Posted on 30 March 2020, 9:30

Below was to be read only on April 1st

The year was 1969.  I was living and working in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, managing an office for an international insurance company. I was invited to join a friend to participate in a weekly run by the world-famous Hash House Harriers, a group of mostly British and Australian businessmen who gathered for a four- or five-mile run through the nearby jungle, after which they enjoyed a beer bust.  A mile or so into the run, I told my friend that the pace was much too slow, so slow that I didn’t feel I was getting any cardiovascular benefit from it and therefore had to pick up the pace. He warned me that the others would brand me a show-off if I did so, but I felt it was a waste of time to proceed at such a slow jog. I lengthened my stride and passed plodder after plodder, hearing a few mumbles about the “bloody, insane Yank” before I found myself leading the pack and drawing away from them. My sudden independence was short-lived, however, as I soon found myself ankle-deep in a pool of quicksand.  When I tried to lift my right leg and extract myself, I realized I was in trouble. I was sinking.

Thirty seconds or so later, as the others caught up with me, one by one they circled around the mud pool, none of them saying anything or offering any assistance. I could see smirks on each of their faces.  By the time the last harrier, my friend, passed me, not saying a word, I was up to my knees in the thick mud and began to realize that I was in serious trouble. It was six years before Dr. Raymond Moody coined the term “near-death experience” for what I was about to experience.  As I continued to be swallowed by the mud hole, I was suddenly above my helpless body, looking down at it, and then found myself talking with someone who identified himself as one of my spirit guides.  He gave the name Milo and chastised me for my impudence, commenting that I was very selfish in my motives.  I had an instantaneous life review, seeing many other selfish acts of which I had been guilty, including a time when I was using my father’s car with a handicap placard and took a parking spot reserved for handicapped drivers. I also saw a time that I hid the ice cream in the back of the freezer so that no one else in the family would see it and finish it off before I could. 

It was then that Milo asked me if I wanted to continue living and warned me that there were rough times ahead. “How rough?” I asked.  “I’m going to take you 50 years into the future and show you what life will be like then,” he said. “I’ll begin with what it will be like if you choose to die now.”

I then found myself looking down at a table in a coffee shop.  There were two people sitting at the table and my focus was on the young male with purple hair tied back in a pony tail and with green streaks on the sides.  He was adorned with many tattoos and jewelry, including earrings and nose and lip rings. “What am I looking at?” I asked Milo.  “That’s you in the year 2020 if you choose not to return now,” Milo responded.  “You’ll be reborn in the year 1995 and you are seeing your 25-year-old self.”  I shook my head in shock and dismay.

“Is that a goat on the floor next to me?” I asked.  “Yes, that’s your emotional support pet,  Milo explained.  “Having him next to you helps you deal with life’s everyday stresses.  You look at Charlie, your goat, and unload your troubles on him.  He’s a good listener and never argues with you.  He accompanies you everywhere, even on the plane when you fly home to ask your parents for more money.”  My mouth was agape. 

The person sitting next to me appeared to be a young woman, although she had more of a male haircut than I did. She was also covered in tattoos and adorned in facial jewelry.  She had a peacock next to her, apparently her emotional support animal. She wore jeans that were all torn up, both knees with large holes in them.  “Is she destitute?” I asked Milo.  “Oh, no, that’ll be the style in 2020,” Milo said with a laugh. “It means that the person is a carefree, happy-go-lucky person, not tied down to the materialistic society of her parents.”

I asked Milo to elaborate.  “Look,” he said, “you grew up with the idea that you had to apply effort to achieve something and that you had to deal with a certain amount of adversity along the way.  At the same time, you were taught that there is a larger life for which the material life is but a preparation.  However, you won’t view that in the same way in the life you are now looking at.  The person you are in 2020 has been nurtured in a philosophy of materialism, more than that, hedonism, and with an entitlement mentality.  And, he has been sheltered from adversity.  Your president in 2020 will call your kind a ‘snowflake’.”

