Rhine Research Center
Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential
Julie Beischel's article
Ever thought about what a different world it would be if we had hard, scientific proof of an afterlife?
If you're local to the Rhine Research Center, Durham, NC, then you might want to jump into their newly formed Rhine Book Club. On May 13, beginning at noon, the group will discuss Dr. Julie Beischel's article, Spirit Under the Microscope: What Science Can Tell Us About the Afterlife.
Beischel and her husband, Mark Boccuzzi, who formed the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, will speak Friday, May 15, 7:30 - 9 p.m. at the Stedman Center; and will conduct a workshop on Saturday, May 16, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. at the Rhine Center.
Beischel studies communication with the dead.
From her article, "The scientific study of mediums is actually over a century old. Today, we can confidently offer the conclusion that during mediumship readings, certain mediums can report accurate and specific information about the deceased loved ones, known as “discarnates” of living people, or “sitters.” They do this without any prior knowledge about the discarnates or sitters, in the absence of any sensory feedback, and without using fraud or deception."
The problem with the information received, she reports, is understanding exactly where it came from. There are three potential sources. First is the idea of Survival of Consciousness - where we continue along in a world away from our human body - life after death. Second is the idea of Super-Psi, where the information is retrieved through some combination of clairvoyance, precognition, or telepathy. Thirdly, is the Psychic Reservoir hypothesis, the idea that all information from all time is contained in the universe. As Beischel says, where "mediums are simply accessing that cosmic database."
Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential studies the process in which this type of information is acquired. She points out in her article that work with a medium might be therapeutic during grief counseling, a process they are just beginning to study.
"In addition to researching and certifying mediums, the Windbridge Institute investigates technologies that may aid discarnate communication and addresses reports of haunting phenomena using both field and laboratory methods. We are also interested in complementary and alternative therapies for personal and planetary health and applied intuition and intention research. The mission of the Windbridge Institute is to investigate the potential that exists within our bodies, minds, and spirits and how that information can best serve all living things."
If you want to read more about Beischel's work, their web site offers several interesting papers, including Contemporary Methods used in Laboratory-Based Mediumship Research and Anomalous Information Reception by Research Mediums Demontrated using a Novel Triple-blind Protocol.
Sacred Dialogue
The following is the incedible story of Mr. Dean, a man very near death lying in bed at an Olean, NY, nursing home in 1978. This story is pulled from my recently released Ebook, Sacred Dialogue: Tuning into Mother Nature's Universal Broadcast Band.
Image: From the cover of the Ebook, Sacred Dialogue; artwork by Amber Marsh.
Philosophy of Death
In April 1978 and during my senior year as a mass communications undergraduate student at St. Bonaventure University, I was living off campus with two roommates. One of those roommates, Tom, was in my Philosophy of Death class, which required we visit a nursing home patient weekly. My second roommate, Dan, joined us in our volunteer activity.
Tom was assigned to visit a woman. I was assigned to visit Mr. Jenkins in another room. When Dan came along one evening, he decided to visit weekly with Mr. Jenkins’ roommate, Mr. Dean. We stayed each week for about an hour talking with the men. The nursing staff said that the two men did not have visitors. While Mr. Jenkins could leave his room in a wheelchair, Mr. Dean was confined to bed. We made longer and more frequent visits later when Mr. Dean had a leg removed and he seemed to be very depressed about it.
Strange dreams
At 6 p.m. on April 4 I met my girlfriend in the campus library smoking room and we walked to Hickey Memorial Dining Hall for dinner. About 6:30 p.m., I walked home alone and found my roommates watching television. I sat and talked with them for about a half hour, until a point I began to feel very tired. I excused myself and went into my bedroom, turned on some music with head phones, and laid on the bed. A few minutes later I felt more tired and turned off the music and the overhead light and climbed back into bed. I slept from about 7 p.m. Tuesday to 3 a.m. Wednesday.
During that time I recall waking up periodically with a feeling as though I weighed 600 pounds, that I could not move. I found myself feeling as though I was shooting through space and time, with blackness all around me, spinning, but not feeling dizzy. I had a feeling as though Mr. Dean was somehow right alongside me and that we were traveling through this together.
