If there is one question I am asked more frequently than any other it is whether our companion animals are waiting for us in the afterlife levels. Some people lead with a personal challenge: “If my dogs can’t be there, I’m not going!” I understand how they feel. A heaven without our animal friends would not be a heaven at all, so I’m delighted to report to you that every animal we ever have loved awaits us in a beautiful eternal reality where love never ends.
There are many things about the afterlife that we can say are more than likely, based upon nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. This is one thing, though, of which there is no doubt.
Animals are of a fundamentally different spiritual nature than human beings. I have seen messages from channeled entities saying that animals are of a “purer” nature, but I’m not even sure what that means; I know only that animals have spiritual identities, and those identities are unique to each kind of animal. When creatures die in the wild, or when domestic animals die without a close human bond, they return to what is sometimes called a “group soul” that is specific to their species. However, when any kind of non-human creature develops a love-bond with a person, that animal develops a separate identity. It enters our afterlife levels as a young and healthy version of itself, and there it awaits the joyous day when it can again lick our face or perch upon our finger or jump up, purring, into our arms.
You can immediately see a problem. People who enjoy their animal companions will love many cats or dogs or birds in their lifetimes, and the evidence suggests that all of them are going to be waiting for their human friends. There are early-twentieth-century communications where someone who has been in the Summerland for awhile complains about the mob of dogs and cats that greeted a new arrival, and nothing would do but that she first must pat every one of them before human loved ones could get near enough to hug her.
It isn’t only beloved dogs and cats and parakeets that await us, but farm and circus animals that have been loved by a human being likewise develop independent minds sufficient for them to be waiting in the Summerland. I have just had a wonderful reading with a psychic medium, my first in more than a decade, and my relatives and guides chose to assemble on my grandparents’ dairy farm. The medium kept remarking about how beautiful the farm was, and how abundant were the dairy cows, each one of which must in life have been a special pet of my grandfather’s.
Sometimes our animals will be among the deathbed visitors who help us transition. Reports of dogs at deathbeds are common. One early-twentieth-century hermit who had trusted no human being in life reportedly was met at his deathbed by a big white horse he must at some point have loved.
Our animals often give us post-death signs and communications. A familiar bark or meow, a rub against a leg, or a cold nose against an arm: these are frequent little signs. Animals that had slept on our beds will sometimes continue to do that, so we might be reading or watching TV and we will distinctly feel the animal jump up onto the bed and then see and feel the little paw-indentations as the animal walks to its sleeping place, where we will see and feel the greater indentation as the animal curls to sleep beside our feet. Full-blown visions of animals are rare, but they can happen, too.
My most extraordinary animal communication was a visitation dream from my horse. There was Beau in harness in front of me, pulling the cart in which he and I had enjoyed exploring the dirt roads near our home. He was trotting along happily, and I was in rapture. The only problem with driving a horse is the bugs in your teeth because you can’t stop grinning. Then we had, one after another, three encounters with diesel eighteen-wheelers that had no business on wilderness roads. Each time, as the truck bore down on us, I steered Beau into the roadside bushes and fast jumped out of the cart to hug his head against my chest so he wouldn’t bolt as the truck roared past us. As the third truck – perhaps his death – was approaching, I woke up.
That had been a communication dream, but what had it meant? In 
minutes, I knew. We had moved twice during his lifetime, and Beau was thanking me that he had been kept safe during both of the moves of his life and gently cared for until he died. After that dream, I have decided that I won’t ride or drive a horse again until my friend and I are reunited and I can have bugs in my teeth forevermore.
The fact that simply being loved by a person can give an animal an independent existence is one more indication of two things that the afterlife evidence consistently tells us. Our minds are integral parts of the eternal and infinitely creative Mind that brings forth the universe. And of every power that exists, by far the greatest power is love.
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photo credit: Oh this is fun! via photopin (license)
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groupie reading popular-science versions of what physicists are up to now feels mind-shriveling. I will give you some quick examples from the recent press:
won’t interact with photons of light. They tell us that everything that we think of as real makes up only 4-5% of the universe, while dark matter makes up 23-27%. (Apparently estimates vary.) So in an effort to study a mass which is five times the size of the known universe, physicists are looking for wimps thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth. This time we’re reading 
minds are eternal. We are learning a great many interesting things about each of the very issues that are puzzling and confounding physicists today. And looking at what we have to show them would at least give physicists the welcome chance to go back to sometimes studying things that can be seen with the naked eye.
real – perhaps most of what is real – is not material. Yet it interacts with and profoundly influences the material reality that physicists are trying without much success to understand. So might it be useful to the advancement of physics for universities to abandon their century-old dogma of adamant atheistic materialism?
battle was forgiving themselves. Self-forgiveness is hard for many of us, perhaps because those raised in Christianity have been steeped in the pain of our inherent sinfulness. The afterlife evidence has some pretty important news for us on that score! But before we talk about how we can best deal with the notion of original sin, let’s first understand why learning self-forgiveness is so important. 
the doctrine of original sin. What we learn from nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead is that each of our minds is part of eternal Mind – each of us is part of God, if you will – and each of us is infinitely loved. The evidence is strong that no matter what we do, God never judges us. God seems not even to notice. It’s as if each of us is God’s treasured toddler, blundering about and getting into trouble but incapable of doing anything wrong.
sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (MT 18:21-23) No matter how many times someone does you wrong, you are meant to forgive without a thought. Every time. 
loves: universally and completely. That’s it! And that’s all. Learning to love is why we live in families, why we are crowded enough to have to deal with others, why some of those we deal with do us wrong, and why bad things happen to good people. Every occurrence in your life is either love or a call for love. So no matter the question, love is always the answer.
So, how do we manage radical forgiveness? The easiest way feels like a physical process. What I did in the beginning was to package the wrong in my mind, gather it all up and wrap it together. Then I would think, “I forgive and release!” and let it go. I let it go physically: I pushed it away. Sometimes the darned thing would come back so I would have to go through the process again, but now my forgiveness is so automatic that I seldom give it a thought. Outrage turns out to be a lot like anger. If you court it and really let yourself feel it, you are going to feel a lot more of it; but if you refuse to give it mind-space, soon it doesn’t even get started. You still notice the wrong, and you recall how that sort of thing used to really wreck your day, but now it doesn’t bother you at all.
holy writ, certain helpful folks have suggested that the Koran may need editing. Well, a certain other book could use a bit of editing as well.
This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Mt 22:37-40)
pioneering work in studying aspects of consciousness, I’m going to offer you another great TED talk that was delivered by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers in 2014. Chalmers shares with us here some extraordinary insights about consciousness. And surprisingly, his TED talk has not yet been banned!
spring from the fact that reality is based in consciousness has greatly enhanced our understanding of oddities ranging from the sense of being stared at and the fact that dogs can anticipate their owners’ arrival to the astonishing way in which for one laboratory animal anywhere on earth to learn something new makes it easier for all other members of the same species to master the same trick.
a spurious dispute. The fact that the Apostle Paul and not Jesus was the founder of Christianity seems incontrovertible to me. Jesus died before the religion began. Yes, he sent out his disciples to spread his teachings after his death, but those teachings on love and forgiveness had nothing to do with the doctrine of sacrificial redemption upon which Paul’s Christianity is based.
should know better!
