“Surviving Death” and the Problem of Subjectivity

“Surviving Death” on Netflix examines the Big Question: does human consciousness survive physical death? The various episodes cover near death experiences (NDE), ghosts and apparitions (including crisis apparitions and near-death visions), a two-part program on mediums and mediumship, signs from the dead, and reincarnation. The reincarnation episode follows up on some of the most famous American cases: James Leininger (see more about this compelling case here: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/james-leininger) and Ryan Hammons (https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/boy-says-he-remembers-past-life-hollywood-agent-n327506).

My purpose here is not to review the individual cases or the series as a whole, but rather to discuss two scenes that exemplify the challenges of psychical research. Nicole de Haas appears in the “Medium” episodes, as one of the leaders and featured physical trance mediums at a mediumship development seminar in the Netherlands. When Ms. de Haas in a trance state, or when she’s behind the curtain in a darkened seance room where she produces ectoplasm off camera, she speaks in various voices that transmit messages to the audience/client. One voice is that of an elderly doctor, and the other is that of a nine-year-old boy. All of the various voices sound like de Haas herself, using vocal gymnastics to sound like her spirit guides. That does not mean that she isn’t channeling these characters; they have to use her physical voice to express themselves. And yet, there is the uncomfortable and inescapable realization that she is not providing anyone information that is not easily found on the Internet.

One of the main participants in the series is searching for evidence of his father’s continued existence after a sudden departure from this world that left him in a deep state of grief. He consults various mediums throughout these two episodes; de Haas initially impresses him and his family with details about the “green car” his brother in law owned and an oft-repeated phrase his father used in his family restaurant: “hook ’em up”. However, all of this information is easy to find on Facebook and on other sites. Does this mean she looked it all up beforehand and used the little boy voice to transmit this information to the family? Not necessarily; but the look of disappointment on her client’s face as he realizes that his father probably did not come through is heartbreaking.

The second uncomfortable moment comes when Ryan Hammons, now 15, is taken to California to meet the daughter of Marty Martyn, who was a Hollywood extra and a talent agent (he died in 1964). Ryan, as a child, recounted Marty’s past life memories with remarkable accuracy. However, by the time this documentary was filmed, he has very few actual memories. He is ceremoniously flown to Los Angeles for the big meeting with Marty’s daughter and niece, who was the only one who knew him as an adult. Ryan’s mother is very enthusiastic about this trip, but her son is clearly uncomfortable and self conscious. The meeting between families is excruciating to witness. Ryan cannot identify relatives and friends in family photos; he has no recollection of the incidents Marty’s niece recounts; and he can’t answer anyone’s questions in order to ascertain his identity as Marty reincarnated. There are long moments of strained silence. When the meeting is finally over, it’s clear that Ryan has not made a convincing case; in fact, he has made no case at all. However, prompted no doubt by the producers, Marty’s niece and daughter make encouraging statements about Ryan’s previous personality.

Ryan and his mother end up at the grave site of Marty Martyn; she has her arm around him, comforting him unnecessarily, because it is not at all clear that Ryan is upset, grieving, confused, or anything but embarrassed and overwhelmed with all the attention. What stands out in this story is a simple fact: you can’t force memory to return once it has fled. There is no holding onto the past; Marty Martyn is, quite simply, not a part of Ryan Hammond’s life anymore, and that is entirely appropriate. James Leininger is clearly still affected by the death of his previous personality; he still relives his death trapped in a burning plane that was crashing near Iwo Jima during WWII.

What do I make of these moments? Nicole de Haas seems to be creating voices and relaying information that she did not obtain in a paranormal fashion, judging by the documentary; no cameras are allowed in the seance room, so there is no way to know if she actually produces ectoplasm. Ryan is a normal teenager who had extraordinary memories that have now vanished. Nicole de Haas might produce amazing and life-changing readings for her clients that do not appear on television. Actually, I’m sure she does; but is what she does paranormal, or simply the confirmation of the obvious messages that she knows people need to hear when they are wading through the deep waters of grief? Did Ryan experience some kind of extrasensory perception, soul connection, or mild possession by Marty Martyn, or is he truly the reincarnation of the deceased actor? Is it possible that his statements were rather vague, but once an eager parent seized them, the narrative coalesced?

So much of what we study in the field of the paranormal relies on believing, on taking at face value, someone’s narrative, or several people’s narratives. I could be completely wrong about Nicole de Haas. She might be an authentic physical medium with extraordinary skills, and I could be the ignorant skeptic. I’m am prepared to accept that possibility. This points out the need for deep and ongoing research; one documentary is not going to provide enough proof for or against physical and/or trance mediumship, for or against the reality of reincarnation, or the truth of the near death experience.

I want to believe everybody. I do not want to think that someone would deliberately mislead anyone in the pursuit of fortune or fame. I know, however, that this happens; human beings fall into temptation on a regular basis. I also know that once something extraordinary and anomalous happens, there is an additional temptation: faking evidence or phenomena in order to keep the attention coming. This creates a mix of authentic and fraudulent paranormal phenomena that ends up tainting an entire case, resulting in investigators ignoring or discounting data that might otherwise have been deeply insightful.

This is the eternal frustration of the paranormal investigator. We have to live between truth and falsehoods, lies and revelations, stunning evidence and demoralizing disappointments. It is very easy to be the skeptic; far too easy. We can decide that a whiff of fraud destroys an entire case, no matter how carefully constructed and researched that case might be. We can leap on one piece of questionable data and decide to deride and ignore years of work. It’s satisfying to the ego to rip someone to shreds on Facebook, crying fake and foul. It is far more difficult to entertain the possibility that extraordinary claims could be true.

