When Someone Appears: The Mystery of Crisis Apparitions

A quiet presence in an ordinary room, the kind many crisis apparition experiences begin with. People sometimes describe a moment that only feels strange afterwards. Nothing dramatic at the time. A sense someone is nearby. A quick impression. Occasionally a voice, or the feeling of being watched.

Then life carries on.

The phone rings later. News arrives. A death. An accident. Something serious.

Only then does the earlier moment return and feel different.

Accounts like this turn up everywhere. Different cultures, different periods, very similar descriptions.

What are crisis apparitions?

Researchers eventually began using the phrase "crisis apparitions" for experiences reported around moments of danger, trauma, or death. The definition is simple, but the timing is what draws attention.

Most reports are spontaneous. People are not trying to contact anyone. They are going about their ordinary routines when something interrupts them. Often the person involved is emotionally close. The experience tends to feel unusually clear compared to daydreaming or memory.

Not everyone interprets these moments the same way. Some treat them as coincidence. Others see them as psychological responses. Parapsychology tends to step back and look at the pattern rather than the explanation.

Early Psychical Research

Early psychical researchers began collecting firsthand accounts in an attempt to understand these experiences rather than dismiss them.

​By the late nineteenth century, people had started writing these experiences down more deliberately. Instead of passing them along as stories, they were being collected, compared, and discussed.

The Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882, became one place where this happened.

The aim was cautious. Members were less interested in proving survival after death than in asking a simpler question. Did these reports appear often enough to take seriously?

One ‘but project’, later known as the Census of Hallucinations, asked large numbers of ordinary people whether they had ever experienced a vivid impression of someone who was not physically present, particularly around important events.

Some investigators felt a pattern might exist around moments of crisis. That suggestion has never been fully settled, but the material itself continued to be referenced.

The Admiral Tryon Case

A distant ship fading into mist, echoing the sudden loss at the heart of many crisis apparition reports.

​One example often mentioned in this context is the death of Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon in 1893. Tryon led the British Mediterranean Fleet. During naval maneuvers off the Syrian coast, a command resulted in a collision between HMS Victoria and HMS Camperdown.

The ship sank quickly.

In the period afterwards, a number of people connected to Tryon reflected on impressions they had experienced around that time. The accounts themselves were understated. What drew interest was when those impressions were said to have occurred.

Researchers approached the case carefully. It was not treated as evidence on its own, but as a reminder of how these accounts tend to surface and how difficult they are to separate from memory, coincidence, and grief.

Patterns Across Reports

Across many reports, certain tendencies appear. Emotional closeness shows up repeatedly. Experiences involving strangers do occur, but far less often.

Timing is harder to assess. Many accounts are described after the person learns about the crisis. Memory shifts in those moments. Meaning settles in quickly. Researchers have always acknowledged that problem.

Closeness appears again and again in these reports. Experiences involving strangers do occur, but far less often.

The repetition is not dramatic. It is simply persistent, which is part of why researchers keep returning to the subject.

Psychological Explanations

Psychology tends to begin from connection. People remain mentally oriented toward those who matter to them. Worry, expectation, coincidence, and memory can overlap in ways that feel striking afterwards.

Another factor is reinterpretation. Moments that seemed ordinary at the time may be reconsidered once new information arrives. Memory adjusts quickly in those circumstances.

Experiences of presence after loss are widely reported and do not necessarily indicate anything unusual in a clinical sense. For many people they are part of ordinary grieving. Crisis apparitions may represent an earlier point along that same spectrum.

Parapsychological Perspectives

Parapsychology approaches the question from a different angle. Rather than dismissing the experiences outright, it asks whether extreme situations might coincide with unusual forms of information transfer.

Some researchers describe this in terms of spontaneous telepathy or emotional signaling. The idea remains tentative. If anomalous communication exists, moments of crisis would be the most likely place to look.

That position does not resolve the question, but it keeps inquiry open.

Modern Research and Experience Studies

Modern research methods often rely on experience surveys rather than individual case investigation. Large collections allow researchers to look for recurring features even when verification is difficult.

Online reporting has changed the landscape. People share experiences quickly, sometimes before timelines are clear. That creates both opportunity and complication.

Crisis apparitions now sit alongside research into bereavement experiences, deathbed visions, and anomalous perception more broadly. The boundaries overlap but the timing element remains distinctive.

Why the Topic Persists

Reflecting on experiences that resist simple explanation is where crisis apparition research often returns.

These experiences sit in an awkward space. They appear too often to dismiss entirely, yet not with enough consistency to explain comfortably.

For many people, the meaning comes first. Explanation follows later, if it comes at all. Even those who lean toward psychological accounts often note how distinct the experience feels.

Researchers, meanwhile, focus on recurrence. Patterns raise questions even when answers remain uncertain.

A Quiet Mystery

Crisis apparition reports are rarely dramatic in presentation. They are brief interruptions. A sense of presence. A glance. A moment that only becomes significant later.

The Tryon case shows how these reports enter discussion. It is not unusual in structure, which is precisely why it is referenced. The details matter less than the pattern it reflects.

What keeps the subject alive is not spectacle. It is repetition. People continue to describe moments in which someone seems to appear at exactly the point something changes.

The explanation remains unsettled. The pattern does not disappear.

Further Reading

Phantasms of the Living — Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore (1886)

Census of Hallucinations report — Society for Psychical Research (1894)

Apparitions — G. N. M. Tyrrell (1943)

New Frontiers of the Mind — J. B. Rhine (1937)

The Founders of Psychical Research — Alan Gauld (1968)

Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century — edited by Etzel Cardeña, John Palmer, David Marcusson-Clavertz (2015)

Skeptics and Parapsychologists Have Something in Common

A new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology examines the similarities and differences between skeptics, parapsychologists, (scientists who study psychic ability), and believers in psychic ability. It challenges the idea that skeptics somehow possess different or superior thinking skills in evaluating the evidence for psychic ability. Here’s the introduction:

Introduction: Belief in psi, which includes psychic phenomena such as extra-sensory perception and post-mortem survival, is widespread yet controversial. According to one of the leading and perhaps most tested hypotheses, high belief in psi can be explained by differences in various aspects of cognition, including cognitive styles. Most of this research has been conducted with lay individuals. Here, we tested the hypothesis that academic researchers who investigate psi may exhibit different cognitive styles than lay individuals interested in psi, and are more similar to skeptics.

And this was their overall conclusion:

Discussion: Our research shows that academics who work with psi differ from lay psi individuals, but not from skeptics, in actively open-minded thinking. In other words, despite their high belief in psi phenomena, psi researchers demonstrate a commitment to sound reasoning about evidence that is no different from that of skeptics.

One of the myths that this research dispels is that skeptics are somehow superior critical thinkers when it comes to psychic research. This is certainly consistent with my own observations over the years. I have personally never seen any case where skeptics demonstrated superior skills at evaluating parapsychological research, or indeed, anything related to the paranormal or psychic ability at all. At best, they are equal in their critical thinking and at worst, they demonstrate obvious biases in their evaluations.

