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Reviews Written by
Michael E. Tymn (Kailua, Hawaii)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting, Informative, Intriguing, November 7, 2009
If the author, Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., is correct, an 890-page book called "Oahspe" is the best kept secret in the world. But it is not supposed to be a secret. It was intended to be as well known as the Bible and provide answers to humankind on all life's mysteries, including the history of the planet, the history of the human race, the fate of man, and countless other matters pertaining to the nature of man and the purpose of life. It was not intended to supplant the Bible, but to be a new Bible.
The book is said to have been communicated to man in 1881 by spirit intelligence through the mediumship of Dr. John B. Newbrough, a physician as well as a dentist. "You have observed, no doubt, that in Oahspe no mention is made of the manner in which the book was written, nor by whom," Newbrough wrote in a January 21, 1883 letter to the editor of The Banner of Light, which appears in the appendix of Martinez's book. "Well, was it not plain to anybody acquainted with such matters, that nay statement on my part would not be believed by persons unacquainted with spiritual manifestations? And had I said that I myself wrote it, my own acquaintances would have known better. Had I said that the angels wrote it through my hands, then I would have been denounced as a pretender."
Newbrough goes on to say that Oahspe was mechanically written through his hands by some other intelligence than his own (automatic writing). He explained that he discovered this ability many years before as his hands "would go flying off into these `tantrums.'"
Newbrough often put questions to the spirits. For example, when Newbrough asked about the fate of souls in the afterlife, the reply came, in part: "When you leave your earthly bodies,
your gilded or earthly character is stripped off, and we all behold you and know just what you are, for your inside life is your real spirit. On this spirit are stamped all the good and evil deeds ever done in the body and the name of this print is called conscience. While on earth, the wicked can divert and hold his conscience in abeyance by seeking amusement or recreation, but when he is born into spirit life his victims are a stain on his garment that he cannot hide even from his own vision."
Born in Ohio in 1828, Newbrough left behind only bits and pieces about his life. Those who knew him left only fragmentary reports. In "The Hidden Prophet," Dr. Martinez has taken scores of these bits and pieces and fragments, including various newspaper clippings and other references discovered in her research in an attempt to find out exactly who Newbrough was. In telling the reader of his early years, she provides much interesting history of the times, including the economic hardships, the social reforms, and the individual struggles. Martinez informs us that though Newbrough was never a Quaker, he was apparently very much influenced by the Quakers, whose "works were a strength and pillar for every American opposed to dogma, bondage, and duplicity." I learned that a "buck," when used to mean a dollar, came from trading buckskins. I also learned that facial hair came into fashion among men with the end of the Crimean War in 1856. There are a number of interesting tidbits of this type.
Martinez provides history on the Spiritualist movement which began in 1848 and also significantly affected Newbrough, who observed much in the way of physical mediumship and lectured on it, sometimes as himself and at other times while in a trance with spirits speaking through him.
Before receiving the wisdom that came through his hands, Newbrough was told by spirits that he had to purge himself for a number or years by becoming a vegetarian. When the messages started coming, Newbrough acquired a relatively new invention called the typewriter and learned how to use it. However, his normal pick and peck typing turned to rapid transmission of around 10,000 words per hour under the control of spirits.
"Yet even while velocity per se may prove to be a clue to genuine overshadowing, it is not only quantitative measures that distinguish the real from the imagined prodigy," Martinez points out. "One must, ultimately reckon with the quality of the thing - the value, the significance, the originality, the excellence." And it is that quality that Martinez and other people called "Faithists" find in Oahspe and why it is so important to know a little about the man through whom it was communicated.
The non-Faithist who chooses to read this book may very well be intrigued enough to find out more about Oahspe.
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Lessons of Heart & Mind, October 14, 2009
"We are Michael, Seth, and Archangel Thomas, and we are here to provide you with information about the soul, humanity, life lessons, karma and processes for peace in the world."
So came the words to Eva Herr, the author of this book, after she realized she was channeling messages from the spirit world. Herr states that she had not believed in psychic powers until her experiments with a pendulum in May 2003. The more she practiced with the pendulum, the faster the messages came.
