Posted on 31 July 2017, 8:02

In her latest book, A Manual for Developing Humans, P. M. H. Atwater, one of the pioneering researchers of the near-death experience, points out that life is “inherently paradoxical.”  She defines paradox as “parallel principles that have crossed over.” For example, “the only way you can keep love is to give it away.”  The one in her book that particularly jumped out at me is “the smarter we get, the dumber we are becoming.”

Most people view death as a very negative experience, but as Atwater found out, there’s a paradox here, too, since her three “deaths” served her in a very positive way.  They awakened her to a new reality.  “Once back after my encounters with death, I continued to operate from ‘realms of radiance’ to the extent that everyday events and decisions lost significance,” she explains early in the book.  “The wisdom I returned with became more as stumbling blocks than guideposts (another paradox) until I regained my ability to discern differences – the contrast between ‘here’ and ‘there’ – between a practical application in the physical world and what I knew to be true in the greater worlds of spirit.”

Atwater does not go into much detail about her three near-death experiences during the early months of 1977, the year she turned 40, as she told about those in her 1998 book, Coming Back to Life.  This latest book touches upon all the things she was awakened to during her NDEs and in the 40 years of research that followed.  It seemingly covers every conceivable subject relating to the human experience – intelligence, intuition, dreams, auras, synchronicity, health, nutrition, emotions, fears, pain, parenting, sex, soul mates, science, racism, terrorism, prophesies, planets,  feminism, justice, politics, economics, messiahs, catastrophes, war, solar cycles, free will, death, enlightenment, quantum medicine, orgone energy, you-name-it and Atwater has some very interesting and intriguing ideas and suggestions about it. 

As Atwater told me in an email exchange, her intent in writing the book was to cover all the basics for being/becoming fully human. “Being more spiritual is backwards thinking,” she wrote. “Being all that you were born to be is the real goal in life, as it includes spirituality along with everything else.  If we are fully ourselves, fully human, quite literally we are gods in the making.”  She added that just the day before sending the email, a man who had been told by his doctor that he would never walk again because of a serious leg condition, contacted her and told her that, as a result of reading her manual, rather “using” her manual, not just reading it, he has thrown away his crutches and canes and is now walking perfectly.  She was also recently contacted by a therapist who told her that he is using her manual techniques throughout his practice. 

“The manual is not channeled, doesn’t come from any entity, angel, or spirit-type being,” she explained. “It comes from my third near-death experience and what I called ‘The Voice Like None Other.’ No voice really.  What seemed as if ‘sound’ later turned out to be the shimmer of The Void, entwined within the 80 years I spent testing existence itself.”

Much of the manual has to do with change.  “Sweeping changes are already flooding the earth plane and they will increase,” she continued. “The United States, in its astrological birth chart, has a Pluto return set to occur in 2022.  That ushers in a time of extremes – great strides forward along with what could be equally great disasters.  I tell everyone to expect a four-year span of this patterning – from 2020 through 2024.  My manual is made to order for this, because by showing people how to test themselves, prove to themselves how powerful and creative they are, they can then navigate changing times in a positive manner.”

Dr. Atwater was quick to remind me that there is a paradox involved with all change, so that the “bad” may be for our betterment, while the “good” may really be to our detriment, at least in the short run.  She cautions against “either/or judgment” and is convinced that there is no such thing as good and evil, not as we are taught.  She mentioned Ireland’s new prime minister, Leo Varadkar.  “He represents a break from the past.  He’s center-right who embraces and works with center-left.  In a land that is staunchly Catholic, he is the son of a doctor who emigrated from Mumbai and a nurse from southeastern Ireland.  He is gay, a man who has known since childhood he wanted to be a politician, and he meets everyone at their level – and not just in meeting rooms filled with cameras.  Ireland today is flourishing because of his new kind of leadership, and in ways no one saw coming.  The model he represents, a mixture of races, religions, sexual and political points of view, is beginning to emerge as a global phenomenon that crosses all borders and all mindsets.”

Whether it is paradoxical or not, I am not sure, but Atwater cites a number of seemingly contradictory changes among today’s children.  She mentions that one-third of those children throughout the world who take the standard IQ test now score in the genius range of 150-160, most without genetic markers to account for this.  However, there have been equal jumps in learning disorders.  Moreover, one-third of young people today have little or no sense of living a full life and two-thirds have no intention of ever marrying, going to college, or becoming parents.  One-third are amoral, with many of them too violent to handle.  “These percentages wiggle around somewhat, depending on what source you check,” she explained. “Yet, figures overall have remained fairly close to those I have given, for the last 15 years or so.  This is impossible, clearly impossible, but it is happening consistently.”

