Posted on 25 May 2020, 15:24

It was in early 1897 that George Wright, then living in Titusville, Pennsylvania and teaching chemistry at nearby Meadville High School, began studying paranormal phenomena by sitting in mediumship circles. On November 6, 1897, George wrote to his brother, Jay: “… I have seen enough and heard enough and felt enough to not only make me believe in the continuity of life and conscious existence after the change you call death, but to make me know its reality and to demonstrate to me the fact that communication can and does take place between those who have experienced this change and those who have not.” 

After a year or two, George began displaying mediumistic abilities of his own – abilities which would soon lead to some profound teachings from an apparently advanced spirit through George’s hand while he was in a trance state. In the absence of any identifying name, the advanced spirit was referred to initially as the “Master-Mind” and later simply as the “Master.”  The teachings were compiled between 1900 and 1912 in an unpublished green leather journal referred to as “The Green Book.” It was not until some 60 years later that Theon Wright, George’s son, told the story of his father and the teachings in a 1970 book, The Open Door.

Michael Prescott, at his popular blog, mentioned the book in his April 29 post, stating that Paul Smith, has done a reconstruction of The Green Book (Reconstructing the Green Book)

“What I find particularly interesting is that the metaphysical teaching of the ‘Master,’ as given in the Green Book, precedes by decades any generally accessible comparative teaching in the West,” Smith commented in an email to me, mentioning that it closely parallels Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, which was published more than 30 years after the last of George Wright’s scripts.  Others have suggested it resembles the teachings of Seth, which began around the time The Open Door was published. However, it would be more proper to say that the Seth teachings resemble the teachings of the Master.

Author Theon Wright served as a colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II and later as an executive for several corporations. His best-selling book appears to have been Rape In Paradise, a true story of mistreatment of native Hawaiians. “We now have a generation coming into active participation in life and world affairs with little or no faith in what has been learned in the past, and even less for the future,” Theon Wright offers in the first chapter. “Religion and philosophy have defaulted, and scientific materialism has failed to fill the void.  And yet the question persists: what happens to us when we die?”  He says that the book is an effort to help fill the void and explains that it is a narrative of experiments carried on by three generations of his family, seeking to establish communication between the living and the dead. 

While he was in a trance state or even while sleeping, messages would come through George Wright’s hand in peculiar handwriting.  He explained that he experienced being something apart from his body. “My body there on the chair is writing words as fast I formulate the idea, but it is only a machine obeying my will, and if it has consciousness I know nothing about it,” he recorded, further explaining that this separate consciousness was devoid of any element of space and that his ordinary consciousness seemed “cramped and absurd” compared with this broader consciousness. Many of the things he wrote about were unfamiliar to him and not in his style of writing.  In some cases, the handwriting was entirely different.

Before George married Nella Stowell on August 19, 1900, after a courtship of less than a month, he received an appointment as an instructor in chemistry at Allegheny College in Meadville.  Nella was quite surprised to find that the “young professor” was a medium, but she adapted quickly and became the primary historian of all that took place in the family circle, which included George and Jay’s parents, while maintaining The Green Book. 

Until Nella joined the family circle, the phenomena had been primarily physical and evidential, including voices and floating objects produced by lower-level spirits. However, Nella’s presence apparently brought some higher spirit links to the circle and during September 1900, after members of the circle had joined hands, a deep voice, identified as Lone Feather, an Indian who was one of a band of spirits who had been communicating with the circle members in the preceding months, informed them that someone new was there to provide “knowledge.” This new spirit was identified as “Akasta,” said to be one of Nella’s guides, and it was explained that Akasta would be an intermediary for a more advanced spirit, one at too high a vibration to directly communicate with the circle.  The circle member began referring to “him” simply as the “Master.” (The pronoun “he” is given to the advanced entity for language simplification.)