"If a soul does not thrive, it wants," Herr was informed. "It cannot remember the memory of love and therefore does not know for that which it wants. When a soul wants but does not know what it wants, negativity breeds..." The communicating spirit went on to explain the importance of positive energy outbalancing negative energy if the world is to survive as we know it.
In Part I of the book, Herr tells of her many personal struggles and then her spiritual awakening in which overnight she received a detailed understanding of the afterlife, souls, life lessons, humanity, and karma. She tells of a visit by her deceased father, who explained how things work on the other side of the veil. "It was strange to me that he never moved his lips while speaking to me," Herr writes. "I just seemed to understand what he wanted me to understand. But it was more than just understanding. It was as if I knew volumes of information for each thought he had."
Among the things Herr came to understand from that experience is that the emotion you die with is the emotion you carry over with you, and, concomitantly, she understood how important it is to not fear death. "Those who are dying sometimes needlessly hang on for long periods because of their fear of death," she states.
Part II of the book sets for the teachings of Michael, Seth, and Thomas that came through the pendulum. Among the subjects discussed are the origin of a soul, free will, the role of the archangels, karma, life lessons, suicide, reincarnation, vibrational frequencies, love, prayer, and afterlife dimensions.
"The world of physical reality exists for lessons of heart and mind," Herr was informed, but it was further explained that it is necessary for the soul to be tuned to the right frequency if it is to progress. It is up to the soul to choose to vibrate at the appropriate frequency.
This is a very informative, interesting, and intriguing read. There is much food for thought to ponder on and it is consistent with modern revelation which has come to us through other gifted sensitives of one kind or another. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the world is absorbing these teachings fast enough and so the spirit world continues to seek out gifted people like the author to try to hammer them across to us and achieve the necessary homeostasis in the balance between the positives and negatives, between good and evil, between love and fear. Hopefully, the balance will shift soon.
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A Physician Ahead of the Times, July 19, 2009
Science has always lagged behind ultimate reality, and the prevailing scientific fundamentalists have imposed punitive sanctions upon those who dare venture outside the narrow parameters of their fundamentalism, but there have always been men and women of courage and vision among scientists, those who are willing to risk ridicule and rejection so that science can move closer to ultimate truth. Dr. John L. Turner, the author of this book, appears to be one of these courageous individuals and his book is very much welcomed.
A neurosurgeon, Turner reports on some of his very interesting medical cases, including one in which a malignant brain tumor disappeared after seven Buddhists monks intervened. "I couldn't believe my eyes! There was no trace of the lesion that had glared menacingly from the screen before and after the surgery," Turner writes. In another case - brain surgery in which Turner seemed to have exhausted all options - he decided to try prayer. "This case taught me that there is a higher power," Turner explains his decision to continue pursuing his journey.
Turner tells of his experiments with astral projection, remote viewing, and meditative chanting. By chanting, he found that he could disassociate his mind from his body and become aware of remote events. Then he discovered Jorei, a form of healing energy channeled from the spirit world pioneered by Mokichi Okada of Japan. Initially, Turner found Jorei "a difficult pill to swallow," but the more he studied and observed it, the more he began to realize that there was something to it. "I had no idea that I was about to follow a meandering pathway that would manifest dramatic results with alternative methods of healing and the use of universal energy," he writes.
After further training in Jorei, Turner began to experience first hand the positive results that can come from tapping into the universal energy. As might be expected, Turner had materialistic colleagues who smirked, sneered, and scoffed at his newfound beliefs in a spiritual world and energy healing. Undaunted, Turner pushed on and with additional successes further embraced the blending of Eastern and Western healing methods. "We are in contact with the universal force before birth, after birth, and beyond death of the physical body," he concludes, adding that it is not a matter of faith but of waking up to the spiritual world.
Based on what he has learned so far, Turner says he is reasonably certain we live on in a never-ending universe. But one of his goals now is to find ways in which complimentary medicine, or energy medicine, might contribute to the quality of this lifetime. "We need to better understand," he offers, "that we are one with that energy and one with all things."
