Posted on 25 July 2016, 8:25

In his recently released book, Seeking Jordan, Matthew McKay, Ph.D., (below) details his efforts to connect with and communicate with his son Jordan, who had been murdered six years earlier, at age 23.  A clinical psychologist and professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., McKay began his journey of discovery with an introduction to induced after-death communication and moved on to channeled (automatic) writing and past-life and between-life regressions. 

McKay states that he had more than a hundred conversations with Jordan, (below) who told him of his initial awakening in his new realm of existence, reunions with deceased loved ones, and the life review, while also providing various other insights about life and life after death.

I recently put some questions to McKay by email for an interview featured in The Searchlight, a publication for the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies.

Dr. McKay, what were your views on life after death prior to beginning your search?

“My search to understand death and the afterlife began a half dozen years before Jordan’s death.  I read Journey of Souls by Michael Newton and learned about his hypnotic method for exploring the “life between lives.”  While I had been a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, everything Newton described about the afterlife, and why we incarnate, resonated with me.  It felt like the truth I had waited all my life to hear.  I learned Newton’s past life and life between lives regression protocol, and used it with people I loved who wanted the experience.  After Jordan died, my search intensified because I was determined to find and make contact with my son on the other side.”

Were you familiar with various forms of post-death communication prior to Jordan’s death?  What was you attitude toward them?

“I knew – prior to Jordan’s death – about Alan Botkin’s “Induced After Death Communication” (IADC) because a friend had given me his book.  I do EMDR with my trauma patients (which Botkin’s IADC is based on) so his discovery that a small variation in the EMDR protocol could help us contact the dead fascinated me. In general, before Jordan died, I assumed psychics and mediums were charlatans.  And I thought most of the “after death communication industry” was bogus, feeding off people’s grief and need for reassurance.”

How long did it take you to master channeled writing?  Did it require much patience?  Were you familiar with it before?

“I had no knowledge of channeled writing before Ralph Metzner showed me how to do it.  He taught me the basic elements of channeled writing in a few minutes: Be in a place where you feel centered and connected to your core self. Have something to focus your attention (like a candle or a bright object). Have an object to connect you to the dead (something that belonged to the person or that they gave you). Use a meditative or hypnotic process to get into a receptive state (for me this is a simple breath focused meditation). Write down your first question (physically writing the question is a necessity for channeled writing). Make room for the answer.  Wait for a word or sentence fragment to show up.  Write it down and await the download of sentences to start.  Accept doubt, accept the thought that your brain can be making things up.  Keep listening for the answer to form in your mind; keep writing down what you ‘hear.’ When nothing more comes, write your next question.”

To what extent were the messages coming from Jordan new or in conflict with previous beliefs or ideas?  If not in conflict, how can you be sure you were not subconsciously providing the answers?  If new or in conflict, can you give an example or two?

“Many of Jordan’s messages have seemed new to me, ideas and concepts that had never before entered my mind.  While they didn’t seem in any way to dismantle the cosmology I’d gotten from Michael Newton and others, they seemed to greatly expand it.  They appeared to burst open these ideas of life purpose and what happens in the afterlife, and take them to a new level.  I knew, for example, that the purpose of life was learning.  But I had no idea that the wisdom each individual soul acquires contributes to the wisdom/ knowledge of collective consciousness (the divine/god).  I had no idea that each lesson in our lives allows – ultimately – collective consciousness (god) to make the next, more perfect universe.”

How do your peers in the psychology field react to your interest in psychic matters and your book?  How about students?

“I’ve shared Jordan’s lessons with very few of my colleagues in psychology.  These are people of science who revere randomized controlled trials and the measurement of human experience.  But many human experiences can only be described, not measured.  They can be given words, but never known in the form of metrics or quantitative analysis.  And for these experiences, we must rely on many, independent observations.  If Michael Newton hypnotized 7,000 naive subjects, and they all described a similar version of the afterlife, that means something.  If thousands of dying people report visits from dead loved ones to help them with the transition, that means something.  If Ian Stevenson, interviewing thousands of children who remembered past lives, discovered evidence of those past lives, that means something.  If Jordan tells me things about the purpose of life and the structure of the spirit world, and this single observation fits with others who report knowledge of the afterlife, this, too, means something.