The Master explained that he was no “Savior of Man,” but simply a friend, brother, and “humble tool,” attempting to help mankind understand the bigger picture. He was drawn to them because his individualization was similar to theirs.  His teachings, he said, embodied the messages of the Master-Mind called Jesus, the Christ – “not the man, nor the God that has been created by churches for worship – but the Intelligence which manifested through Jesus, and on account of which received the reputation of a God.”

The first message from the Master extended to about a thousand words, and began: “My children, Back of and beyond the Universe you know, permeating and transcending it, there exists an Underlying Reality, the nature of which you cannot conceive or express in terms of your ordinary everyday experiences or language. It is a Cosmic Consciousness that is aware of its own Being.  It is intelligent, universal, integral in its essence and in its manifestations.  It is coherent, indivisible, and a complete Whole that expresses its potentialities in a diversity of individual manifestations….

“And in your functioning on this plane and these levels of manifestations, you gain wider and wider experience, express more and more the potentialities inherent in your particular individualization of the Underlying Reality, and thus by your specialized activity, you enrich the Whole and participate in its unfoldment …..”

The Master explained that progress toward self-realization and fulfillment is represented by different planes of development, “from the crudest, densest physical expressions through graduated and overlapping levels of consciousness to the highest spiritual individualizations.”  He further explained that on the higher levels, consciousness becomes so expanded and merged that it approaches unification with the Universal Self, the Cosmic Consciousness of the Underlying Reality. The physical universe, he said, comprises the lower, denser levels of manifestation.

The Master further communicated that below the physical plane is a sub-material world in which Cosmic Consciousness first appears under conditions that are difficult for us to comprehend because they are outside the scope of our experience.  Similarly, there is a “world” of consciousness and manifestations above our plane of existence.  He referred to it as the “Psychic Universe,” the next step in our progress and unfoldment, adding that it is superimposed upon the physical world, interpenetrating and overlapping it. It is keyed to rates of vibration and dimensions which few in the physical world can perceive.

“The condition that you know as consciousness is one of the personal attributes that man possesses while passing through a human experience,” the Master said.  “It is that which measures limitations, making everything finite and commensurable. Now I, who am outside of consciousness, must become conscious whenever I take upon myself the conditions of limitations, and while manifesting through an instrument (a medium) I am personally conscious in the ordinary sense.”  He added that normally he exists in a hyperconscious state, which bears the same relation to the conscious that the infinite does to the finite.”

The realization of “Oneness,” he continued, is the highest form of hyperconsciousness, or universal self-realization.  Nevertheless, he added, the individual spirit continues to exist whenever there is spirit activity along the particular line of their individualization.

While George and Nella moved from Pennsylvania to California, Nevada, and then Hawaii, the messages continued during their evening hours.  Upon finding that others showed no interest in the messages, they continued for their own self-knowledge.  There was apparently no thought given to making the contents of the Green Book into a published book until Theon visited his mother at her home in Honolulu in 1946, following the war and the death of his father in 1944. 

The Master further communicated that souls on the psychic plane are entities as real and as positive as the humans they meet in everyday life. “These souls have the power of exerting force in the form of influence, and can direct it upon either mind or body.  They have the power of penetrating and occupying your bodies at the same time as the permanent soul that is you.”  While much positive influence comes from them, there are “undesirable influences,” which can be overcome when the strongest self-assertion is maintained.  Other teachings of the Master:

Truth:  “As there are different degrees of knowledge, so are there different degrees of truth, different grades of steps in the approach to the Underlying Reality.”

Discord: “Discord always arises out of the attempt to make others see the truth as you see it before they are ready for it.”

Good Works: “The purpose of activity lies not in the accomplishment, but in the process itself.”

Obstructions: “Tonight I will tell you of the three chief fetters to development.  These fetters are Fear, Doubt, and Hate.”

Fear: “Fear is the shrinking of the ego from all that is objective, a terror lest in some way its individuality be lost or merged into the universe, when in reality such merging would not be a loss but a vast gain.”

Christ: “Christ’s mission, as symbolized by the Cross, was one of service to humanity, a service that tried to unite the severed bonds that once linked the inhabitants of the Earth in peace and love.”

