Dead People Appearing

(An excerpt from my upcoming book "Hearts Wide Open - Leaving Religion, Finding Faith"

I am starting to sense a thin veil between this life and the next.

Too many experiences have come my way in recent years to hint that loved ones may die but our relationship with them can continue.

In the past, my academic training taught me that everything I experience comes from within the walls of my brain. Any impressions or dreams or visions come from many physical directions including the collective unconscious.
But reductionist science tells me that the appearances are nothing but physical

My theological training taught me that anyone who consults a medium is damned by the big Kahuna in the sky.

But what was that experience with the praying mantis that came in response to a request to ancestors “Show me a sign”?
“The Day I met an Ancestor” medium.com/p/3c80b5977941

How about the following for a parallel experience?

Recently I read how Mythologist Joseph Campbell was in his fourteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan. He was reading how the praying mantis was a hero symbol in Bushman mythology.

Campbell suddenly had a rare urge to go over to the window and open it. When he stuck his head out the window and peered to his right, he noticed a praying mantis staring at him.

Later he wrote, “Its face looked like the face of a Bushman’s face. It gave me the creeps!”

A posting on The Mystical Underground captured my thinking about both our and Campbell’s experience
“Think about it. How many praying mantises hang out on the 14th-floor windowsills of Manhattan apartments?”

Describing the appearance of this magical creature as a coincidence takes the poetry out of the experience.

It was one of those awe-inspiring goosebumps revelations where the veil between this world and the next can, at times, seem to be very thin. Photographer and poet Anne Berry gives another lens through which to view such visits,

Fragments of stories collected with light,

In a world enchanted, often unreal,

And what’s essential is hidden from sight.

So trust not reason but what you can feel.

Each piece of this tale is part of a whole,

An epic, a play, a poem for the soul.

My expanding faith now embraces the strong possibility of dead folks appearing.

Are my ancestors just a heartbeat away beyond the veil?

Today I find myself communing with my mother, who, in her words, has gone home to her reward. I ask what she thinks about this or that in my life. I get the message, “keep walking in the light!”

Is this message luck, coincidence, or something that just rattles around in my brain? I’m divided and at the experimental stage regarding meetings with departed ones.

What the heck? Why not talk to my departed mother? After all, if Roman Catholics can speak to their saints, why can’t I speak with mine, my mother?

Such contact experiences are my growing edge spiritually. I’m excited to sign up for many other similar classes in the future.

What about your visitations from the great beyond?

#general