As Atwater sees it, many of today’s young people are suffering emotionally due to difficulties in distinguishing between the real world and what they perceive from social media, the entertainment industry, and the advertising industry. “We need to at least acknowledge that there is something going on within the human family that is beyond our present understanding,” she continued, suggesting that it is part of a rhythm, plan, perhaps even a divine plan, God.  “If we can recognize the rhythms here, the patterns of change, then innovation can replace fear.” 

I asked Atwater if she had any thoughts about the tattoo craze among young people.  She responded that she hadn’t given that much thought, “except the obvious signs that humankind is seeking to be more tribal and sincerely desirous of being recognized as part of a chosen mindset, or pattern of mind.”  She further theorized that tattoos are a visual affirmation of one having chosen his or her family, how each individual wants to feel, to respond to life, to be recognized above and beyond whatever seems “fated” from the bloodlines of birth.

I asked her what she would do if she could go back in time to her younger years with what she has learned over the past 40 years.  “I’d go back to my childhood and forgive my mother and myself,” she responded.  “Until we can face our youngest years, all the pain, all the joy, all the mystery, all the confusion, we’re handicapping ourselves [if we hold on to it]. Progress means nothing if it’s hollow, and hollow it is until we can forgive what seemed limiting.  Life reflects thought.  Our ability to love and to forgive marks the difference between thoughts around and within us and what actually has value.”

Back to those “sweeping changes” that Atwater sees from 2020 through 2024, I sensed something of a doomsday scenario from what she set forth in her manual and asked her what she would tell young people now about raising a family, pursuing goals, etc.  “I cannot imagine any reason not to love, dream, plan, try, look ahead,” she replied.  “Knowing about where we are in the grand cycle of time, I believe makes a difference in our sanity, in understanding our place in the world and what’s going on around us.  Like it or not, our world, our planet, is experiencing what is called ‘The Great Shifting’ or ‘The Turning of the Cosmic Clock.’  This massive changeover in energy flow happens every 25,920 years. On top of that, two great ages of time are now on top of each other: The Age of Pisces and The Age of Aquarius.  This ‘overlap’ is crazy in how ideas clash and in how we are called upon to make decisions and take action in ways which are unprecedented.  No matter how wild or unstable things seem, there really is progress; we are moving forward and upward in the Grand Cycles of Time.” 

Atwater’s son once asked her how he is supposed to recognize truth.  Her reply: “When everyone agrees with each other, and there is no dissent, run for the nearest door and get out.  All you have found is illusion.  But when you find paradox of unity in opposition, stay as long as you can and learn as much as you can.  You have found truth.”  Her manual ends with a discussion of life’s greatest paradox, one involving love.

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 17 July 2017, 7:58

By David Stang

Preface: Outside of my blog post of December 12, 2011 about John of God. I have woefully neglected the subject of healing mediums.  My good friend David Stang offered to help me catch up on this subject by writing this blog.  Dave is a retired Washington, D.C. lawyer.  Also, Keith Parsons, another friend, just happened to post a you-tube dealing with the healing mediumship of George Chapman. It can be viewed on Youtube and you can read about Chapman in “Surgeon from Another World,” which has been published by White Crow Books.  – Michael Tymn

We begin with Mac and Terri McKean, both of whom I got to know in England during the summer of 2009. Mac was then 91 years old and his wife Terri was 83. Mac at that time was spending nearly 10 hours a day doing spiritual healing and he used his dowsing pendulum to assist him. Terri was then a trance medium through whom many a disincarnate being or Ascended Master has found a temporary earthly opportunity to use her voice box in order to convey messages about happenings and insights originating in the spirit realm.

Terri said that while traveling in Beijing with her husband some years ago she heard a spirit voice talking to her and he indicated that he would be working with her from then on. She later learned the voice belonged to an Ascended Master who directed Terri to follow the Spirit Path near the cemetery in Beijing where the emperors of China were buried. At the juncture of where the Spirit Path met the cemetery her Ascended Master then declared that he had been assigned to look after Terri. She said that ever since when he speaks to her he refers to Terri as “my child.”

Terri informed me that “as a child I used to see spirit beings and living shadows but never said anything about what I saw and this ability went away in my early teens, but in my early 50s when I met Mac I’d see an event take place in my mind and then know it would happen. I asked myself how did I know that event was going to happen. When I put this question to Mac he would take my hands in his and hold them saying, ‘Let’s see what we can do together.’ When he took my hands I felt a big force come into the room then it whooshed right out straight through the window into the sky and after that I became much more aware of spirit activities and could again see spirit beings.”