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Captivating!, June 19, 2009
On the surface, Catholicism and Spiritualism are widely divergent belief systems. As a former Catholic and now a Spiritualist (of sorts), I know how difficult it is to explain my beliefs - or rather, my convictions - to my Catholic friends and relatives. They shake their heads at my explanations of the various phenomena involved in Spiritualism, while I struggle to understand why they find them so difficult to accept and wonder how their minds can be so closed to phenomena that is so much part of Church history.
It is this gap between the two schools of thought that make this book especially interesting. One knows before beginning the book that there will be a marriage between a former Jesuit priest and a Spiritualist minister, but the reader is held in suspense as to how they will meet, discover that they are soul mates, and then reconcile their seemingly conflicting religious beliefs.
Author Suzanne Giesemann, a former Navy officer, tells two stories in alternating chapters before the priest and the medium meet and fall in love. She tells how Anne Gehman, raised in the Mennonite tradition, discovered at an early age that she had mediumistic abilities, being able to communicate with the "dead" as well as to sometimes see the future. She takes us through some very interesting paranormal experiences with Gehman, including her near-death experience, the solving of crimes, some intriguing prophecy, and guidance from the Other Side.
In between chapters on Gehman, Giesemann introduces us to Wayne Knoll, a Kansan whose early ambition was to be a Jesuit priest and teach at Georgetown. She takes us through his trials and tribulations en route to earning his Ph.D. at Harvard and then fulfilling his dream by teaching at Georgetown. She details his struggle to overcome his loneliness and find companionship.
Finally, as if governed by fate, the two meet and marry. The final 30 or so pages involve a dialogue between the priest and the medium as to reconciling their views of God and the spirit world. It would seem that their beliefs were not that divergent after all.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A Long Overdue Biography, June 13, 2009
The latter part of the 19th Century was a time of despair and hopelessness for many. "We were all in the first flush of triumphant Darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond," wrote Frederic W. H. Myers, a Cambridge classical scholar and poet before becoming a pioneering psychical researcher.
As with so many other educated people, Myers, the son of a minister, had lost his faith, and life had become a march toward an abyss into nothingness. He recognized that there were many who were "willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually dissipate and obscure the larger hope" during life's death march, but, perhaps because he was a deep thinker, Myers was unable to effectively use the defense mechanism called repression to overcome his death anxiety and the concomitant fear of extinction.
Subtitled "FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death," this book details the efforts of Myers and several of his colleagues to make sense out of various paranormal phenomena which seemed to suggest that the world is not totally mechanistic and that consciousness does survive physical death.
Although Professor William Barrett, a physicist, is recognized as the prime mover in setting up the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, he relinquished the leadership roles to Myers and his two Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, and Professor Henry Sidgwick. Their objective was to scientifically study the phenomena, including hypnotism, telepathy, multiple personalities, and mediumship, to see if they offered any evidence that mind was not totally dependent on brain and that there is something beyond the five sense. But they had to do it discreetly, cautiously, and indirectly. "To admit the literal reality of the ghost was to move back to the dark ages," author Trevor Hamilton explains their dilemma. There were simply too many "newly enlightened" people in the upper echelons of society who could not make a distinction between matters of the spirit and the superstitions of the church they had left behind and now scoffed at.
"It is too simple to represent Victorian England as a pious, fundamentalist land shaken by the advances of a materialistic and iconoclastic science," Hamilton states, pointing out that the census of 1851 revealed that well over five million people did not attend church on Sunday, March 30, 1851. However, it was clear, Hamilton adds, that the educated middle classes and upper-middle classes were emancipating themselves from their evangelical roots as a result of the scientific and scholarly advances. Darwinism might have been the crowning blow, but this emancipation had begun well before Darwin, during the "Age of Reason."
Drawing from Myers' diary, short autobiography written only for his friends, and other references, Hamilton explores Myers' early life and the influences which shaped his beliefs and disbeliefs. He acquaints us with his days at Cambridge, when he was called, "Myers the superb," and then discusses his conflicting love interests as well as other trials and tribulations. He tells how Myers hooked up with Gurney and Sidgwick and how the three intellectuals complemented each other in various ways - Myers often brash and assertive, Sidgwick reserved and cautious, Gurney meticulous and somewhere in between Myers and Sidgwick in his enthusiasm for their mission.