A very important aspect of this discussion is the idea of objective vs. subjective experience. This line isn’t clear cut and there is a lot of ambiguity on the table. What this means is that people who rely on their subjective experiences to create their worldview aren’t necessarily worse thinkers, only different in what they rely on. Objectivity itself relies ultimately on choosing what data to believe.

Better Informed Equals better at Being Objective

Also, lay individuals, whether skeptics or experiencers, were generally worse at critical thinking. No surprise there either. Objective evaluation is a scholarly skill that has to be learned. In general, lay skeptics and experiencers tend more towards knee jerk reactions to data that they don’t like and both exhibit more defensiveness over their positions.

A lot of bias comes from having an emotional attachment to a particular position. Spending more time with a subject includes careful considerations of contrary positions, which in turn will slowly erode strong emotions surrounding a subject and introduce more objectivity.

So these study results shouldn’t be very surprising. Informed people are better at evaluating a subject than uninformed people. Having said that, my long history with the controversies in parapsychology tells me that the situation is decidedly more complicated. This has less to do with logic and rational thinking and more to do with the nature of psychic ability. Believers are not really believers and skeptics aren’t really skeptics. There are deeper layers to this situation.

Who is Really the Believer?

Belief implies a reliance on faith without evidence and skepticism implies objectively examining evidence and not drawing unsupported conclusions. Yet “believers” often rely on evidence, it’s merely a question of interpretation and how much evidence they think that they need. And skeptics often begin from their own sets of beliefs before they examine evidence.

One complication comes from the self reporting nature of the study. It can only measure people’s view of themselves, not the accuracy of their self reflection.

For example, when examining beliefs about psychic ability, it is important to establish the reality of psychic ability first. If, for example, we were examining a discussion about whether trees exist, we would immediately divide that group into rational people who know that trees exist and irrational people who did not believe in trees.

The believers in trees would not be criticized for being inflexible about the reality of trees nor would their critical thinking skills be questioned for refusing to entertain any discussion about it, rather the tree skeptics would be criticized as tree deniers. The entire narrative completely flips depending on what we agree is real.

Who is the Rational One?

So if it’s assumed that psychic ability is real, then of course people are not going to be open to changing their minds about it. Doubt about whether a particular experience is real is weighed against whether it is within the boundaries of ordinary psychic experiences. If psychic experiences are not considered to be exceptional, then the bar for acceptance is not very high. In this case the classification of “believer” is grossly misleading because they are operating on knowledge based on experience, not on personal beliefs.

The other thing to consider is that skeptics tend to talk big about being open minded, and often sincerely believe this to be true about themselves, but in practice most of them demonstrate just the opposite to be true. What passes for careful rationality and critical thinking is often just pride and stubbornness with a lot of ego mixed in. So a skeptic might claim that their mind can be changed by evidence, but when push comes to shove, it gradually becomes obvious that no evidence will ever be enough. In the study, this was somewhat acknowledged by measuring a “need for closure.” While this is certainly related to stubbornness, there may still be a gap between what a person thinks about themselves and what they actually do.

Measuring Skeptical Stubbornness

Skeptical stubbornness is difficult to uncover because it requires repeatedly probing the skeptic to see whether they will change their mind in the face of contrary evidence, but revealing this trait is extremely important in evaluating their critical thinking skills. Part of stubbornness is the belief that one isn’t being stubborn, merely holding steadfast to the truth, so a survey or a psych test that is not designed to specifically uncover this is probably insufficient.

For example, if you asked a skeptic if sufficient evidence would change their mind, they would say that yes, it would. If you instead forced them to quantify exactly what evidence would definitively change their mind, (a successful telepathy test? A personal experience?) they would likely refuse to commit to a concrete answer that would force them to concede, or choose an answer that will always be out of reach. Either path demonstrates stubbornness and a deficiency in critical thinking.

When it comes to these two things: sorting out whether belief is actually experience or whether claims of being open minded and objective are just lip service, it’s very hard for academic studies to sort these two things out, but they have huge ramifications for the conclusions. The flaky believer magically transforms into an open minded holistic thinker and the critically thinking skeptic becomes a stubborn fool.

Know Your Universe Before Passing Judgment

This is an important point because evidence is mounting that we live in a universe where consciousness, not the material world, is fundamental to reality. In that case, reality itself is relative to the observer, which must necessarily change our perception about what constitutes belief vs. reality. It no longer becomes a question of whether someone is correctly viewing reality, but about how far off they are from what is often referred to as “consensus reality.”

The takeaway here is that I think that we have to be careful in our assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of “believers” and “skeptics.” It is a question with far more depth and nuance than first appears. If we don’t question our underlying assumptions, we may lose sight of thinking processes that are far more complex than first appears.

What We Know About Psychic Ability

A Sad State of Affairs

I used to be in the New Age Movement — back in the day. I taught myself psychic healing and taught others how to do it, although I quickly realized that I did not know much about it. Unlike medicine, there isn’t a wealth of scientific information to draw on. In fact, at the time, there was next to none. So I was flying blind. Because of the ubiquitous presence of bad skepticism, I had no idea that there was any science behind psychic ability at all.

Psychic Ability

It’s been like that for psychic mediums, remote viewers, dowsers and pretty much anyone else pushing the limits of their psychic ability. There is a lot that people don’t know and that has been a big problem. It has opened the door to all sorts of speculation by people who have asserted that they understood THE TRUTH. Countless books have been written offering someone’s version of what reality is and those range from rejecting the existence of psychic ability, to viewing it as a gift of God to the work of the Devil.

The problem with all of these random theories, is that they have no explanatory power. These theories tell you nothing about how psychic ability functions or why. They are useless for going forward because they have no knowledge base to build upon.

The Actual Experts

Parapsychologists; those scientists who do scientific experiments and publish papers in journals while carefully building a body of knowledge, have learned a great deal about psychic ability. Their theories come from a solid body of knowledge based on investigations and published experiments.

The most popular theory among parapsychologists; (i.e. the one with the most explanatory power), is that psychic ability is fundamentally a subconscious ability. The subconscious operates with full psychic functioning, and it’s always “on.” We access this psychic information by accessing the subconscious. To get to it, we have to navigate deeper parts of our personalities that we’re not normally aware of. This isn’t normally an easy thing to do and it may open up hidden fears and buried memories, which are also in the subconscious.

The theory speculates that we normally use our ordinary senses to accomplish our goals and it’s only when we enter into an ambiguous situation that cannot be resolved by our other senses that our psychic ability will kick in. So if we’re still trying to accomplish something with our other senses, we’re not likely to utilize our psychic ability.

My Own Thoughts On Psychic Ability

I have theorized that based on some studies, that psychic ability tends to be stronger based on need, and somehow the subconscious knows what that is. The more you need your psychic ability, -combined with a realization that you’re not going to get the help you want any other way,- the more likely you are to access it.

