You will be able to perfectly and joyously inhabit the eternal life that is your birthright only after you have done some of your own research! To aid you in that process, here are more than seventy books on seventeen primary topics that I have found to be useful as we work to better understand what actually is going on.

 

I. Things Are Not What They Seem
II. Consciousness as the Source of Reality
III. The Nature of Your Mind
IV. The Post-Death Realities
V. The Design and Functioning of Extra-Material Realities
VI. Near-Death Experiences
VII. Deathbed Visions
VIII. Signs and Messages From the Dead
VIX. Spiritual and Psychic Mediums
X. Physical and Deep-Trance Mediums
XI. Automatic Writing
XII. Guided or Induced Afterlife Connections
XIII. ITC and EVP
XIV. Group Contacts
XV. Reincarnation
XVI. Spirit Influence and Possession
XVII. Achieving More Rapid Spiritual Growth

 

I. Things Are Not What They Seem

 

Given the depth and range of the afterlife-related evidence now available, it is a sorry fact that the mainstream scientific community continues to ignore it, and even tries to debunk it. This scientific stonewalling is millennia old, although its more active phase seems to have begun at the start of the twentieth century, just as the pioneering quantum physicists were proving that things are not what they seem.

 

Fortunately, dedicated folks have been studying the evidence on their own, so this lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream scientists is little more than an inconvenience.

 

  • A Lawyer Presents the Evidence For the Afterlife (2013) – Victor Zammit and Wendy Zammit have spent decades gathering and presenting afterlife evidence to anyone who will listen. If you are having trouble accepting the fact that there even is an afterlife, here is where you might begin your education.
  • Your Eternal Self (2008) – R. Craig Hogan summarizes so much of the evidence about what is going on in such an easy and enjoyable volume that I have bought dozens of copies of this book as gifts.
  • The Biology of Belief (2005) – Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist who got off the mainstream science reservation and never looked back. Like Hogan’s book, Lipton’s is so fundamental that it should be one of the first things you read as you get your feet wet in doing wider research. Lipton also recorded a CD set called The Wisdom of Your Cells that makes a great companion to his book.
  • Is There Life After Death? – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a physician who specialized in death and dying, and this CD story of her personal journey – told in her wonderfully accented voice – is compelling. If you don’t make the time to listen to Kubler-Ross, your life will forever be the poorer for it.
  • The Secret Life of Plants (1972) – Nearly half a century ago, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote such an extraordinary book that I am amazed that so few people have heard of it. It is a long book and not directly on point, but if you have the time, please read it. I read this book when it was first published, and even today I wince a little when I cut a tomato or grate a carrot.

 

II. Consciousness as the Source of Reality

 

The conclusion that consciousness is the source of reality will come to you only gradually, as you read more and more death-related evidence and you realize there is no other explanation. If you want to speed up the process, here are ten very different books, four of them by physicists, which should get you there more quickly.

 

  • Quantum Enigma (2006) – Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner are adventurous academic physicists, and here they give us an enjoyable summary of their understanding of the consciousness issue in quantum physics. This book is plainly written and highly accessible for non-physicists, so it gives you a great place to begin your physics studies.
  • The Idea of the World (2019); Why Materialism is Baloney (2014) – Bernardo Kastrup is a brilliant Dutch scientist who has written a half-dozen scholarly but very accessible books that point to the nonmaterial nature of reality. Here are the two that are most relevant to our research.
  • The Self-Aware Universe (1995) – Amit Goswami is a physicist who understands many of the implications of quantum theory. His book is a little tough for non-physicists, and because it takes into account only Eastern religious teachings, it can be a struggle for the rest of us to grasp. Still, it is fascinating support for the fundamental truth that Consciousness (or Mind) is all there is.
  • The Physics of Consciousness (2000) – Evan Harris Walker was another physicist. He is said to have been the founder of the modern science of consciousness research, and although he tries to simplify the physics, his book can be a tough slog in spots. Still, I loved every mind-bending minute of it. Walker died in August of 2006. After more than fifty years apart, he is again with Merilyn, the love of his life, who died when they were both sixteen, and (his dedication says) “without whom there would be nothing.”
  • My Big TOE (2007) – Thomas Campbell is a physicist whose consciousness theory of everything is entirely consistent with what afterlife researchers have learned independently. I first met Dr. Campbell soon after this book was published, and I was astounded to see how close his theory of everything based in traditional physics was to the one I had developed using the afterlife evidence. What wonderful validation! His book is meant for physicists, so it is another hard slog for laypeople. But it is altogether worth the effort.
  • The Unobstructed Universe (1940) – Stewart Edward White worked in the 1930s. You will be astonished to find that more than seventy-five years ago he was writing about consciousness as the source of reality, the indestructibility of consciousness, and so much else! There are few books so basic. You will enjoy both him and his psychic/spirit wife, although you may find this book (if at all) only in an antique paperback.
  • Our Unseen Guest (1920) – Darby and Joan (pseudonyms) worked with Stephen (also a pseudonym), a soldier killed in World War I, and a century ago they published a seminal account which identifies consciousness as the source of reality. The first half of their book is an insightful study of the problems inherent in communicating through mediums. The second half is the earliest reasonably accurate account of the reality revealed by the afterlife evidence that I have yet found. I feel about this book very much as I felt when I realized how completely modern evidence agrees with the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels: if they got it right so long ago, then Darby and Joan both reinforce and are reinforced by what the evidence now tells us. And when eventually some physicist is acclaimed as the mother of a consciousness theory of everything, she ought at least to acknowledge the fact that plucky young Stephen was there long before.
  • The Conscious Universe (1997); Entangled Minds (2006) – Dean Radin is an academic parapsychologist whose interest lies in the workings of psychic phenomena in a quantum reality. Dubbed by some “the Einstein of consciousness research,” he never quite says that everything springs from consciousness. But his books are filled with evidence of the primary role of consciousness, and they are well done and fascinating reading.

