Jeffrey Mishlove confirms an afterlife: Excerpt #1

My Great Uncle Harry Schwam passed away on March 26, 1972. He died in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, at age 84. A religiously observant man, he ran a small, corner grocery store. He came home after attending early Sunday morning religious services, sat down in his favorite chair, and passed away. In California it was two hours earlier, 7:30 a.m. I was still sleeping – captured by, and absorbed in, the most surprising, vivid, and powerful dream of my life.

Uncle Harry appeared and spoke to me about my life, addressing personal issues in a way that penetrated me to the core. I cannot say I knew Harry well during his life. He was over fifty years my senior. I was 25 years old. Yet, in this dream that seemed more real than waking reality, we shared a soul-to-soul communion that defied description.

I awoke and wept, crying joyful tears and simultaneously singing a Hebrew song, Avinu Malkeinu, normally reserved for the most sacred Jewish observances. Something profoundly beautiful and transformative had touched me. Neither before nor since have I had a dream embodying such an intensely sublime, emotional state.

I immediately wrote home and asked about Uncle Harry, mentioning I had a dream about him that morning. Two days later, as soon as she received my letter, my mother phoned with the news of his death. Her voice was suffused with emotion when she asked me, “How did you know? That’s when he died.”

There is only one reasonable way to account for this event, the most earthshaking and unforgettable of my young life. Uncle Harry actually visited me in a dream when he died. Extrasensory perception alone doesn’t account for the overwhelmingly potent emotions associated with his presence. Uncle Harry’s visitation convinced me, beyond all doubt, the soul exists and survives the physical body’s death.

I asked my mother for some object of his to remember him by. Within a week, I received a book with a note saying it had been Uncle Harry’s favorite. To my surprise, it was a book of mystical teaching stories about Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century miracle worker who founded the Jewish Chassidic tradition.

That’s how I learned Uncle Harry was a mystic at heart. When he died, he had gifted me with a brief, yet unforgettable, taste of another reality.

I gleaned from this indelible experience that postmortem survival is part of humanity’s long history of inner, mystical exploration. Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, called the philosophy behind this exploration the primordial tradition.

Huston Smith claimed religions of every age and culture held understandings in common. One such unifying concept is the soul. In a 1987 video, Smith and I discuss the soul and its relationship to science. While today’s science would like to deny the need for such a concept, Smith states neither the soul nor the spiritual reality it implies is going away. It surrounds us – even if it is invisible to our instruments and cannot be measured.

I tried to discuss my Uncle Harry experience with faculty at the University of California, where I was a graduate student in the School of Criminology, with a clinical psychology emphasis. I reached a complete dead end. Basically no one I spoke to at the university had given any thought to postmortem survival. So, I resolved to become my own expert.

Within a year, I left the criminology program with a master’s degree. Taking advantage of graduate division rules, I created an individual, interdisciplinary doctoral major at Berkeley in a field that raised a few eyebrows – parapsychology. I was fortunate to find professors from multiple departments in the widespread university system who would sponsor me.

In 1980, I received what is – sadly, to this day – the only doctoral diploma in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited, American university. My switch in career focus from criminology to parapsychology was radical. An experience lasting for only a few minutes was the catalyst for this transition that became a permanent fixture of my life. Such extraordinary transformations aren’t uncommon. They accompany many after-death communications.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host of “New Thinking Allowed” on YouTube.