I have also theorized that psychic ability tends to be emotionally based. (This ties into need.) Reading other people’s emotional state, even when they’re not physically present, is what psychic ability is “tuned” for. Especially when people are deliberately hiding their emotions. I think that it’s the thing that it does best.

Psychic Ability Explained?

So how does this explain anything? Well, for starters it answers the question of why we don’t use psychic ability all the time. Our other senses can and do handle our day to day functioning just fine. It explains that a person’s ability to tolerate ambiguity will affect their psychic functioning. People who can stop thinking, stop trying and just relax and let things be, will do better psychically than people who keep hammering away and never give up.

This also describes the creative process, so we would therefore expect people who are better at creative tasks and holistic thinking to perform better at psychic tasks (which require entering into an open, receptive state of mind) than people who excel at linear thinking. It doesn’t take much of a leap to realize that the latter more or less describes skeptics.

The Trouble With Skeptics

The skeptics, who pride themselves on their linear thinking, are revealed to be lacking in the qualities that would make them good at psychic ability. A lack of ability to enter into a receptive state of mind means that they are most likely not good holistic thinkers; this would explain why they have trouble making the necessary connections to understand psychic ability. Another aspect of this is that the more linear your thinking is, the more trouble you have changing your mind.

We would expect psychic people to be inclined towards holistic thinking, to be creative in other areas and to have personalities that capable of having quiet moments and self reflection. This does, in fact, describe psychic people as a group quite well. It’s also been shown that creative people do better than others at psychic tasks.

That’s what explanatory power is. The theory matches what is observed and explains it, and also provides a map towards future knowledge.

The Psychic Process

The psychic process is challenging to describe because it occurs solely within a person’s mind, where it cannot be directly observed by anyone else. Psychic information, because of how it’s obtained, is difficult to distinguish from one’s own thoughts.

To sift through one’s own thoughts, one must first have strong inner awareness to know what one’s own thoughts look like and from there discern what psychic information personally looks and feels like. All of this must occur without trying to hard, which will disrupt the process. It’s a delicate balance that requires discipline, good intellectual awareness and strong holistic thinking skills. Not everyone is capable of this. So when researchers test for psychic ability they should expect to see some people do far better than others. In the scientific lingo, they would not expect to see homogeneous results. (Yes, this is also confirmed in scientific testing.)

Suspension of ordinary thought processes is so crucial to the psychic process that the Ganzfeld experiment is constructed around it. Ordinary sensory input is reduced to the absolute minimum. Unsurprisingly, this experiment also yields some of the most reliable results.

How This Relates To Physics

Of course, eventually we get around to the question of what the mechanism is. How does it work? And that is a damned good question. Psychic ability does not rely on sending or receiving signals. All forms of electromagnetic waves have been ruled out, even including ELF waves. (That is a story for another time.) In order to understand it at all, we need to look at reality differently, and here is where quantum physics comes in.

The question lands us smack in the middle of the mother of all scientific debates of our time: Is the universe fundamentally material, like a giant clock? Or is it fundamentally like a giant mind? If we look at the universe as material, then psychic ability is impossible, end of story. But it plainly IS possible, so that avenue does not match the evidence and we can safely dismiss it. So we conclude that the universe is like a giant mind and consciousness is therefore fundamental to the universe. Consciousness shapes our reality.

Time and Space Reality

Moving on from there, time and space are not absolutes. They utterly relational to one another, (You measure time with distance and without time you are everywhere at once and distance doesn’t exist.) which is why the term “spacetime” was coined. If consciousness is fundamental to reality, -and there are good arguments for this- then the mind has the ability to transcend this aspect of reality. Thoughts do not travel from one person to the other because their minds were never separate in the first place. With telepathy, we’re only making particular connections stronger and bringing them into conscious awareness through our own intent. They were already there.

This is what entanglement shows us: a universe beyond space and time. Bell’s Inequality Theorem states that QM only works if the universe is entangled. A lot of people miss the implications here and act as though entanglement was just another feature of QM instead of realizing that it’s showing us something fundamental about reality.

Space and time must be something created by a more fundamental reality; they cannot be fundamental themselves. If photons can entangle and behave as though space and time don’t exist, then space and time can be treated as though they don’t exist. That’s why psychic ability operates as though it’s time and space independent. Because it is. It seems spooky and weird and in defiance of physics only if you’re stuck in a Newtonian materialist view of the world. Once you understand the implications of quantum physics, and you view consciousness as fundamental to reality, psychic ability is not only possible, but predictable.

Sources:

The theory is called “First Sight” by psychologist Jim Carpenter: Here is a PDF four page description: http://www.drjimcarpenter.com/about/documents/FirstSightformindfield.pdf

Theory of need is based on these sources (and others) because of their extremely high success rate: A healing study by William Bengston with a cure rate of a whopping 87.9%. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf

Neuroscientist Diane Powell, who investigated telepathy in autistic children with a mind blowing success rate of over 99% You can read the article here: https://drdianehennacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/ES_Issue23Article.pdf

The sources for a link between consciousness and physics are too numerous to list.

A Tough Subject for Research: Psychic Healing

Decades ago, when I was first seriously exploring the paranormal, psychic healing was the one thing that I was most comfortable with. I could feel it. Touch and energy came naturally to me. But I always had a nagging feeling that I had no idea what I was doing.

Whatever problems that mainstream medicine has, and there are many, there is no arguing that they have data. Lots and lots of data. Medical practices and medicines are extremely well documented, evaluated and improved. As a result, doctors learn what works and what doesn’t and unless they’re dealing with a rare case with very little literature or symptoms that don’t point to anything specific enough to nail down a diagnosis, they have data to back them up.

They also have a huge and useful array of diagnostic tools to do this. For most problems that people bring to them, they know what to do.

Psychic Healing’s Data Problem

In contrast, we know almost nothing about psychic healing. Almost all of the existing studies center around proving its existence. Very few studies examine the phenomena in depth to understand what works and what doesn’t and more importantly, why.

There are also a great number of different psychic healing method and traditions to choose from:

DHI [distant healing intention] techniques are known by many names, including intercessory prayer, spiritual healing, aura healing, energy healing, energy psychology, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, therapeutic touch (TT), quantum-touch, qigong, reconnective healing, Johrei, and Reiki.4 Each of these methods carries its own idiosyncratic theoretical and cultural forms, and some DHI methods include both distant and proximal (but without direct contact) variations. A common feature shared among DHI techniques is the assumption that distance between the healer and healee is not a limiting factor.5 This “nonlocal” aspect of DHI defies classical physical assumptions and accounts for its controversial status even among alternative biofield therapies.

Distant Healing Intention Therapies: An Overview of the Scientific Evidence Glob Adv Health Med. 2015 Nov; 4(Suppl): 67–71

The Problem of Small Studies

The ideal situation for a study of this kind is to be able to isolate the effect. This is much harder than it might initially seem. Most healing studies tend to be small, which is problematic because people with real health problems, particularly those interested in alternative medicine, will pursue a number of avenues to become healthy again, and psychic healing is just one of them. So did they get better because of the psychic healing, or was it something else that they did?