 

III. The Nature of Your Mind

 

If you have trouble grasping the fact that your brain does not generate your mind, here are some books to help you better understand what and where your mind is and how powerful it is. Like it or not, the reality you create is your own!

 

  • Brain Wars (2012) – Mario Beauregard is a professor of neurology and radiology who has written an engrossing and highly readable summary of the battle now raging between scientists who are still trying to find a source of the human mind inside the brain, and those who have come to accept the fact that the human mind is separate and pre-existing. If you are having trouble making this important leap of understanding, then Beauregard’s book is for you.
  • An End to Upside-Down Thinking – Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life (2018) – Mark Gober has written a smart and highly enjoyable summary of the modern case against scientists’ erroneous assumption that the brain generates consciousness.
  • Your Eternal Self (2008) – R. Craig Hogan makes our list again. His book is easy to read, and it is a good summary of some of the best evidence currently available. If you have managed to get to this point without having read his book, please read it now.
  • The Holographic Universe (1991) – Michael Talbot’s masterwork remains a classic in this field. Much more evidence has been developed in the quarter-century since this author published and soon thereafter died young, but his book remains one of the most important resources on this subject.
  • The Field (2001) – Lynne McTaggart is an essential pioneer in this area. This book is indispensable background, and she also recorded two wonderful CD sets called The Field and Living the Field if you would rather listen than read.
  • The Power of Eight – Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World (2017) – Lynne McTaggart’s most recent book is a wonderful guide to using the power of our minds in practical ways to improve our lives.
  • One Mind: How Our Individual Consciousness is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters (2014) – Larry Dossey, MD is a scientist who follows the lead of physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein in explaining what underlies reality in simple terms that laypeople can understand. For you to begin to internalize the true nature of your mind and the nature of God will considerably aid your efforts to grow spiritually.
  • The Divine Matrix (2007) – Gregg Braden is another pioneer in helping us to understand where and what our minds really are, and his book is fascinating and highly readable.

 

IV. The Post-Death Realities

 

We have nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, most of the best of which were received in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fact that there are so many communications, and they have been coming to us for so long and in a number of different ways, is not what is most significant. What still astounds me is the fact that all these hundreds of communications describe the same complex and wonderful post-death reality! In decades of reading afterlife communications, I have never found an outlier. I will here give you some of what afterlife experts consider to be the best summaries, together with two channeled works that are believed by experts to be genuine.

 