The SPR exposed many fraudulent mediums, although there is controversy over some of the exposures, including that of Madame Blavatsky. The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino was also very controversial, some members of the SPR convinced that she was a charlatan and other that she was a genuine medium, whereas the truth seems to be that she was a "mixed" medium - producing genuine phenomena at times and faking some at those times were her powers failed her. Theosophists, in the case of Blavatsky, and Spiritualists, in the case of various other mediums, argued that the researchers simply didn't understand the phenomena and were applying terrestrial science to celestial matters which they didn't understand.
As Hamilton sees it, Myers was caught in a Victorian dilemma. "One set of desires, the yearning for the immortal, spiritual universe, was opposed by another set, which was the wish for privacy and the hiding of any evidence that breached the unimpeachable façade of familial and moral behaviour," he writes. "His need to prove and even preach survival was counterbalanced by his reticence over intimate evidence."
That "intimate evidence" involved a number of evidential messages coming to him through different mediums from Annie Marshall, his great love of the early 1870s (although apparently a platonic affair because of her marriage to Myers' cousin). When Annie killed herself because of her many frustrations, Myers grieved deeply. When he later married the beautiful and wealth Eveleen Tennant, their marriage was troubled somewhat because of Annie's communications with Myers from beyond the veil - communications which Myers kept private and were destroyed by his wife after his death in 1901.
Although not educated as a psychologist, Myers has been credited with developing a systematic conception of the subliminal self as well as a theory holding that telepathy is one of the basic laws of life. In fact, it was Myers who coined the word "telepathy," previously called "thought transference." As Hamilton points out, Myers seems to have been ahead of Freud in exploring the subconscious (which Myers preferred to call the subliminal), although their theories bore little resemblance to each other. When Freud joined the SPR in 1911, he wrote an article making it clear that Myers' "subliminal" was not the same as his "unconscious." Hamilton quotes Aldous Huxley as saying that Myers' "unconscious" was superior to Freud's in that it was more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience. How much Myers influenced Freud is not clear, but there is little doubt that Myers' ideas significantly influenced pioneering psychiatrist William James. And yet, because Myers dared see a soul hidden in the physical shell, he is hardly remembered in psychology circles today as the prevailing paradigm remains the Wundtian approach, which holds that the only things that make sense are those which can be scientifically measured and quantified.
Myers died in 1901, a victim of Bright's disease. William James wrote that "his serenity, in fact, his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle and deeply impressed the doctors, as well as ourselves."
After Myers death in 1901, various mediums began receiving messages purportedly coming from him. Some of these messages were very fragmented and made no sense until they were collected and pieced together to make complete ideas. "The whole process seemed at times like a giant Victorian word game (anagrams, cryptic puzzles, strange puns and rhymes), of which, in fact, Myers and his colleagues...were inordinately fond," Hamilton explains These so-called "cross-correspondences" were interpreted by other researchers as attempts by Myers, as well as by Gurney and Sidgwick, both of whom preceded him in death, to overcome some of the objections to mediumship, including fraud and telepathy. "[They suggested] a high level of collective design and purpose, implying character, intention and personality," Hamilton states.
One message for Sidgwick's widow, Eleanor, who had been very active in the SPR, read, "Now, dear Mrs. Sidgwick, in future have no doubt or fear of so called death, as there is none."
Hamilton concludes the book by asking if Myers' quest had been successful. "In personal terms it was," he opines. ""He became convinced, on the basis of the intimate sittings he had with both Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson, that he had communicated with human beings (however different their nature and post-mortem existence) who had survived bodily death. This belief was underpinned by his wide ranging reading and research in paranormal and abnormal activity across Europe and in the United States. It led to him bearing the onset of death with a kind of joyous resilience, almost even insouciance..."
On the other hand, Myers obviously failed in his wider hope of establishing immortality for the spiritually-challenged masses. While the search for immortality continues today, more than a hundred years later, the foundation established by Myers and his colleagues seems to be slowly but increasingly appreciated.
Hamilton offers us a very interesting, intriguing, informative, in-depth, and even inspirational look at one of history's most overlooked and unappreciated contributors.