Normally, in a situation like this, you find the money for large studies so that the larger numbers will dilute the effects of all those individuals doing their own thing. But research into alternative medicine is not well funded and money is hard to come by. So for the most part, studies into psychic healing are sporadic.

A Review of Psychic Healing Meta Analyses

In order to get around this, senior psi researchers Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz and one other person gathered together a whole boatload of studies and meta analyses and presented them in a paper. This included studies of prayer and Reiki and other types that didn’t involve proximity and touch.

Here is what they looked at:

• A survey by S. Schmidt et. al, (2004) found 40 studies on remote intention, 4 of which were substandard and dropped. The 36 studies that were included had 1015 test sessions and statistically significant results. In addition, there were 15 studies on remote staring with 379 sessions with similar effect sizes. Interestingly, study quality did not seem to affect the results. There were 12 remote helping studies, 11 of which totaled 576 sessions. Distribution of effect sizes and the effect size itself was similar to other studies.

The conclusion by Schmidt, et. al, was that the differences of these collected experiments combined with their similar outcomes meant that an artifact (problem) in the study design(s) was highly unlikely and if it were there, it would have to be a very simple mistake that all the researchers had made.

• Astin et al. (2000) found 23 experiments with 2774 patients. 13 of those studies (57%) yielded statistically significant healing effects, 9 of them showed no effect and one showed a negative effect. The authors concluded the the effect was strong enough to keep studying.
• Crawford et al, (2003) did a systematic review of 45 lab and 45 clinical studies. They were making a quality assessment, and they concluded that in general, distant healing studies did better in quality reviews.
• There were two systematic reviews by the Cochrane Collaboration (2008,2009): A Reiki review of 24 randomly controlled trials with 1153 participants yielded measurable pain relief, with experienced practitioners getting better results than newbies. A review of 10 randomly controlled prayer studies with 7646 patients found no statistically significant measurable effect.
• Roe, et. al, (2015) looked at 57 studies and found statistically significant effects compared to controls.

Image: Light Field Studios, Canva

Psychic Healing Studies Could Benefit From Standardization

What can be learned from this is that quite a few people have looked into healing studies over the years. One recurring theme that many of the analyses mentioned was that study quality was inconsistent and that a set of standards needed to be developed. The problems included:

Inadequacy of blinding, dropped data, poor outcome measures, lack of statistical power estimations, lack of confidence intervals, and lack of independent replication.

Nevertheless, high quality studies, when combined, showed a statistically significant effect. While less robust studies, particularly those with a lack of blinding, have outcomes that can be explained by poor study design, it’s worth noting that in many cases the results of these studies tended to mirror those of the better studies. That generally means that poor design probably did not affect the outcome.

Now before you all go scoffing at the prayer studies, which tended to show no effect, it’s important to keep in mind that the researchers could not evaluate who was praying, how they prayed and whether some forms of prayer were more effective than others. The lack of success in other words, could potentially be explained as “the wrong people doing it wrong.” Given that other forms of distant healing were successful, this is a distinct possibility.

With such a smorgasbord of studies of varying types and quality, you really can’t learn much about the psychic healing process this way. For that you need a much more consistent and reliable experiment that can be altered to learn more about the process.

The Psychic Healing Study That Changed Everything

There is one healing study with replications that appears to meet this criteria. And unsurprisingly we’ve learned a few things already from this study. Back in 2000, Bill Bengston published results of this study in the Journal for Scientific Exploration. The Effect of the “Laying On of Hands” on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice.

This was an A+ study design. The study was done with mice, which eliminated the problem of the placebo effect. The mice were bought from a medical supplier that bred them to have no immunity at all to a type of breast cancer (mammary adenocarcinoma). This disease was 100% fatal to the mice wit,in 2 to 4 weeks. This eliminated questions about how sick the mice were and because the environment of the mice could be controlled, it eliminated questions about whether it was the healing work doing the healing or something else. It was also easy to create a control group and establish that the healing work was the variable.

Using mice removed the problem of blinding because mice are not susceptible to the experimenter effect or the placebo effect (presumably; if the mice have any beliefs, they aren’t sharing them.) It was all amazingly straightforward for a medical study.

Some Surprising Results

Good studies can produce surprising results because when the effect is strong enough, as it was in this case, you can learn something new. The control mice had to be sent to another city to prevent remission of the disease. Having them nearby meant that some of them would go into remission. Awareness of the control mice was apparently enough to heal some of them, but if they were in another city then it was out of sight, out of mind.

One of the things tested by this experiment was whether belief played any role. Skeptics were brought in to participate in doing the healings and if they were trained properly, the healing worked just as well with them as with believers.

The healing work itself was quite reliable. 87.9% of the mice who received healing work went into remission. If the control mice were not sent to another city, their healing rate was 69.2%. For a parapsychology experiment, in fact, for any medical experiment, that’s an incredible success rate.

Not Just a Remission, But a Real Cure

Some mice were injected with the cancer after they recovered to see if they would get it again. This led to yet another discovery: The mice had developed immunity to that cancer. They weren’t just in remission, they were outright cured. If there was a new drug or medical procedure that could cure cancer like this, it would lead the news.

This discovery also tells us that the psychic healing process uses the patient’s body to heal itself. In practical terms, it means that psychic healing is unlikely to work on people with compromised immune systems, such as with chemotherapy or radiation. Anecdotally, Bengston has confirmed this. You have to choose chemo and radiation or alternative methods. They won’t work together.

It’s referred to as energy healing, but no one has ever demonstrated what energy is being transferred or if it’s an energy transfer at all. How this works is still a matter of speculation, but there are some leads.

In a later paper more findings were disclosed:

Because of the unconventional nature of the research, Bengston insisted on independent replication by disinterested researchers in independent labs. As of this writing, more than a dozen healing experiments using the Bengston Energy Healing method on this cancerous mouse model have been conducted in 6 independent labs.6,7

Subsequent to the determination that the healing effect was reliable, secondary correlates involving the effect of distance, dose, and whether healing can be stored were introduced. In brief, healing does not seem to diminish with distance; there is a minimum dose necessary to produce the healing effect; and treated water and cotton seem to be able to reproduce cancer cures without further human intervention (personal communication: William Bengston, PhD, 2015).

Studies of the biological effects of the technique on human healers and healees have been conducted to investigate its effects on brain activity by electroencephalogram (EEG)12 and functional magnetic resonance imaging.13 Those studies indicate reliable physiological changes in both healer and healee. Paired recordings of the healer and subject done both with the subject at a distance and in proximity to the healer showed harmonic frequency coupling across the spectra, followed by between-individual EEG frequency entrainment effects, and then by instantaneous EEG phase locking. These results suggest the presence of a connection between the healer and healee and may thus provide a mechanism for phase coupling.12 This connection seems to be stimulated by the needs of the healee more than the conscious intention of the healer.13

Additional physical correlates to healing using the Bengston method have included anomalous magnetic micropulsations14 in the surrounding space of healing events which may indicate a reduction in entropy when healing occurs. If this is the case, then perhaps it is “information” rather than “energy” that is being transmitted in the healing process. And, if it is indeed information, that would be consistent with the apparent ability to store healing in materials.