It requires far more from me to think that perhaps Nicole de Haas is truly channeling spirits and producing ectoplasm, or to accept that Ryan Hammonds is the reincarnation of Marty Martyn. It means that I have to keep working, investigating, thinking, writing, and searching for the truth. That’s work. Most people don’t have patience for this level of work, this depth of inquiry. I understand that; I am regularly tempted to play the skeptic and write something snarky about a medium or a case. Then I remember my own paranormal and anomalous experiences, and recall how it felt when my reputation was tarnished at work after revealing them. I remember the derision of people in my own family and the pain that lingered for years as a result. That keeps me honest. And compassionate.

—Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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When Death Takes Your Loved One

Death popped into my inbox recently and into my life. Someone wrote to me about losing his father to Alzheimer’s, wondering how–if the brain does not produce consciousness–his loved one could have been so completely lost to the world. Around the same time, I lost my cat Nod. Nod was family. She helped me raise my daughter. We had her for 12.5 years, and she was the soul of the house. My husband stayed with her while the vet injected her with a lethal cocktail. I ran away and cried hysterically in the parking lot. What do Nod’s death and the loss of my reader’s father have in common? One, fundamental, question: where is my loved one now?

Here was my response to his question:

“First of all, my sincere condolences on your loss. Our family lost someone recently, so I understand the tremendous pain and confusion. 
My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and I have had multiple surgeries where my consciousness was altered by anesthesia. So, I understand how vital this question is. My grandmother had moments where a different level of awareness would operate, even in the worst of her disease. Suddenly, the light would go on, and she was ‘back’—of course, nothing about her diseased brain had changed; yet, she would go ‘online’, as if plugged in to an entirely different level of consciousness. There were no medical explanations for this. In my own case, of course anesthesia would knock out my everyday, operating consciousness. However, on more than one occasion, I became aware of myself on the operating table and was able to ‘see’ what the surgeons were doing to me. Once, I saw myself with my eyes closed and a mask on my face, even though I had made the anesthesiologist promise me that no mask would be used during surgery (the very idea terrified me). I remember confronting the shocked doctors about that fact. There was no way that I could have known what they were doing via ‘ordinary’ consciousness.
So, there are different mediators for consciousness. This higher awareness is like the generator kicking in when the electricity fails. Another common metaphor is the television set or the radio—if the machine is damaged, the signal is scrambled or lost, but the signal does not cease to exist. The brain interprets, filters, and modulates consciousness, but it does not create it. There are many (countless, really) examples of the brain being “offline” and conscious awareness finding another way to make sense of one’s surroundings and circumstances. The lucidity in one’s dying moments that so many nurses and family members report (and I have witnessed) is not due to a sudden recovery of the brain, but to a higher consciousness going online, a switching over to another system.
Another example are people with traumatic brain injury who are still able to execute functions that biology would tell you are impossible. I had a friend who had half of her brain removed and lost no significant function—nobody could explain her complete lack of disability given the catastrophic injury she had sustained. There were experiments with mice where so much brain was removed that they should have been utterly non functional, and yet they ran mazes based on memory that should not have been there at all if memory was stored in the brain.
So, your father is still conscious, but at a far greater level than he was before. Exactly how this works or what form we take is still part of the great mystery; but everything points to the same conclusion: consciousness is not dependent on or created by our brain. I hope that is of some comfort to you during this difficult time.”

Even if one fully accepts that consciousness continues on, there is nothing that erases the physical pain of losing your loved one. After deaths in my own family, I would feel the loss as actual pain in my body. It would affect my stomach, my back muscles, my energy levels, my ability to sleep, my concentration, and show up as depression and fear. Loss of the physical presence of your loved one is brutal. There is nothing that erases that, not even knowing that their consciousness continues, because we don’t know HOW their consciousness continues; my kitty can’t sleep on my chest anymore, and my reader can’t talk to his father anymore.

Sometimes, the signs that our loved ones leave for us can create even more pain and confusion. Nod has appeared in many, many, ways; she has jumped up on the bed and walked up to me; but when I reach for her, there is nothing but air. She can’t appear in her physical form. It’s as if she were both here and not here; exists and doesn’t, in equal measure. In that sense, she is like Schrodinger’s cat, both alive and dead at the same time. I have felt that acutely since her passing, as I did when my grandmother passed away and when my two friends from Wisconsin killed themselves. They, too, left tantalizing evidence that their energy was still active in the world, but I could not talk to them or reach out to them. If they decided to come to me, they did; but when they decided not to, the loss and emptiness was overwhelming.

A few things are clear from my experiences with the ‘transitioned’ states of my loved ones: I cannot force contact, I cannot predict it, and I cannot control the form that it will take. Contact does not respond to or respect my fantasies, desires, and needs. It happens when it happens, and each time someone makes the effort to reach out to me, I try to respond with gratitude and grace. Lately, however, I’ve been stuck in depression over the magnitude of the losses. Like my reader, I wonder how it is that it is possible for consciousness to continue in the way that I have observed. It feels like energy and memory, sparking reactions and effects in the physical world. And yet, it also serves to remind me that so much of what makes this life meaningful is the sheer physicality of it, the warmth of a hug, the sensation of petting your kitty as she sleeps on your chest, the electricity of a kiss, the joy of shared laughter. I want to use all my five senses to reconnect with my grandmother, my cat, my friends–and yet, I am asked by the Universe to redefine my senses in order to make contact. I am asked to connect on a far more subtle level, one that requires energy, concentration, meditation, and an intense ability to observe and tune in.

This refinement of the senses in order to contact one’s loved ones is not simple, because it can be clouded by grief and depression. It is hard to focus on the signals when you are wracked by sadness and overwhelmed by loss. For all of you who know exactly what I am talking about, let me make one thing very clear: the essence of who our loved ones are, their essential pattern of energy, their personality, does not disappear. However, in order to appreciate it, we can’t be in a state of denial, deep despair, anger, or resentment. We have to accept the physical losses and the radical change in the nature of the relationship. Once we have accepted the loss and let go of the need to hang onto to form, we can clear a channel for communication.