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Darklore Volume 3
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by Greg Taylor
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $12.55 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting, Intriguing, Informative, April 28, 2009
As with Dark Lore I and II, I admit to being a biased reviewer, having contributed one of the 14 stories to this anthology concerning the paranormal. My contribution is on the Glastonbury Scripts, which involved the excavation of the Glastonbury Abbey ruins in England. Frederick Bligh Bond, the architect and archaeologist hired in 1907 to excavate the ruins, decided to employ a medium and contact long-dead monks who had lived at the abbey for information as to where to dig. Over a period of some 12 years, interrupted by World War I, Bond received more than 60 messages from the monks directing his excavations. Many of them were exact to the inch. Some, however, were a little off due to overlapping construction over the centuries. The monks sometimes disagreed among themselves as to how things were in the abbey's heyday.
The other 13 stories touch upon a wide variety of paranormal subjects. Nick Redfern gives a different spin to the Roswell E.T. theory. Greg Taylor, the editor of the anthology, discusses some of the pre-Raymond Moody near-death experiences, including that of Dr. George Ritchie, whose NDE inspired Moody's 1975 best-seller. Greg Bishop presents the very intriguing story of Dr. Mario Tazzaglini, who is said to have channeled aliens. Neil Arnold investigates the monsters of Dutch folklore, while Theo Paijmans gets to the occult roots of Nazi Technology and Robert Bauval searches for the secrets of Menkaure, builder of the third pyramid of Giza. Other contributors include Mike Jay, Philip Coppens, Blair MacKenzie Blake, Robert Schoch, Geoff Falla, Adam Gorightly, and "The Emperor," with the subjects ranging from the "Philadelphia Experiment" to ancient biblical sites.
I found the stories interesting, intriguing, and informative. It was a great bedside read, and I can honestly say I would give it five stars even if I had not contributed one of the articles.
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Making Sense of God, April 19, 2009
While I have read much of the material presented in this book over the years, I have never seen it all tied together in such a clear and informative manner as Dr. Jones has done. He has taken things that were bits and pieces of history to me and woven them together so that I now see the complete warp and woof of the fabric.
He covers the whole gamut, beginning with the nature of God based on scriptures from various religions on through the ideas of medieval philosophers, and then on to post-Renaissance thought and scientific investigations concerning the nature of the soul. "This book has been written to try to reconcile world-view derived rationally from science and philosophy with those originating from mystical insights to develop a coherent approach to the concept of the divine," he explains in the Preface, noting that while scientists have mainly involved themselves to explain Creation without invoking the notion of God.
"Three great systems of thought - religious, philosophical and scientific - converge in portraying the physical world as simply our conscious sensory experience of it, Jones offers, going on to say that our sensory impressions are simply mental impressions or images, the exact nature of which we can never know.
Jones' discussion of religious concepts offered a number of things I was not aware of but also served as a reminder and refresher of things I had read but which had been buried deep in my subconscious. For example, he tells us that the preparation of the new Latin version of the Bible by Jerome was primarily an attempt to convert the pagans who still made up the majority of the population of Rome. He goes on to explain that political rivalry between the Greek and Latin theological empires in the years after 1054 ensured that the break between the Greek and Roman churches was maintained.
There is a discussion of newer religions, such as the Church of Latter Day Saints, Adventism, Christian Science, and the Baha'I faith.
In the Epilogue, Jones mentions how he was raised in a nonconformist Christian family and confirmed in the Church of England before drifting away from orthodoxy while training as a physical scientist. "I effectively became an atheist as defined by Western religious belief, though still obliged to attend church services with my wife at the time," he says. It was through "mystical enchantment" that he was first brought back to a belief in God, even if it was a belief much different from his earlier belief.
"I have now become totally convinced of a spiritual reality that is part of our everyday existence," he ends. "...I feel reassured in my belief by the fact that thre is now scientific theory that, again for me, underpins and rationalizes that which would be otherwise a plausible but unsubstantiated theological hypotheses to account for those psychical and mystical events that are usually described as paranormal or supernatural."
As the subtitle suggests, Jones makes sense of the world's biggest idea - God.