“How did that happen?” I asked Milo. “It’s very complicated, but in a nutshell it has do with science and technology progressing much faster than people could adapt to the changes; it’s humans looking for new powers when they haven’t adjusted to those they already have,” he responded. He went on to explain that it all started with the impeachment of religion by Darwinism and the growth of critical rationalism.  It stalled somewhat during the first half of the last century because of the two world wars, people not wanting to believe that loved ones killed during the wars were totally extinct, but then it gained steam again during the 1960s, as television came into its own and offered an easy escape from reality.

The primary culprit, Milo said, is academia, since it rejected all things spiritual as “unscientific,” thereby misleading fertile minds – minds which were at the same time being indoctrinated by the advertising and entertainment industries into thinking that life is all about pleasure seeking.  “You know the Seven Deadly Sins from your Catholic upbringing – greed, lust, sloth, wrath, envy, gluttony, and pride,” he said.  “Those negative characteristics will be turned into positive attributes by Madison Avenue and Hollywood by 2020.  Instant gratification and having fun will replace long-term fulfillment and happiness as motivators. People will become slaves to the five senses and there will be a significant moral void. You can see it now in 1969, but it will be ten-fold of what you see now in half a century.”

Milo added that by 2020 nihilism will be the philosophy of many, including an increasing number of young people. “Your heroes will be movie actors – people pretending to be real people – and athletes – people pretending to be real warriors,” he said. “The unreal will become the real for most people and that will result in a flight into self-delusion. You’ll live in a fantasy world.  Salvation will be a secular matter and dependent on government entitlement programs. You, like so many others, will live from payday to payday.  ‘Seize the day’ is your philosophy.  The American dream is no more.”

Young people will have so much in the way of material goods and toys in 2020, Milo further explained, that they’ll become bored and lonely and rebel against materialism. “They’ll become angry, arrogant, apathetic, anxious, apprehensive, alienated, and aimless, and they’ll begin to consider a more socialistic government,” he said. To overcome the loneliness, he continued, they’ll join groups to promote causes they don’t really care about; their primary objective is to socialize with other humans, no matter the cause.  “They’ll be out marching in the streets, carrying signs and protesting things they know nothing about or really care about. They’re looking for some kind of meaning in their lives even though it makes no sense to them.  Some of them trick themselves into thinking their cause makes sense. Most of them are in deep despair, even though they don’t realize it.”

I noticed that my friend and I, as well as all those around us, were occupied with some small object we were holding.  Milo referred to them as portable phones, but he said he hadn’t quite figured out what they were doing with them. He believed it to be some sort of finger flexibility exercise as he could make no sense of them otherwise. 

I asked Milo if I’ll have a job in 2020.  “You had one as a ripper,” he replied. “You were on the production line that makes those jeans your friend is wearing, and it was your job to rip them up as much as possible.  However, you came to realize that you could make more from government programs, so you spend a lot of time in the coffee shop.  You do make a few extra dollars every month from being a sperm donor.”

“Didn’t I get an education?” I reacted. “Yes, you got a Ph.D. and did your dissertation on the advantages of moral nihilism,” Milo answered.  “You had hoped to teach that subject at the local university, but like so many of your generation you trained for jobs that no longer exist or for which there is a surplus of educated people.  Yours was the latter. Technology moved too fast for the academic world, diminishing the appeal of the liberal arts and the humanities.  Most people in 2020 should be going to trade school, not college, if they are to find meaningful employment.  Incidentally, your friend there, who has a master’s degree in music, is on the production line after you.  She’s a shredder.  After you rip, she shreds, and the end result is what they consider a perfect piece of clothing. Such will be the world of 2020.”

Milo said that a big “cleansing” was going to begin in 2020 and things would gradually change.  “But it’s going to be rough going for some years,” he warned.
 
I told Milo that I preferred not to die and face that future, but I wondered what was ahead if I managed to free myself from the mud.  “You’ll face a lot of adversity,” he said, “but you’ll take it in stride and learn from it.  You’ll find love and meaning in life, a meaning that will totally escape you in your life as a snowflake.”  Milo then disappeared and I was back in my lower self.  My friend had returned and extended a frond from a palm tree to me, and I was able to pull myself out of the quicksand (see photo).  I feel certain I made the right decision in returning to my body in 1969.  Better to have only days, weeks, or months left in this lifetime while believing in a larger life than another 50 or 60 years in my snowflake life as a deluded moral nihilist. 

