I’ve always been curious if there really is life “on the other side”. Over the years I’ve read quite a bit about it, and there actually is some pretty strong evidence for it, but the materialist science community stomps on that evidence pretty hard. However, there is nothing like real-life, personal examples to sway the hard skeptics. In fact, my sister and I have had a few such experiences since our mom died.
Incident 1
Mom died just around tax time. In fact, she had a previously arranged
appointment with H&R Block on the very day we arrived in town after my sister and I learned of the news. We kept the appointment and met mom’s tax preparer and handed her all of the receipts and papers. She had known mom for several years, so she was somewhat shocked and upset herself about our loss.
When we came back the next week after the funeral to sign-off on the tax return and pay the bill, the tax lady had a strange story to tell us. “Do you believe in ESP?” she started. “When you first came in, I was too distracted and had not yet realized a strange incident with your mom’s account had actually occurred on the very day she died!” Apparently, their computer system started popping up a report that she hadn’t paid the bill for the preparation of her tax return. The lady had thought that was very odd because she knew mom had not even come in yet, as she had the appointment booked for a few days later. It also couldn’t have been a notice for last year’s bill as mom always liked to pay in-full right away. The puzzled staff was starting to think that the computer system was malfunctioning, but eventually their receptionist was able to permanently dismiss the pop-up notice.
Our tax lady was quite spooked when she later realized this incident happened the very morning of the death—probably only a few hours afterwards. My sister and I thought it was fitting: our mom was always worried about getting her paperwork done and her taxes filed on time. It would be quite like her to realize her own death and then immediately trying to report into the tax office!
Incident 2
After my sister had returned home to Calgary after the funeral last spring, we still had much to discuss over the phone, such as the plan for tackling probate. In one call we began discussing this topic, exploring the idea that we should try it ourselves and reviewing the different steps that would be necessary. Suddenly, a radio came on in the background at my sister’s house that I could hear over the phone. Her husband (now deceased) had played around with tube-radios and had a few set up so that they came on randomly, acting as a security feature to make the house sound occupied.
My sister excused herself to go turn the volume down as it seemed to be blaring at us rather loudly. As I held the line, I could catch some of the words and got the gist of the broadcast: “If you are applying for probate by yourself, you may want to consider the services of a probate coach”! My sister came back on and asked excitedly, “You’ll never guess what the radio program was about!”
That certainly was an interesting coincidence. The odds of a radio randomly switching itself on to a talk show about managing your own probate application just as we were discussing that very subject seem truly incredible. Again, our mom was always concerned about ensuring her affairs were in order, so it seems appropriate that she would send us advice about such matters in any way she could!
Incident 3
Last summer and fall, I often went back to my mom’s house alone to wrap things up there. However, in early October my wife and son came with me on one occasion. We were preparing for an extended period of cleaning up all the years of accumulated clutter and holding an estate sale. My wife and I wanted to take some pictures so we could get a sense of the “before and after” state of the house, while our young son hovered around in the background looking for something to do or interrupting us with questions and/or requests to play. He was feeling a bit nervous in the house, knowing that his grandmother had died there, and was on the look out for ghosts.
At one point my while I was talking to my wife who was occupied with some project in the kitchen area, I felt a little poke at my backside. I distractedly turned around expecting to be faced with an impatient son wanting my attention. However, no one was behind me. My son was sitting on the living room couch several feet away, totally engaged in a favorite TV show…
I could have sworn someone touched me as I stood at the threshold between the kitchen and living room, right beside the chair my mom had died in, but I decided not to mention it to my son. That would have confirmed his ghost suspicions for sure!
Who really knows if and how the dead can communicate with us. Perhaps it is an effect of our own unconscious designs; we want to get some sort of sign that our loved ones are still with us, so we assign that meaning to events that are simply coincidental.
Or maybe not. Newtonian science is running up against several problematic issues that it simply cannot explain away: near-death and out-of-body experiences, for example. Dutch cardiac surgeon Pim Van Lommel, among others, has published studies indicating that about 18% of patients who are clinically dead (no heart beat and no brain activity) and later resuscitated report a near death experience of conscious-like reality. They often report the conversations and surgical activities that occur while they are “gone” with astounding technical accuracy. Materialist, classical physics and biochemistry cannot account for this as it holds that our senses and consciousness are fully dependent on a working brain. However, more modern branches of physics, such as Quantum Mechanics, point to possibilities that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon of the brain, but more of a cosmic undercurrent, interconnecting us in ways we can’t yet believe.
Perhaps our true selves really are just ghosts in our body-machines…
ReSearching MySelf 