I feel for all of you who have endured a loss. It’s a long process to come to terms with our own emotions. Grief can overwhelm the body and the mind with such force that we wonder if we will ever feel ‘normal’ again. We will. It takes time, patience, and abundant love. I have felt the love and concern of my loved ones from beyond this world. They want to know if I am OK. Well, not yet; but I will be. Death tends to bring up every trauma that we have suffered through, every death to which we had to adjust. It is soul work, and it hurts.

But I will do the work, because love is stronger than any force in the universe. It is from that love that we take these forms in the first place, and it is to that love we will return.

—Kirsten A. Thorne

(kirstenthorne@gmail.com)

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I AM BACK!!!! SAY HELLO!

Dear Readers, (in case any are left)
I apologize for the extensive delay in posting. After I declared that there was no spiritual path, I was not sure how to follow up. After all, the entire point of this blog site was to address issues of a spiritual nature, and Soulbank in many ways WAS an important part of my spiritual path. So why would I declare that all of this was an illusion?

I spent the better part of the last 20 years deeply engaged in questions related to life after death and survival of some form of consciousness, in addition to reading everything that I could get my hands on that was in any way related to paranormal phenomena, mostly what we call spirits or ghosts. What I needed was some kind of direct experience of God, the universe, the Goddess, the cosmos, whatever you wish to call that which transcends human experience and yet somehow produced it. As you all know, I experienced a sudden memory of my death from a heroin overdose as Mary, a foster child who died in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. That memory kicked off a strange series of events in my life. My emotions bubbled to the surface, and I was overwhelmed with traumatic memories from not only Mary’s life, but my current one. I had no idea that the bizarre physical, emotional, and perceptual symptoms were due to a recognized phenomenon: spiritual awakening, or spiritual emergence. It was a total transformation, one that continues on unabated (although not nearly so intense) to this day. I can only describe it as a completely unexpected trip to my subconscious mind, where I met God and assorted spirits and guides. Was it real? It was at least as real as my everyday life. If you wish to call our day-to-day existence an illusion, then I would say it was MORE real than said illusion. It’s very difficult to explain the process to someone who has not experienced it. I was not seeking this out, because I didn’t even know what it was. The process shocked and surprised me precisely because it was utterly unpredictable and was orchestrated by some force far greater than me; it was so awe inspiring and humbling that all I could do was bow down to it and give up.

I still wake up at 3:00 AM feeling like I’m about to crawl out of my skin and overwhelmed with energies that I can barely comprehend. I stretch, jog in place, pray, fall to my knees, and wait for the spiritual episode to run its course. I am something like a conduit now for cosmic energies. I don’t know to what end or for what purpose this is happening to me. It started on June 26th, 2017, and rolls forward.

With that in mind, what I would like to do is revise my statements in the last post. I don’t think that there is no such thing as a spiritual path; I think that most humans cannot understand said path. I certainly do not know why this is happening to me, or where I will go with the cosmic downloads of energy, visions, mood swings, and my new perspectives. All I can say is this: I take more action now for the people I love, and the people I love number far higher than before. I feel intense empathy for the plight of human beings and our planet. I want to do something, no matter how small, to ease our collective sufferings and to celebrate our accomplishments and our innate beauty and promise. I am showing up and ready to work for something better. I want to create small spaces for peace and beauty that perhaps, one day, will grow larger and affect more and more of us.

I have become a beginner and am starting over. The journey begins with the small hope that you are all still out there, that you care, that you want to help me raise the collective vibration; I still love to talk to ghosts and read about where memories are stored in the brain, and figure out how time was created, and whether or not space actually exists; I remain curious, dazzled by life, and ready to research any fascinating topic. The difference is, I no longer feel agonized in the process, because I found out that I’m eternal and the Universe loves me. Even if that statement makes you want to roll your eyes, consider that it might possibly be true. I can’t convince you of that; all I can do is ask that you go find the way–however you choose to do it–to answer the question yourself.

This site is no longer about proving anything to anyone; it’s about creating a community of curious seekers and adventurers who are dedicated to enjoying this human experience. Much love to you all,

Kirsten

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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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An Unusual Rant

Dear Readers: Today, you’re going to hear me boot the nice Kitty to the curb, because the angry Kitty is ready to write today. Forgive her for her lack of fuzziness and warmth. That persona will be back soon. In the meantime, this is what’s going on:

Every now and then, some kind soul will send me hate mail. Hate mail is never fun to receive, but on the other hand, it means that people are reading. Just like there is no bad publicity, there is always cause for a writer to celebrate when someone takes the time to send an email, even if it’s vicious vitriol from an inflamed and angry soul whose sensibilities you’ve offended.

There is a segment of the population who despises all talk of the survival of consciousness–the idea that we are more than meat machines–and the very notion of the human spirit. In part, those people have been hurt by organized religion, and think (falsely) that I am promoting religion or a particular vision/version of God. I understand the backlash; but let me be clear: although I consider myself Christian, I do not write on soulbank with a conversion agenda nor am I an apologist for a particular faith. Atheists are always welcome to debate issues relating to the survival of death of some aspect of human consciousness.

However, there is a trend in my hate mail: people who believe that nothing survives death–no soul, no spirit, no aspect of consciousness–tend to insult me on a personal level. There is a certain pattern to the meanness: first, attack my PhD. Start by telling me how you can’t believe that someone with an advanced degree would spout such drivel, etc. Then, move on to how worthless my degree must be in order for me to question the status quo of materialism. Then, express dismay at the state of higher education to allow someone like me to exist in the world at all. If you are a distant relative of mine, or a friend of a distant relative, your next move it to wring your hands in dismay over my ‘lost promise’.