  • Flying High in Spirit – A Young Snowboarder’s Account of His Ride Through Heaven (2015) – Mikey Morgan with his mother, Carol, and with the help of Roberta Grimes has written an extraordinary and easily understood summary of his own afterlife experiences. He is a very high-level being, reportedly now upper sixth level, who had last lived on earth in the 1600s and wanted to be able to communicate with you and me in modern terms so he took a twenty-year additional earth-lifetime that ended in 2007. Now he communicates through his mother by pendulum. Everything he tells us is amply corroborated by other communicators. For someone so spiritually advanced to be communicating with us in the 21st century as a modern American kid makes his book important, and it is a cheerful delight to read!
  • The Afterlife Revealed – What Happens After We Die (2011) – Michael Tymn is a venerable expert in the field of afterlife communication, and his brief book is a wonderfully detailed summary of what we learn from studying afterlife communications.
  • The Afterlife Unveiled (2011) – Stafford Betty is a professor of religion, and a good friend of Michael Tymn’s. Their books – both brief and easy to understand – make great companion volumes for people beginning to understand the afterlife realities.
  • The Fun of Dying – Find Out What Really Happens Next! (2010) – Roberta Grimes wrote a brief explanation of the afterlife realities for laypeople. This book is meant specifically for those who need an easy summary of this information because they themselves are sick or a loved one has died, but general readers have called it an easy and happy way to begin their studies.
  • Afterlife Interrupted – Helping Stuck Souls Cross Over (2018) – Nathan Castle is a Dominican priest who helps people who died in an accident or otherwise at a time other than a planned exit point, and were in the grasp of such severe negative emotions that they did not transition. Fr. Nathan helps them to complete their journeys home. The process he describes is perfectly consistent with what we know about the afterlife and the greater reality. This wonderful book breaks new ground.
  • Life in the World Unseen (1954) – Robert Hugh Benson was a Catholic priest who discovered after he transitioned that his book, The Necromancers (1907), was altogether wrong. So through his friend, Anthony Borgia, he wrote a series of books, of which this is the first and the best. In fact, many researchers consider this to be the most comprehensive and accessible account of the afterlife ever communicated to us. I urge everyone who has any interest in this field to read it, especially since it is now available for free on the Internet.
  • Testimony of Light (2009) – Frances Banks was an Anglican nun who died in 1965, and whose account of the period soon after her death is full of beautiful and touching stories and gorgeous scenes, all consistent with the rest of the evidence.

 

V. The Design and Functioning of Extra-Material Realities

 

Our biggest problem in studying the realities that we enter at death is that we must get our information from fallible human beings. Whether they speak from beyond the veil, or, like Bob Monroe, they only visited the extra-material realities and returned, our reporters often know little more than we know, believe it or not. This means that it is important to read many after-death accounts, since the more of them we read, the more we can see that each is giving us a slightly different miniscule glimpse of what is the same gigantic set of after-death realities.

 

  • The Place We Call Home – Exploring the Soul’s Existence After Death (2000) – Robert J. Grant gives a brief and lucid examination of the extra-material realities based primarily on the Edgar Cayce materials. I have concerns about relying on Cayce because some of his predictions have been wrong. (Actually, my studies suggest legitimate reasons for his errors, but a treatise on Cayce is, like so much else, beyond the scope of this book.) Because Grant’s book is simply written and what he reports is reasonably consistent with other sources, his book may be a good introduction.
  • Journeys Out of the Body (1971); Far Journeys (1985); Ultimate Journey (1994) – Robert Monroe was a successful businessman with an interesting hobby. At about age 40, he learned how to leave his physical body whenever he liked and travel in extra-material realities. A bright and ruthlessly honest researcher, he wrote three books that together present a gripping story of his own development. Monroe’s books detail these realities from the viewpoint of someone who has not died, and therefore he was not protected in his travels as you and I will be at death. From his out-of-body perspective we see less of the scenery and more of the scaffolding. What is interesting about his books to me is the fact that nevertheless Monroe describes essentially the same beyond-material realities that we discover from other sources. His perspective lets us better appreciate how lovingly the post-death process is designed to protect and nurture our minds.
  • Cosmic Journeys (1999) – Rosalind A. McKnight was one of Bob Monroe’s Explorers, the volunteers who replicated his out-of-body work under laboratory conditions. Her book describes her experiences as a naïve and untrained but fearless participant. The first part is a bit silly, but the second half is great, and the view of reality that she sets forth here is amply corroborated elsewhere.
  • After We Die, What Then? (1987); Enjoy Your Own Funeral (1999) – George W. Meek spent his retirement studying the after-death realities. His books are easy and enjoyable reads, and they contain useful diagrams of the upper levels and the nesting of your various bodies – so long as you always remember that all the levels and bodies exist in the same place (to the extent that talking about “place” means anything). Meek was an important Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) pioneer, so his books also contain interesting sections on these topics.
  • Journey of Souls (1994); Destiny of Souls (2000) – Michael Newton hypnotically regressed a number of people in deep trance to what they said were their lives between lives, and he reported in these books what they told him. After having read many tales from dead people, I was astonished to read these books and find that the accounts they contained were different from most of the others. They seemed oddly impersonal, even mechanical, although the after-death process that they described was consistent with what I had found elsewhere. It was only later that I thought about the possibility that when we are under deep hypnosis, we may be accessing our eternal subconscious (or superconscious) minds rather than the conscious minds of the individuals who have just died. If that is true, then these books are interesting for that fact alone. Most of what they say is reasonably consistent with other evidence, although they also contain some things that I have not been able to corroborate. These shouldn’t be the first books on this topic that you read, but later on if you are curious and open-minded, you might enjoy them.
  • Our Unseen Guest (1920); The Unobstructed Universe (1940) – Darby and Joan and Stewart Edward White were colleagues nearly a century ago, and the two books listed here are the earliest reasonably accurate modern summaries of afterlife details that I have found. The fact that I came across them only after I had pieced together most of this from other sources made them astounding to me, although if I had read them decades ago, I might not have taken them seriously. These books are highly readable, and you will find them to be both informative and still on the cutting edge. I urge you to read them, even though you will find them only in libraries or in used paperbacks.

