Any Pathway to an Afterlife Realm Implies the Possibility of Reverse Visits

The site www.archive.org is an invaluable resource for scholars of psychic phenomena and the paranormal. Using the site, you can find very many books written by witnesses of the paranormal and scholars of the paranormal.  The full text of very many of these books can be read by a user who does not even bother to register at the site.  Examples of such books are below:

• The astronomer Camille Flammarion's monumental three-volume work Death and Its Mystery (which you can read here, here and here);
• Flammarion's also monumental opus The Unknown;
• Catherine Crowe's long book The Night Side of Nature;
• The often cited work two-volume Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Podmore and Myers, which you can read here and here;
• The long and very fascinating work Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by former US congressman Robert Dale Owen;
• The Debatable Land Between This World and the Next by the same author, a worthy successor volume of equal length; 

• The Voices by Vice-Admiral William Usborne Moore, a fascinating account of mysterious auditory phenomena during seances;
• On the Edge of the Etheric by James Arthur Findlay, a book on the same topic;
• The Proof Palpable of Immortality by Epes Sargeant;
• Planchette, or the Despair of Science, a longer work on paranormal phenomena by the same author;

• Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance by James Esdaille MD, written by a doctor who was very successful in getting very large numbers of patients to be pain-free during surgery without anesthesia (using only hypnosis);
• The very long two-volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by Frederic Myers, which you can read here and here;
• From the Unconscious to the Conscious by Gustave Geley;
• The Widow's Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena by Isaac Funk, the same Funk of the famous Funk and Wagnall's dictionary;
• The Watseka Wonder by E.W. Stevens,  a contemporary account of one of the most notable cases in the history of the paranormal, discussed here; 
• Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences by W. F. Prince, a book documenting how countless illustrious names have reported paranormal experiences;
• Researches into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism by Sir William Crookes, one of the most accomplished physicists of the nineteenth century;
• The Survival of Man by physicist Sir Oliver Lodge;
• Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Robert Crookall;
• More Astral Projections by the same author, containing some fascinating cases I discuss here;
• What Happens When You Die by the same author;
• Dead and Gone by James S. Pollack, a very readable description of paranormal phenomena;
• Ghosts and Poltergeists by Herbert Thurston and J.H. Crehan, one of the most in-depth examinations of poltergeist cases;
• Phenomena of Materialization by Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, discussing very interesting results described here;
• Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, by William Gregory M.D. professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University,  a book abundantly documenting the reality of clairvoyance, as discussed here; 
• New Frontiers of the Mind by J. B. Rhine, the foremost twentieth century researcher on ESP;
• After Death -- What? by Cesare Lombroso;
• Thirty Years of Psychical Research by Charles Richet, a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine;
• The Seeress of Provost by physician Justinus Kerner, an astonishing case history described here; 
• There Is No Death by Florence Marryat;
• Mysterious Psychic Forces, another great work on the paranormal featuring abundant first-hand testimony by the astronomer Camille Flammarion;
• Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery by Casper S. Yost, a book documenting one of the most interesting cases of the twentieth century;
• Seen and Unseen by Emily Katherine Bates, a remarkable account of a woman's observations of paranormal phenomena around the world;
• The Proofs of Life After Death, a balanced book presenting the opinions of many scientists, heavy thinkers and investigators regarding whether there is good evidence for life after death;
• An Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism by the Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, a book that abundantly testifies to the reality of clairvoyance during hypnotic trances; 
• The "Report on Spiritualism" by the Dialectical Society of London, a document of more than 400 pages containing some of the most shocking and interesting testimony ever given (the contents of which are discussed here). 
• Incidents in My Life by D. D. Home, one of the most famous mediums;
• The Case for Astral Projection by Slyvan Muldoon;
• Supernormal Faculties in Man by Eugene Osty, one of the most carefully documented accounts of clairvoyance, including the very interesting case discussed here;
• Man and His Relations by Samuel Byron Brittan, a very long and little-known classic of parapsychology with contents described here. 
• Glimpses of the Unseen by B. F. Austin, a 500+ page book documenting a great variety of paranormal experiences;
•  The 633-page book "Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena, Their Observation and Experimentation" by Dr. Paul Joire, which you can read here (it includes the extremely interesting case I discuss here);
• Studies in the Out-lying Fields of Psychic Science by Hudson Tuttle; 
• Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, a long case history of one of history's most astonishing clairvoyants;
• China's Super Psychics by Paul Dong and Thomas E. Raffill;
• Man's Survival After Death by Charles L.Tweedale, a long book that includes many cases from the annals of the Society for Psychical Research, as well as many fascinating first-hand cases of paranormal observation by Tweedale and his family;
• Psychic Science: An Introduction and Contribution to the Experimental Study of Psychical Phenomena by Emile Boirac, which you can read here. 