At this point in the conversation Mac intervened: “When Terri goes into a deep trance she is taken over completely by her spirit guides and allows herself to be used by them. Trance mediums don’t usually know what happens when they are in trance. If a person goes into a deep trance and afterwards doesn’t recall what she said this is a clear indication that she realized only what the spirit wanted her to remember to say without interfering with the spirit’s thoughts by injecting other thoughts that came out of her own mind. Some mediums go into a light trance and do not only remember what they are saying. But the danger here is that they’re getting the thoughts of their own minds mixed up with what the spirit being is communicating. Terri’s ascended Master is her control, but he asks for permission from Terri before he speaks through her with information for me.”

I asked Terri the name of her spirit guide and what he looks like. She answered, “His name is Baylam and he is about seven-feet tall and black as ebony, yet gentle as a lamb.” She added that he usually visibly appears when they are in danger and he comes to help protect them. For example, Terri told of the time when she and Mac were working together to get rid of a witch’s coven she said as at that moment in time she was standing next to the window and Mac was working with his pendulum.  “I felt that I was being drawn toward a well and Baylam suddenly appeared and gently pushed me away from the well. There was no cover over the well so it would have been easy to fall into the well. It so happened that this particular well was the entrance to the witch’s coven that Mac was trying to clear.”

I then asked Mac how he relates to Baylam. Mac said “I ask him questions which call for a yes or no answer and if it’s yes Baylam gives me the yes signal and if it was no he gives me the no signal. Also he gives me a “maybe” or “so-so” signal which means that the answer in yes or no terms is unclear. I can tell by the speed, direction and intensity of the pendulum’s motion how emphatic Baylam’s answer is.  Baylam also works mind-to-mind and lets me know what I need to learn.

Mac emphatically insisted that he does not do any healing at all and that it is Baylam who does all the healing. “When I ask Baylam to do the healing my pendulum will usually start swinging and that lets me know what Baylam has started work on healing my patient. Also, I work mind-to-mind with Baylam on what is needed to heal the patient and any special action that is required. Often Terri and I work together in healing a patient and if there is some doubt as to what is wrong with the patient or what needs to be done to help the patient she will ask Baylam for answers just as I ask him.”

Terri and Mac died a few years ago.  They were good friends of Madge Rowe, another English medium who is also a spiritual healer.  It was she who first introduced me to Mack and Terri. Several years earlier I had been introduced to Madge by another English spiritualist healer. Madge, like Terri and Mac, exhibits extraordinary mediumistic skills. She not only worked on my late wife Sarah, but also on two women friends of Sarah’s who had been stricken with breast cancer. Madge was able to help extend their lives for several years. She also heals her clients’ sick pets and is able to locate and determine the physical condition of lost dogs and cats. A few years ago Madge was able to locate the lost dog of Susan Myatt, one of Sarah’s nurses and predict the exact date on which the dog and Susan would be reunited.

Madge’s late husband Reginald was also a spiritual healer and spiritualist. According to Madge, since his death in 1988, he has been a Psychopomp whose function is to escort recently deceased souls from the Earth plane to the spirit realm. His specialty, Madge said, is to help the disincarnate spirits of persons who have met sudden and shocking deaths often as a result of fatal accidents.  Reginald indicated to Madge telepathically that such persons are often unaware that they have died and believe they are still living. Madge explained that Reginald’s function has been to tactfully inform these new disincarnate beings that they are now living in spirit form only and then, having persuaded them of the reality of their disincarnate status, to escort them to facilities in the spirit world where they might stay and receive whatever additional attention they require until they are able to adjust to their afterlife existence.

Madge, like a multitude of other spiritual healers – whether they practice “hands-on” or “distant” healing – prays to her angels and spirit guides to assist and empower her. Madge believes that when she detects areas of her patient’s body needing healing energy that this awareness is amplified by the intervention of her angel or spirit guide. She has a deep confidence that her angel not only knows in advance what is the cause of the patient’s illness, but also where healing energy should be directed to help cure it. Additionally Madge’s angel or spirit guide will inform Madge if there are problems Madge did not discover during her scanning of the patient, such as an underlying emotional problem or block. They will give advice telepathically on herbal supplements or other remedies that can assist in the patient’s healing.

