Almost three years after committing suicide in 1915, Washington attorney Richard Ross Perry came through to his friend and fellow attorney James E. Padgett using automatic writing to update him on his progress through the spirit planes. He explained that he had suffered for a time in the darkness many report after death, but now he was progressing, and as he progressed, his appearance and environment were improving, and he now saw those who hadn’t in a very different light.
“I was at the séance tonight … and besides me there were Carrington and another spirit whom I did not know, named Silsby, who had committed an act similar to my own. … Hutchins was also present, and he also is in a very bad condition and needs help very much, but I believe it will be more difficult to help him, because the sins of his earth life had a long continuous and accumulating acquirement.
“He is very dark and repulsive looking, and has not yet had any spiritual awakening. His thoughts and interests are still connected with the money that he left and the fight that is going on between his children and wife. He has attempted to discuss the matter with me just as he did on earth, but I tell him that he must forget these things and think of things that are more vital to his happiness and progress.”
“Hutchins” was almost certainly Stilson Hutchins, the publisher who founded the Washington Post; he died on April 23, 1912. As stated in Perry’s New York Times obituary, Perry was Hutchins’s attorney and presumably knew him well. In Hutchins’s case, it appeared that clinging to earthly affairs was keeping him in a lowly condition.
During his life, Hutchins was at the top of the tree—one of the richest and most powerful people in the richest and most powerful country in the world. But now Perry described him as “very dark and repulsive looking.” Maybe this is what is meant in the third saying of the Gospel of Thomas, which reads:
“When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.”
This corresponds with afterlife reports that our environment after death and how we manifest to others are determined by the state of the soul. At that stage of his development, perhaps Hutchins was indeed “in poverty and poverty.”
In December 1914, Albert Riddle—also a Washington attorney and Padgett’s former boss, who had died in 1902—explained to Padgett that appearance and environment are all about the state of the soul. He wrote, “You must know that we are all affected to a greater or less degree by the condition of our soul development. Your wife, for instance, is now a very beautiful spirit both as regards her spiritual body as well as her spiritual soul. She is one of the most beautiful that I come in contact with except your mother and grandmother, who are beyond my ability to describe. I am also very different but not so very much changed, as I have not yet made very great progress in the things pertaining to the involution of the soul.”
During their conversations, Hutchins, who died in 1912, insisted to Perry that he was happy, but Perry—now experiencing a higher level of consciousness—perceived him as dark and repulsive. Conversely, Riddle described Padgett’s wife, Helen, who had only been dead for eight months, as “a very beautiful spirit.”
Keeping Up Appearances
Through automatic writer Charlotte Dresser, Fred Rafferty received a communication from his deceased wife, Carrie—aka “Dee” (who died around 1917). In their book Life and Life Here after, she explained that after physical death: “Worth is of more value than beauty; but worth expresses itself in beauty [emphasis added]. When the spirit first arrives it is not more beautiful than the earth life expressed, but becomes beautiful in proportion to spiritual advancement.”
In a message to Padgett on March 2, 1917, a communicator who identified as Jesus concurred:
“The soul’s home is in the spirit body, whether that body is encased in the mortal or not, and it is never without such spirit body, which in appearance and composition is determined by the condition and state of the soul. …Then what is the spirit? Simply this—the active energy of the soul.”
In near-death experiences, people sometimes report meeting a “being of light”—someone “higher” helping those “below” ascend to brighter climes. “Higher” does not imply hierarchical power over others but a deeper awareness of reality.
Riddle’s comment that Padgett’s grandmother and mother were “beyond my ability to describe” reflects many near-death experience reports where the experiencer meets a beautiful being—a being of light, a faithful friend, a guide, a helper. NDE researcher Kevin Williams has written about the fluidity of the “Being of Light.” An example is Anke Evertz’s memoir Nine Days of Eternity (2023). “In September 2009, Evertz was tending to her fireplace when her clothing caught fire. Unable to extinguish the flames, she suffered severe burns and was eventually placed in an induced coma for nine days. During that time she had an NDE and encountered the Being of Light. When Evertz asked, ‘Who are you?’ the response was both simple and profound: ‘I can be anything you want me to be.’”
These communications suggest that a more advanced spirit can manifest to someone needing help in a way tailored to that person. For the less evolved, that ability comes only with progress—and much of that progress comes from within. There are no external rewards or punishments imposed—just a continuum of life. Hate breeds stagnation; love frees the soul to grow. One of the Dresser communicators explained, “The one thing that seems to us positive is the evolution of humanity. Upward, always upward.”
It’s often said, “You are what you eat,” but in the world beyond this one it seems “we are what we think.”
Jonathan Beecher is the author of No One’s Dead: The Jesus Messages, published by White Crow Books.
This article can also be found on Substack.