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Striving for Balance, April 16, 2009
Those seeking spiritual enlightenment are sometimes accused of not living a balanced life. In pursuing the spiritual, they often shut themselves off from more earthly matters and forget how to live in the material world. No one can accuse Don Morse, the editor of the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies as well as the past president of the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, of such polarity.
At 77, Morse, a retired Temple University science professor, clearly sees no conflict between "living in the now" and seeking spiritual enlightenment, as evidenced by the fact that he is actively engaged in senior bodybuilding competition, having won several titles in the sport over the past few years. As he sees it, the body is a gift the purpose of which is to glorify God. "We have an obligation to take care of our bodies, not just for our own well-being, but so we can of service to others," he explains his motivation and the reason for writing this book, which essentially is about living a quality life, especially in one's senior years.
With graduate degrees in dentistry, endodontics, microbiology and immunology, clinical psychology, and clinical nutrition, Morse has been teaching courses in "stress management" and health and wellness" at Camden County College the past five years.
The most helpful part of this book for me were the chapters on nutrition, but Morse touches all bases, discussing exercise, relaxation techniques; relationships; humor; diversions (hobbies, vacations); sleep; anger and anxiety control, overcoming obesity, dealing with smoking, alcohol, and drugs, avoiding unnecessary risks...and spirituality
He cites several studies suggesting that spiritual people, expecially those who attend religious services, live longer and healthier lives than others. In addition to a chapter on spirituality, Morse devotes a chapter to dying, death, and the afterlife, briefly discussing near-death experiences, other out-of-body experiences, mediumship, apparitions, past-life regressions, electronic voice phenomena and "God." He also briefly discusses the various monotheistic religions.
One of the people featured in the book is Dr. Alex Imich, who recently celebrated his 106th birthday, crediting his longevity to undernutrition, nutrient supplementation, meditation, regular exercise, and keeping his mind occupied in psychical research and other interests.
The book offers much humor, including many cartoons by Dr. Marvin Herring.
The bottom line as far as the spirituality aspects of the book are concerned is that by living a long, quality life we can better serve others and prepare for what is ahead in the afterlife.
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The Art of Dying
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by Peter Fenwick
Edition: Paperback |
| Availability: Currently unavailable |
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Gives Hope, March 25, 2009
Subtitled "A Journey to Elsewhere," this book is primarily about deathbed visions and visitations. The authors interviewed dozens of caregivers and gathered numerous interesting stories relating to the dying process. "There are plenty of papers about palliative care and pain control, but very few about the mental states during the dying process, or about the visions reported at this time by dying people," they explain their purpose of their investigation and for writing the book.
Dr. Peter Fenwick is an internationally renowned British neuro-psychiatrist and a leading authority on the near-death experience, while Elizabeth Fenwick has authored a number of health-related books. "All the experiences we have been told of point to death being part of a structured and supportive process," they write in the concluding chapter. "They also suggest that a greater understanding of what happens when we die would lead to a removal of our fear of death and open up the possibility of a new beginning, the start of a new journey..."
The Fenwicks' book is by no means the first on the subject of deathbed visions. Sir William Barrett's 1926 book "Death-Bed Visions" has become a classic in the field, while "At the Hour of Death" by K. Osis and E. Haraldsson, first published in 1977, added significantly to Barrett's book. More recently, Dr. Carla Wills-Brandon has added "One Last Hug Before I Go" to the short list of references on the subject. But, as with so many other areas not subject to strict scientific measurement and validation, much of old material has been forgotten, ignored, or resisted and there is a need to periodically resurrect the subject and explore more current cases.
Often, at the moment of death, the Fenwicks found, the dying patient is observed looking at a particular corner of room and commenting that a deceased love one is there. The dying person may stretch out his or her hand as if greeting the person and may even talk to deceased person. "Suddenly my Gran sat up in bed and smiled," one interviewee told the Fenwicks. "She said, `I'm going now and here's Dad and George come to meet me.' She then died still with this big smile on her face. My mother never forgot it."
In exploring deathbed visions and visitations, the Fenwicks examine coincidences, mental states, hallucinations, near-death experiences, and consciousness. In the end, they conclude that the evidence points to humans being "more than brain function, more than just a speck in creation, and that something, whether we regard it as soul or consciousness, will continue in some form or another, making its journey to `Elsewhere'."
