1-800-HEAVEN

Communicating With Loved Ones Who Have Died

by Anne Puryear

Will it ever be possible dial a toll-free 800 number and talk with a loved one who has died? Perhaps that time may not be so far in the future.

My first experiences with attempts to communicate with the dead occurred in the early 70s, in a suburb of Maryland near Washington, D.C. I had just read Ruth Montgomery's book, A Search for the Truth, in which her guides, those who had died but were able to work with her from the other side, spoke to her. They told of future events, which later happened as they had predicted. Her credentials impressed me. She had been a very successful political writer, had written many books, was, like myself, a skeptic, yet couldn't deny the evidential information she and others received from those purportedly dead.

Nothing of that sort had ever happened to me or anyone I had known, but the book seemed so honest, so evidential, that I sat and prayed and asked that if such a thing was possible, to show me. After praying for several days. getting quiet and trying to "listen," finally something happened. I heard a male voice coming from my left side, then another from my right, and another in front of me. The voices were as clear as if someone were standing beside me, yet with my eyes open, I couldn't see anyone or anything, only hearing the voices. I wasn't afraid, just amazed and excited to hear them.

They invited me to sit and listen to them daily at 2:00 p.m., and they said they would share many things with me. I asked them if they were dead. They laughingly said, Most people would say that; but, we are more alive than when we had physical bodies." They told me that some like themselves were assigned to those of us who remained behind. 'They identified themselves only by initials, and said that had been assigned to me as guides for the next few years to help me with a work I was to do. They told me that this was the first time I had believed I could listen to or contact them, though they had been assigned to me for several years, trying to make their presence known. They also reminded me specifically of many times they had sent thoughts to me that I thought were my own to help me with a particular thing in my life. They said they were the ones who had directed me to Ruth Montgomery's book, Search for the Truth.

We talked awhile, and they left. I say "left" because after they said they would talk with me the next day, I could no longer hear them. I was shaken, but excited. I didn't tell anyone about my experience. I knew they would think I was crazy. Maybe I was, I admitted to myself.

At 2:00 p.m. the next day, I sat at my typewriter, as they had instructed, to "listen" to them. I felt really foolish. Perhaps I was imagining it all. After all, I had not ever heard their voices before yesterday, and not again since they spoke to me. I started to pray for protection and guidance, then paused quietly, waiting. Within a few moments, first one then another began to speak. 'They instructed me always to begin with prayer, and ask to be surrounded with light and protection, and to ask that anything I received would be for the highest spiritual good for myself and others. Then I was to begin to type what I heard. They said I could pause at any time and ask questions, and to know that at all times I had the free will to accept or reject anything they said. They said if they didn't have the answers to the questions that I had, they would go higher up to find out from others what I asked. With those statements, I relaxed a little.

The voice to my right began to speak and tell me about things that were going to happen in my life. These things did indeed occur very quickly in the following days. The voice in front of me continued with telling me about situations in the world and in history. The third gave me some philosophical advice about what was happening to me and how to prepare myself better. It felt like their voices would gently move my own thoughts aside, and their voices would fill that space. This kind of listening was not an easy process at times. Sometimes my mind would wander as they told me some fascinating fact, and they would call me back to attention, even spelling words letter by letter when I couldn't understand them clearly.

Through the years, my skepticism has warred with the guidance; yet time after time the guidance has proven to be true, and has been of incredible help in my life. With the aid and instructions of these guides, I never had a negative or frightening experience. After a few years of this "guidance from the dead," I was assigned four new guides, who have been companions with me along the pathway ever since. They tell me they once had physical bodies too. Some people are fearful and condemnatory of "mediumship" or "spiritualism." These "guides" are not "gods" to me but friends-friends I can call up on the "phone" and friends who may see the pathway ahead a little more clearly than I.

As they worked with me, they directed me to and I found hundreds of books, which I read voraciously. I discovered that my experiences were not all that different from hundreds of others. I was amazed at some of the scientific research about life after death that had been going on since the turn of the century, and continued to this day.

A retired West German fire equipment inspector Klaus Schreiber made his basement into a small-scale laboratory for electronic contact with the dead. There he recorded many faces of dead friends on his video camera. By transferring individual frames back and forth between video recorders, he often brings the hazy shapes into focus as faces on the screen. They are faces of people, including his daughter, who are dead. Several other experimenters have also made similar contacts.

Friedrich Jurgenson, a Swedish painter, musician and film producer, was recording bird songs. Upon playback he heard the voices of individuals addressing him personally and claiming to be dead relatives and friends of his. Subsequently he spent years recording and researching these voices and publishing his evidence. German psychologist Professor Hans Bender, director of Government-funded parapsychological research at the University of Freiburg, repeated Jurgenson's experiments and came to the same conclusions. He said, the tapes "contain human voices speaking recognizable words when played back. . . they yield prints in the same way as normal voices, and register as visible oscillograph impulses on videotape recordings."