Evolution: “When we view the process of Being in the light of future enfoldment and relate the ultimate to the process in the light of cause under the domain of Time, we call it ‘evolution.’ When the ultimate is looked upon as the effect, of the process of Being and Becoming, or better, the manifestational activity, we call this ‘involution’.”

Other Realms: “It is difficult to convey to your minds any idea of the conditions on the other plane, simply because there are no conditions as you know them.”

Warnings: “Our activity is in the realm of the abstract.  We think and act in broader and more general terms than those which enter into your limited and finite lives; thus, we cannot give you the specific information you seek, because we ourselves do not know in detail the facts of your concrete and material environment.”

Ebb & Flow: “The whole universe is one vast and mighty tide, whose ebb and flow marks cycles as it does seconds. And there is associated with this ebb and flow an attractive force that seems to draw things together, while an apparently repellent force seems to drive them apart.”

Repulsion:  “In its actual nature, so-called repulsion is only another form of attraction – the attraction that draws away toward something else.”

There is so much more in the way of teachings offered in the book, teachings which appeal to reason and are consistent with other teachings coming to us from the spirit world over the last two centuries. And yet, they were and are still buried away and ignored while Harry Potter type books become best sellers.  It is very strange. 

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.
His forthcoming book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is due later in 2020.

Posted on 11 May 2020, 9:28

When it comes to the subject of life after death, some people are content to shrug it off and flippantly comment, “Well, we’ll all know some day, won’t we?”  My response to that is, “Maybe not as soon as you think.” 

As discussed in my book, The Afterlife Revealed,  there have been numerous messages and signs from the spirit world indicating that many spirits are slow in recognizing that they are “dead,” some floundering in an “earthbound” stupor for a long time, however time is measured in that apparently low realm. This phenomenon was popularized in the hit 1999 movie, The Sixth Sense, when the Bruce Willis character apparently didn’t know he had died.

A somewhat different twist on afterlife awareness is offered in a 1954 book, Through the Psychic Door, by Dr. Frederic H. Wood, a professional musician and composer, who heard from a number of departed souls in the afterlife through the mediumship of a woman given the pseudonym Rosemary (to protect her privacy). In one message, around 1950, Wood’s deceased brother Dennis, who had died in 1912, told Frederic that after he (Frederic) dies and joins him in the spirit world that he is going to arrange for him to give a lecture to a group of scientists on his side about the reality of the earth world.  Dennis explained that many scientists on his side do not believe that there is such a place as Earth.  Apparently, these are the same scientists who refused to believe in a spirit world when they were in their physical bodies. 

Whether or not Dennis Wood was jesting is not clear, but it does seem clear from many messages coming from the spirit world that the consciousness we awaken with on that side is based on the spiritual consciousness we take with us from the physical world.  In effect, we continue in the larger world with the same beliefs we left this world with, or, otherwise stated, perhaps with the same open- or closed-mindedness we leave the physical world with.

Allan Kardec, the distinguished 19th Century French educator and psychical researcher, likened the “earthbound” condition to somnambulism, as in sleepwalking, when the somnambulist thinks he is awake.  “The moral state of the soul is the condition which determines the ease, or the difficulty, with which the spirit disengages himself from his terrestrial envelope,” Kardec explained. “The strength of the affinity between the body and perispirit (spirit body) is in the exact ratio of the spirit’s attachment to materiality; it is, consequently, at the maximum in the case of those whose thoughts and interests are concentrated on the earthly life and the enjoyment of material pleasures; it is almost null in the case of those whose soul has identified itself before with the spirit life.”

Silver Birch, the spirit entity who spoke through the entranced Maurice Barbanell said the same thing.  “The higher your consciousness, the less the need for adjustment,” he communicated.  “You must always remember that ours is a mind world, a spirit world where consciousness is king.  The mind is enthroned and mind rules.  What mind dictates is reality.” Silver Birch added that the time for realization is self-determined.  It can be short or long, as measured by our duration of time.  For the enlightened, at least those whose actions in the physical world were in accordance with their enlightenment, it is a speedy process.