The hate mail usually goes on to question my psychology: I am somehow traumatized or deficient in some way, suffering from a personality disorder or simply deluded. My mental stability is questioned or my emotional life must be out of whack. This is followed by the materialists’ trump card:

• “this is wishful thinking on your part”

Of course, this is an old objection and the excuse for not researching the issue in any depth or at all: since this is just your desire speaking, there is no validity to the question in the first place. Or, there is that other objection that states that this is all fantasy akin to inventing some fantastic creature and attempting to prove it exists. To both of these very typical objections, and by way of some general observations, I offer the following:

• There is no reason that people who disagree with me cannot be civil or polite in their responses; the failure to adhere to basic, human courtesy tells me more about how threatened YOU feel by the subject matter than it does about a rigorously defensible point of view;
• My education, my writing and my critical thinking skills speak for themselves. If you are disappointed in me or think that I can’t defend a premise, you are free to stop reading soulbank;
• Thousands of years of human history have shown us that every culture has believed in a sort of afterlife, and that elaborate preparations for that life are a common feature of those cultures. To say that our entire, collective past is founded upon delusions and wishful thinking makes one the worst kind of colonizer: the kind that believes in her privilege to such an extent that you represent ‘civilization’ and all others are primitive savages with quaint, superstitious beliefs;
• Science is moving in the direction of more openness regarding the possible existence of consciousness after clinical death. There is now a considerable chorus of voices representing many disciplines in the sciences who are considering the ‘life after life’ questions with curiosity and receptivity. To anyone who wants a bibliography, just let me know. I have a great many books by doctors, physicists, neuroscientists and others who have dared to consider this question.
•  There is no need to make a religion out of materialism and defend it to the point of alienating anyone who disagrees with you. If you believe in scientific materialism and will not consider evidence to the contrary, that’s fine–but there is no need to be vindictive, wounding, insulting and condescending in the process. Is this what happens to people who deny the human spirit?

There are many nasty things one can write to me that will have no effect. However, there is one kind of attack that I have difficulty with: those who seek to deny the validity of others’ experiences. People tend to label and insult what they do not understand or have not themselves experienced. So, when someone feels that a possible past life is the best explanation for their anomalous memories, feelings and/or behaviors, to call into question that person’s sanity or to state that they are naive, deluded, unable to think critically or don’t understand their own psychology, is an act of violence.

When a widow says she was visited by her late husband and told some important information that is later verified, to call her crazy, to say she’s unable to distinguish reality from fantasy due to grief, is an act of violence.

When someone comes back after a period of clinical death to say that they had an out of body experience where they had extraordinary powers of perception and understanding and you call them sick, drugged or a victim of a ‘dying brain’, that is an act of violence.

When someone has predicted the future, read someone’s thoughts, communicated with the dead, all under strict controls and evaluated in an academic setting by well trained scientists–to insult the researchers, to belittle the protocols, to question everybody’s ethics, IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.

Let me go further. Even if all these people, across all these cultures, all throughout human history, did not have labs, scientists and formal experiments to monitor their experiences, to call those ‘experiencers’ insane, misled, misinformed, deluded, uneducated or victims of their own desires/illusions/fantasies, etc. IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.

Whenever we seek to denigrate a human experience that we share with MILLIONS of others, we perpetuate a witch hunt against those who are at odds with our dominant, militant culture of scientific materialism. Whether or not anomalous experiences have been proven for YOU, to YOUR satisfaction, is another issue completely. What I will never understand is why those who profess no belief in anything other than the mechanical/biological workings of the material self behave in ways that are intended to belittle and mock those who see something transcendent and universal behind the forms of the world. To see beyond the material is not to deny the material, or the importance of the disciplines that study it.

If I see beyond this world, it is not due to a sick or infantile brain; it’s comes from a mind that has been either blessed or cursed to perceive pieces of a reality that connect and explain the mysteries of consciousness that lie just beyond the full grasp of any of us, even–or especially–the academics who study the world so ardently.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PHW

 

 

 

 

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Is There No Difference Between Life and Death?

If you believe, like so many profess to, in the existence of the human soul (or consciousness, if you prefer) as something separate from the material body, then you must also accept that the sharp distinctions we draw between life and death don’t make logical sense. How do you define life? Are you so completely entwined and identified with your body and its chemical processes that you can’t imagine a ‘self’ without them? It’s a bit like saying that your car is you, or your clothes are you; if you leave one and shed the other, are you no longer yourself?

I have written before about what all children know when their pet dies. After ‘death,’ the body has nothing to do with the pet. Everything that made that animal your pet departs at the moment of death. We do ourselves a disservice by asking WHERE the pet ‘went.’ The usual categories upon which we depend to locate a self do not apply here. Only in the material world can one say where you are in space and time. Does that mean that you do not exist after your material body ‘gives up the ghost’? Of course not. You exist, but not as a material entity. Sometimes we can contact the self that exists after physical death, and for centuries, human beings have done so. Contact with the non-material self has happened countless times and will continue to happen.

Why is this so hard to believe? For me, that’s the real mystery. There is abundant evidence dating back thousands of years that all cultures on this planet have engaged in practices designed to contact the departed. Contact with the ‘deceased’ has been empirically studied for 150 years. That’s all the Society for Psychical Research did for many, many years. In any jury on the planet, the case for life after life has been proven time and time and time again. Why, then, is our culture so loath to accept something that any intelligent human being, reviewing the evidence, would be utterly convinced of?