Konstantine Raudive, a Latvian scientist, recorded over 50,000 of these voices and wrote about it in his amazing book, Breakthrough, which also came with a small record of the voices.

Raymond Moody, M.D., is a psychiatrist who previously researched the near-death experience (where people have died, recovered and came back to tell stories of the other side), and helped establish its scientific legitimacy. Moody`s latest book, Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones, reports on his research on after death communications. With his near-death experience research background and studies of techniques the ancients used to communicate with their dead, he was led to set up a remarkable experiment to help in "calling forth the spirits of the dead, producing visionary encounters in a laboratory setting." His book contains case studies that make even the most skeptical of us pause to think. "Contacting departed loves ones is not only a deep-seated human desire," he believes, but "also a fundamental part of the grieving and healing process."

So communication with the dead is not so far fetched and bizarre as some might think. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph and electric light bulb worked also on development of a device that he believed would make it possible to communicate with the dead. In October 1920 in an interview in the Scientific American, he said: "If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth. Therefore if personality exists after what we call death, it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left here. . . if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated. . . by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument when made available, ought to record something."

Researcher Bill Guggenheim in Florida has interviewed over 3,000 people who have had spontaneous and evidential experiences with a loved one who died. His instructive and convincing new book, Hello from Heaven, contains some of these stories.

Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, wrote in The Wisdom of Gibran: "Between the people of eternity and the people of earth there is a constant communication...oftentimes an individual will perform an act, believing that it is born of his own free will, accord and command, but in fact he is being guided and impelled with precision to do it. Many great people attained their glory by surrendering themselves in complete submission to the will of the spirit. . . as a violin surrenders itself to the complete will of a fine musician.

"Between the spiritual world and the world of substance there is a path upon which we walk in a swoon of slumber. It reaches us and we are unaware of its strength, and when we return to ourselves we find that we are carrying with our real hands the seeds to be planted carefully in the good earth of our daily lives, bringing forth good deeds and words of beauty. Were it not for that path between our lives and the departed lives, no prophet or poet or learned man would have appeared among the people."

Norman Vincent Peale adds: "I firmly believe in the continuation of life after what we call death takes place. I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon known as death; this side where we live, and the other side where we shall continue to live. Eternity does not start with death. We are in eternity now. We merely change the form of the experience called life-and that change, I am persuaded, is for the better."

Of two thousand people off the street, polled by a major university on the East Coast, 87% said they had had a communication with a loved one who died. Most of them had not told anyone, explaining, "They would have thought I was crazy."

There are dozens of scientific research projects demonstrating life after death. There are thousands of convincing accounts of near-death experiences. And there are thousands of personal experiences that credible people have had with loved ones who have died. These all indicate that the "dead" try to communicate with us in dozens of ways. They often just want to let us know they have survived and are OK. Some of them want to help us in various ways.

After reading and studying the mountain of research, I became involved in a scientific experiment with a group of researchers and scientists in what was then called, "paranormal voice recording," now called "electronic voice phenomena," or EVP, much like the work of Jurgenson and Raudive. Voices from the dead would appear on reel-to-reel tape, sometimes in response to questions, often spontaneously. When we played the tape back, voices which were much faster than normal speech had appeared on the tape. When played over and over again, we could begin to understand them. Often they contained messages for others. After experimenting with several friends and hearing the voice of my friend's father who was dead, I was a believer, and willingly participated with many others in this experiment. The results were amazing. One night, as the tape was replayed, a voice had spoken to each of us in the room, calling us by name.

But there were limitations to this technique and it was incredibly time consuming to play and replay the tapes to get a voice that sometimes held little helpful content. There was no way on the instruments available to the public at that time to slow the voices down. After four years of this research, my friends and I continued to experiment with various techniques of communication with the dead, some of which worked poorly and some fairly well.

How is it possible that the dead can communicate with us? Perhaps the veil between life and death can be lifted, or perhaps it isn't there as strongly as we have been taught to fear. Perhaps we can and should learn to listen and communicate in many different ways, not just as we usually do with our ears and our mouths and voices.

In the scriptures "angels" appeared to others in dreams, spoke to those who remained, appeared to them, and often directed them. There are some scriptures that seem to warn against such communication, but the same scriptures advocate stoning rebellious children and leaving your sideburns untrimmed. Other sacred scriptures contain not only information about communicating with the dead, but ancient cultures even taught various ways in which to do it.

Could many of our dreams of friends and loved ones who have died be actual encounters with them, the dream recall being just a small part of that experience? Could the feeling of the presence of a dead loved one in a room be more than just imagination? Could the voice many hear of their dead child, calling their name be an actual experience and not an hallucination? Could a voice coming into the mind telepathically giving guidance or instruction be more than a fantasy thought? Could those "gut" feelings we often have and follow that help us, be inspired from the other side? Are there ways in which we might set up situations where communication with the dead could be achieved? Could we make progress in this endeavor as has been made in every other field of science?