Until a couple of years ago when Madge was treating a patient whom she sensed was demonically possessed she would contact by telephone Mack and Terri McKean to solicit their assistance. She told me that they were powerful exorcists. To this day when Madge is working on a patient filled with dark energy she summons Mack who shows up in spirit form to continue working with her. Madge told me, “Each time Mack comes to assist me I ask him to lovingly take the demon to the Light.” Sometimes if the demon seems to be nearly overwhelmingly resistant Madge prayerfully contacts the Archangel Michael and asks him to come and exorcise the demon.

Similarly, when she feels she needs a powerful energy boost to help heal a chronically ill patient, who is not possessed, she contacts the Archangel Rafael, who, she tells me, is “quite remarkable, very powerful, always kind, responsive, helpful, encouraging and consistently reliable. He never lets you down.”

Sometimes when Madge is feeling exhausted, distraught or burdened with an illness of her own one of her favorite spirit guides, an Arab named Acefi, shows up literally riding on his big white horse.  Madge said that Acefi has remarkable brown eyes. He never gets off his horse but soon after arriving he sends Madge healing energy. When he does her revival occurs instantly. She finds his presence always uplifting and she can feel the power of his love for her and can hear his encouraging tone of voice.

Acefi once informed Madge that he and she had worked together during their past seven lifetimes, before he became a spirit guide. In the first lifetime they came to know one another many centuries ago. Madge lived with her father in Cornwall, located in Southwest Britain. One day two Arabs came and kidnapped her and took her back to Arabia as a slave. When they returned to Acefi’s home she was branded on her right arm.  Gradually Acefi became very fond of his slave, Madge, and he impregnated her. Acefi’s mother disapproved of her son Acefi’s affection for Madge so one time when Acefi was traveling away from home she sold Madge who never thereafter in that lifetime saw Acefi again.  Sadly, she died a few months later during childbirth. In her present life, Madge has had a dark mark on her right arm where she had lifetimes before been branded. Her husband Reginald in this life time, who like Madge, is quite psychic, once noticed that birthmark and informed Madge that it was a brand mark from a prior lifetime when she was a slave.

Terri, Mac and Madge are three stellar examples of the continuing powers of mediums to do good by healing others. Were it not for my late wife Sarah introducing me to spiritual healing and a number of spiritual healers and creating within me a burning curiosity to learn more about that sacred art and the altered state of consciousness that seems endemic to such healers I would have never met Terri and Mac McKean and Madge Rowe.  It has been indeed a very real privilege for me to have met these three people who never held themselves out as being especially gifted or possessing a consciousness capable of communicating with spirit beings ranging from Archangels to Ascended Masters to the disincarnate spirits of family and friends.

Even though the stories I’ve mentioned are anecdotal, the three people in the stories are representative of a breed of sacred mediums who instead of parading their talents on a stage have chosen to remain anonymous because they believe that their gifts are of divine origin, and that it is predominantly the spirit beings they are in touch with who are the power behind the good works they regularly perform out of humility and unconditional love. Ironically, they deliberately “hide their light under a bushel” and avoid the temptation to make a spectacle out of themselves because they believe they have been called to serve and not to become self-important exhibitionists seeking glory.

Next blog post: July 31

Posted on 03 July 2017, 9:40

The recent National Geographic television series, Genius, about the life of Albert Einstein, prompted me to do a little research on the great scientist’s beliefs about God and the afterlife.  Over the years, I had read somewhat conflicting statements by him and was never quite sure whether he was a hard-core atheist or an agnostic.  In the eight-part television series, Einstein mentioned God five or six times, leaving me to wonder whether this was fact or the creation of the screenwriters. 

According to various Internet sources, Einstein (below) declared himself an “agnostic.”  However, he definitely did not believe in an anthropomorphic (humanlike) god or a personal one.  His god was more of the cosmic consciousness type, a very abstract one.  “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one,” he wrote in a 1949 letter to a friend.  “You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein viewed fanatical atheists as being “like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”  Moreover, he did not oppose a belief in a personal God “as such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook.”

As for an afterlife, Einstein was more definite, saying he did not believe in the immortality of the individual. “An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise,” he is quoted, seemingly limiting his view of the afterlife to that of Judaism and other orthodox religions. He considered belief in an afterlife as “childish.”

Einstein seems to have been especially turned off to the idea of an afterlife by the angry God of the Hebrew Bible and the idea of an everlasting reward or punishment.  In my brief research, I did not come upon anything indicating that Einstein was aware of the psychical research carried out by some of his peers in physics, such Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, and Sir Oliver Lodge, or by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution.  All of those esteemed scientists came to recognize a different kind of afterlife, one of spiritual evolution.  Perhaps such an afterlife would have better appealed to Professor Einstein.