Two reasons:

1) American culture focuses almost exclusively on the material world, because we are a capitalist culture that needs materialism to justify our economic system. If you focus exclusively on making this life comfortable and fun, then you need to buy a lot of stuff to accomplish the American goal of getting rich. YOLO is the supporting doctrine for consumerism. BUY baby, buy a lot, because you only live once!!!

2) Religion. If religion is the exclusive domain of the human spirit, then all expressions of that spirit can be controlled and defined by doctrine, often in the service of an economic and political system that directly benefits from that doctrine (think fundamentalists of any stripe).

OK, so you might think that this is all too pessimistic or too conspiracy-theorist, but it makes sense to me after years of contemplating this topic. If you agree, or if you don’t, write to me!

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PHW

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What to Pray For

Praying hands

2015 ended poorly. In fact, without going into great detail, the year left me in a state of near constant anxiety, insecurity, sadness and confusion. When I have fallen into a state of spiritual disrepair, I pray; but I am not satisfied with the way I am praying. Prayer, I should add, has nothing to do with one’s religious affiliation. Prayer is universal and cosmic in nature.

What do I not like about the way I have connected–or not connected–with God? I wasn’t sure until this morning. Sometimes, what you THINK is bothering you is simply a screen or a deflection from what is ACTUALLY bothering you. Praying for a particular outcome does not work. For me, there is no point praying that I won’t die or get sick, because it is our peculiar human destiny–along with everything in the natural, material world–to get sick and die. I might hate that, find it unfair, repugnant, crazy, terrible, and so on, but I can’t change it, and I’m not going to pray for the impossible. When I was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness 18 years ago, I did not pray that God would spare my life. I asked only that the result of the process leave me more spiritually evolved and more healed as a broken human than I was before.

I didn’t die. Once again, I survived. I did grow a tremendous amount in the direction of God, but what really upset me was the reality of what that means. Following God can be terribly painful. It means letting go of the people who have hurt you, giving up homes, family, friends and sometimes, your very life. Most of all, following a universal principle means losing your fear. You are forced to lose your fear to follow God, even the biggest fear of all: your physical death. Did I succeed in losing my fear? HELL NO. However, I did learn a huge lesson: as long as you try to control what happens to you and to other people, you will be miserable and afraid. I can’t control someone else’s path in life, even if that path horrifies me, upsets me or confuses me. I can’t even control what happens to me, much less other people! My job is not to micromanage change, but to accept it and attempt to understand it. Of course, I can take productive and proactive steps to change my circumstances, and one should always move forward on a path towards a goal; but if the path floods or you get lost along the way, what matters is your resilience, your faith and you ability to see God through the obstacles.

I have discovered that it is far better to pray for someone’s continued, spiritual evolution and healing. I can’t know what form that will take. If I pray for one’s spirit instead of one’s body, I have allowed God to decide the form that the healing will take. That is what I am attempting to do for everyone I love: I won’t pray that Uncle Todd stop smoking, but I will pray that he is spiritually transformed to such an extent that he will no longer wish to harm his body, the temple for his soul. This is all we can do, pray for enlightenment, for progress, for deep understanding. The particular way this progress will manifest itself is not our concern or within our power to determine.

When I thought I had only a few years left of life back in my early thirties, I understood it was useless to ask God to spare my life. If I needed to die to evolve in the next life, then so be it. If I was supposed to lose my life at that time in my development, then my job was to accept it as gracefully as possible and find a way to make that time mean something. For in truth, we are ALL on borrowed time and we ALL have to learn this lesson, whether we have only a few months to figure it our, or a few decades. In the end, we have the same task; some of us have to learn it faster than others. None of us escape suffering, and it is now my belief that most of us don’t learn anything at all unless we’re in pain and we figure out how to relieve that pain through considered and thoughtful prayer and meditation.

My particular case is odd, since I was dying at age five from kidney problems. I truly was not expected to survive, and I knew it then. What has been the strangest experience for me in this life is to have survived at all. I think that is why I am often confused about my path, about what I am supposed to do with myself. That is why every year I make resolutions to figure out what my mission is as Kirsten in this life. Death seems oddly more familiar to me, and what I mean by that is not annihilation of consciousness, but that state one is in between lives. I came into the world very strongly connected to my previous life (I have written about this before in previous posts on this site) and remembering a great deal of who I used to be. As a child, I felt that I was ‘going back’ to a place I had been before that was much more familiar than the hospital and my family. I couldn’t explain where that place was or what my role was in it, but I KNEW it. Now, halfway through my life, I still feel that I am not entirely HERE. On a purely animal level, death terrifies me. The physical self is hard wired not to die. On the level of consciousness and identity, death means very little. It’s a gateway to a more understandable world. I was there before, I’ll be there again.

I do believe with all my heart and soul that prayer works and is effective, but not if the prayer is directed towards specific, concrete, ego-driven goals or desires. The prayer must not be grounded in fear of loss. The only prayers that work are those that ask for love and light to do their work in and through us. We must heal our fractured, fearful minds before the real work of transformation can begin.

Many blessings to you and yours in 2016.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD/PHW

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Proof of Immortality

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This time of year is really difficult for me. I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and have to use a ‘happy light’, but it’s not just that–these short days and the odd winter light make me think of death, not birth; so while Christians celebrate the arrival of Jesus (which, in fact, happened in September according to historical records), I am contemplating the endings of things.

I accept my particular mindset and the inevitability of my mood this time of year, but sometimes, I really need help. That happened yesterday. I was tired of my general tendency to believe that anything really good that happens to me or to my little family will be followed swiftly by some kind of cosmic punishment. It looks like we just bought a house for the first time since we lost our home in 2013, via a you-have-no-choice short sale. I have been so overwhelmed by this that I managed to convince myself that since something good just happened, I will either get cancer, or a truck will flatten me crossing the street from Starbucks, or we’ll have some catastrophic event that will drain all of our money and put us in the street, or some other variation on that general theme.