I believe these things to be true and possible, as do countless others. I have often heard my son Stephen's voice, both out loud and telepathically as he gently pushes my own thoughts aside and begins to speak. Recently he has dictated a book to me about his life and death and afterlife. He died at fifteen, and I have often felt his presence, but he had never appeared to me in recognizable form. He did appear to his nine year old sister a few weeks after he died. He was dressed in his karate gi and standing in the kitchen. He smiled and disappeared. She accepted this gift for the reality it was and was never so sad about his death again.

Recently I set up an experiment based loosely on Moody's Reunions work, to see if through the use of a mirror in a darkened room, which Moody calls his psychomanteum, I could make a contact with Stephen. I was quite skeptical of any results, but determined to give it a try.

In my office at home is a reclining chair. I darkened the room, placed a small mirror on a bookshelf near the ceiling, laid back in my reclining chair and prayed that if there was anything to this whole work that Moody had done, that Stephen would do more than speak to me, that he would appear to me.

I waited. Ten minutes passed. My eyes were beginning to adapt to the darkness and I could see the outline of the mirror. Nothing. I was getting impatient and began to think how foolish this was, when I began to see movement in the mirror. A pinkish-purple swirl of light began to form. I blinked my eyes in case I was imagining things. But the swirling light began to form into a sphere. It grew larger and larger and came outside and to the right of the mirror and grew in size until it was about 12" in diameter. The swirling stopped and this perfectly round sphere began to show some movement in it. As I continued to look, Stephen appeared in a side view, then a 3/4 view as he turned. It was like a movie or video of him, for he moved, turned and appeared in the mirror for several minutes. Then he disappeared and the sphere slowly disappeared also.

I began to cry and cry. Stephen hadn't spoken to me as he often did, but he had appeared to me. When I tried it several days later, and it happened again, I knew there really was something to this experiment. Perhaps with my husband's help, we could pull together a project of this kind to help other people have such an experience.

My husband Herb is a clinical psychologist and the author of seven books, and many articles, on the work of Edgar Cayce, the most scientifically researched psychic, or Christian mystic, of the century. Cayce's work of "life readings" as they were called were helpful and evidential to thousands of people. There were many times when Cayce talked with the dead and brought helpful messages from them.

Herb and I both have a strong interest in a personal and a scientific approach to communication with the dead. As directors of the Logos Center, a research and educational center, with an interfaith church, we have both been involved in various types of research over the years. We have the staff and a room for such a project. We asked for 25 volunteers to participate, people who had a desire to communicate with their deceased loved ones and friends, but who had not been sure of such an encounter previously.

We decided to combine the ideas of the EVP, Moody's psychomanteum and the work of Robert Monroe, author of Journeys Out of the Body, who had done ground-breaking research into altered states of consciousness using sound and music. We would try to use the best of what we felt appropriate from these three types of research

The room we set up contains a reclining chair, can be completely darkened with black drapes, or has lamps with low wattage bulbs that can be left on. There are paintings on the wall, several chairs and the room is decorated in subdued colors. The subjects were required to read six books we selected to prepare themselves for a variety of possible experiences. Research forms and questionnaires were prepared and a six-week project began, with each subject spending at least 1-1/2 hours or more in the room weekly.

Some participants came in alone, some brought another member of the group. They were instructed on how to prepare themselves through prayer and meditation, and were allowed to use any methods they preferred The Monroe music played through earphones during the session, as the subjects reclined in their chair. They selected total darkness or light from a lamp. An assistant turned on the reel-to-reel tape for the EVP data on the final sessions.

After each session the subject filled out a lengthy research form. As we are beginning to study the data, we are amazed that many of the subjects had a loved one appear in the room or in the mirror. Some had felt a presence so strongly they spoke out loud to it, others had seen angels, some had heard voices, many had smelled a fragrance associated with the person they were trying to contact. Others experienced a variety of visions with their eyes open and closed. Quite a few had communications from their guides. We are still in the process of analyzing the data, and have yet to listen to the many tapes. But I firmly believe that some of them will contain the actual voices from those encounters.

Our hope is that we will be able to suggest ways that any individual could set up such an experiment in the safety and privacy of their own home to try to make contact with a loved one. To this end we are currently compiling a book about this experiment, called The Threshold Project.

It is time for all of us personally to take fearless steps forward in an effort to remove the self-imposed barriers of awareness between dimensions. Volumes of research data from almost every country in the world demonstrates, except to the most skeptical, that those who die do continue and many of them want us to know how they are and what they're doing.

Perhaps it is not too unreasonable to expect that one day, we will pick up a phone and dial 1-800-HEAVEN and ask to speak to our loved ones who no longer have physical bodies. Imagine their delight when such a connection is made, to be able, at last, to tell someone about their journey and their new home, and to return greetings to those they love.

We may well discover that receiving a message from heaven may be a lot less expensive and a lot more meaningful than sending a man to the moon.

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