 

VI. Near-Death Experiences

 

We are consistently told by those who are dead that death is always a one-way trip, and people who return from NDEs never actually reach the afterlife levels. This is is why many accounts of their experiences are aberrant and tinged with religious symbols meant to comfort them. The primary value to the rest of us of stories told by NDE experiencers is the wonderful sense that most of them have of all-pervading love, and the plain assurance that people’s minds can function independently of their bodies. Since they are coming back, those assisting experiencers through their NDEs and back into their bodies will give them only experiences that will further their earthly spiritual growth, and will work to avoid burdening them with imagery that might confuse or trouble them.

 

  • Evidence of the Afterlife (2010) – Jeffrey Long, with Paul Perry, has published what is billed as the largest study of near-death experiences ever conducted. It focuses on statistical compilations of many experiences gleaned through his website, and it also shows how common NDE details (like the fact that those blind from birth are able to see during NDEs) help to prove the reality that our minds can function apart from our bodies. Long and Perry claim that their book “reveals proof of life after death.” If you need to see such proof before you venture ahead, then their book is for you.
  • Beyond the Light (Revised Edition – 2009) – P.M.H. Atwater had three NDEs in 1977, and she spent the next four decades investigating the phenomenon. NDEs are highly variable from individual to individual, but they are consistent across cultures. The fact that infants and young children have the same experiences that adults do (except that they don’t have unpleasant NDEs) helps to prove that NDEs are more than just suggestion-induced fantasies. Atwater has written more than a dozen good books, including the enormous and daunting The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (2007), but this one seems to be the best for our purposes.
  • Life After Life (1975); The Light Beyond (1988) – Raymond A. Moody, Jr., is the first popularizer of near-death experiences, and by now he is something of a legend. The experiences that he describes are commonly reported by people who attend a lot of deaths.
  • Ordered to Return (originally published as My Life After Dying, 1991) – George G. Richie, Jr., had what may be the most elaborately detailed near-death experience ever, and his brief book is a classic in this field. Moody calls it “the best such book in print.”

 

VII. Deathbed Visions

 

Less well known today than near-death experiences are deathbed visions, even though they appear to be a universal part of dying. All the books listed here are enjoyable and fascinating, and I suggest that you read at least one of them.

 

  • Death-Bed Visions (1926) – Sir William Barrett wrote what remains the classic work on deathbed visions, and his brief book is a wonderful read. Unfortunately, it is long out of print and it may be hard to find. Reading it made me see how sad it is that today most dying people are so well sedated that they (and we) miss some wonderful experiences during the moments that they spend in two realities.
  • At the Hour of Death (1977) – Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson detail a study of some 50,000 terminally ill patients observed just before their deaths by a thousand doctors and nurses in the United States and in India. Osis and Haraldsson are able to rule out medical explanations for these patients’ before-death visions, and they show us that these experiences are much the same in both cultures.
  • One Last Hug Before I Go (2000) – Carla Wills-Brandon’s summary of modern deathbed visions and other before-death and at-death phenomena is a worthy successor to Sir William’s pioneering volume. It was this book that helped me understand why it is that deathbed visions may be necessary. Those newly freed from their bodies are apparently so clueless and confused that without the guidance of dead loved ones and guides they can easily go off-track.
  • Glimpses of Eternity (2010) – Raymond A. Moody, Jr. has done it again! Having coined the term “Near-Death Experience,” he went on thirty-five years later to coin the term “Shared Deathbed Experience.” His research indicates that some of those sitting at the bedsides of the dying will see the visions of loved ones and the next levels of reality that the dying typically see, and some even leave their bodies and join the departing spirit on the first part of its journey. As is true of everything that Raymond Moody and Paul Perry write together, this book is an easy and enjoyable read.
  • In the Light of Death (2015) – Ineke Koedam is a Dutch researcher whose important book is a powerful contribution to the literature of deathbed experiences.
  • Words at the Threshold (2017) – Lisa Smartt conducted a broad study of the things that dying people say in the days and weeks before they transition, and the result is a fascinating compilation which includes some phenomena that have not previously been observed.

 

VIII. Signs and Messages From the Dead

 

Those living on the afterlife levels are far more aware of us than we are of them, and naturally our grief pains them very much. It seems that millennia ago, dead people learned how to manipulate our reality with their minds so they could send us signs of their survival. By now, it seems to be an almost universal phenomenon that those who transition successfully will pause to send a few comforting post-death signs before they venture forth to enjoy the glorious afterlife realities.