Note:  This blog was prepared to be posted April 1, but it could go up a day or two early.  I did manage to free myself from the mud before it was above my ankles.  Happy April Fools’ Day.

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 16 March 2020, 9:24

During his 50 years of studying psychic phenomena, Sir William Barrett observed nearly every type of mediumship.  In his reminiscences, read at a private meeting of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) on June 17, 1924, less than a year before his death, Barrett said:  “I am personally convinced that the evidence we have published decidedly demonstrates (1) the existence of a spiritual world, (2) survival after death, and (3) of occasional communication from those who have passed over… It is however hardly possible to convey to others who have not had a similar experience an adequate idea of the strength and cumulative force of the evidence that has compelled [my] belief.”

A physics professor at the Royal College of Science as well as a renowned inventor, Barrett (below) was one of the pioneers of psychical research.  It was his idea to form the SPR in London in 1882.  However, since he was living and teaching in Dublin, Ireland at the time, he was not able to take an active part in managing the Society.  He left that up to three Cambridge scholars, Henry Sedgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Edmund Gurney. Barrett also encouraged Professor William James of Harvard to organize the American branch of the SPR in 1884.  He edited the SPR Journal from 1884 until 1899 and served as president of the SPR in 1904.

Barrett began to take an interest in psychic phenomena in 1874 after hearing of the research of chemist William Crookes (later Sir William) with mediums.  “In fact I began the whole investigation of these phenomena convinced that [mal-observation or hallucination] was their true explanation, and it was not until after stretching this hypothesis to illegitimate lengths that I found the actual facts completely shattered my theory,” Barrett explained his early views.

Then 29, Barrett began experimenting with hypnosis, more popularly known as “mesmerism” in those days.  He observed a young girl under hypnosis correctly identify a playing card randomly taken from a pack and placed in a book that was put next to her head.  He also observed another hypnotized person correctly identify fourteen cards taken at random from a pack.  As a scientist, he found such results very disturbing.  However, while many of his scientific colleagues simply scoffed at anything paranormal, Barrett was open-minded and determined to find some rational and scientific explanation. As he explained his 1917 book On the Threshold of the Unseen, his prior theories really began to fall apart sometime in 1876 when a prominent English solicitor (lawyer) named Clark spent the summer at a residence near his in Dublin.  Clark’s 10-year-old daughter, Florrie, produced various paranormal phenomena, including levitations and spirit “raps” that spelled out messages from an “intelligence” calling himself “Walter.”

As a result of his experiments in hypnosis and his investigation of Florrie Clark, Barrett prepared a paper to deliver to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  The Association rejected the paper as well as Barrett’s request to present it orally to the group, such was the materialistic mindset of the organization. After Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution, William Crookes and Lord Rayleigh protested the Association’s action, Barrett was allowed to deliver the paper but not publish it.
Barrett continued his investigation with other mediums, including Hester Travers Smith, Gladys Osborne Leonard, Etta Wriedt, Kathleen Goligher, and Geraldine Cummins.  In his 1917 book, he recalled the sitting with Goligher, who was being studied then by Dr. William Crawford of Queen’s University.  He observed a table rise from the floor some 18 inches and remain suspended in the air.  “I was allowed to go up to the table and saw clearly no one was touching it, a clear space separating the sitters from the table,” Barrett explained.  “I tried to press the table down, and though I exerted all my strength could not do so; then I climbed up on the table and sat on it, my feet off the floor, when I was swayed to and fro and finally tipped off. The table of its own accord now turned upside down, no one touching it, and I tried to lift it off the ground, but it could not be stirred, it appeared screwed down to the floor.  At my request all the sitters’ clasped hands had been kept raised above their heads, and I could see that no one was touching the table.  When I desisted from trying to lift the inverted table from the floor, it righted itself again on its own accord, no one helping it.  Numerous sounds displaying an amused intelligence then came, and after each individual present had been greeted with some farewell raps the sitting ended.”
 