“A few colleagues in the world of psychology, and particularly those who embrace mindfulness and Buddhist thought, have been very open to what I’ve learned from Jordan.  While committed to science, they can see beyond the limits of our material universe.”

Do you accept or reject the idea that spirits of the dead can influence us in a positive or negative way and even be the cause of extremely deviant or criminal behavior?  If you accept the idea, would you dare to suggest it to your peers, a patient, or to a student?

“I believe that spirits of the dead can only influence us in positive ways.  Once souls leave the physical plain and go through the re-entry process to the spirit world, they have access to knowledge gleaned from all their previous lives.  They know the purpose of life – to learn and gather wisdom – and they are bathed in love.  It is not possible for those souls to harm or damage the living.  These are myths perpetrated by people who do evil and wish to explain it via the supernatural.

“We can be influenced and affected by lessons we haven’t learned from past lives, but never by lost or evil spirits.  Some souls, after death linger because they are not yet aware that they have died.  And their presence may be experienced as a mood, a shadow, a hushed sense of distress.  But these souls have not direct power to hurt the living.”

How are we so influenced?

“Guides from the spirit world, as well as deceased loved ones, exert influence on our choices.  They whisper to us through random and strange thoughts, through sudden feelings or urges, to help us make wise choices.  Their messages are frequent visitors to our unconscious mind.  The ones we love on the other side, as well as masters and guides, are in constant communication.  And much of our work on this planet is to tune into our wise mind, or spiritual short wave radio, so we can hear them.

“Mainstream psychology is already studying the positive impact of meditation and prayer.  Now we need to examine how spiritual practices – and the connection to spirit – impacts human well-being:  When people receive messages from the other side? How does it impact them emotionally and behaviorally?  Do they make better choices?  Do they experience more love?  Do they experience loss differently, and with less pain?  We can actually measure these things, and it would advance scientific and human knowledge.”

Jordan mentioned that certainty is not a healthy state.  Is there a point between the blind faith of most religions and absolute certainty that you feel we should strive for relative to a belief that consciousness survives death?

“We live in a place where certainty is impossible.  Certainty about truth, about right and wrong, often results in holocausts – emotional and societal.  We need to hold every belief lightly – as a tentative truth that may later be modified or disproved.  The belief that there is an afterlife, that souls are immortal and come here between lives to learn, is not absolute truth.  It has been reported by many observers and there is much data to suggest that consciousness can exist outside the body.  None-the-less, nothing is certain about what the afterlife looks like or the eternal life of souls. Those of us who have sought to connect, and who have experienced the flooding sense of love from those on the other side have experiences to support the belief that the relationship between the living and the dead is never broken.

“It’s important to separate religious/moral beliefs that tell you how to act, from cosmologies –a picture of what the universe is and why we are in it.  Moral/religious beliefs dictate ‘right’ behavior – which often turns out to be damaging and hurtful.  Cosmologies (such as what Jordan tells me) describe our place and role in the cosmos.  We can evaluate the usefulness of cosmological beliefs by watching how they affect people – whether they become more loving, more at peace, more connected to all.”

So many people are turned off to the idea of a higher power and an afterlife when they suffer pain of one kind or another.  They claim it is not consistent with a just and loving Creator.  What do you say to them?

“Jordan has been very clear that pain is a necessary environment for souls to grow.  There are lessons we cannot learn without pain.  In fact, we come here to learn how to love in the face of pain.  This planet is a school that teaches us how to make wise choices when we hurt, and everything around us is threatening us with pain and loss.

“Pain is not a sign we are bad or have done wrong.  Our work here is not to seek pleasure and avoid suffering.  Our work here is to ask the question: ‘What can I learn from this pain?  What wisdom, what truth lies at the root of this pain?’  Every choice we make in the face of pain teaches us, and what we learn is uploaded to collective consciousness, to the all, to god.

“Pain is a sacred path through which we grow, and because of us, it is how god grows.”