I parked near the soon-to-be new house and walked a few minutes until I reached a trail behind Mulholland (this is one, big reason we bought the house–the location allows me to walk into the hills). I scurried into the scrubby, fragrant underbrush and soon was well hidden among the tumbleweeds, oak trees and prickly bushes whose name I never look up. The goldfinches were cheeping and extracting seeds from dry weeds, a scrub jay cried out nearby, and assorted hummingbirds zoomed by me in their incessant search for juicy flowers. Then I talked to God.

I have conversations with God on a fairly regular basis; but a caveat: please, dear Reader, don’t see me as a Bible-thumping fundamentalist–I am very liberal in my spiritual views and although I do identify as Christian, I do not evangelize. This time, I was really emotional, crying out in the wilderness, and completely, spiritually naked. I said that I was tired of not allowing myself to be happy. I asked for permission to let that go, along with the main reason that I put myself through such torment: fear and insecurity. The events of the last three years–crises with my kid, the loss of our home, issues at work, illnesses in the family, financial challenges, and more–had conspired to turn me into a terrified, depressed, fatalistic pessimist who had lost all faith in the world around her, and worse, in herself.

I also cried out about Death, which I think is deep down the root of all my fears. If I have such limited time to learn, to figure so many things out, then I am not going to succeed, and if it all ends in death, then why bother to evolve at all? This was a crisis of faith in its purest form: if you’re going to end my existence, God, then why I am here at all? What’s the point? I made Him a promise: I am going to let go of my anxiety and my fear to the best of my ability, but please, help me to understand these things I have asked You. What happened after that was life changing, and I am going to be processing it for quite awhile.

As I walked home, I ‘heard’ a voice that asked me: do you remember who you were at 15? Think about your emotions then, the way you thought things through, your core personality, that girl in Spain who was absorbing her surroundings at light speed, that girl who first found God watching an image of the Virgin Mary surrounded in candles, flowers and gold. Is that girl gone? “No,” I said aloud, “she is me.” That person who is and has always been me is NOT SUBJECT TO TIME. Time passing has not changed Kirsten’s fundamental characteristics, personality, preoccupations, emotional identity or spiritual essence. All that has changed is her biology: she doesn’t look exactly the same. That’s the only difference.

That which is not subject to time is, therefore, not subject to death. Death cannot happen without the passage of time; the passage of time ‘kills’ organisms via entropy. Entropy cannot occur without the concept of moving forward in time. Consciousness is not a time or entropy affected concept or phenomena. The source of consciousness is outside of the physical organism that expresses it, just as radio waves exist outside of the radio itself, or television transmissions are not “in” the television set itself. What allows for the show to play is not the show itself. “Kirsten” is expressed at the moment in a physical body that changes and will pass away; but “Kirsten” is consciousness, emotion, spirit and soul–none of which are dependent on her body to continue to exist.

We have become so obsessed with the question of HOW this happens–how a conscious personality moves from one state to another, or one body to another, that we have missed the important point: WE DON’T DIE. By “we,” I mean our essential, defining characteristics, our ‘anima’, our consciousness, our essence, and our eternal selves, that which recognizes itself as a particular expression of the universe. Think for a moment: go back to a point in time and ask yourself WHO you were; is that person gone? Has he or she been obliterated by the passage of time? The core individual who recognizes him or herself as the same over time is not part of your body. Do you mourn the stray hair that washes down the drain? Do you cry over your loss of self when you cut your nails? Of course not, you say; but what about my brain? There are people with less than half a brain who function normally. But that’s not the point; your brain is filtering and expressing consciousness and is quite necessary in that process. It is not, however, producing it.

You have always been you and will always be you, whether you die once or a thousand times, whether you are born once or a thousand times. Your birth and your death do not make you who you are. They are physical transitions necessary for the version of you that is here now.

One would expect that this epiphany would bring instant relief, but it has not. If fact, the consequences are huge and daunting. If I can’t die, then I can’t ever stop existing, even is my existence is painful or emotionally difficult. There is no stopping the process or opting out when I’m sick of being in the world, or ‘being’ in general. This kicked off a kind of existential panic like I’ve never felt in my life. The cry in the wilderness was for the end of pain, which, if the answer had been different, would end at the very least with my death. The answer received, however, was of a very different nature. Since there is no end in sight, I have to handle the pain, the challenges, and the fears and the insecurities without the comfort of knowing that it will all vanish when I die.

So there is no choice. You have to progress, you have to work through all the dramas and traumas until you find peace. That could take more than this life, and probably will take a few more–God knows how many. Although is seems appealing to have another and another shot at life, there is also something deeply frightening about eternal life. You simply cannot choose to stop it and you cannot escape it. Last night, I was reading something dismal about global warming that said 80% of us will be dead by 2100 due to climate change. I told Ty that I was glad I would be dead by then and wouldn’t have to experience it. Then I remembered the lesson from earlier today: there is no way to escape life. You might very well be there to experience it. You might be one of the people that helps the planet recover, or you might have some other role in the global catastrophe. You don’t, however, get to skip out on a problem you helped to create.

I am so overwhelmed by knowing this. I wrote about this concept over the years, but it was always a plausible theory and not a lived reality. I connected in such a strong way with the universal intelligence that I was granted an answer to the most fundamental question. Living with that answer is the next, huge challenge. I will be ‘unpacking’ this insight for quite awhile, always hoping that anyone who reads this will share their own experience of asking a difficult question and receiving a transformative answer. If this particular question has also been answered for you, I hope that you will tell me about it in the comments section below.

With much love and respect,

Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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TELL ME RIGHT NOW, WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU DIE????