At some point during this sleep session, I felt a slowing down of this process as we came upon a brilliant white light. I remember communicating with Mr. Dean telepathically and telling him to go into the light. He was no longer afraid and moved toward and into the light and disappeared.
In the dream state, I then found myself sitting in Mr. Dean’s room in a morning light. I was sitting in a chair at the table by the window and looked across the room at the two beds where he and Mr. Jenkins should be laying. I looked at Mr. Dean’s bed, but instead of seeing him lying there, I saw another man that I did not know. Mr. Jenkins was sleeping in the first bed. Just then a nurse came into the room and walked up to me. I asked her where Mr. Dean was. She explained that he died during the evening hours and Mr. Jenkins had been asleep. Since the bed space was needed for new patients, they removed the body, changed the linens, and quietly put the new patient into Mr. Dean’s bed. But they had forgotten one important step, she said.
They had not woken up Mr. Jenkins and told him about Mr. Dean’s death. Mr. Jenkins woke up later in the night on his own, saw the new person in his room, and assumed that his friend had died. They heard him crying and came to his bedside to explain what had happened.
Upon waking
With that explanation, the dream ended and I woke in my bed in my apartment. It was 3 a.m. I got up and worked on a paper due later that day for a few hours, then went back to sleep. Just after my 1:30 Shaw class, I met my roommates on campus and told them about my dream. They were about to bicycle into town, so I asked them to stop by the home and check in on Mr. Dean. They never stopped.
Then on Thursday, April 6, in my 4 p.m. Philosophy of Death class, Dr. Bean announced that the female patient Tom was visiting had passed away. He also said that Mr. Dean had died Tuesday, April 4 at 11:30 p.m.
Nursing home visit
I thought about Mr. Dean’s death and realized that I had been asleep at the time of his death and feeling as though I was traveling with him to this great white light. The coincidence bothered me. The following day I visited the nursing home and spoke with the senior nurse on duty.
The woman recognized me as one of the visiting students, and I reminded her that I had been visiting both Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Dean for several months. I wanted any details about Mr. Dean’s death that she might offer me. The woman acknowledged his death, but said that something awful had happened.
She explained that there was a long waiting list for beds in this facility, and that when Mr. Dean died during the night, they removed the body from the room, changed the linens on the bed, and moved another patient into the room. Throughout the switch, she said, Mr. Jenkins remained asleep.
The problem, she said, was that no one woke up Mr. Jenkins to tell him about Mr. Dean’s death.
Then a few hours later, she said, Mr. Jenkins woke up and noticed that the man he was sharing the room with was not Mr. Dean, and he assumed that his friend had died. This upset him very much, she said, and he began crying. A nurse on duty overheard the crying, and went in to check on him and gave him the details of what happened earlier in the night.
The similarity to what this woman said actually happened and to my dream was overwhelming. Just when I had convinced myself that I most likely just dreamed about moving through space and time with Mr. Dean to the white light, the matching details about the second piece of my dream with reality stopped me in my tracks. It seemed to me at the time that the piece of my dream about the nurse telling me what happened was deliberately put in place to allow me to reassure myself that the first part – moving along with Mr. Dean – was in fact a reality.
Back in class
I needed somehow to talk about what had happened and decided that the university was the best place. I spoke up at the end of the next Philosophy of Death class and told my story. The professor laughed right out loud in the classroom. His laughter then extended to the students sitting around me.
Class was over and everyone moved out of the room. I sat there thinking about why we were all here, why we were all taking the class in the first place, and that somehow I had been touched by the death process – certainly a story worth discussing in a university setting.
But I had been publicly ridiculed, by the professor himself no less, and sheepishly walked out of the classroom deciding it best to keep the story to myself.
Open for discussion
More research in this area is needed to understand how or why scenes like this play out. I bring up this story in particular, for the study of how mediums receive information, as it appeared as though I could have been communicating with a living person, and then stayed along for the ride as he passed over. The resulting conclusion to the dream experience seemed somehow like a final message, filling me in on the human side of the drama, facts that I would not know until several days later when the exact details were delivered by a member of the nursing staff.
http://www.examiner.com/x-2764-Paranorm ... -afterlife
