits do we find on the first plane?

LL:  Well, I guess religions would call them the wicked, but the spirits usually refer to them as the depraved.  They developed no spiritual consciousness at all while in the flesh, but it is important to understand that they are not there for eternity as religions would have you believe.  They can be educated and enlightened and eventually work their way up into higher and higher realms.
 
George: Are they judged by God and sentenced to the first plane?

LL:  Gracious, no, lad.  The spirits tell us that everything we do out of love or lack of love generates an electrical impulse that is impressed on our energy field, what we commonly call the aura.  The combined vibrations over a person’s lifetime determine his or her initial level in the afterlife.  We just automatically gravitate to the level corresponding to the acts and thoughts we have compiled during our lives and we enter the spiritual world with precisely the same character, enlightenment and disposition as that with which we have left the material world. 

George:  [Smiling] Sounds like we have computer chips installed in our energy fields.

LL:  [Laughing]  I don’t know about those things, but maybe so.

George:  What class of spirits end up on the second plane?

LL:  I think we find there the very materialistic person who is not necessarily depraved.  They have developed a little spiritual consciousness, but not enough to fully awaken in the spirit world.  They are in something of a half-conscious stupor, I would say.  They tell us that these days there are far more spirits on the first two planes than on the five planes above them.

George:  And the third plane?

LL:  It is my understanding that most decent people start from the third plane, which the Spiritualists call Summerland.  They lived reasonably good lives, but were still materialistic and didn’t develop much of a spiritual consciousness.  They say it is fairly pleasant and comfortable there and not too unlike those here on the earth plane. 
 
George:  And above the third plane?

LL:  Again, George, it is a matter of consciousness developed during the earth life.  Keep in mind that all consciousness at that point is only spiritual consciousness. All materialistic consciousness is a drag on the wheel of progress on that side. On the fourth plane, I believe we find spirits more spiritually developed than those on the third plane and less spiritually developed than those on the fifth plane.  After all, we are not all either wicked or righteous as many religions suggest.  There are many degrees of good and evil between the extremes.
 
George:  The spirits I’m hearing from – are they on any particular plane?

LL:  I suspect most of them are on the third plane.  The spirits tell us that the lower the vibration the easier it is to communicate with those of us still fettered in the flesh.

George:  In that case, it should be easier for spirits on the first and second planes to communicate with us than those on the third.

LL:  [nodding] Quite true, my boy.  That is why the Bible tells us to “test the spirits whether they are of God” and to “discern” the messages.  The good spirits tell us that many low level spirits try to interfere in the communication and even take on the identity of those we are trying to communicate with.  We call them impostor spirits.

George:  So how can we know if the message is not from an impostor?

LL:  Generally, you can tell by the nature of the message.  The messages from the impostors are usually misleading, devious, or mean-spirited. Again, you must test and discern and examine the overall purity of the message. 

George:  Can spirits from the fourth plane and up communicate with us?

LL:  I understand they can, but they must often relay the message though a spirit at a lower vibration – a well-meaning spirit of course, probably one on the third plane.

George:  It sounds so complicated and difficult.

LL:  It most certainly is. What you have to understand, young man, is that celestial matters don’t easily lend themselves to terrestrial methods or words.  So much of this is beyond our understanding and that is why mainstream scientists scoff at it all.  They think, in all their arrogance, that we should be able to understand everything.

Another scene

In a later scene, George, now more enlightened, is visited by a man named Justin, who wants a reading. 

Justin:  I have to warn you.  I am very skeptical when it comes to this stuff, but I thought I would give it a try.

George:   That’s fine, Justin.  It’s good to be skeptical.  But let me tell you from the outset that if your skepticism turns to negativity, I probably won’t get anything.  There has to be a certain harmony existing among all of us in order for me to get something.  That is why the debunkers rarely get anything.  Their negativity defeats the whole process. Of course, in their ignorance, they jump to the conclusion that the medium is a fraud and see it as a victory for themselves.

Justin:  I’m not sure I understand all that.

George:  Let me put it this way.  Let’s say you are making love to your wife.  There is a certain harmony there and things just spontaneously happen as you expect them to.  But let’s now put you on a stage in front of a bunch of observers who tell you that you must prove to them that you are able to make love to your wife.  There is a good chance you might not be able to respond.  The harder you try, the more difficult it becomes.  It’s like that in mediumship.  When we start trying, it often doesn’t happen.

Justin:  I think I understand. 

George:  Good, Let me further explain how all of this works. It is not like I am on a telephone talking to someone.  Because I am clairaudient, I do hear words now and then, but I am primarily clairvoyant and the messages come mostly by the pictographic method.  The communicating spirit will project a thought to me and I’ll receive it as a picture.  I’ve then got to interpret that picture and figure out what he or she is trying to tell me.  I might not interpret the image correctly and give you something that doesn’t make sense to you.  I’ll then try to reinterpret it.  I might ask for your help in figuring out what it is I am seeing.  The debunker would say I’m “fishing” for information, which is partially true.  I’m fishing for the correct interpretation of the thought-image I’m seeing.

Justin:  Wow! I didn’t realize it was that complicated.

George:  It clearly is.  Frequently, I can’t get the person’s name, and people wonder how I can get other information and not a simple name.  Well, the problem is that most names don’t have a pictograph symbol for them.  There are times when I’ll hear a name, but it will come through very faintly.  I might catch that it starts with a “J” or a “G” but I can’t hear the whole name.  There again, the debunker would say I am fishing for a name, which is in a sense true.  It is so much easier for me to get ideas than actual names. 

Justin: Do you go into a trance or anything like that?
 
George:  Not really.  I try to remain in a passive state.  There are many varieties of mediumship.  Some are trance mediums, some semi-trance, some no trance at all.  There are physical mediums and mental mediums and various types within those two broad classifications.  That’s another thing that confounds the debunkers.  They seem to assume that we should all operate in the same way. It just doesn’t work that way.

Justin:  Very interesting.

Closing scene of the movie

George is speaking to a group of grieving people and quoting the words of Silver Birch, an apparently advanced spirit or soul group able to communicate through the trance mediumship of Maurice Barbanell.

“No, death is a not a tragedy to those who die; it is only a tragedy to those who are left behind.  To go from darkness to light is not something over which you should grieve.

“If you grieve, you are in reality grieving over your loss and not for one who has in truth become enfranchised.  She is better off.  She will no longer suffer all the ills of the human body.  She will be no longer be subjected to the ravages of wasting disease.  She will unfold all the gifts with which she has been endowed, and will express them free from any thwartings, and will be able to give a larger service to those who require it.

“Death cannot part you from the one you love, for love always claims its own.  Your sorrow is based on ignorance.  With knowledge you could be sure that the one you love is closer than ever he or she has been before.  You could taste some of the joy that comes with the appreciation of an understanding of spiritual reality.

“Do not mourn because the caterpillar has become a beauteous butterfly.  Do not weep because the cage has been opened and the bird has been set free.  Rejoice, and know that the enfranchised soul has found liberty and that, if you would but unfold the powers of that the Great Spirit has given you, you could share some of the new beauty and joy which is theirs.  You could understand the plan of death and realize that death is but a stepping stone, a door through which you enter into the larger freedom of the realms of spirit.”

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.