The Afterlife as Common Sense

Dr. Alan Hugenot is a medium who is also an engineer and a classically trained physicist. I don’t like long quotes, but if I’m going to reference someone as an authority on something as important as life after death, make sure that your readers know who this person is. Here is his own bio on LinkedIn, but you should read more on your own:

“Dr. Hugenot is a semi-retired, Naval Architect & Marine Engineer, who often works as an expert witness in maritime cases. After surviving a Near-Death experience in 1970 which occurred during a 12 hour coma, he has made a 45 year, scientific study of Consciousness Survival and Evidential Mediumship. The NDE “opened” his consciousness to intuitive communications, and after completing studies with the Morris Pratt Institute (NSAC), and Arthur Findlay College of Psychic Science (SNU), He currently serves as research medium with the Consciousness Research Lab at IONS (Noetic.org) with Dr. Dean Radin, Ph.D and Dr. Arnaud Delorme, Ph.D, and also with Dr. Gary Swartz (University of Arizona). He currently serves on the Board of Directors for both the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS.org) and the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies (ASCSi.org). He is fascinated with parapsychological science and the physics of consciousness, consciousness survival in an afterlife, mediumship, remote viewing, and out of body experiences. Trained in classical Newtonian physics, but having also experienced the phenomena of consciousness survival and out-of-body consciousness, he realizes that our materialist paradigm is an extremely restricted aperture for viewing the larger reality of the Conscious Universe, yet he also comprehends the skeptic’s perceptive difficulty that, “Consciousness survival can never be observed unless the observer first infers that it could be possible”. He speaks several times each month at various conferences on Death, Consciousness Survival and Mediumship Science in North America at local IONS and IANDS groups and at various Unity and Spiritualist churches. He also holds workshops on Evidential Mediumship. He is available, by prior arrangement, to speak and hold workshops throughout Europe and the British Commonwealth.”

What I like about Dr. Hugenot: He made a decision to become medium via intense study and preparation, discarding the notion that the scientist or the observer must keep herself at a skeptical distance in order to draw conclusions or gather evidence about survival of consciousness. The preponderance of the evidence is in favor of the existence of ‘discarnate entities’ who communicate with us via signs, direct voice, writing, channeling and other means. It is NOT that we don’t have enough evidence to support our beliefs in the afterlife; the issue is that we can’t convince the majority of the scientific community to examine the evidence because they refuse to consider the question. If you refuse, a priori, to study the evidence because it concerns an issue that requires you to abandon materialism, then you cannot convince a skeptic. Oddly enough, this has led to an anti-scientific attitude among the materialists, since they will not consider the results of studies carried out at universities and government agencies that followed scientific protocol. Dr. Hugenot joins the ranks of Dr. Morse, Dr. Stevens, Dr. Mona Schultz, Dr. Parnia and so many others who have found reasonable grounds for accepting the continuation of consciousness. We need to be reminded: science has not proven that consciousness arises from brain function, an assumption upon which materialists rely.

Another fascinating theory that Dr. Hugenot proposes: the ‘near death’ experience is an actual ‘death experience.’ Therefore, the question of reincarnation has been solved: if you return to your body after you died (Dr. Sam Parnia discusses this in depth–he has resuscitated patients who he considered dead–no less dead than those who don’t return to their bodies), you HAVE REINCARNATED. Not, clearly, into another body, but back into the one you had before. That fact alone is enough to upend any thinking person’s world view. Several of us wandering around right now have returned to our bodies after death. We have reincarnated. If we could do it once, why could we not do it again in a different body?

There is much more that you need to hear. Go to his page and listen to the videos. They might just change your life.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

 

 

 

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Knowing Nothing, Falling Backwards

The year started with my hero vanishing into space. Others followed, creating a vacuum where my teenage soul used to be. I defined myself with “Major Tom” and every song on Purple Rain. When people die, my beliefs tell me that they are still ‘here,’ just on the other side of a thin veil. I didn’t know them, of course; it wasn’t their physical demise that slammed me into shock. It was the past that disappeared. The past was always already gone, so what do I mourn? I’m not sure. I don’t know.