If you take the time to register at www.archive.org, which does not take long, the door will be opened to a huge number of more modern books, which you can "borrow" on an hourly basis simply by pressing a Borrow button after logging in. By clicking on the Borrow button after registering, you will be able to read important works on the paranormal such as these: 

• Life After Life by Raymond Moody;
• Hidden Channels of the Mind by Louisa Rhine, who was one of the leading collectors of accounts of spontaneous telepathy and spontaneous precognition;
• Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder;
• The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People by Sally Rhine Feather and Michael Schmicker;
• What Happens When You Die by Robert Crookall PhD, which contains many interesting accounts of out-of-body experiences;
• Out-of-Body Experiences: A Handbook by Janet Lee Mitchell;
• Extraordinary Experiences: Personal Accounts of the Paranormal in Canada by John Robert Colombo;
• At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson.

An aspect of www.archive.org that I particularly like is that there are individual URLs for each page.  So if a scholar is citing page 347 of some book, he can include a link that takes the reader exactly to that specific page. 

A technique I recommend for serious students of psychic phenomena is to read works at www.archive.org, and look for references in such works to other books that sound worth reading. When you hear an interesting book mentioned, then look and see whether that book is also available for free at www.archive.org. If so, save the URL for that other book in a reading list to be finished later. 

I have recently found quite a few interesting works at www.archive.org on the topic of what is called after-death communication.  In such an event someone may experience some mysterious effect he may regard as having come from some person who died. For example:

• Someone may report that while awake he heard the voice of someone who died.
• Someone may report that while awake he saw some human form that looked like someone who died.
• Someone may report some mysterious hard-to-explain event occurring at the time someone died or shortly thereafter. 
• Someone may report having some "feeling of presence" in which he somehow gets the idea that some deceased person is near. 
• Someone may report some very hard-to-explain event that he regards as some kind of sign of manifestation of someone who died, which may occur months or years after the person died. 
• Someone may have an unusually high number of dreams about someone who died. 
• Someone may have some particularly vivid dream about someone who died. 

A scientific paper tells us that experiences such as these are common. Below is a quote:

"Haraldsson reported on an Icelandic survey in which 31% reported that they had ‘perceived or felt the nearness of a deceased person’ (36% of women, 24% of men), and in the USA McCready and Greeley found that 27% of respondents answered affirmatively the question ‘Have you ever felt that you were really in touch with someone who had died?’ In the UK, an Ipsos MORI poll found that 17% of their sample claimed to have personally experienced a ‘ghost’, and a subsequent poll found that 10.4% had experienced an ADC [after-death communication].  In Germany the incidence of having experienced an ‘apparition’ (described as perceiving something they took for a ‘ghost’ of someone who had died) was 15.8% (18.6% of women, 11.3% of men). These experiences seem to be independent of culture or religious affiliation."

One very interesting book on this topic (which can be read at www.archive.org) is the 2005 book "Induced After-Death Communication : A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma" by Alan L. Botkin, who holds a Doctor of Psychology degree. After mentioning 20 years of experience treating subjects at a Chicago Veterans Administration hospital, Botkin describes a very high success rate treating grief-stricken subjects or subjects suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome), using an extremely unorthodox technique.  The technique first involves something called  EMDR (eye movement desenitization and reprocessing), which sounds a bit like hypnosis.  The technique somehow leads to subjects reporting visions of the deceased, experiences that end up having a highly therapeutic value.  Botkin says he has used that technique on thousands of patients, and claims "the therapy method has worked for nearly everyone with whom we have had sessions."  Conversely, conventional therapeutic methods of treating PTSD tend to be very much less effective. 

On page 32 Botkin states that the cases he treats often involve someone haunted by some image of the last time they saw a dead person, perhaps a distressed or disfigured face or a badly wounded person. He says that with his technique such a distressing image is replaced by an image of the same person but with some smiling face, often accompanied by words claiming well-being or happiness.  On page 36 Botkin states that these "induced after-death communication" experiences which his subjects report typically last between 5 and 20 seconds, but may last as long as 10 to 20 minutes.  A movie recently atttempted to document therapeutic treatment based on Botkin's technique. You can learn about the movie at this site. 

Botkin's book has been largely ignored, which is a shame. Regardless of whether such experiences do or do not come from actual contact with the deceased, a technique that is so powerfully effective deserves the fullest attention of psychiatrists and psychologists.  What has occurred is just another example of the massive failure of psychiatrists and psychologists to follow up on promising leads, while continuing to stick with ineffective techniques that are largely chemical based.  In the nineteenth century before 1870 very many hypnotists reported the most astonishing medical improvements and useful medical effects (physical and psychological) from hypnotic treatment, which were long referred to under the name of Mesmerism or animal magnetism.  But after about 1870 there was little effort by psychologists to follow up on such successes, using the methods that had produced the successes. There was often a practice of hypnotism, but a kind of watered-down version of hypnotism that was not as effective.  

Two other books on after-death communication that can be read on www.archive.org are the book After Death Communication by Emma Heathcote-James and the book Messages and Miracles: Extraordinary Experiences of the Bereaved by Louis E. Legrand PhD. In these books we have many accounts of apparition sightings.  Countless apparition sightings were reported in the literature of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as you can read about in the post here and the posts that post links to. Some have claimed that in modern times apparitions are seen less frequently, but judging from the accounts in these books, that is not the case. 