 

  • Hello From Heaven! (1995) – Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim wrote a voluminous book on spontaneous signs received from the dead. Often the closest survivors of those who are recently dead will experience communications of various kinds, and some of them are spectacular. Indeed, it has been estimated that more than half of widows and widowers see a vision of the departed spouse within the first year. The Guggenheims interviewed some 2,000 people and collected and categorized more than 3,300 accounts of their experiences.
  • Messages (2011) – Bonnie McEneaney lost her husband in the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11. Soon thereafter, she began to receive signs from him, and other survivors heard from their lost loved ones as well. McEneaney collected many of these accounts into a book that also includes premonitions and messages received in other ways. This is a beautiful and moving account of a group of people who left their homes one morning not expecting that they were about to die, and then they were desperate to assure their families that they were still okay.
  • Afterlife Communication (2014) – Expert presenters at the 38th Annual Conference of The Academy For Spiritual and Consciousness Studies assemble chapters on the state of play concerning sixteen proven methods of afterlife communication and eighty-five accounts of extraordinary communications facilitated by these methods. Despite the bounty of information this book contains, it is an easy and enjoyable read.
  • The Fun of Staying in Touch (2014) – Roberta Grimes presents a simple summary of the types of signs that the dead typically send to us, and also of some of the methods of communication that we can initiate with them.
  • Soul Smart (2017) – Susanne Wilson is a spiritual medium who here shares some of her tried-and-true methods for achieving direct connections and relationships with loved ones that we used to think were dead.
  • The Survival of the Soul and its Evolution After Death (1921, 2017) – Pierre Emile Cornillier was a meticulous researcher whose wonderful book containing an amazing three hundred and seventy-odd pages of séances held during the heyday of physical and deep-trance mediumship has recently been republished.

 

VIX. Spiritual and Psychic Mediums

 

I still have trouble believing in the work of mental mediums. I can’t get past the fact that they are mind-reading with dead people! And often the dead people whose minds mediums are reading are their own guides, which guides are in contact with our dead relatives. It all feels too tenuous to me. But that is just me. Gary Schwartz’s book has convinced me that my prejudices are wrong, and I have lately come to understand that good spiritual and psychic mediums can be very good indeed.

 

  • The Afterlife Experiments (2002) – Gary E. Schwartz of the University of Arizona is one of very few academically trained scientists who are investigating the afterlife evidence in a traditional university setting. Something of a skeptic himself, he uses strict scientific methods to study psychic mediums under laboratory conditions with remarkable success. For this book, he subjected some of the most prominent living mediums to double-blind and triple-blind experiments, and he found in some cases that the odds against chance for the results of their readings were in the multiple millions to one.
  • The Amazing Afterlife of Animals: Messages and Signs From Our Pets on the Other Side (2017) – Karen A. Anderson has made a specialty of assisting bereaved pet owners by receiving for them messages from their recently departed pets.

 

IX. Physical and Deep-Trance Mediums

 

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of physical and deep-trance mediums. What appears to be needed for talented living psychics to develop these skills is many years of passively sitting in the dark night after night, and in the days before radio there were folks who started with fads like table-tipping and went on to become amazingly good trance mediums. Physical mediums in trance are able to produce extraordinary phenomena and materializations, and deep-trance mediums can withdraw from their bodies and let a dead medium (called a control) speak, using the living medium’s vocal cords. Recent efforts to resurrect both skills in Great Britain and in the United States are showing some initial promise, but the journey to full development for a talented trance medium is a long one! Meanwhile, I have given you here a recent encyclopedic compendium; two recent books about physical mediumship; two important books by a current leading afterlife researcher; a fascinating set of early accounts by a different researcher; and also three accounts of the work of an important early-twentieth-century team.

 