The news in 2016 just got worse and worse. Syria. Trump. Russian hacking. Climate changing faster and faster. Cancer diagnosis in the family. Depression and other issues surfacing like dead fish in a pond. It seemed as if the downturn in my mood paralleled the swirling misery of the election and the general feeling of anxiety that permeates everything concerning human affairs.

There were the highlights, as well: I became the Project MATCH Faculty Coordinator and was able to assist in the training of some very talented and smart interns. I felt that I was making some real progress towards the betterment of education for the students in the LA Community College District. It was the best summer in a long time. We were finally able to buy a house, up in the mountains of Santa Susana. In the morning, I no longer hear the 101 Freeway blaring through the windows. I hear an anemic rooster, toads and owls hooting in the distance. I feel protected by the giant boulders and ancient oak trees. The spirits around this area are powerful and very, very old. This has allowed me peace of mind, even as the world falls into pieces.

This is where the knot is. I have a peaceful environment in which to contemplate all the things I didn’t understand as a younger version of myself. My bubble of ignorance burst three times: in 1997, 2002 and 2012. I was told I was going to die from a progressive disease in ’97 (that turned out to be a misdiagnosis, but I lived with it for almost a year), my ex husband moved out and divorced me in 2002 and in 2012 my kid had some serious issues which I am not at liberty to discuss in detail. After 2012, we moved three times in three years. The idea that things get easier and more understandable as you get older is bullshit. I understand less now and everything is more confusing and complicated than it was at any other time in my past.

My nickname in Middle School was “Polly Pure”. I was always told how naive I was, how easy to dupe and fool. I assumed everybody was nice and good, and that the world was always moving towards a better, more perfect state. I believed in constant spiritual progression: all things were destined to achieve perfection. I was such an idiot that I actually thought I had achieved enlightenment, somewhere around 2010 or 2011. I truly believed that I was on the fast track to Paradise, Oneness with the Brahma, the Source, whatever. I resent the fact that the world showed me otherwise.

The world showed me that I was (and am) a spiritual infant, and the state of affairs on our planet is regressing. Not only are we not moving forward, we are traveling backwards, undoing what little good we had managed to accomplish. As for people: nope, they are not inherently good. They are propelled by insecurities and fears that drive them to do terrible things to themselves and others, all in the name of protecting fragile egos. My entire world view was based on progress and enlightenment, and that paradigm has been shot to hell. Therefore, my view of time has been turned upside down. The arrow of time from now into the future is pure illusion, along with the idea of future perfection. We go in circles, falling backwards, struggling to break out of the present only to fall into the past and repeat, repeat, repeat.

All progress is individual, I fear. And it is not necessarily accomplished in this life. The arc of progress is LONG and requires so much more time than I thought, if such an idea exists at all. I would like to think that there is ultimate transformation after X number of lives wind themselves down, but I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe it’s two steps forward, one step back, and I’m in the middle of the one step back. One thing I do know:

Polly Pure was beaten with a barbed-wire covered bat and lies bleeding and dying in the ashes of her naive dreams for the world. I am waiting for Major Tom and Prince’s elevator to take her up, to be saved from her mistakes and her lost hopes.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PWH

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The Apocalypse: When the World Ends . . . and Starts Again

NOTE: As in all my discussions on Christianity and its beliefs, my intent is to link certain ideas regarding Biblical theology with current theories on the afterlife. There is NO evangelical purpose here; I am not trying to convince anybody of the truth of one religion over any other. I simply write what I know.

There are a great many Biblical stories that upset me. One of them is contained in Revelations and concerns the Apocalypse. The verses have to do with ‘being awake’ and aware as if you were protecting yourself from a ‘thief in the night.’ When the end of the world comes, one of every two people will be ‘taken up’ or rescued from a dying world. This is the ‘Rapture,’ which I simply cannot understand as something literal. The idea that these verses concern a literal end of the world where people actually rise to Heaven has created much confusion: there are entire cults built around this idea of Apocalypse, and as they patiently await the end of the world, they are also waiting for the second arrival of the Savior. This too strikes me as allegorical and symbolic. It also occurs for me as a lesson on time, and how we are tricked into thinking salvation is a future act for which we are supposed to wait.