Very interesting, Jon. Concerning one’s appearance after death, I had a discussion with a friend not long ago resulting from my recent blog about materializations. He seemed to feel that we would appear the same to our friends in the spirit world as we appear now. However, I agreed that he might appear the same to those still in the material world, but I doubted we would appear the same to those in the spirit world, unless our standards of beauty change with the transition. Would a person who was very virtuous and saintly in this life, yet ugly by human standards, still have the same appearance? He saw the problem, but stuck with his first impression.
Mike
A few years ago I visited my dad (my step dad). He was in a nursing home having suffered a catastrophic stroke. On this particular day, he told me he was fearful because he was experiencing hallucinations. I asked him what he was seeing. He said his ex-wife was coming to him.
I said “do you mean in a dream?” He said “no it happens in the middle of the day.”
I had read the reports about people communicating with the physical world who appear to be in their prime — in their thirties — and looking healthy.
With that in mind, I asked “did she look like when you first met her when you were teenagers or was she old?” Purposely not mentioning the reports.
He replied that she looked around thirty — she looked good and was happy.
She had died a couple of years before and he hadn’t seen her or spoken to her for more than 50 years.
I asked if she said anything. He replied “she’s asking me to come over and beckoning to me.” He was embarrassed to tell me because he was married to my mother, and he never told anyone else.
I thought that was interesting.
Pick up duty…not uncommon for people that are close to transition to see someone they love turn up to take them home.
Michael and Jon,
Suicide is not liked by mediums for a few reasons. Early departure means unfinished business but given the choice of pain or early departure I would choose the later.
I needed to help a close one who passed early and needed some powerful spirits to assist. Their explanation was it was like a deep dive into a black sea searching for a person in pain. This was successful but you need someone able to do it.
I remember Chapter 9 Dark Realms in Life in the World Unseen by Anthony Borgia on page 56 “Some of the inhabitants, he said, had lived here, or hereabouts, year after year—as time is reckoned upon earth. They themselves had no sense of time, and their existence had been one interminable continuity of darkness through no one’s fault but their own. Many had been the good souls who had penetrated into these Stygian realms to try to effect a rescue out of the darkness.
Some had been successful; others had not. Success depends not so much upon the rescuer as upon the rescued. If the latter shows no glimmer of light in his mind, no desire to take a step forward on the spiritual road, then nothing, literally nothing, can be done. The urge must come from within the fallen soul himself. And how low some of them had fallen!”
The problem is getting the spirit to believe that there can be progress.
Thanks,
Bruce
Bruce,
My question is, are there any consequences to suicide? And the answer seems to be “it depends.”
The Silver Birch communicator said that no one benefits from suicide. If our conscience is the judge, it’s easy to contemplate that it might be painful to observe how those we’ve left behind might be suffering as a result. On the other hand, if we’ve been suffering during life, it might be seen by those left behind as a blessing.
This is what the “invisibles” told Betty White during the Stewart Edward White sessions:
“Those who deliberately, and not by submission to accident beyond their control, take into their own hands the termination of prescribed experience are in a different class. The very renunciation of responsibilities exerts a magnetic attraction which reorients the psyche back toward responsibilities. So that, in place of impulse forward toward onward progress, the soul is bound, by an urge which it cannot overcome, to the backward view.”
In the Charlotte Dresser books written a hundred years ago, a communicator wrote:
“When a human life is broken by the owner of that life, there is a long period of unconsciousness before any reconstruction can take place. Years may elapse before they are ready to begin any advancement. The suicide takes his own way instead of God’s way; and the result is, to paralyze the finer spiritual qualities, and prevent entrance into the joy of this life for a long time.”
If we are to believe these communications, it seems there are consequences in some cases but no one is punished or consigned to a permanent hell, and progress is eternal.
Jon
Indeed, all too true…”You are what you think”. In my rescue practice, I have come across a few who are not in the dark.. Some because they seem to have forgiven themselves and others as they were welcomed into a Christian community, over there. Often evangelical in nature. The most completer sudy of suicides I have come across in my readings is Jon Klimo’s “Suicide: Whar Really Happens In The Afterlife”.
So what about medical assisted suicide to free oneself from untreatable sever pain?
Surely we arnt expected to ride that out to avoid the blackness.
What about our “Freewill and Choice”that we are told about?
Good question, Bret to which I don’t have the answer.
We are told we can’t terminate our existence, and if that was the intention, which was the case with Perry, the problem is amplified. If love is the law of life in the spirt world, which is regularly reported among afterlife reports, then anything other than love results in disharmony
Those who report back often say had they had known what they know now they wouldn’t have done it. The common theme seems to be that there is no “punishment” and endless suffering but neither is there a benefit, and if possible it’s to be avoided. That’s the message.
Gordon mentioned Jon Klimo’s book in the previous comment. It examines many cases from suicide bombers to assisted dying. It’s worth reading for anyone who’s interested.
I am open to a gentle release from the body when very near death. The means would be stopping all food and drink, with loved ones gathered around to send me off. The process should take about four days.