  • Great Moments of Modern Mediumship – Volume I (2014) – Maxine Meilleur has assembled a breathtakingly complete account of the various kinds of afterlife evidence to be found in the annals of mediumship, from the mid-nineteenth century onward.
  • Unfolding Physical Mediumship: Historical, Philosophical, and Personal Perspectives (2018) – Susan Barnes has written an excellent and easily read summary of the overall history and the current state of play in physical mediumship.
  • In Pursuit of Physical Mediumship (2007) – Robin Foy has a long personal history in the field of modern British physical mediumship, notably including his involvement in the Scole Experimental Group. His book is a colorful journey though his personal experiences in the field.
  • The Articulate Dead – They Brought the Spirit World Alive (2008) – Michael Tymn is a venerable expert in the field of afterlife research. This is his seminal book on the heyday of evidential afterlife communication.
  • Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife (2013) – Michael Tymn’s book about the “white crow,” Leonora Piper, is a must-read.
  • Spectral Evidence I & II (2017, 2018) – Riley Heagerty has made a career of researching and bringing to light the more obscure aspects of the heyday of spirit communication around the turn of the 20th century, and his books read like candy.
  • Some New Evidence For Human Survival (1922); Life Beyond Death With Evidence (1928); In the Dawn Beyond Death (late 1930s) – Charles Drayton Thomas was a British Methodist minister who worked with a deep-trance medium named Gladys Osborne Leonard and her dead control, Feda. He was a curious and methodical fellow investigating what he saw as a cutting-edge phenomenon that was delivering world-changing information. Reading these books in order gives you a sad sense of what a lost period the whole twentieth century really was. Scientists had spent the latter part of the nineteenth century disparaging and trying to debunk all evidence related to mental telepathy and other psi phenomena. Then the early twentieth century brought a flood of afterlife communications produced through deep-trance mediums, so scientists of the day changed their tack. They began to insist that these were not communications from the dead at all, but the mediums were reading the minds of living relatives. So then some of the teams of dead collaborators who were working with deep-trance mediums set out to prove their existence to scientists by devising clever tests for themselves which would rule out the possibility of mind-reading. Thomas’s 1922 book is less interesting to us than are the other two listed here because most of it is patient documentation of the results of these self-tests by the dead delivered to help scientists overcome their skepticism. The dead passed nearly all their own tests, so by the time of Thomas’s 1922 book, mainstream science had changed its course again and was ignoring all phenomena that did not fit with materialism. If you have never heard of Charles Drayton Thomas and his century-year-old book of proofs that were given by his dead collaborators, you know that even then mainstream science’s stonewalling was sadly effective.

 

X. Automatic Writing

 

Some of the most interesting first-person accounts by dead people have been received by means of automatic writing. Someone with mediumistic ability sat with pen in hand or with fingers on the keys, and a dead person with similar abilities then wrote as if those hands were his own. The books listed here are quick and enjoyable reads, and nearly all of what they tell us is amply corroborated elsewhere. If you can accept how they were received, they are a useful introduction to the post-death realities.

 

  • Life in the World Unseen (1954); More About Life in the World Unseen (1956) – Robert Hugh Benson was a British Catholic priest who died in 1914 and discovered after his death that some of what he had written during his lifetime about the afterlife was wrong. So through his friend, Anthony Borgia, he wrote these corrective manuscripts. I came across his books late in my research, and I found them to be so consistent with what I had already learned from other sources as to be frankly astonishing. No matter where these two volumes came from, they are useful first-person accounts of how the afterlife levels can appear to those who are newly arrived.
  • The Book of James (1974) – William James and Susy Smith wrote an entertaining book that is mostly consistent with the rest of the evidence. William James, the brother of novelist Henry James, was a late-nineteenth-century Harvard professor of psychology and the first president of the American Society for Psychical Research. Susy Smith was a psychic and a prominent researcher during the 1970s, when this book was dictated.
  • Testimony of Light (1969) – Frances Banks and Helen Greaves have given us a fascinating portrayal of Banks’s early adjustments to life after death. Banks was an Episcopal nun and a spiritual seeker all her life. So many of the details of her account of what happened to her after her death are so consistent with other evidence that her slim volume is well worth reading.

 

XI. Guided or Induced Afterlife Connections

 

The afterlife evidence and insights provided by quantum physics seem more and more to suggest that everything that we consider to be real is happening in what we might begin to think of as a universal Mind of which each of our minds is a part. So it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the most promising research into personal contact with the dead involves communications that seem to be happening in our minds, while at the same time they are happening in an external and palpable reality. I cannot explain this promising new field, so I’ll let some of its pioneers do that for you.

 

  • Induced After-Death Communication: A Miraculous Therapy For Grief and Loss (2014) – Allan L. Botkin, Raymond Moody, and R. Craig Hogan have updated and reissued a remarkable book that Botkin and Hogan first co-authored a decade ago.
  • Guided Afterlife Connections (2011) – Rochelle Wright and R. Craig Hogan are among the pioneers of an extraordinary set of procedures that enable grieving people to meet with, talk with, laugh with, and even hold hands with and hug their dead loved ones. I have met some of the earliest experiencers and heard directly from them about meetings with the dead that seemed to be almost unbelievable. The proof was in the pudding, though: people who had been distraught with grief told me that their grief had been nearly eliminated altogether in one session. Some of them now enjoy regular visits with a dead husband or child. Amazing.
  • Reunions: Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones (1994) – Raymond A. Moody, Jr. and Paul Perry describe Moody’s extensive work in the 1980s with a psychomanteum patterned on the Oracle of the Dead that was used for 2500 years at Ephyra in ancient Greece. Moody and his clients have had considerable success with this method of contacting the dead. He continues to offer the use of his psychomanteum to seekers, but he tells us that the process of preparation is extensive and “is not to be taken lightly.”

