In my introductory blog I proposed that death is just one of life’s stages. Specifically, it is not the end of our unique existence. By unique existence I mean that no two persons in the universe had or will have identical life experiences.
Now I want to reinforce the contention about stages of life by reference to one of the authors on the attached reading list: Raymond A. Moody, M.D., PhD, in his seminal book on near death experiences, “Life after Life” printed in 1975. Dr. Moody is a practicing psychiatrist who found himself intrigued by accounts of two patients reporting the continued functioning of their consciousness following having been declared dead by an attending physician, before being resuscitated. Dr. Moody, also an instructor at a medical school, reported on this anomaly at a conference of his peers and, instead of being hooted off the dais, as he was half expecting, a few of the attendees nodded understandingly and then came up to him afterwards and told him of their own puzzling experiences of a similar kind with their own patients.
By the time he wrote Life After Life, Dr. Moody had investigated 150 cases of near-death experiences (NDE’s). He chose 50 of the most arresting cases as a basis of his claims that the NDE’s had common elements that appeared to support the contention that conscious life continues after death. Among those elements are: being out of body but with an “etheric” body of some kind, traveling at a high speed through a dark tunnel, experiencing a detailed life review, meeting a being of brilliant light who emanates warmth, loving acceptance and understanding and seeing deceased loved ones who come to greet him/her; then often being informed or shown they must go back to their earthly body to complete some kind of unfinished business in life. Dr. Moody notes in his book that not all of these common elements occur in every NDE but enough do to establish a recognizable pattern. Since the author appears to be advocating a so far untestable hypothesis, and that all the subjects he refers to were successfully resuscitated, he admits he has not proven that life continues after death. On the other hand, he ends his book with the following: “My own subjective judgement is that there is a world beyond death”. The reader may be interested to note that Dr. Moody has stated he is going to spend the remainder of his professional life reinforcing his beliefs by searching for more corroborative evidence. In this he has been quite prolific, lecturing, and writing several more well-accepted books in the same vein.
Now I’d like to go on to another author who has recounted an absolutely fascinating story about life after death in which he and his wife were the principal characters. The author, also included in the attached reading list, is Stewart Edward White, a popular writer of adventure stories early in the 20th century, who turned his hand to recording the experiences of his wife, Elizabeth, who developed notable expertise as a medium in the final twenty years of her life with Stewart until her death in 1939. I should insert here that a medium’s authenticity in her ability to receive intelligence from discarnates beyond the veil, is based almost entirely on “evidentials”, facts that she has no way otherwise of knowing that are transmitted by the discarnate through the medium to the recipient human, often someone formerly close to the deceased. I read somewhere that as much as 80% of the information transmitted in a “reading” pertains to evidential material, usually private information shared between two closely related people before the death of one of them. I have to add here that there are plenty of charlatans who prey on gullible people desperate to hear from a recently departed, who are happy to receive “authentic” details of their loved one (that were only recently printed in the obituaries of a local newspaper), just one example of the practices of unscrupulous persons tarnishing mediumship.
The Betty Book, printed in 1937, authored by White, was an account of his wife’s experiences in becoming a medium. This process apparently was very difficult, taking more than 1 ½ years of prayerful effort to begin achieving even a minimum of garbled response from the spirit world, even for one who started out with psychic abilities. Ultimately however, she and her husband, who acted as her stenographer, were able to produce the fascinating material appearing in The Betty Book. Apparently, residents of the next world are eager to help us in our psychological/spiritual growth and welcome any opportunity to make contact with humans for that purpose. The Whites were not professionals in the usual sense, Stewart already was a popular author of novels, but they wanted to share the encouraging information about immortality they gained from 20 years of mediumistic encounters, of which The Betty Book was the result. The book has undergone numerous reprintings and still is in significant demand.
In my next segment I’ll tell you about the amazing encounters the Whites had after Betty died of natural causes in 1939. The connection between husband and wife was not severed and this is the whole focus of the following chapter.
Proof Of An Afterlife 