On page 137 of the Legrand book, we have an interesting list of different types of apparitions that people report seeing. These include two-dimensional apparitions like seeing a photo, three-dimensional apparitions in which someone may look as real as if he were still alive on Earth, mist-shrouded or translucent apparitions, apparitions that appear only as a figure, and "angelic" apparitions in which someone may appear surrounded by light.  For example, in a different book on after-death communications by a different PhD, we have on page 30 an account of a person saying she saw her deceased sister standing in a doorway "as solid as you or me," with an instant disappearance "in the blink of an eye." But on the next page we have an account by a different person saying she saw her deceased father "see-through, but with color," an apparition that "began fading until it just disappeared."  The author of the book (Edie Devers) says, "Many people report seeing the deceased as a living person (no different from any other living person) or as a spiritual entity (transparent and/or not in a physical body)."

The book by Legrand has very many lengthy first-person accounts of people who reported having hard-to-explain experiences that the author has categorized as after-death communication.  One minor imperfection with Legrand's book is that he repeatedly defines after-death communication as if it only occurred with mourning people, but quite a few experiences like those in my bullet list above seem to occur to people who are no longer mourning some friend or relative who died. 

The book is written in question-and-answer format. On pages 101-102 Legrand considers the question of how some soul could make contact with an earthly relative (or give some sign to an earthly relative) after that soul had progressed to some afterlife realm.  Legrand's answer is a poor one. He basically appeals to the miraculous, saying that this could happen if God willed it or some angel helped it happen.  He could have answered the question in a better way. 

Let us consider the hypothesis that a human soul can survive death and progress or travel to some afterlife realm of existence. It is not necessary to maintain that such a thing happens each time by some divine fiat, by some miraculous intervention.  Following the very strong evidence (discussed in the posts of this site) that the brain is absolutely inadequate to account for human mental phenomena and human memory, we can believe very justifiably that the real basis of human minds and human memory is some non-neural soul. If humans have a soul, there could be some transit path by which souls can leave Earth and go elsewhere.  Evidence from near-death experiences suggest that there may well be such a transit path. Commonly people in near-death experiences experience something like traveling through a tunnel or arriving in some afterlife realm where deceased ancestors are seen.  If such a transit path exists,  then that implies a strong possibility or probability that the path allows travel in both directions. 

Humans sometimes construct one-way transit paths. But most of nature's transit paths are two-way paths.  For example, a river and a lake and an ocean can be crossed going in either direction. So can a mountain pass or a desert plain or a meadow or the atmosphere (in which helicopters or spacecraft can traverse going up or down).  It is relatively rare to find in nature a one-way transit path (a waterfall is practically the only example I can think of). 

One of nature's rather rare one-way paths

If a human soul could somehow leave our earthly realm and go to some other state of existence, this tends to imply the possibility of a return (possibly a very brief return) by which the journey can be made in the opposite direction.  So if Joe believes that his late mother died and that her soul went to some heaven or afterlife realm, it would seem that Joe should not be terribly surprised to see such a person briefly returning (or perhaps some sign created by the invisible presence of such a person after briefly returning).  Most paths of travel are two-way paths rather than one-way paths. 

Mysterious appearances of coins are some of the things that many people regard as examples of manifestations from the departed or some other strange reality, perhaps angels. I have had innumerable mysterious-seeming occurrences involving coins, such as seeing a coin roll up from behind me (on its edge) while I was alone in an apartment, and just after I had double-checked that there were no loose coins in the apartment (a checking that followed what seemed like, over several days, a great repetition of finding mysterious coins in the apartment).  Just after publishing this post on my blog today, I found a dime in my shoe, right under the heel of my foot. The shoe (a typical running shoe like the one here) was one which I had previously worn a few minutes earlier without noticing any such thing.  

An interesting and very speculative hypothesis is that it is possible for some mysterious unseen presence to move or materialize objects in our world, but that the more massive the object, the harder such a task is. In such a case we might expect strange events involving very lightweight objects such as dimes and hairs and small feathers to occur vastly more often than strange events involving heavy objects.  In a 2018 post I stated, "Since 2014 the breakdown of the number of anomalous-seeming coins I have sighted is as follows: 121 pennies, only two nickels, 20 quarters, and 62 dimes, for a total of 205 coins."  What is striking here is that I recorded hard-to-explain dimes appearing 36 times more frequently than hard-to-explain nickels, but in the US coin population dimes are only about twice as common as nickels.  So it is incredibly unlikely that such a 36-to-1 ratio would occur among some random set of hundreds of coins.  The difference might have to do with the fact that a nickel is about twice as heavy as a dime. Under the imaginative hypothesis I mentioned, the sighting of hard-to-explain nickels might be less common because it is harder for spooky things to happen with heavier objects.