Chapter One: Life after Death ‘It is enough that there is a beyond’. (Lilith in George Bernard Shaw's ‘Back to Methuselah’)

When I heard the words in my head: ‘But I was there and I approved’ my hands on the wheel began to shake and I pulled over to the side of the road and parked for a moment. Where did those thoughts come from? I was sure they didn’t come from my own mind. They didn’t make any sense. Of course I was there. I had just conducted the funeral but I wasn’t happy with what I had tried to do so those thoughts were definitely not mine. I didn’t recognise the truth at first because I had never received a message telepathically before. I had just conducted the funeral service of young Garry* who had died of cancer at nineteen years of age. He had never been to church with his parents and had spent his young life keeping company with a gang of fellows his own age who dressed like those we used to call ‘bodgies’. While he was in hospital facing his last operation I had visited him at his mother’s request and discovered that, thanks to her love and encouragement, he had undergone what could be called a conversion experience. He had a great sense of confidence and assurance. His last words to his mother were, ‘Mum, if I survive this operation I will come home to you. If I don’t survive it, I’ll still be going home.’ However, he did have two regrets that she told me about before the funeral. One was that, if he died, he would never have had a chance to attend one of my services with them as a new Christian and the other was that, as his mates had not visited him since his conversion, he would never have the chance to tell them how he had come to faith in Christ. I was so moved by this story that I vowed to tell them the story for him if I had the chance. As it happened on the day, when I entered the pulpit, I couldn’t help noticing that there were four long-haired youths in the front pew on one side of the church looking a little

uncomfortable in their good suits. During the sermon I told the congregation of Garry’s conversion and his great assurance, making sure that his four friends knew of his dying wish that they should know what had happened to him in hospital. I was on my way to the cemetery for the committal of his body, driving separately from the cortège as was my usual practice, when I said to myself, almost out loud, ‘I wonder whether he would have approved of what I said to his friends, if he had been there’ . It was then that I heard the thoughts, ‘But I was there and I approved.’ When I had recovered my composure, I started up the car and proceeded to the cemetery with my mind in turmoil. But when I told the grieving mother at the graveside, she showed no surprise and seemed greatly comforted by my experience. Garry’s words in my mind were my first and only experience of after death communication (A.D.C.) during my whole active ministry. I was absolutely overwhelmed by feelings of amazement that I had received a communication from another dimension. It proved to me that at least some people live on immediately after they die and it is possible for them to communicate with us within a short time of their death. I remembered Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross that they would be together in Paradise that very day, and they both died that day1. I also remembered that, when Jesus died, he ‘yielded up his spirit’. 2 Therefore, according to experiential knowledge backed up by some parts of the Bible, Jesus would have lived on in his spiritual body immediately after he died on the Friday even though he didn’t appear to his disciples until the Sunday morning. So I regarded my A.D.C. experience as wonderful and awe inspiring, but I did not speak too openly about the experience because I was afraid of the reaction I would get from others. My own reaction had been one of incredulity and this was quite surprising because I had just been telling the congregation that Garry was with us all in spirit. I just didn’t expect to hear from him personally. So maybe I hadn’t really believed it deep down. But

after that experience I knew it to be true. From then on I read about, listened to and took careful note of, other people’s experiences. In fact, after that time stories from various sources came thick and fast, now that I was open-minded. It was probably similar to what happens when you contract an illness you have never heard of before and then discover many others who have had it or you notice articles or programmes about it in the media.

Near Death Experiences Soon after the incident with Garry, still in the 1970s, I saw an article in a Readers’ Digest called ‘I Died for Eight Hours’. The author claimed that he had suddenly found himself alive in a body that was not physical but had some kind of form recognisable to him and to others already deceased. All the time he was in this intangible form, his physical body had been clinically dead. About this time I read ‘Reach for the Sky’3, the story of Douglas Bader, the legless pilot of World War II. He felt that he must have ‘died’ for a short time because his pain disappeared and he saw a lovely garden scene with vague figures of friends or relatives who had died before. Then he heard as if at a great distance the voice of a nurse saying, ‘Please keep your voice down. There’s a boy in there dying’. Hearing that he reacted angrily saying to himself, ‘Dying am I? We’ll see about that’. Immediately he felt his pain return as if he were suddenly back in his body. Douglas Bader recovered and flew his aircraft once again.