A very similar message comes from the writings of medium Alice A. Bailey and her teacher, the Tibetan master, Djwhal Khul. They point out that most people, being focused on the physical plane, experience a semi-consciousness in the period after death, usually one of emotional and mental bewilderment. “In the case of the [spiritually] undeveloped person, the etheric body can linger for a long time in the neighborhood of its outer disintegrating shell because the pull of the soul is not potent and the material aspect is,” we read in Death: The Great Adventure. “Where the person is advanced, and therefore detached in his thinking from the physical plane, the dissolution of the vital body can be exceedingly rapid.”

As set forth in No Death: God’s Other Door, Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” said that “many an individual has remained in that called death for what ye call years without realizing it was dead!”  Cayce further explained that the “entity” becomes conscious gradually and that this is contingent upon “how great are the appetites and desires of a physical body.”

One of the leading psychical investigators in the United States during the early part of the 20th Century was Carl A. Wickland, M.D., whose wife was a trance medium.  Wickland recorded the information coming from the spirit world through his wife for some 40 years.  “In the case of the open-minded, unbiased individual there is no protracted death sleep, for as transition from the physical draws near he will often discern the presence of waiting friends from the Unseen, bidding him welcome into the new life…,”  Wickland wrote, going on to state that others may awaken from the death sleep entirely oblivious of their transition and remain in such oblivion for many years as “vagabond spirits.”

Much more recently, in his 2013 book, To Die For, physicist James Beichler concludes that when mind is much more evolved than consciousness, those making the transition from this life to the larger life may be faced with a very big gap, thus encountering “boarding” problems.  He opines that an enlightened person would merge with less difficulty into his or her new state of being. “In such a case where mind – one rich in rational thinking – significantly exceeds (spiritual) consciousness, the mind might be “stuck” in its four-dimensional reality and not even realize that the body is dead,” he adds. Or this “handicapped mind,” still expecting input from the five senses, might experience a total blackness or “nothingness” because of the lack of consciousness.

Beichler’s model explains many of the characteristics and properties of the near-death experience. For example, noting that not all experiencers undergo a past-life review, he concludes that those who have a highly-developed consciousness – one that has kept pace with the development of the mind – may not need a life review as they probably reviewed their lives when alive in the flesh.  At the other extreme, there are those not advanced enough in their conscious evolution to appreciate a life review, and still others who may not accept a life review because they deny their death and sense nothing at all.  “In other words, people’s minds seize upon the most familiar surroundings when they enter the new environment of the five-dimensional universe, but can still reject the experience completely depending upon their mind set and mental priorities at the time of death,” Beichler states.

If I am interpreting various metaphysical teachings correctly, there are “magnetic currents” keeping the individual in the earthbound condition. These currents should not be confused with the so-called silver cord, the connecting link between the physical body and the spirit body.  The silver cord will have been severed at the time of physical death, liberating the spirit body, but the magnetic currents can still keep the spirit body close to the physical body. Moreover, cremation does not undo the gravitational pull of a materialistic life, but it at least mitigates the pull.

But back to the Wood brothers.  Dennis cautioned Frederic about word tests, pointing out that Lodge, who died in 1940, had, while alive, arranged to communicate a secret word after his death in such a way that the recipient would know that he had survived death.  However, it was apparently unsuccessful.  “Nothing passes so quickly from the memory on This Side as the form and construction of mere word-phrases!” Dennis communicated, further explaining what many others have said, that theirs is a thought world, one in which ideas, not words, are communicated. “Lodge is very sorry, now, that he chose that particular form of test. It is not easy or natural for us to communicate with your side in this way.”

The bottom line here seems to be that the more you come to understand about the spirit world and spiritual matters in this life, the better off you will be when you first enter that life, assuming you lived in accordance with such enlightenment.  If nothing else, you will understand that you are no longer in the physical world, and you will understand that there really is an earth world.     

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.
His forthcoming book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is due later in 2020.