Still More Stuff To Be Learned

Again, once you have a reliable, successful study, you can use that study to examine other aspects of the effect. In this case, a preliminary attempt was made to isolate the effect in cotton and demonstrate the effect on lab samples of genes to demonstrate proof of concept. (This did not work well enough to be usable.)

Here’s where things get fascinating. The researchers were able to isolate a small electromagnetic effect from the healers and duplicate it using speakers. The sound was then used on different cells to see if they could get a healing reaction. It did, but it was less than what the healers could accomplish.

The researchers speculated that they hadn’t fully captured the healing effect in the recording. With more experiments and further testing, this may be possible, leading to inexpensive cancer treatments using inaudible magnetic and electromagnetic signals.

That was about three years ago. Like so much research in parapsychology, limited funds and immense resistance from skeptics means that everything happens very slowly. There is a possible breakthrough here, leading to novel methods of curing cancer, but it will take a long time to get anywhere.

Ganzfield Experiment and The Success That Won’t Go Away

Imagine that you’re a scientist and you have an experiment in your field that has been replicated all over the world by over 50 scientists in a 108 different publications, comprised collectively of thousands of trials. It is so dependable that it’s often tweaked in order to understand the phenomenon better.

This experiment demonstrates something very important to your field and probably to other fields of science as well and meets any and all ordinary scientific criteria for success, and yet there is a level of crazy surrounding it that is only rivaled by national politics. You discover that people will outright lie like little children rather than accept the results. Some scientists are so hostile that they write papers attempting to smear the research with badly written and inaccurate critiques.

Imagine that despite your best efforts you cannot get past the hostility, inaccuracies and lies, so you see this magnificent, replicated, and incredibly important experiment languish. Although it is filled with profound scientific implications, it sits there, a testament not to the failure of science, but of humanity.

Ganzfield Experiment In The Hostile World

This is the story of the the Ganzfeld Experiment; the flagship experiment of parapsychology. It has so thoroughly demonstrated the existence of telepathy that among researchers in the field, there no longer exists any doubt. Even hard core skeptics, -those few who have taken the time to actually understand the science- know this and one has even admitted it. It meets any sane standard of scientific evidence, and there’s the gotcha. The standard isn’t sane and indeed, never has been.

Experimental Simplicity

cards used to conduct experiments for extrasensory perception ( ESP)

The experiment itself is pretty straightforward at its core. There is a sender, who sends an image, and a receiver, who receives the image. The experiment is easy to control for cheating because all you need to do is separate the test subjects and design the flow of data so that they can’t interact in any way. Easy peasy.

The receiver must select from four different images and choose the one that the sender was sending. This is called “forced choice.” If the receiver only gets it right 25% of the time, then he/she is just guessing; anything better than that? Then something interesting is happening.

The name “ganzfeld” refers to the fact that the receiver is shielded electromagnetically in a room, can only hear white noise; their vision is reduced to a blur by covering the eyes with the halves of ping pong balls and the lights are dimmed. Their total field (In German this translates to “Ganzfeld”) of sensory input is diminished. Without distractions, the receiver has a much better chance of receiving information telepathically.

This works. Not perfectly, but certainly well enough for an experiment. It’s been done more than enough times by more than enough people to rule out any statistical anomalies. The success rate is typically between 32 and 35%. That’s pretty normal for a successful, statistics based experiment. There have been six different meta analyses from skeptics and researchers alike, all showing positive results. From an objective scientific perspective, this is an ordinary successful scientific experiment.

Who’s Bat Shit Crazy?

But this is parapsychology we’re talking about; a science surrounded by batshit crazy people with advanced degrees and a horde of intellectual wannabe’s desperate to bury and ignore the profound implications that the experiment has for science and reality itself. It’s . . . always like that. People fight change.

Since the inception of the modern version of the experiment, first done in 1974-75, critics have been taking shots at it, trying to discredit it. From the skeptical point of view, psychic ability cannot possibly exist, so something MUST have gone wrong. It’s a poor way to do an evaluation and it has led to some quite ridiculous criticisms.

The main one used these days is what is referred to as “selective reporting” aka the “file drawer effect.” The claim here is that studies which did not show positive results were never published and only positive ones were, skewing the results. This is something that can be claimed without having to produce evidence, which is makes it a favorite argument among skeptics.

Can The Ganzfield Experiment Be Disproved

This doesn’t mean however, that it’s impossible to disprove. You can statistically look at how many unpublished studies it would take to nullify the findings. If that number is unrealistically high, then you can safely dismiss this as a consideration. Long story short: in this tiny scientific field where everyone knows what’s happening, you would have to run ten years worth of experiments non stop and have every single one of them fail and have no one else find out about it, in order for selective reporting to be worthy of consideration. So no, selective reporting is not a problem.

When people have dug up unreported studies in the past to examine how deep the problem goes, what they found was a mixed bag. Some results were null, some were positive, some were negative. The results tended to reflect the results of existing research. This outcome should surprise no one with an actual brain. Only in the fever dreams of skeptics would there be a massive conspiracy to withhold studies and carefully curate positive results.

Meta Analysis

Then there was the 1999 Milton-Wiseman meta analysis that found no effect. Wiseman, a skeptic, made sure to widely publicize that result and because of this, skeptics cite this one as proof that the Ganzfeld is a failure. This is typical of the drama surrounding parapsychology. Failures are widely publicized and positive results buried and ignored.

But do a little research, (getting skeptics to do serious research is like trying to give a cat a bath. They lose their shit fighting against something that’s good for them.), and you’ll find that a mistake was made in calculating the statistics and when corrected, the analysis yielded positive results. Today it is regarded as just another positive meta analysis. There are still skeptics 20 years later who will not admit this.

It gets even more absurd. There have also been arguments that meta analyses may not be useful. They are ready to throw away a tool used by many sciences in order to make this go away.

Try the Ganzfield Bias Test

Try this experiment. There are two encyclopedia articles on this experiment that you can access for free. Compare them. One is from the Society for Psychical Research, and Wikipedia, which you can find here. The SPR article is written by experts in the field. It contains all the relevant criticisms, but it also contains the rebuttals and puts everything in its proper context.

The Wikipedia article, in contrast, is written by skeptics. (They have overwhelmed that platform and dominate all psychic related topics.) People who try to bring balance to those topics are quickly booted off the platform. You can see this in the writing.

What you will see is that the Wikipedia article massively overemphasizes criticism, puts it in everywhere and provides no rebuttal to it, although those rebuttals certainly exist. It cites the 1999 meta analysis and conveniently ignores its correction, while downplaying the other 5 meta analyses. The article is cherry picking the data to create a false impression. It’s quite biased and very amateurish.