Last Sunday, a guest pastor at Saint Francis Episcopal explained these troubling stories in a way that links them to quantum physics and human psychology, although not explicitly. The question he asked us was painfully simple: “Have you ever had something happen to you that made you feel that your world had just ended?” Most of us can answer with a yes. When my grandmother died, there was a sudden rupture in my life that would forever change my existence. There was the world with Nana, and the world without her. I was different in each of those worlds. There are many examples of this: when my first husband told me that he was no longer in love with me, I felt that I died that evening. Of course, I woke up the next morning, but I was not the same person nor was my world the one I knew before. Everything seemed unfamiliar, as if I had just started over somewhere strange where I had to learn new rules and build another life.

You do not have to stop breathing to die. You can die to your old life and wake up to a different one many times before you lose your physical body. I suspect that losing your physical existence won’t be much different than losing your husband, your grandmother or another important person that has defined so much of you. You will wake up from your physical death as you wake up from an emotional or spiritual death and have to start over.

The ‘many worlds’ theory in quantum physics states that there are many dimensions of existence (perhaps uncountably many) where we exist in slightly different circumstances. There is a universe where Nana still is my grandmother and where I never endured a divorce. There is a universe where I wrote this post and one where I did not. Although there are logical problems with this interpretation of reality, and I don’t necessarily buy into it, the idea that multiple dimensions of reality intersect with this one explains a great deal of paranormal phenomena. Ghosts, EVP, NDE, OBE and so on might simply represent interactions between dimensions of reality where other beings are living out their lives and where we occasionally slip into a universe where the rules governing reality are vastly different.

The Apocalypse, then, is about the ending of YOUR world, not all of Creation. When your life utterly falls apart, you have died to your old reality. What will you do then? Do you find salvation? Or do you turn away from the Divine Principle and end up alone, isolated and abandoned? You have a choice regarding which world you inhabit: in one, you have reconnected to God and life; in the other, you have become a shadow, a lost soul in the darkness. Perhaps in some worlds, we are lost and in others, we are saved. Which one is the Ultimate Reality? Not all of these universes can be coequal. I suspect there is only One World where we live out our true and eternal lives, but until then, we are fragmented in infinite ways.

Our task, then, is to find the unification of these disparate selves living out multiple lives. This is not about waiting for a Savior to pull us together and raise us to Heaven. Heaven, Hell, Salvation and damnation are always happening right now. They are not ‘in time,’ but ‘of time’. All aspects of our soul and spirit are eternal–nothing concerning salvation can happen in the future, because past and future rely upon time to have any meaning. We are outside of time. The Apocalypse is now, and has always been now; salvation is now, and has always been now. There are many worlds where we exist simultaneously: in some, we are moving towards our ultimate salvation and integration (we are making the right choices); in others, we are moving away from God and spirit into oblivion. Fragmentation of our souls and spirits is the enemy. Integration of our essence within the multiverse is what saves us and recreates us as a whole being.

Jesus, then, isn’t waiting to show up again. He’s already here. He has ALWAYS ALREADY been here. The Second Coming isn’t about Him, but about us: do we make our way towards Salvation, or not? That’s the religious understanding. The scientific one is similar: time is not an independent quality of the universe; everything that has happened, is happening or will happen is actually occurring right now! Actions, lives, events, and simply spread out in space-time. There is no ‘before’ or ‘after’. Only now. Every potential you have as a human being is ‘out there’ for you to discover–but to see it, you need a new and radically different perspective. And that is where the Divine Principle comes in, or whatever you wish to call it. You don’t achieve that kind of radical vision and perspective without serious transformation; how you discover that transformation that gives you the gift of true sight is the purpose of your live(s).

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

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