‘Life after Life’ Soon after that I read a newly published book called ‘Life after Life’ by a psychiatrist, Dr Moody4. This was the book that made Near Death Experiences (N.D.E.s) a household phrase. He had found that many people who had been clinically dead for a short time remembered having an ‘out-of-body experience’. Originally a sceptic, he became a believer after he interviewed a hundred and

fifty of them and found that most of them testified to the same sort of experiences. During a period of ‘clinical death’ the vast majority of them said that they had ‘floated’ out of their bodies and found themselves looking down at their own bodies surrounded by medical staff working frantically on them to revive them. Their out-of-body experiences (O.O.B.E.s) were usually accompanied by a journey through a tunnel of some sort and then a meeting with a ‘Being of Light’ who was personal and all compassionate. The Being of Light asked what the people had done in their lives and what they had to show for their lives. He (or She) asked questions telepathically such as how well they had loved and how they had grown in wisdom and understanding. This Being did not inquire regarding their beliefs, which were as varied as they could possibly be. Some even had neither religious affiliation nor beliefs. The testimony of the interviewees seemed to indicate that everyone continues to live on after they die, no matter what religion they belonged to or what faith they professed, if any. Because wisdom and understanding had been one of the questions asked by the Being of Light, Dr Moody’s book marked a turning point in my own search for truth because I began studying the beliefs of the Eastern traditions which emphasised the gaining of wisdom. This in turn led to a Master’s Degree in world religions, an interest in interfaith dialogue and a published book, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, which sought to reconcile the different understandings of the nature of God between East and West. Being quite excited about the discovery of these Near Death Experiences I was eventually bold enough to mention it in an Easter sermon as evidence supporting the Christian belief in resurrection. To my surprise a faithful elder in my congregation took me to task after the service and informed me that scientists regarded the out-of-body aspect of N.D.E.s as hallucinations caused by the dying brain. But further research on my part soon revealed a few flaws in that argument. A few of the people who had had these experiences said that, during the early part of the experience while they were out of body, they saw objects up on top of cupboards

while they appeared to be floating near the ceiling, things that they couldn’t possibly see from their hospital bed if they had been in their physical bodies at the time. Some also testified that they saw their loved ones talking quietly or crying in the waiting room well outside the operating theatre, and were able to tell them later what they had said at the time, much to the surprise of their relatives. Only an out of body experience seemed to me to account for all that evidence.

‘No heaven and no devil?’ About that time in that same parish a young lady came to me to arrange to have her new baby baptised and she confided in me that she had ‘died’ clinically during her difficult birth. Bit by bit, with my encouragement, she told me the story. She had had a Near Death Experience while she was clinically dead. It was exactly like those in Moody’s book. She had only told her husband and then one other person who had laughed at her, so she didn’t tell anyone else. She had not known that many others had had the same sort of experience until I told her. There is another argument against the dying brain argument. Apparently, a person doesn’t have to be clinically dead to have an out-of-body experience. Beth, the wife of a ministerial colleague of mine and a good friend of ours, was very ill in a hospital recently and in a coma. We did not know about this because my colleague, Colin, and his wife live a fair distance away from us and we had not yet heard about her sudden illness. However, we were about to be informed in another way: Testimony from a Medium: Message from a lady in a coma While attending her weekly hydrotherapy session my wife was asked a strange question by her physio who is also a psychic medium. Her physio asked did we know anyone named Beth because she had received a message from

someone named Beth while meditating. She felt that it might have been for us and she thought that Beth might be in a coma. When I heard about it, I rang Colin immediately and asked after Beth. He told me with great sadness that Beth was in hospital in a coma. But he was amazed at how I had heard about it through our physio. Later, when Beth was recovered and home again, she remembered being out of her body while being comatose, in a way she couldn’t explain. However, a person doesn’t even have to be in a coma to have an out-of-body experience either. Years ago I had a parishioner in Toowoomba who told me she was resting and meditating one afternoon and suddenly, to her surprise, found herself looking down from the ceiling at her own body on the bed. So there are at least some who have had out-of-body experiences without dying, or even being ill. It is very surprising to me that some scientists have not taken this type of out-of-body experience into account before arriving at their sceptical, dying brain explanation. On the other hand, I once visited a lady in my parish who told me she didn’t believe in heaven or the devil because she had been clinically dead for a few minutes but did not see or experience anything. Apparently the same thing happened to Australia’s richest man Kerry Packer when he ‘died’ the first time. Such an experience is not unusual but when people use their negative experience to deny the existence of life after death they are ignoring the fact that many other people have had N.D.E.s. According to the latest Gallop poll5, over 22 million people in the US alone are said to have remembered having an N.D.E. and some of them have been clinically dead more than once – including at least one where they remember something and one where they don’t.