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 11 July 2016, 11:25

Imagine, if you will, more than 130,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican to hear the pope speak.  I don’t know if the pope has anything meaningful to say in that imaginary situation; I sort of doubt it.  However, I’m sure that nearly all of the 130,000 people who have viewed Keith Parson’s (below) Youtube documentary on life after death will agree that it is very meaningful.  Oh, there are the fundamentalists of both science and religion who don’t get it and probably never will, at least in this lifetime, but I know that those who do “get it” will agree with me that it is the best documentary on the subject ever produced.

“I was watching a TV documentary in 2008, here in England, that was being sceptical about psychic phenomena, as usual,” Parsons responded by email when I asked him what motivated him to produce the video.  “After it was over, I stormed into the kitchen and declared to my partner something like: ‘They’ve done it again – rubbishing this subject!’ And she said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’ And that was a challenge that set me to thinking … Having read around this topic for quite some time, I’d wondered about writing a book. But frankly, it would just have been yet another journalistic pot-boiler. There are other authors, far more qualified than I, to write on this topic. And in any case, I think the general public is turning increasingly to the TV and computer screen in their leisure time. Books are for the seriously interested, videos appeal to a general audience, so I went out, bought a camera, and hey, presto – two documentaries!”

In addition to that first documentary, titled “This Life, Next Life,” Parsons has recently produced a second video, “This Life, Past Life,” which deals with the subject of reincarnation.  It should be of interest to many. 

Parsons is a retired radio current affairs producer who spent many years with BBC World Service, London, often traveling the world while making documentaries on international politics and economics.  I recently put some questions to him by email.

When and how did you become interested in the subject of life after death?

“As the years went by, my partner became more afraid of flying, so we discussed this and concluded it was not the ‘flying’ at issue, but the prospect of ‘dying’. So I googled ‘Scientific Proof of an Afterlife’, thinking if I could demonstrate that death is not final this might help her (not believing in this stuff myself, though). I found 29,000 websites popped up in a quarter second back in the 1990s. (I did this again today, and now there are 380,000 sites, which demonstrates the burgeoning interest in this topic). It turned out that this was my partner’s ‘gift’ to me since I became fascinated by the topic and did a lot of reading. Unfortunately, however, it has not helped her!

“One brilliant web site at the time, now archived, was called the International Survivalist Society. Subsequently, having done a lot of reading, I wrote a racy novel in 2004 – both humorous and serious – with evidence for the afterlife built into it as a way of introducing people to this amazing material. Entitled Lucky James? it languished in my desk drawer until this year, when finally, 12 years later, it was published and is available on Amazon both as a kindle and as a paperback for folks in U.K. It’s available in Kobo and iBook, too.”

Did you have any prior beliefs, religious or otherwise?

“I was brought up in the Swedenborgian New Church, but left by age 17. One day the minister said: ‘You know, you’ll never reason yourself into a belief in God, you’ll only reason yourself out it,’ and I thought: ‘Well that doesn’t say much for God!’  and that was it, goodbye Church.”

So, how would you summarize your current beliefs relative to survival and related topics?

“Based on my reading, like you, Mike, I’m 98 percent convinced of the survival of consciousness after death, but I allow 2 percent for continued doubt while I wait for the 100 percent proof that absolutely nobody could deny. If I lived in Brazil when the physical medium Carmine Mirabelli was alive, to witness his materialisations in front of large audiences in broad daylight, then maybe I’d be 100 percent convinced, but currently I am disappointed that materialisation mediums still require to work in the dark. A film of materialisations – where trick photography has been ruled out – is urgently needed, and would clinch the matter. For me ‘evidence’ is crucial, otherwise we can find ourselves accepting speculation as fact. So, although I find for example, the afterlife communications of Frederick Myers through Geraldine Cummins (The Road to Immortality) and the communications of Monsignor Hugh Benson through Anthony Borgia (Life in the World Unseen) to be really interesting (and there are many more such books), I’m not sure how much trust we can put in what they say, since they are not evidential. Is it possible to be authoritative without evidence? I’m trying to get away from belief based only on faith. As a result, I think we should be reserved about any statement beyond this: that there is most probably an afterlife dimension.”