The trick to understanding the Ganzfeld Experiment and parapsychology in general is to not let yourself get drowned in the criticism. Science is complicated and if you try hard enough, you can find fault with anything. You have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The study is in line with other parapsychology experiments and affirms something that many people have experienced. That’s why it’s being studied in the first place. Based on people’s real world experiences and other experiments, telepathy is something that we would expect to find.

Psychic Ability Under The Microscope

There is something about existence of psychic ability though that is deeply unsettling to some people and they will look for any reasons, even imaginary ones, to deny its reality. This is the controversial soup that the Ganzfeld experiments must swim in.

In their mentality, parapsychology’s skeptics are not much different from Young Earther’s, climate deniers, Holocaust deniers and the Stop the Steal crowd. Their compulsive need to deny the existence of psychic ability is not a contribution to society, as they claim, but rather an attempt to relieve their own anxiety.

Once you frame the endless criticism in that light, it makes a lot more sense. The skeptics aren’t convinced that the Ganzfeld is a successful experiment because they are incapable of conceding. If you want to understand the Ganzfeld, you have to see them for what they are: barking dogs on the side of the road. You can listen to the barking if you like, or even bark back at them if you want, but it’s best to just leave them behind.

The Ganzfeld meta analyses:

Honorton (1985); Bem & Honorton (1994); Milton & Wiseman (1999); Storm & Ertel (1999); Bem et al. (2001); Storm et al. (2010)

Other sources:

http://www.skepticalaboutskeptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/How-Richard-Wiseman-Nullifies-Positive-Results-by-Chris-Carter.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215514293_Extrasensory_Perception_and_Quantum_Models_of_Cognition

The True Nature of Psi Skeptics

Back in 2008 when I first began writing about psychic ability online, I encountered a lot of skepticism which led to arguments about the Million Dollar Challenge for psychics, created and managed by none other than the late stage magician and skeptic, James Randi. This challenge was certainly convincing to skeptics at the time, so I decided to look into it.

I was more than a little surprised at the emptiness of it. It was ridiculously . . . crude. I did a deep dive into the challenge which I wrote up in my book, but at the time it was already clear that the challenge wasn’t science-based and didn’t prove anything. Anyone who claimed that the challenge proved anything was basically advertising that they didn’t know how science worked. (The challenge did not employ repeatable experiments; they weren’t properly documented; they didn’t use established scientific protocol, but made them up as they went along, leading to amateurish testing. It wasn’t designed to prove anything.)

Skeptic Talking Points Instead of Knowledge

The challenge gave people talking points, but little else. Indeed, the skeptics I encountered would go on and on about how Randi used his magician skills to expose the bad psychics and catch them at their tricks. It did not seem to occur to them that even though this was partially true, it only proved that there were frauds in the professional psychic community, which didn’t prove anything about psychic phenomena in general. There was a gap in their logic that they didn’t seem to comprehend and more importantly, it couldn’t be explained to them.

As I learned more and more about parapsychology and what experiments had actually been done, I also conversed with a lot of skeptics along the way. A pattern emerged. Skeptics are almost universally belligerent, condescending and prone to making declarative statements with no nuance or gray areas. A lot of what they say amounts to talking points and nothing more.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You’ve probably heard this phrase, and it seems ok on the surface, but is it? What makes a claim extraordinary? What counts as extraordinary evidence? This isn’t skepticism so much as it is a vague belief. It’s no more than a rhetorical club to beat people with.

Skeptic Blah!

Skeptic talking points also include: “There is no evidence for psi.” “In the entire history of parapsychology they have never had a successful experiment.” “If psychics existed, one of them would have passed the million dollar challenge” and other nonsense. Any disagreement is met with a demand for proof.

However, very few had enough knowledge to discuss any experiment, let alone discuss it in depth. Those who could talk about the experiments followed a particular path, i.e any source I volunteered was 100% biased and any source they volunteered (usually from a 30 second Internet search) was 100% legitimate. No gray area. Anyone I cited was an idiot, anyone they cited was the authoritative last word. I never heard any subtlety in their thinking at all. For example, in all the years of talking to them, I only ever heard a single skeptic say: “I am not yet convinced by the evidence.” And that was on a forum where the worst of them were consistently kicked off.

Are Skeptics Impartial?

An assumption of skepticism is that both points of view are examined in an even-handed way. That is to say, skepticism is considered to be a position that relies on knowledge and impartial judgment. If either of these are missing, then it’s not really skepticism, it’s something else. The self described skeptics that I have encountered, are usually missing both knowledge and impartial judgment. It’s more zealotry than anything else.

Just to be clear about this, people who actually look into the science of psychic ability find replicated experiments in telepathy, precognition, being stared at, psychokinesis and Reiki, a type of psychic healing. There are also a large number of one-off experiments looking into various interesting areas, that for various reasons couldn’t be easily replicated. (For example, there was a precognition study that examined train crashes in the 50s and a telepathy study with a non verbal autistic child.) In addition there are many investigative reports by scientists that have yielded interesting results that cumulatively provide a form of evidence.

Around half of the world reports having had a psychic experience of some sort and in some countries psychic ability is taken for granted. It isn’t controversial.

For the skeptics to be right, half the world must be fooling itself and all of these thousands of experiments conducted over the years must be faulty in some way. It is an unrealistic, irrational position to take.

Skepticism or Denial?

And this is where we see the true nature of psi (psychic functions) skepticism. Denying the existence of psi takes a certain type of attitude. It requires arrogance because you have to believe that you’re right and other people are crazy or deluded. It requires blindness to other points of view and an ability to explain away inconvenient facts. It requires extremist type logic where you are right and everyone else is wrong. This is usually accompanied by attacking people who disagree with you as idiots.

The thinking that many people follow is that parapsychology has to convince its skeptics in order to be considered legitimate. But this logic automatically grants those skeptics infallible, unquestioned judgment and gives parapsychologists no room to prove that the skeptics are wrong. Indeed, it’s customary for parapsychologists to be forced to confront skeptics at every turn. So instead of explaining their findings and moving the field forward, they have to fight for every fact against people who give them no respect and never concede anything of substance, no matter how strong the evidence. With this set up, doubt is always cast on everything they do and they can never win.

Image: Wyron A - Unsplash

How did the field of parapsychology get into this trap in the first place?

Before I get into the organization that started it all, it’s helpful to know who the skeptics are. With very few exceptions, they are all atheists. Self defined skeptics are a subcategory of anti-theists, aka “New Atheists” who distinguish themselves the following way:

In other words, anti-theists view religion as ignorance and see any individual or institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental. The Anti-Theist has a clear and – in their view, superior – understanding of the limitations and danger of religions.  They view the logical fallacies of religion as an outdated worldview that is not only detrimental to social cohesion and peace, but also to technological advancement and civilized evolution as a whole.  They are compelled to share their view and want to educate others into their ideological position and attempt to do so when and where the opportunity arises.

You can see that there is a fundamentalist aspect to anti-theism. Self described skeptics are even more radicalized. Skepticism, as practiced, is best described as a fundamentalist version of atheism.