Death-bed Visions There is a lot of anecdotal evidence for other kinds of After Death Communications also, such as ‘death-bed visions’. When I was ministering in the country, I was called to visit a lady called Nancy who had leukaemia and was continually being admitted to hospital for total blood transfusions. She was concerned about a dream she was having every night about her deceased husband standing at the foot of the bed reaching out his hand to her, apparently asking her to come to him or with him. She wanted to know what it meant. Without being sure, I suggested it may have been the spirit of her deceased husband telling her it was time she prevailed on the doctors at the hospital to stop giving her blood transfusions and just let her die. To cover myself I also suggested that, if that was the correct interpretation, she would probably not have the dream again. The next day her daughter rang to let me know that her mother did not have the dream the previous night. Soon after that she was admitted to the hospital again but this time carrying a letter I had helped her prepare, authorising the staff not to give her a blood transfusion. Throughout the day that she died and right up to the end, she kept reaching out her hand to an invisible person at the foot of her bed. She died happily and peacefully. In another parish an elder told me that his mother had a favourite saying that she only ever used when relatives she hadn’t seen for years arrived at the door. It was, ‘Well, well, well.’ The day she died at home, he was sitting beside her bed and she suddenly opened her eyes, looked at someone he couldn’t see at the foot of her bed, said happily, ‘Well, well, well,’ and then died very peacefully with a smile on her face. That elder had never told anyone about that incident before.

Psychic Mediums In 2005 I watched a number of episodes of the TV series called ‘Medium’ in which Patricia Arquette plays the part of Alison DuBois, a Psychic medium working for the District Attorney’s office in Arizona. Having decided to investigate the findings of this amazing medium, Alison DuBois, I managed to acquire and read a copy of her first book, ‘Don’t kiss them goodbye’6 and was very impressed with her obvious sincerity, natural charm and good humour. I could not believe that she was a fraud because her ‘readings’ were so accurate. So, when she wrote about being used as a ‘guinea pig’ by Dr Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona, I decided to check on the truth of her story by finding out all about Gary Schwartz.

The Afterlife Experiments To my surprise there was a great deal of material about Dr Gary Schwartz and his continuing research into life after death, the results of which are published in his book, ‘The Afterlife Experiments’7. The first thing I noticed in the book was that he used John Edward of ‘Crossing Over’ fame in his experiments as well as Alison DuBois. I had not believed that John Edward was authentic when I first saw his TV show, ‘Crossing Over’. The names of people who were ‘coming through’ were so fragmentary that I, like many others, suspected that he was ‘fishing’ for someone to confirm that his ‘contact’ was one of their relatives. The famous sceptic, James Randi, who once offered a large sum of money to anyone who could prove that one of these ‘mediums’ was genuine, calls them clever ‘cold readers’. However, after ‘hearing from’ young Garry many years ago, I was more openminded than James Randi. If I could receive a message from the other side, then surely others like John Edward could receive messages also. A few of my church friends have recently been to

hear him and he was so successful that they were totally convinced of his authenticity.

Communication from the ‘Deceased’ So, I decided to read a couple of John Edward’s books including his biography, ‘One Last Time’8 and let him speak for himself. When I did I found a believable story of the gradual development of his ‘gift’ and many verbatim records of private and public readings. I am sure that those ‘readings’ actually happened, especially those where real names were used, otherwise someone would have objected or sued him. I also found a reasonable explanation for the lack of clarity of some messages from the other side that had made me suspicious when watching his TV performance many years before. He explains as follows:Testimony from a Medium: Messages in MySpace ‘For spirits to come through, they must slow their vibrational rate of energy. Think of the blades on a helicopter. You can't see that there are four of them because they are spinning too fast. That's how I view the energy of the spirits. What happens during a reading is that as the spirits slow down their energies, I speed mine up. Communication is what happens in that space in between. But because there is that space, that gap, communication is never easy and rarely clear. There is also the fact that spirits no longer have physical bodies to facilitate communication. They have no tongues or vocal cords to pronounce words. Instead, through their energies, they place thoughts and sights and sounds in my mind’… ‘It is not a conversational language, though many believe it is. When I do a reading, people might think I'm repeating exactly what I'm hearing. But what I am actually doing is delivering and interpreting symbolic

information as fast as I can keep up with it. If it were truly conversational, I would be a lot more accurate than I am. It's just not that simple’.8 Another factor that impressed me about John Edward and Alison DuBois was that they refused to hear anything from the ‘client’ about their departed loved ones before they started the readings. That way, they could not be accused of being a ‘cold reader’, or of manufacturing the information to fit clues provided by the client. I found out later that this is a fairly common practice with genuine mediums. The fact that two of the most highly regarded mediums of our time receive such detailed and accurate messages without clues, was added to my growing pile of experiential evidence, which I define as other people’s direct evidence, of our continuing existence on the other side. John Edward would not acknowledge that he had a special gift, only that he had developed the gift that everyone has to some extent or other. I could accept that because, if it could happen to a logical, sceptical person like me it could happen to anybody. As I continued my reading, ‘surfing the net’ for any references to After Death Communications, which were many, I discovered a website called ‘Dreaming with the Departed’ by Robert Moss, in which he agreed that we all have the gift and don’t really need a go-between like a medium to talk with the departed because we can all have direct communication ourselves if we want to.