I was listening to “Maria Marin Live” (forgive the lack of accents; not sure how to add them here!) on AM 1020, as is my custom after my last class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She pulls no punches and forces her callers to be direct, honest and sincere. Woe betide you if you can’t make your point or you’re full of B.S.; she will call you on it. I’m not sure how many of my readers listen to talk radio in Spanish, but I recommend you listen to what she has to say if you understand Spanish.

The topic of one of her recent shows concerned life after death, or more specifically, what her callers believe happens after death. There were those who had the quick answer, “you go to Heaven to be with God,” but when pressed on the details, became utterly incapable of providing any realistic descriptions or scenarios. Others, of course, said that nothing happens; and the majority stumbled around attempting to answer the question without the Heaven or the nothingness explanation, only to find themselves impaled on their own uncertainty. Ms. Marin did not provide them an easy out; she pressed them relentlessly to answer the question in a specific and meaningful way. When they couldn’t do it, she moved on to the next person.

I found myself in something of a panic, imagining that I was one of her callers and I had been pressured into answering the question. Even though this topic is my area of research and interest, there is NO WAY to spit out a quick answer to the question, ‘what happens after you die’. I realize that those who have had a near death experience might be able to answer this with the typical imagery: the tunnel, the white light, meeting relatives who have passed on, the life review, the inability to cross a certain boundary between life and death, and the final (usually unwanted) return to the body. However, this describes a transitional state between life in the flesh and the life of consciousness, not what happens after actual, physical death.

No one can answer definitively, since no one has died 100% in the flesh and returned to talk about it except Jesus, and well, there are some issues there, as well. My experience tells me that while there is no quick answer to the question, there is–at least–a concept that we can hold onto when forced to answer questions about life after death. In terms of scientific research, nowhere is there better evidence for the continuation of life than in the work of the late Dr. Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia. His work on the past lives of children from around the world is legendary; I’ve discussed it extensively in other blog posts. What his work points to is that ‘life’ after ‘death’ is about the transference of consciousness from one body to another.

The best evidence points to the indestructibility of the conscious mind, spirit or soul (I do not think that these terms are interchangeable, but the differences between them are the subject of another post). It doesn’t disappear, but finds another body through which it expresses a self. How this happens is pure speculation, but it must happen at some point in fetal development. I remember my sister telling me–and she is nothing if not a skeptic–that she felt the precise moment when a spirit ‘jumped into’ my nephew while in the womb. He was pure potential and suddenly became a personality. This personality was, in his case, external to him and perhaps had nothing to do with our family and genetics at all.

Consciousness finds a way to continue, whether it be through reincarnation or through some other mechanism, such as inhabiting another dimension or alternate universe as posited by some quantum theories. One of these alternate dimensions of reality might look and feel much like the Heaven that the faithful expect to experience. Many Eastern religions posit the twin existence of soul and spirit, each living out separate existences as the same personality: the “spirit” continues to reincarnate with limited or absent memories of the previous existence, and the “soul” inhabits a timeless dimension where the expected rewards and/or punishments are experienced as expected. Some quantum theories posit that there are infinite versions of us in infinite universes, so that when one of us dies in one world, we simply skip over to another and pick up our lives there, either in the ‘present’ moment or a past or future moment.

It doesn’t work to think of time as important to consciousness after death, since it is a biological concept useful to understand what we perceive as forward movement towards a goal, but it is not an independent entity necessary to understand reality (at least as far physics is concerned–time could just as easily move backwards as forwards, and we only need the ‘arrow of time’ for formulas concerning entropy, which some physicists think doesn’t exist as an independent measure of anything, anyway). You can see why, by now, there is no way to answer Maria Marin’s challenge in a one-minute phone call. When you are discussing issues concerning consciousness–that great mystery–it doesn’t make sense to explain exactly what will happen, since that requires us to know exactly how our minds will perceive reality when we are no longer dependent on a brain or a body to filter and limit our experiences.

Since Ms. Marin requires total honesty, I will say this: I am afraid that the best evidence points to a recycling of consciousness that does not involve karma, reward, Heaven or eternal rest. It seems that our personalities are transferred to another human being, and we drag our baggage along into another life–whether in the form of unconscious trauma or conscious memories. I do think there is room for spiritual evolution from life to life, but that is not the same concept as karma or reward. Our suffering in one life might purify us and lead us closer to God, but it certainly doesn’t mean our next lives will be easy, fun, interesting or rewarding. The most spiritually evolved person might appear to have the worst material circumstances.

For what it’s worth, that’s my answer to Ms. Marin, if I had called in. We come back, again and again, working towards a nobler, more refined relationship with God. What that looks like for each individual is unknown. So, I take my last breath, I might have a transitional period where I’m in the Light and meet up with those long gone, and then I probably black out or go to sleep and wake up screaming, inhaling that first breath again, remembering or not that I was here before, and here I go again.

Yours on the journey,

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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Are You Crazy, or is Your House Haunted?

When we rented our current home, I knew it was a troubled place. The landlady was enduring a bitter divorce, and she needed to move from the house that her husband had rebuilt for her and then abandoned. There were many unhappy scenes in the house before she left; according to her, his personality had undergone a ‘complete transformation’ while living here. He plotted and schemed in his office, planning an escape to a foreign country to be with his very young girlfriend, and his illegal activities prompted a federal agency to visit this property a few months back.

She suffered here after he left. There was evidence–which I will not detail here–that she did not deal with this huge loss in the healthiest of ways. While she was here and for several months after she left, she had one accident after another and fell terribly ill for several weeks. Her life unraveled in this house. When we first saw the place, both my kid and my husband had reservations. Ty thought it was “antiseptic,” and my daughter said the place was filled with “bad vibes.” I had decided to ignore my initial impressions and my feelings, primarily because I was sick of making decisions based on emotions. That was the reason I lost my beloved home at Marmora: I had made an emotional decision that cost the family every penny we had earned. This time, I reasoned, I am only following pure practicality. The house was big, boasted all the most modern conveniences, and was well constructed, since the previous owner was a contractor.