What do you find to be the most convincing evidence?

“In my first documentary, I go very strongly in favour of the Scole Experiments and the mediumship of Leonora Piper. And in the second one, which was launched only on 30th June this year, I go strongly in favour of a couple of evidential hypnosis past life cases: that of Ray Bryant remembering the 19th century life of Reuben Stafford, a soldier in the Crimean War; and that of L.D., remembering the life of Antonia, an innkeeper in Spain in the 16th century (Under the Inquisition by Linda Tarazi, published by Hampton Roads). I also find Professor Ian Stevenson’s photographic birthmark evidence in the remembered lives of children to be as fascinating as it is mystifying.

“The one other case I wish I had included in my documentaries is that of the Kluski wax hand moulds that I understand can be seen at the Institut Metapsychique International, in Paris. These moulds were taken at a séance from a materialised spirit who dipped his/her hands into a bucket of wax, which then solidified. The only way for these fragile moulds to remain intact was for the hands to subsequently de-materialise. The interesting thing is that the wax was mixed with a dye that would have got onto the skin of any live human interloper trying to cheat in the dark. I confess, however, that I have yet to visit Paris to see these moulds for myself. Incidentally, I was also very interested in the mediumship of Daniel Dunglas Home.”

If you had to pick three most convincing cases from the annals of psychical research and parapsychology relative to survival, which ones would you pick?  Why?

“It crosses my mind that the English researcher Sir William Crookes (below) has been criticised far more than he deserves and that his scientific approach to his investigations made them most convincing. It is notable that he never retracted his view that his findings were legitimate, despite being denigrated by professional colleagues. As mentioned above, I also think that the Scole Experiments are also top-notch, and they are so well known there is no need to go into them here. I am also aware of the importance of EVP and ITC, but have some difficulty getting my head round why statements coming from the other side using these techniques should be so incredibly short instead of conversational. However, I wouldn’t be amazed if, in due course, the final proof we seek comes from this direction.”

If you could go back in time and meet three psychical researchers, spending a day with each one, who would you choose?

“Sir William Crookes, Richard Hodgson, and (he’s still alive) Professor Gary Schwartz.”

If you could go back in time and observe a medium at his or her best, who would it be?

“I’m spoilt for choice! Daniel Dunglas Home, Stainton Moses, Mirabelli, Chico Xavier……Just one? I can’t.”

Do you see today’s research as good as that of yesteryear?  If not, why do you think that is?

“In the old days folk used to hold séances as a way of spending a pleasant time with friends, as well as looking for afterlife evidence. So there were a lot of sitters, more mediums and a lot was achieved in terms of evidence. Today, there are far more distractions through the media, and popular interest in spiritual investigation is often ridiculed and has been overwhelmed by materialism. So fewer people are inclined to devote the time and attention needed to get results. Having said that, the work of Gary Schwartz with his double blind investigation of mediums was valuable since it adopted scientific protocols, and others such as Dr Beischel’s Veritas programme continue to do careful work. Another point made by some commentators, and I don’t know if it is true, is that the technological world of today is now more penetrated by electro-magnetic emanations, making contact with the other side more difficult.”

What are your thoughts as to why the research is not better known or better accepted?

“In my recent Youtube documentary This Life, Past Life, I refer to a BBC Wales TV programme examining the research of Professor Stevenson on children’s past life memories. It was made in 1992 – that is to say, 24 years ago. I can’t imagine such an open-minded programme being made today. It seems to me that now the media – both radio and TV – are dominated by materialist scientists with a disproportionate influence on programme making decisions, so psychical research never gets onto the agenda.”

What feedback have you received from your videos (both positive and negative)?

“The hundreds of comments on Youtube reflect the variety of opinions that exist in the world. To begin with – plenty of praise for an interesting job well done, amateur though it is. But I detect positive attitudes are now tailing off even though the number of viewings is not – 130,000 views in the first year with about 2,500 more each month. Perhaps more religious perspectives are being expressed that don’t appreciate my rational approach to the subject.

Thanks, Keith.  I believe you have done a great service.

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.