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Minding the Gaps, February 11, 2009
In London, people riding the Underground train system are warned to "mind the gap," referring to the gap between the boarding platform and the train. Minding gaps is what this book is all about - the gaps between mind and matter, science and religion, materialism and spiritualism, the normal and the paranormal, quantum theory and relativity theory, the orthodox and the unorthodox, the first scientific revolution and the second scientific revolution, the three-dimensional world and the four-dimensional world, the four-dimensional world and the five-dimensional world, life and death, death and after death, mind and consciousness. To me, the author's lengthy discussion of the last-named gap, between mind and consciousness, and his theories explaining how this gap affects us after physical death make the book very special and unique.
"Mind interprets our sensed world and environment using reason, the cumulative result of real experiences of the material four-dimensional world placed within a specific mental framework or worldview," author Beichler, a semi-retired physics professor, explains, "while consciousness deals more with intuition, our innate feelings and subconscious understanding of the larger five-dimensional framework of physical reality."
Because all of our normal experiences come through our five senses, which operate in three-dimensional space, it is difficult to comprehend 4-D space. However, Beichler contends that our consciousness operates in 4-D space via "psi" or the sixth sense. A 4-D space with time gives a 5-D space-time dimension, which, Beichler, points out, was Kaluza'a 1921 extension of Einstein's 4-D space-time theory that we call general relativity.
Within this broader framework, Beichler establishes a theory of death which encompasses many things learned from paranormal phenomena, like near-death experiences and mediumship. As Beichler sees it, when mind is much more evolved than consciousness, those making the transition from this life to the larger life may be faced with a very big gap, thus encountering "boarding" problems. "If the person had achieved a higher level of consciousness, such as enlightenment, then the mind would already have memories of five-dimensional experience and would then merge with less difficulty into its new state of being," he offers. In such a case where mind - one rich in rational thinking - significanty exceeds (spiritual) consciousness, the mind might be "stuck" in its four-dimensional reality and not even realize that the body is dead. Or this "handicapped mind," still expecting input from the five senses, might experience a total blackness or "nothingness" because of the lack of consciousness.
"People with a more developed consciousness immediately utilize the connectivity of their consciousness to other portions of the five-dimensional single field to orient and prioritize the mind rather than using the mind to expand consciousness within their new five-dimensional habitat," Beichler further explains.
Beichler's model explains many of the characteristics and properties of the near-death experience. For example, noting that not all experiencers undergo a past-life review, he concludes that those who have a highly-developed consciousness - one that has kept pace with the development of the mind - probably don't need a life review as they have likely constantly reviewed their actions when alive in the flesh. At the other extreme, there are those not advanced enough in their conscious evolution to appreciate a life review, and still others who may not accept a life review because they deny their death and sense nothing at all. "In other words, people's minds seize upon the most familiar surroundings when they enter the new environment of the five-dimensional universe, but can still reject the experience completely depending upon their mind set and mental priorities at the time of death," Beichler offers.
Indeed, the mysteries of life and death present themselves as a very complex jigsaw puzzle that no one has been able to completely put together. Of course, there are scientific fundamentalists who think they have it figured out and religious fundamentalists who believe it is all spelled out for them in certain books. However, much of it remains a mystery to thinking, open-minded people. Beichler doesn't pretend to have all the answers but his model seemingly puts all the pieces of the puzzle in place, offering us a universe of purpose and one in which mind and consciousness survive beyond death.
Beichler begins by discussing the evolution of science and philosophy, from Aristotle on through Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and up through Planck and Einstein to the present. The first scientific revolution, he explains, was triggered by Descartes' differentiation between mind and matter, but the failure of science to completely and accurately define those two subjects led to the second scientific revolution. Still, science went off on a tangent and came up with mutually incompatible ideas, leaving mind and consciousness without clear definitions. He takes on the task of providing definitions.
"It is hoped that To Die For will teach people not to fear death, but to embrace it when it comes," Beichler states in the Introduction. "Nor should people ever force death to come when it is not due. Death is natural and should be viewed as a celebration of life, neither welcomed nor forced before its time, but accepted for what it is when it comes calling."
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(Kailua, Hawaii)