It was interesting to note in the television series that Crookes (below) was depicted giving a talk to an august body of scientists, including Einstein, about the threat of famine in Europe if countries did not add nitrogen to the soil, a development that would soon take place.  As I understand it, Crookes’s research in the area of radiation established some foundation for later discoveries by Wilhelm Roentgen (X-ray) and Einstein (general relativity).

Crookes was one of the first scientists to study mediumship, closely observing the phenomena of mediums D. D. Home and Florence Cook under strictly controlled conditions. There was no doubt in his mind that he had witnessed such phenomena as levitations, apports, and materializations.  However, most of his peers concluded that he had become too friendly with Home and that he had had a romantic interest in Cook, thereby affecting his objectivity and allowing him to be duped. It made no difference to them that Wallace and other respected men of science witnessed the same phenomena under lighted conditions in Crookes’s home, it all defied science and was unacceptable.  “It argues ill for the boasted freedom of opinion among scientific men, that they have so long refused to institute a scientific investigation into the existence and nature of facts asserted by so many competent and credible witnesses, and which they are freely invited to examine when and where they please,” Crookes addressed the many scientists who refused to investigate the phenomena.  “For my own part, I too much value the pursuit of truth, and the discovery of any new fact in nature, to avoid inquiry because it appears to clash with prevailing opinions.” 

Crookes claimed that the phenomena he had observed over some three years of study “point to the existence of another order of human life continuous with this, and demonstrate the possibility in certain circumstances of communication between this world and the next.”
 
If the television screenwriters are to be believed, famed Russian Leo Tolstoy (below) was Einstein’s favorite author. In one scene, he is shown reading Tolstoy to his young son.  In his book, A Confession, Tolstoy tells of the despair he began to feel as he approached his fiftieth birthday. “I often asked myself, if such a state of utter despair could be, what man was born to,” he wrote. “I sought an explanation of the questions, which tormented me in every branch of human knowledge; I sought that explanation painfully and long, not out of mere curiosity, not apathetically, but obstinately day and night; I sought it as a perishing man seeks safety, and I found nothing.  My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this – that life is without meaning.”

In spite of his success as an author, his 1860 book War and Peace widely ranked as one of the greatest books ever, Tolstoy did not find the usual escape or repression methods available to most people satisfactory, and considered suicide.  “Life cannot be measured by what we possess,” he further wrote of his struggle.  “If we think so, we only delude ourselves…. Is there any meaning in life which can overcome the inevitable death awaiting me?”

Tolstoy looked to science but found no answers. “The problem of exact science is the succession of cause and effect in material phenomena,” he stated. “If exact science raises the question of finite cause, it stumbles against an absurdity…. Experimental science gives positive results, and shows the grandeur of man’s intellect, only when it does not inquire into finite causes; while, on the contrary, theoretical science only shows the greatness of man’s mental powers, is only a science at all, when it gets rid altogether of the succession of phenomena, and looks upon man only in relation to finite causes.”  He went on to say that he saw metaphysics as the most important science of all and that if man is to overcome his despair he must believe in the infinite.  “Without faith,” he asserted, “there is no life.”

If the picture painted of Einstein by the screenwriters is any indication, he was not a particularly happy man in his everyday living. He may not have experienced the despair of Tolstoy, at least in his most productive years, as he was able to find fulfilment and escape in his search for scientific truths.  But he seems to have lived most of his life in a state of melancholy.  One senses that he sometimes, especially in his declining years, wondered to what extent his scientific discoveries would contribute to the overall good and to which generation full fruition. While Tolstoy was able to overcome his despair by discovering in his later years an unorthodox form of Christianity, Einstein persisted in his unhappy march toward an abyss of nothingness, claiming that one life was enough for him.  Whether that claim was out of sincere courage, pure indifference or mere bravado must remain unanswered in this realm of existence.

Another person portrayed in the television series was the pioneering psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Einstein called upon Jung to help his son overcome some mental problems.  Perhaps Einstein should have given more heed to Jung’s words in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul:  “As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic – if I may use the word – to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.  I therefore consider the religious teaching of a life hereafter consonant with the standpoint of psychic hygiene. When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.” 

Tolstoy might have responded to Einstein’s comment that belief in an afterlife is “childish” by telling him that you don’t have to be a genius to understand it.  In fact, Tolstoy begins one of his books with the words of Jesus, as quoted in Matthew xviii, 3:  “Except ye ...become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

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.