 

XII. ITC and EVP

 

Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) are in their infancy, but this field of research begins to show such promise that we can now pretty well foresee that within a few decades electronic communication with the dead will likely be common. As is true of so much of what is involved in getting this information to the world, the most important ITC and EVP researchers are teams of dead scientists. The biggest barrier to advancement in this area has long been a deficit of living researchers who could act as their long-term laboratory assistants. That problem seems to be ending, however, and the dead now working in this field seem to be feeling a new urgency about making breakthroughs.

 

  • Miracles in the Storm (2001); Spirit Faces (2006) – Mark Macy has for decades been at the center of ITC and EVP research, and his books are a good introduction to these subjects. The first book listed here details how almost a decade of promising research fell apart in the late 1990s because clashes among some of the living researchers caused their dead collaborators to withdraw. The second book includes a summary of some extra-material details gleaned from Borgia’s Life in the World Unseen as well as two similar primary sources.
  • Electronic Voices (2010) – Anabela Cardoso is a venerable Portuguese researcher working with an eminent team of the dead. She has achieved some extraordinary results.

 

XIII. Group Contacts

 

What is needed for real evidential contact to take place between our level of reality and the levels occupied by the dead is the sincere long-term commitment of living people to the process. The dead know who is genuine and who is not, and sometimes when they find a group that seems to them to be worth the effort, a team of the dead will begin what for them is a difficult process and use their living collaborators as a way to deliver validating evidence. The best ITC and EVP have been produced this way, as have most other remarkable proofs, like apports (items materializing in air), images produced on film, and even human materializations. I have never heard of a team of dead collaborators who began the process and then tired of it, but living people seldom devote the time and energy required for more than a few years’ time. What happened in the village of Scole in Norfolk, England, in the mid-nineties is an example of the sort of wonderful result that can be obtained by dedicated living researchers who are willing to let their dead collaborators take the lead.

 

  • The Scole Report (1999) – The most extensive report to date on collaborations with the dead is available as a research paper that was printed in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 58, Part 220, in November of 1999. You can find it in many university libraries, and if you resort to copying it you will want to make color copies of its wonderful illustrations. The Scole Report describes a scientific investigation of some extraordinary validations that were visited on The Scole Experimental Group from 1993 through 1998 at Scole in Norfolk, England.
  • The Scole Experiment (1999) – Grant and Jane Solomon worked with the Scole Experimental Group to summarize the findings detailed in The Scole Report for general readers. When you read this book, be aware that the full Scole Report is even more wonderful.

 

XIV. Reincarnation

 

There is so much evidence for reincarnation that clearly something like it happens. It’s a difficult process to understand, however, since time is not objectively real, so somehow all our lives on earth are happening at the same time. Accounts from upper-level beings suggest that we think of reincarnation not as a linear process, but more as a vat from which the bucket of each lifetime is dipped and back into which each lifetime is poured. Who knows? If you wonder about reincarnation, here are a few good books on the subject.

 

  • Reliving Past Lives (1978) – Helen Wambach’s groundbreaking study of mass hypnotic regressions is a brief and fascinating book. She set out to disprove reincarnation by hypnotically regressing thousands of people to lives lived in specific historical periods, expecting to be able to record an inconsistent mess of fantasy and gibberish. What she found instead was a distribution of thousands of memories of past lives that included genders, locations, clothing, utensils, foods, and other small details which so perfectly matched the historical record that to have achieved these results by chance was nearly mathematically impossible.
  • Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1971); Unlearned Language (1984); Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997) – Ian Stevenson was Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and he was a leading researcher in the field of reincarnation. Stevenson spent a half-century studying cases of young children who remembered recent previous lives that had ended violently, and the result is a spectacular body of work which will be celebrated only when the rest of modern science catches up with it. Stevenson wrote for scientists, so his writing style is dry. But the work that he details in his dozen or more volumes is overwhelming evidence for prompt reincarnation in what appears to be the narrow case of unexpected violent death. These are three of his seminal works.
  • Many Lives, Many Masters (1988); Same Soul, Many Bodies (2004) – Brian Weiss is the foremost popularizer of past-life regression therapy for use in the treatment of medical and psychological problems. An eminent Yale-trained psychiatrist, Weiss accidentally discovered the effect that apparent past lives can have on our present life. Unlike other regression therapists who have made the same discovery, he risked his medical career to get the word out. He has even ventured into the newer field of progression therapy (the investigation of how our future lives might affect the present one), which consciousness theory suggests should be possible, although it is a lot harder for us linear-thinking humans to grasp. The result is two illuminating books that offer a good introduction to the whole topic of reincarnation.
  • Children’s Past Lives (1997); Return From Heaven (2001) – Carol Bowman has studied the past-life memories of children, and while most of Stevenson’s subjects remembered only their most recent lives, Bowman studied children whose present lives appeared to have been affected by traumas suffered in more distant lifetimes. She also has studied the phenomenon of children quickly reincarnating within the same family, which appears to happen fairly often when infants or toddlers die.
  • Reincarnation – The Missing Link in Christianity (1997) – Elizabeth Clare Prophet wrote a scholarly but highly readable exposition of reincarnation as an original Christian belief. People who doubt that reincarnation was taught and believed by the earliest Christians owe it to themselves to read this book.
  • Your Soul’s Plan (2009) – Robert Schwartz wrote the definitive work on the fact that nearly all of us write life-plans before our births, and these can contain what we might consider to be negative events. Understanding why sometimes very bad things happen for our own spiritual good can help us to make the most of crucial lessons, and might perhaps reduce the need for us to return for additional lifetimes.