‘Off to see the wizard’ During the writing of this book I had been corresponding with a professional ‘psychic medium’ asking him questions as part of my research. One day, after much correspondence, he sent me an email inviting me to his house for coffee so I could interview him face to face. In that same email he offered to do a ‘reading’ for me in order to give me some personal experience of the subject I was researching.

I accepted his invitation for the sake of the interview and made an appointment but immediately regretted it. I was surprised at how resistant I was to the possibility of having a reading. I had never before had a ‘reading’ and my religious background had prejudiced me against such an activity. But I was being inconsistent because I was quite prepared to accept the information that mediums provided indirectly as evidence of life after death but I was reluctant to have a ‘reading’ with a medium myself. Eventually I gave in and kept the appointment. About two thirds of the information he gave me I was not able to ‘acknowledge’ as they say, at that time but the remainder was very convincing. Some relatives came through for me who had recently died and there was no mistaking their identity. Perhaps the most impressive display of his authenticity was from two aunties of mine who were sisters. Up to that time I had wondered if mediums were not simply reading the minds of their clients but on this occasion the medium passed on information that I did not know and could not verify until much later. My medium friend told me that those two sisters would be with me and my family at a celebration the following May. Later I discovered that my deceased sister’s son was getting married in that month. I had not known that at the time.

The Witch of Endor After reading about John Edward and Robert Moss I then consulted the Bible and found that, despite the fact that King Saul had banished all the mediums, or ‘wizards’ as they were called in the Old Testament, from his land, he did go to the ‘Witch’ of Endor secretly to ascertain his chances against the pretender David9. The prophet Samuel was ‘brought up’ (today this would be called ‘coming through’) and was allegedly annoyed to have been brought back. The medium only became aware of Saul’s real identity after the spirit of Samuel ‘came through’.

In looking up a number of other Biblical references10 I was reminded that some people of the Old Testament believed in some kind of life after death and in the fact that some people lived on as spirits, but that consulting them was indeed thought to be a dangerous practice and was strictly forbidden. Resistance to the idea of life after death and the idea that advice from mediums was not trustworthy and could even be mischievous or evil will be dealt with in a later chapter. However, it seemed to me that the Bible provides evidence of belief in the existence of spirits and the authenticity of mediums even though the attitude to consulting them was ambivalent even as it is today. In one of the most comprehensive examinations of this topic from both a religious and also a scholarly point of view, John Hick in his book, Death and Eternal Life, 11 sets out questions that need answers even though he doesn’t supply many. For example, ‘is the death of the body the extinction of the person or does the person survive as a continuing consciousness?’ (I know personally that at least one person, Garry, survived as a continuing consciousness.) ‘Do we rise again in a physical type of body, or with a spiritual body?’ The Christian tradition has often favoured a physical resurrection of the body in ‘the last days’ at the end of time but I was pleased to find other passages in the New Testament that affirm an immediate rising to life in a spiritual type of body.12 In the next chapter I will set out my new understanding of the nature of this ‘spiritual body’ in the Afterlife. * Fictitious name

* 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

*

*

Luke 23:43 (All Biblical references in this book are taken from the Revised Standard Version) Matthew 27:50. Paul Brickhill, Op. Cit., Cassell, 2000. Dr Raymond A Moody, Life after Life: the investigation of a phenomenon, survival of bodily death, Rider, 2001, or Bantam Books, (Transworld) London 1976, See also, Reflections on Life after Life, N.Y. 1977. Rosen, Elliot May, Experiencing the Soul: Before Birth, During Life, After Death, 85

6. 7.

Alison DuBois, Op.Cit, Simon and Schuster, NY, 2005. Dr Gary Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiments, Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death, Atria Books, 2003. 8. John Edward, Op. Cit., One last time: a psychic medium speaks to those we have loved and lost, Piatkus, 1999, c1998, 44-5. 9. I Samuel 28:7-14. 10. Leviticus 19:31, 20:6, 20:27; Deuteronomy 18:11; Isaiah 8:19, 19:3. 11. Op. Cit., William Collins Sons and Co Ltd, 1976, Fount Paperbacks 1979, 21. 12. 2 Corinthians 5:1-9, I Peter 3:18