It’s all there if you look for it. Phil Torres, writing for Salon, recently spelled it out in stark language. Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right. In the article he lists a seemingly never ending stream of prominent New Atheists who have landed on the side of the right wing and all its crazy.

I was not surprised. These are the people who coined the term “grief vampire” and accused mediums of preying on the bereaved. There was James Randi who gave out Pigasus awards and insulting nicknames, such as “Gullible Gary” to Prof. Gary Schwartz. They think that they are saving the world from irrational beliefs.

Skeptics Online

The website Skeptical About Skeptics has been documenting what it refers to as “media skeptics” for many years and I documented that kind of behavior back in 2013 in my book: Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet. The language has changed a bit and different social media has arisen, but the song remains the same. There is something wrong with the skeptics.

Which brings us back to the Committee for Scientific Investigation (CSI). Way back in 1976, it was formed at a convention of the American Humanist Association, (Humanist=atheist) and named CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). (You can find the whole story here.)

The newly formed organization quickly split between those who wanted impartial investigations and those who wanted simply to debunk. The debunkers quickly won and cemented the organization as being forever opposed in every way to the paranormal. The more open minded of the skeptical individuals, including the late Carl Sagan, slowly distanced themselves from the organization.

What exists today is a media organization focused on discrediting the paranormal and parapsychology in particular. If a failed psi research replication shows up in the news, it’s them. If a medium or psychic is discredited in a “study,” it’s them. They accomplish this by using academics to lend credibility to the skeptical message and they have select magazines that they can count on to push the skeptical narrative. (Chris French is a CSI fellow).

Skeptic Competition

They have succeeded for this long by not having any real competition. The paranormal nor the scientific psi community have anything like it to push back against a steady stream of atheist beliefs. By marketing themselves as scientific and reality based and the paranormal and science community around psi as unscientific woomeisters, they’ve gotten the high ground and have become the unquestioned authority.

Skepticism was always overrun with authoritarian types who misunderstood what it was and used the term to gain legitimacy, but in this day and age it’s pretty much synonymous with a radicalized form of atheism pushing their brand of atheistic materialist beliefs. So when you see a skeptic in the news, you’re basically looking at an evangelical atheist trying to convert you to disbelief in the paranormal.

I personally don’t like other people’s beliefs pushed on me disguised as science.

Massachusetts Palm Reader In False Exorcism Scam Worth $70,000

Encountering people with paranormal gifts can be a wonderful experience, especially if there is no hidden agenda, but in some cases, it can be a bad one, it can even destroy one's life. There are people out there who do not have your best interest at heart and are looking for cold hard profit at any cost and that could even be your soul. According to NBC Boston, a Massachusetts palm reader who conned a client for $7o,000 claiming she needed it to essentially buy back her daughter's soul and remove the demon into a barbie doll.

Palm Reader Arrested After $70,000 Swindle

Courtesy Of Somerset Police Department

A palm reader, Tracey Milanovich, from Somerset was arrested last week. She stands accused of stealing approximately $71,000 from a client. The palm reader in question had convinced the woman that her daughter was possessed by a demon. She also told her that giving her the money would allow her to buy back her soul and vanquish the demon by placing it into a barbie doll.

The Fall River District Court has released a statement on Monday about the palm reader. They state that she stands accused of larceny for an amount bigger than $1,200, intimidation of a witness, as well as obtaining property by trick.

Sources say that Tracey Milanovich is the owner of Tracy’s Psychic Palm Reader and that she stole around $71,000 from one client. In addition to the money swindle, she also told the woman to buy her common household items, including towels and bedding, and that the more valuable the item the more the demon would be affected. Milanovich kept asking for money, according to the police report, claiming that a previous payment "only cleaned half of her daughter," and that she needed an "additional $6,058.00 to remove what was left. Victims can contact Somerset police officer Daniel Cormier by calling (508) 679-2138.

How To Protect Yourself Against Psychics With Poor Intentions?

Just like in any profession, psychics and mediums can be evaluated these days. Evidently, some have become very good at conning people but there are organizations to protect you from them and who have high standards when it comes to the paranormal. There are also organizations that help you find a trustworthy psychic or a medium.

Some of the organizations that are often used as a reference are;

• Afterlife Connect
• Best Psychic Directory
• ISSMPI
• SNU
• Forever Family Foundation

These organizations have standards by which one must abide and also have to reach in order to become a member, certified or listed by them. When using some of the sites, by entering the service that you are looking for and your area, you can get an immediate overview of suitable mediums or psychics. You are able to make a choice on many whom are listed based on their history, reviews and so much more.

Evidently, there are some things you can look out for to ensure you are not being tricked by a fraudulent psychic. Here are some of our tips to ensure you have a good experience.

Do your homework

Research is key when you want to find a good psychic. Some people may appear like the best out there, but the reality can be quite different from the claim. Look for reviews, experiences, and even advice from friends and family who may have visited someone before.

Check the rates

Being a psychic is a job just like any other; this means that you will have to pay a fee for a private reading. The location where you reside can make a huge difference in terms of cost and availability. To get a better idea about the cost of psychics in your area, it can be a good idea to call around or look online for going rates in your area. Remember, the most expensive may not always be the best and similarly to the level of fame.

Unusual demands

The story above is a cautionary tale. The palm reader in question was able to fraudulently obtain large amounts of money and even property by fooling her clients. When a psychic has unusual demands such as signing over your house or buying them things in addition to the session price or using fear to get what they want, then alarm bells should start ringing. Be sure not to give them anything.

To avoid huge costs that have not been agreed upon, agree on a price before you head to the session. If the costs are considerably higher upon your arrival, then you may be dealing with a fraudulent psychic.

Being Approached

If you are approached randomly in public with someone who has a message or who felt like they must connect with you to tell you something out of the ordinary, then run a mile. This is highly unprofessional and is one of the first signs that you are about to be tricked.

Growth In Mediumship and Psychic Business

It is unfortunate that in the modern-day, everyone seems to be a medium, or is an amazing psychic and to some, it seems an easy way to make a living. There are a plethora of courses and small workshops and attending one of these it seems is all one needs to set up in business. The truth is very different and those genuine ambassadors in the community will tell you that it takes years of development and discernment as well as sacrifice and that a great deal of responsibility is needed. Be aware of one's history and development. Even training in a workshop with a famous person in the scene does not make you a professional medium or psychic.

Protect Yourself, But Remember There Are Good Ones Out There

Even though the story about the Somerset psychic is not an isolated case, there are genuine psychics and mediums out there that have the best intentions. Unfortunately, stories such as the one above can make it difficult for genuine psychics to make a living and get the respect from the community they deserve. Therefore, the message is to protect yourself but to remember that there are genuine people with real gifts out there that could contribute to your life. However, they are few and far between.

Spirit Walker Stories and Other Paranormal Explorations

As an esoteric wisdom teacher and someone who works, breathes and lives with one foot firmly grounded on the earth plane and the other just as firmly set in the spirit world, I thought I should begin by introducing you to my work.