 

XV. Spirit Influence and Possession

 

You may or may not take seriously something for which there is considerable evidence: it seems to be possible for living people to be influenced or even possessed by spirits of the dead. Indeed, the condition may even be common, and it may be the cause of any number of otherwise inexplicable maladies. Who knows? Unlike mediumship and near-death experiences, possession has scarcely been studied at all, and spirit-releasement therapy is seldom practiced now because state regulators and malpractice insurers frown on it. This attitude can be expected to change once eternal Mind is shown to be the source of reality. Meanwhile, those few therapists who have made their careers in spirit-releasement therapy (the process of coaxing possessing beings away from their victims and toward the loved ones waiting for them) have had such apparent success that you may find these books fascinating.

 

  • People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead (2005) – Gary Leon Hill wrote a quick and enjoyable book that is a useful introduction to the topic.
  • Healing Lost Souls (2003) – William J. Baldwin was a late-twentieth-century expert in this field.

 

XVI. Achieving More Rapid Spiritual Growth

 

There have been a number of good things to come from the nascent science of afterlife studies, even beyond the obvious boon of our knowing at last that our minds are eternal. We also have learned from the dead why we even take lifetimes on earth at all: we come here to raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, just as Jesus tells us in the Gospels. As the truth about reality becomes more widely known, and as our need to achieve rapid spiritual growth becomes foremost in more of the developed world, there will be many new resources to aid us. For now, here are some important books to help you in your quest for spiritual growth.

 

  • Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – The red letters in any modern translation of these four slim books of the Christian Bible are the only place where the words of Jesus are preserved. Early church councils edited the Gospels, both removing things that Jesus had said and adding bits about church-building, sheep-and-goats, and Apocalyptic warnings that Jesus could not have uttered; but otherwise the words of Jesus in the Gospels are amply corroborated by what the dead now tell us. Appendix III of The Fun of Dying, The Fun of Staying in Touch, and The Fun of Living Together gives you further details about the correspondences between the genuine teachings of Jesus and the modern afterlife evidence.
  • Awaken with Gratitude (2016) – Hillis Pugh is a guru of gratitude. He teaches it, and he can help you understand how to use it to its best effect.
  • The Fun of Growing Forever (2016) – Roberta Grimes uses the teachings of Jesus to deliver the simplest and among the most effective methods for achieving rapid spiritual growth while we go on living our daily lives.
  • Conscious Being (2015) – TJ Woodward’s book rocked my world. Here are the essential Gospel teachings, arrived at from the perspective of Eastern writings! TJ writes beautifully and very accessibly. If you really cannot stand to think of doing anything related to the Bible, then perhaps his book will be enough for you; although once you have begun to work on forgiveness, I hope you will come to realize your need also to forgive Christianity.
  • A Course in Miracles (1992, 2008, 2009) – Helen Schucman with the help of William Thetford received between 1965 and 1972 this set of Text, Workbook for Students, and Manual for Teachers that apparently was channeled by a team that Jesus led. Wherever the Course came from, it is a powerful set of lessons in ultimate forgiveness. If you are ready to try for Level Six of the afterlife realities at the end of this lifetime, then doing the Course may be your best shot! Beware, though. The Course is heavy learning, and it is very hard to manage on your own. Fortunately, there are A Course in Miracles study groups in most cities worldwide that will welcome you.
  • Quantum Forgiveness (2015) – David Hoffmeister is a student of A Course in Miracles who uses movies as modern-day parables to give us another approach to learning forgiveness.
  • Liberating Jesus (2015) – Roberta Grimes received this book during two weeks of time from an entity who reportedly was Jesus. Many of those who have fallen away from strict Christian practice love Liberating Jesus, although for devout Christians what it has to say about the religion can be troubling to read.