Barrett said that he could not imagine how the cleverest conjurer could have performed what he experienced, especially since it was clear to him that there was no elaborate apparatus in the room.  Moreover, Dr. Crawford had been observing the Goligher circle for six months or more before his observations and had detected no trickery. “That there is an unseen intelligence behind these manifestations is all we can say, but that is a tremendous assertion, and if admitted destroys the whole basis of materialism,” Barrett added.

Barrett is also remembered for his study of dowsing and deathbed visions. His book, Death-Bed Visions, first published in 1926, the year after his death, is still popular today. It offers a number of intriguing reports in which a dying person appears to see and recognize some deceased relative or friend, some of them involving instances where the dying person was unaware of the previous death of the spirit form he sees.  “These cases form, perhaps, one of the most cogent arguments for survival after death, as the evidential value and veridical (truth telling) character of these visions of the dying is greatly enhanced when the fact is undeniably established that the dying person was wholly ignorant of the decease of the person he or she so vividly sees,” Barrett stated in the Introduction.

Several weeks after his death, Barrett’s wife,  Dr. Florence Barrett, (below) an obstetric surgeon and dean of the London School of Medicine for Women, began receiving very evidential messages from Sir William through the mediumship of Mrs. Leonard.  Over the next eleven years, she sat with Leonard every few months, taking verbatim notes as Sir William communicated and explained how things work on his side of the veil.  Lady Barrett also received evidential messages from several other mediums. This book, Personality Survives Death, published in 1937 by Longmans, Green and Co. of London, and recently republished by White Crow Books, resulted from these sittings. 

Lady Barrett asked Sir William how she might satisfy people that she was really talking to him.  He replied that it depends on the type of mind, commenting that reference to a tear in the wallpaper in his old room might satisfy some people and not others.  Lady Barrett noted that a month before his death he had pointed out a tear in the wallpaper in one corner of his room.  Sir William then said that some higher minds have gone well beyond the need for such trivial verification, mentioning another distinguished British physicist, still in the flesh, Sir Oliver Lodge.  “Lodge is nearer the bigger, greater aspect of things than most,” he stated.

Sir William reported difficulties in communicating with his widow, explaining 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.” He went on to describe other obstacles to communication between the material and spirit worlds. 

Sir William further explained that his objective in communicating with his wife was not simply to add to the mass of evidence already given concerning the survival of consciousness at death but to help find a working philosophy to guide those on earth who are struggling with finding a purpose in life.  “It seems to me from where I am most people are not even struggling but meandering on purposelessly, blindly, because they have no definite philosophy as a starting point,” he communicated.  He went on to say that knowledge of the afterlife opens the gates of inspiration and makes the intuition keener.  With that comes greater enthusiasm, greater understanding of the beauties of life, even the perceiving of beauty where ugliness had appeared to exist.

“Life on my side seems so extraordinarily easy compared to earth,” Sir William offered in a 1929 sitting, “because we simply live according to the rules of love.” 

Next blog post:  March 30

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 02 March 2020, 9:55

The idea of spirits wearing clothes provokes humor among the skeptics and doubts among the believers. However, if those same spirits were to appear naked, it would likely result in more humor and more doubt. Would it be more believable if they appeared as blue flames or white orbs? 

“Can you fancy seeing me in white robes?” Raymond Lodge, a battlefield victim of World War I, asked his mother through British trance medium Gladys Osborne Leonard on November 26, 1915. “Mind, I didn’t care for them at first, and I wouldn’t wear them. Just like a fellow gone to a country where there is a hot climate – an ignorant fellow, not knowing what he is going to; it’s just like that.  He may make up his mind to wear his own clothes a little while, but he will soon be dressing like the natives.”

Raymond, (below) a second-lieutenant in the British army, had been killed in action in Flanders on September 14, a little more than two months before he communicated with his mother.  He went on to tell his mother that he was allowed to have earth clothes until he got acclimated.  “I don’t think I will ever be able to make the boys see me in white robes,” Raymond added, apparently jesting.