As an author, I've written six books, two of them are on the subject of the paranormal, being Spirits of New Orleans: Voodoo Curses, Vampire Legends and Cities of the Dead and Ghosthunting North Carolina.

I'm known as 'Your Travel Guide to the Other Side' as the body of my work is focused on metaphysical abilities, wisdom teachings and how to live your best spiritual life here on earth, including seeing auras, developing your psychic ability, interpreting dreams and discovering the hidden wisdom within you.

The publisher of my two paranormal books created this series called America's Haunted Road Trip (AdventureKeen/Clerisy Press). They asked authors who live in each state of the US to write about the haunted history in these states and in some cases, prominent haunted cities. I grew up in Louisiana and later lived in North Carolina as an adult, so it was my great pleasure to share the incredible haunted history of both places. The books are travel guides to publicly accessible haunted sites so that you can visit each one to see what supernatural experiences you may encounter.

I visited each location to see what I would experience as a psychic medium and I reported my encounters in the books. In some locations, I didn't experience any paranormal activity while there and I reported that too. I think it's just as important to share this information when doing paranormal research, as a place could have activity, but this doesn't mean that the activity is there 24/7. There are a lot of variables in each situation, including but not limited to; does activity pick up when certain people are present, does the weather or season or time of day or night play a factor, or is activity connected to a specific date like an anniversary. Spirits, like people on earth, have other things to do and they come and go just like we do.

My journey with spirits began at an early age when I became aware of my supernatural abilities by having dreams that would come true. I would share these dreams with my parents and they would note their accuracy and discuss. As I became a bit older, around eight or nine, I was able to share more details about the dreams and this is when my parents began to pay attention, as I was now predicting future events about people and situations that were part of their lives.

The dream that was life-changing for me and for them was when I dreamt that my grandfather was about to pass away and when I awoke from this dream in the middle of the night. I could still feel this physical death experience happening to him as I had while dreaming. This was what I would later come to understand as being an Empath, having the ability to connect to others energetically in this form. As I ran to wake my parents so they could go help my grandfather, I could feel the physical pain he was experiencing. It's one of those moments you never forget.

It was a very troubling experience for me in many ways, losing my grandfather was the first death of someone that I was very close to, which was devastating. Along with that, I would find this beyond frustrating that I could feel someone's illness or sadness as am Empath, but many times there was little I could do to help them in their situation.

During this time, my great grandmother visited me in spirit before his passing, preparing me for the abilities that were coming through for me. I wish I had been older and had the ability to discuss with her what I was seeing with my grandfather, for now I realize she had probably been visiting him all of this time too, preparing him for when he would cross over. I had wanted to discuss her visit with my grandfather, but after a psychometry experience where I held some of my grandmother's jewelry and shared the stories of what she had been doing while wearing the jewelry, I was asked to no longer discuss these things. So I had shied away from discussing most of what I saw and experienced supernaturally with the family anymore.

Once my grandfather crossed over, she informed me that I would be doing the work she did and much more, and that it had been in the family for ages. The most interesting thing I found when she visited me was that she spoke in French the entire time. This is when I realized that people in spirit communicate telepathically with energy, images, and impressions and that there is no language barrier when communicating in this manner. I could understand her as if she was speaking to me in English.

My journey as a 'spirit walker', which is what my mother referred to me as, a person who travels back and forth between the earth plane and the spirit world, was active since my childhood. I came back remembering past lives and I would share these stories with my parents. I would spend a great amount of time in the local library checking out books on mythology and haunted history and then would proceed to 'edit' these books, explaining how they were wrong in many ways. My journey as a wisdom teacher began early in this form. At the age of twelve, I went to my mother and declared that I was ready to begin my formal studies in Astrology again and she agreed and encouraged me. The next year at age thirteen, I went to her again and explained that I was ready to study the Tarot and she bought me my first deck of cards and found a teacher for me. I was so fortunate to have a mother who understood and encouraged my journey. I think by this time my mother had realized it was a huge part of my life and who I was, so she didn't want to stop it.

Louisiana Bayou

Around this time, my mother and my grandmother had taken me with them one day when they drove to a lady's home where I had never been before. The home was in the country near the bayou where we lived in Louisiana. It was a beautiful two-story clapboard structure, painted white with a wraparound porch and black shutters. Outside the home stood several big oak trees and under one of these trees, there was a rope swing with a slat of wood for the seat. My mother explained that she and my grandmother were going inside this home to talk to the lady who lived there and that I needed to stay outside and sit on the rope swing. I sat on the swing, enjoying the peaceful feeling that surrounded this property. The sun was shining, birds were singing and there was a cool breeze blowing steadily. It was easy to wait here and I enjoyed my time on the swing.

About an hour later my mother and grandmother appeared back on the front porch and I saw the lady behind them waving goodbye. She and I looked at each other and I saw her aura, which I had been able to do with everyone for as long as I could remember. I also saw someone in spirit standing next to her. Her aura was glowing and it felt familiar to me. I waved to her and she was staring just as intently at me and waved back.

In the car on the way back to my grandmother's house, my mother and grandmother were trying to speak as adults do, in code, that they think children won't pick up on. Growing frustrated with their strained conversation and the tension it created that I was feeling as an empath, I spoke in my sweet southern Louisiana voice and said to my mother,

"I know y'all went to have a psychic reading with that lady and that she told you about what's coming for you. I agree with her, as I've seen the same thing and it will scary at first and then it will be ok".

Well suffice to say, my family was used to hearing about my prophetic dreams, but not as much about how psychic I was on a daily basis. The psychometry jewelry experience had given them a small hint of things to come, but me knowing what they had discussed inside the home with the lady, changed how they perceived what I knew and could know. Let's just say it put a strain on the relationship between my mother and I as she had a lot of things going on in her life at that time.

It was at this point in my journey that I began to understand discernment and how important it was not to share too much with people when they weren't ready to hear or face certain situations. My frustration grew again. Now that I was old enough to understand how difficult life is many times for people and while I could see what they were experiencing, I didn't know yet how to help them. It was during these early times that I believe is what set the tone for me to study and then become an esoteric wisdom teacher. I didn't want to just be a psychic and see things for people (give a man a fish and he eats for a day), I wanted to teach them what I knew, about discernment and energy bodies and how the aura fluctuates with our thoughts and emotions and how what we think and feel, affects our daily lives. I wanted to explain how to connect with the wisdom within our soul, and from the Akashic records and higher soul and how we are intuitive creators (teach a man to fish and he eats forever).

This is how my journey began in this lifetime. In future articles, I'll share how it's all culminated and led me to what I do today as a I teach, write and offer consultations to help people on their path.

author Kala Ambrose

It's wonderful to connect with you here. I hope you'll join me again here soon. Next time I'll share what happened to me when visiting the spiritual planes this year at Halloween and into the next day, which the Catholics refer to as All Soul's Day. It certainly was for me!

Yours in exploring life's deeper mysteries,

Your Travel Guide to the Other Side

Kala Ambrose