The strangeness of the house began almost immediately, and ever since we moved in last September, I have tried to leave. My gut instinct continued to drive me to find another home, even though my intellect was horrified at my hunches. My rational brain has been in a full-out battle with my animal instincts since Day 1. I wanted to be practical, I desperately wanted to make this work, especially because my husband settled in and had zero desire to uproot himself again. Moving is traumatic for everyone, but especially for my husband. However, I could not stop myself. I have been driven to look elsewhere.

Nothing has worked. Every time I thought we could get out, the possibilities vanished. We couldn’t buy anything, so I decided to find another rental property. This constant hunt for the next place is gradually shifting in the right direction, but something–some force greater than myself–has blocked me from moving the hell out of here. Our lease is up in three months, and I think I might have found something that will work–but if not, I vow to continue the search.

I made the mistake of confronting my house and the oppressive, angry atmosphere. I know that one is not “supposed” to run EVP sessions in one’s own house. However, I had done this many times over in the old house to no ill effect. When the energy is positive, one can run EVP sessions without fear of repercussion. When the energy is negative or sick, it is not advisable to try to figure things out on your own. My apologies to the paranormal community: I know I broke a golden rule. As a result, there is no way for me to be comfortable in my house.

Rather than go into detail about what I heard, I offer you a few clips to listen to yourself. I was alone in the house at the time. I have a bird that you might hear screaming in the background. It was around 11:30 AM. I was in the office, the same room where the ex-husband plotted his evil misdeeds. I feel him the most, even though he is not dead. I don’t believe physical death is a requirement for a haunting; more on that later. Here are the clips, but please do turn up the volume and wear headphones. Otherwise, you won’t hear anything. I will provide detail on what I hear at the end of the audio clip posts, so if you don’t want to know my interpretations, please write down your own impressions first and then see if they match mine.

What I hear in these clips is the following:

For the “Mesa Response” clip, I hear the word “DEPART” and then a knock.
For the “Right After I Say ‘Or Not'” clip, I hear “GET OUT OF HERE”.
For the “Mesa Woman Says Two Sentences” clip, I hear “Don’t you come back, go back” and then something else afterwards that is unintelligible to me.
For the “Mesa Whispered Response” clip, I hear “Sorry”.
For the “Mesa Woman Voice” clip, I hear a woman’s voice in the background at 3 seconds, and a faint, male voice responding at 4 seconds.
For the “Mesa Man and Woman Responds” clip, I hear the male voice start a sentence with “if you blink” but I can’t tell what he says afterwards, and the woman clearly responds “no”.

The question is: what is happening in these clips that might explain the feelings in the house? I had always assumed that these voices were directing their “get out” messages to me; but upon listening to them again, it’s clear that most of what I am hearing is a dialogue between a man and a woman. This seems now to be more of an echo of past trauma in the house, a replay of the arguments that infected the home during the break up the marriage. I was convinced, until right now, that the male energy here wanted me gone; upon further reflection, there is no way to know that by listening to these clips.

I wonder now if the house is simply a repository of unhappiness. I have attempted to ‘cleanse’ the house of this energy, but to no avail. I don’t think that one can clear houses of either intelligent activity or of residual activity. When investigators claim to have accomplished such a feat, I am always skeptical. I don’t believe that we have such powers. I think that the rituals that we engage in to “lighten” a house serve mostly to make us feel better but have little effect on the residual or intelligent haunt. Activity can decrease temporarily, but it’s hubris to assume that we can eradicate spirit energies. Nothing will erase what happened here.

I am convinced that humans can haunt locations while alive. There is evidence for this in research conducted by the Society for Psychical Research (see Phantasms of the Living). There are many accounts of apparitions of living people who return in times of stress to interact with family or friends. There are many credible reports of people seeing someone they know in one location when that person is proven to be at another location. Trauma in a certain house or building can split one’s spirit or consciousness into active fragments that play themselves out again and again. My dearest friend is convinced that she is actively haunting certain places from her childhood where she experienced trauma. When she recalls certain incidents, she feels something akin to an ‘out of body’ experience where she is back at the site in spirit, venting her anger and outrage with such force that anyone at that site might be able to pick up her emotions.

This theory would also explain why people have the experience of having been somewhere before, to the point that they are able to identify landmarks, streets and buildings that they could not have seen in the flesh. Our consciousness is unbounded by time and space. We can experience much more than we are aware of on the surface. My landlady’s divorce continues to play itself out in her old house. She doesn’t know this, but she and her ex-husband are not finished hashing out the misery of their old unhappiness. Whether or not this is a “stone tape” recording of old grief or a continued interplay of two people on another level of consciousness is a question I cannot answer.

What makes all of this so heartbreaking for me is the fact that I am the only one living here who feels this sadness. My husband and kid are rarely at home. I am the only one who is here during the day, when the energy here is the heaviest. I live in one universe, and my husband lives in another. He simply does not perceive these invisible worlds. His inner life is as mysterious to me as my exquisite sensitivity to the outside world is mysterious to him. When one person can perceive alternate realities and the other can’t, it creates certain challenges.

I’m planning on finding us another home as soon as our obligation is met here. I am paying the price for ignoring my first impressions and attempting to negate my excellent instincts. I survived one divorce. I will not expose myself to the emotional and spiritual damage of yet another one.

I welcome your comments on this post and any interpretations you may have of the audio clips. If you heard something that I did not, please write to me. In the meantime, I wish you all a blessed week and much peace and love in your homes.

—Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

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