Raymond’s father, Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished British physicist and pioneer in electricity, radio and spark plug ignition, recorded the communication in his popular but controversial 1916 book, Raymond or Life and Death.  Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge began receiving messages from Raymond on September 25, 1915, 11 days after his death.  A number of them were very evidential, offering facts which Mrs. Leonard could not possibly have known, thereby convincing the Lodges that they were in fact in touch with their youngest son.

As a world-renowned scientist, Lodge took much flak from his fellow scientists for his interest in such “occult” matters.  One current reference suggests that Lodge had no interest in the subject of life after death until Raymond’s death, but the fact is that he had joined the Society for Psychical Research a year after its formation in 1882 and had 23 sittings with Leonora Piper, the famous American trance medium, in 1889.  His book, The Survival of Man, dealing with life after death, was published in 1909, six years before Raymond’s death and before he met Mrs. Leonard, and makes it clear that he accepted survival well before Raymond’s death. 

Sir Oliver continued his interest in psychical research until his death in 1940 and often heard from Raymond.  On March 11, 1932, Raymond attempted to further explain conditions on his side of the veil.  “Father, we are obliged to create conditions, and what you might call things, on our plane,” Raymond stated through Mrs. Leonard’s vocal cords. “They’ve only got a temporary life.  They are illusions, something to the same extent as a materialization is an illusion.  On your side, you have something material for the time being.  It’s something natural in appearance, in feel, apparently in every way it appeals to the senses of this body (the entranced medium touching Sir Oliver).  On our side we are bound to create certain things, houses, clothes, partially for the time being, in order to make a satisfactory harmonious and suitable setting for the soul to live in and work in.  And they become a medium of expression…It’s one of the necessary illusions of our life.”

When Sir Oliver (below) asked Raymond if he was saying that he lived in a world of illusion, Raymond said that he was in an extension of the illusory world in which his father was living.  “We are in touch with a world of reality because we are in the outer rim of the world of illusion,” he explained to his father.  “We’re more sure of the world of reality than you are.  Father, the spirit universe is the world of reality.  Spirit and mind both belong to the world of reality.”

Mr and Mrs Lodge

Sir Oliver pondered the situation in writing:  “I know that its inhabitants say it is extraordinarily like the earth, that they have flowers, and trees and houses, and can get anything they want by merely wishing for it, which seems rather strange, “but I was not prepared to think of it as a world of illusion wherein all such objects of sense were illusory.” 

In further discussing the matter with Raymond and Frederic W. H. Myers, his old friend and fellow psychical researcher who had died in 1901 and who also communicated through Mrs. Leonard, Lodge concluded that it was a temporary environment for spirits who had recently crossed over and were still making adjustments before going on to realms of higher vibration, which become less and less illusory and more and more real as a soul advances in the spirit world. “We are not transported to the full blaze of reality all at once,” Lodge surmised, pointing out that a table that feels solid and substantial is really a multitude of whirling electrons with great spaces between them and that when we stand on the floor we are bombarded upwards and supported by a great multitude of little blows delivered by the atoms beneath our feet.  “As none of this is apparent to the ordinary senses, it can be considered illusory even though we choose to interpret it in a way that appeals to our coarse-grained sense organs.”

Through another medium and to another person, Myers communicated: “We were accustomed to wear clothes that belonged to our particular period. The images of these are deeply marked in our subconscious memory. So our first instinct is to appear to those we love as we were on earth. Our minds, though unconscious of the imaginative act, fashion out of this amazingly plastic ether every thread, every inch of the garments which we habitually wore during our earth life. Naturally, after a while, we come to realize the change in ourselves and, aware at last of the creative powers of imagination, devise strange and lovely coverings for our etheric bodies. But as these fancies are largely drawn from it they are limited by the subconscious memory in character and kind. …”  Myers added that this applied primarily to souls who had just passed through the gates of death and were still in the lower realms or spheres.

The Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a Wesleyan minister and psychical researcher, carried on detailed conversations with his deceased father and sister through Mrs. Leonard.  He wrote that his father wanted him to understand that he now lived in a body which, to him, was as real and substantial as the body he had inhabited on earth. “Instead of the vapourish form which I had imagined to be the dwelling place of the departed soul, he described a replica of his former body, but one which possessed powers of movement, and an extension of the senses, far surpassing anything familiar to earth,” Thomas wrote. “He spoke of being suitably clad in garments, and not, as I had supposed, draped only in a cloud of light.”  His father further explained that his spirit body was built up by the character formed while in the flesh.

At a different sitting, Thomas was told that he often visits with deceased relatives when he is sleeping.  His deceased father told him that he could see Drayton’s soul leaving the body from his solar plexus during sleep, although at death it would leave from the head. He would watch the soul come out and form a sort of clothing for itself.  “That is because of one’s intuitive sense of the need of clothing, the soul naturally seeks to clothe its body (i.e., the spiritual or psychic body),” it was explained.

Many spirit communicators have stated that spirits tend to move from traditional clothing in the lower realms to robes and gown in the higher realms. After transitioning to the spirit world, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson began communicating through the hand of Anthony Borgia.  He told of being able to visit one of the higher realms. “I observed that most of the people waiting in the gardens were not habited in their earth clothes,” he communicated, “and I assumed that most of them had been in spirit for some considerable time.  Such was not necessarily the case, Edwin (their guide) told us. They had the right to wear their spirit robes by virtue of the fact that they were inhabitants of this realm we were now in.  And the robes they wore were eminently suited to both the place and the situation.  It is difficult to describe this costume because so much rests in being able to give some comparison with a particular earthly fabric.  Here we have no such materials, but by the kind and degree of light that is the essence of the spirit robe. Those that we now saw were in ‘flowing’ form and of full length, and the colours – blue and pink in varying degrees of intensity – seemed to interweave themselves throughout the whole substance of the robes.”

Emanuel Swedenborg, an esteemed 18th Century scientist and inventor turned mystic, reported on his clairvoyant visions of the afterlife in his 1758 book, Heaven & Hell.  Referring to spirits as angels, Swedenborg said that angels live together as people on earth do and “they have clothes, houses, and many similar things.”  He explained that clothes correspond to their advancement in the spirit world.  The more advanced have clothes that gleam as if aflame, some radiant as if alight.  The less advanced have shining white clothes without radiance, while those even lower in advancement have clothes of various colors. 

A spirit calling himself Johannes communicated through medium Hester Travers-Smith to H. Dennis Bradley, a British playwright. “Now you ask me about clothes and appearance…Every soul has its own form.  It has formed itself during the earth life, and it comes to us as it makes itself.  We seem to each other to be men and women as you are; and as to our garments, we do wear garments which convey the same impression as yours.  There are merely veils for the mental part, something that gives clothing and appearance to the mental form; but you need not believe that when you pass on you live so differently as you expect.  These garments are not made in the market as yours are; they really proceed largely from the idea of the individual.  They help to demonstrate the mind as yours do.”

On September 12, 1945, Phillip Gilbert, a sailor in the British navy killed in WWII, communicated with his mother, Alice Gilbert. “You want me to tell you more of conditions here,” he communicated by means of automatic writing.  “It’s not easy to explain how one can be solid and yet not solid.  Still, anyone who knows anything about physics and electrons knows that all earthly matter is just that – seeming solid and yet really a mass of vibrating particles.  We are the same, I think, the body I use now looks to me very like my old one, but there are no organs, as you know.  I think I function through my thought, somehow. I can will myself into any clothes I want. I usually get myself into my tweed coat and flannels…Some people go about seeing themselves in the most fantastic outfits.  They are dressed as their inner nature builds them up. That is why, at first, Grandpa so often showed to mediums in a sort of black cassock, like a clergyman.”  Phillip went on to say that people in higher planes become more and more luminous and that Christ is seen as a mass of violet golden light.

The bottom line seems to be that we are our own tailors and are weaving our afterlife garments now whether we know it or not. 

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.