Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.


Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.                      

 

I looked over Jordan and what did I see?


Comin’ for to carry me home.


A band of angels coming after me.


Comin’ for to carry me home.                               

 

If you get there before I do.


Comin’ for to carry me home.


Tell all my friends I’m coming, too.


Comin’ for to carry me home.                               

 

I'm sometimes up and sometimes down.


Comin’ for to carry me home.


But still my soul feels heaven bound.


Comin’ for to carry me home.                               

Measha Brueggergosman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpLszBOka0k

Leslie Kean's dead brother communicates with her

Leslie Kean, author of Surviving Death, writes: “I take after death communications (ADCs) seriously partly because I received some dramatic ones myself over a two-year period (from 2013 to 2015) while researching evidence included in this book. Although they are very personal and remain puzzling, they made a deep impression on me, and after much thought I decided it would be dishonest for me to withhold them from my narrative. They are part of my investigation—the time was fortuitous—and I kept an open and receptive mind throughout the process, sometimes even asking for an ADC to occur through directed thought. Some of the experiences had an interesting link to aspects of my mediumship readings. These paranormal events may be hard to believe (they were for me), but in reporting on them here, I trust myself as the most reliable source I know! You can be absolutely certain that everything I describe is exactly as it occurred, down to the smallest details. I made notes immediately after each event and analyzed them afterward. I understand why ADCs have so much impact, and how profoundly mysterious, and provocative, they are. They evoked a complex set of emotions in me—expanded awareness, elation, incomprehension, questioning, doubt, and hope—and always a sense of connection to something nonlocal.

 

“My younger brother died unexpectedly in January 2013. We were always bonded and through his life he was closer to me than he was to our other two siblings. Sadly, I don’t think I realized how much I cared about him until after he died. The shock of his sudden departure, and our unfinished relationship, was a different kind of emotional pain than anything I had ever known, and I never could have predicted the deep effect it had on me.

 

“My first ADC came out of the blue before I had entertained even the slightest thought of any such communications. I was lying on my bed alone, in deep mourning with the overwhelming pain of my brother being gone forever. Suddenly his voice burst onto the scene. It startled me, because as I experienced it, it was not generated from my brain; it was from the outside. I heard his familiar voice clearly say, ‘Leslie . . . I’m fine. It’s okay.’ The way he said my name was unique to the way he spoke; it was so clearly his tone. His emphasis was: ‘Hey—stop! Everything is totally okay and I’m fine!’ I was stunned because it was like a sudden and jolting external intrusion, completely different from a thought or memory.

 

“This seemed like an experience of telepathy: I felt like I was hearing with my mind and not my ears. It wasn’t in my mind, but was perceived by my mind, as if my consciousness had its own nonphysical ears. It had sound: it was loud, but not quite like someone talking, because it wasn’t localized to one spot. I was completely taken aback.’

 

“Some months later, I was staying at my family’s summer house on the coast in Massachusetts. One afternoon I was in the woods and sat on a rock near the ocean, and in a deep, lengthy, heartfelt meditation I connect to my brother and asked him for a sign. I wanted more ‘proof’ that he was there—something physical that would make it obvious to me.

 

“The next morning, I woke up and groggily went into the kitchen, turned on the light, and made coffee. After adding milk to my cup, I was just about to put it in the microwave when the ceiling light blinked twice—off, on; off, on—and then went off. The microwave went off also, along with the light above the stove on an adjacent wall. The other lights in the kitchen remained on. I checked the lights in rooms nearby, and they were all working. Well, all I wanted was a hot cup of coffee, so I picked up the microwave and plugged it into a working socket on another counter. Then it hit me: Is this Garry? Then the lights came back on. They had been off about three or four minutes.

 

“Some requests I made for signs after that were not answered. But on May 15, 2014, I went into a meditative state and once again passionately and deeply asked my brother Garry to do something definite, something obvious, to show his presence. I need more proof! I never get enough physical manifestations to convince me! I need to dispel my doubt! The request was not made casually, and I spent much time delivering it.

 

“The next day, I was cooking and using Spectrum organic sesame oil. In one bottle there was only a little left, and I had a second bottle about a third full. So, I emptied the remaining sesame oil from that jar into the second one, and put the now-empty bottle down on the counter with the cap loosely on top. (The standard sixteen-ounce jar had a narrow neck with a plastic opening allowing the cap to be screwed on.) About a minute later, suddenly the top went shooting straight up into the air about five or six inches, and fell on the counter. There was a force there, seeming to be coming from inside the empty bottle, strong enough to send the cap flying into the air. But there was nothing inside the empty bottle. I admit that I was elated. My brother was delivering in spades!"

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Communications from a deceased friend

In Surviving Death Leslie Kean writes: “Jane Katra holds a PhD in public health, was a professor at the University of Oregon, and coauthored two books on nonlocal consciousness and healing with physicist Russel Targ, who was a pioneer in the development of the laser. In 2002, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ, her close friend and Russell’s daughter, died. Elisabeth had spent a decade at Stanford University, becoming a certified Russian translator and then earning her medical degree. In January 2002, she was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant of $1.5 million to carry out two distant-healing prayer studies, one on patients with glioblastoma multiforme, a rare and aggressive brain tumor. Two months later, Elisabeth received the devastating diagnosis of a fast-growing tumor of the same type she was about to study. She died at the age of forty, in Palo Alto, California.

 

“Coming from a ‘science-minded family’ of intellectuals, Jane did not accept that communications could come from someone who had died. That changed for her and others after Elisabeth seemingly sent so many messages and signs to such a range of people that the source of the communications became incontestable. Jane explains:

 

“I have been the recipient of or witness to over thirty surprising and spontaneous communications from Elisabeth. The most evidential ones were those received by more than one person at the same time: a communication in a foreign language unknown to the recipient; lights flashing on and off or books about healing moving themselves off shelves when people talked about her; messages to two people regarding serious health problems unknown to either of them; and a prediction wherein several people received different, incomplete communications, and when we put them together, they completed an idea.”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Mrs. Piper communicates with George Pellew

In Surviving Death Leslie Kean describes more of Mrs. Piper’s communication with the dead: “In the spring of 1892, Dr. Phinuit was gradually superseded by another control, who, whatever his ultimate nature, was at least not fictitious. This was George Pellew, a young man of literary and philosophical interests who had been killed in New York a few weeks previously. He was known to Hodgson, and five years before had had, under a pseudonym, a single sitting with Mrs. Piper.

 

“Pellew first manifested at a sitting to which Hodgson brought a close friend of Pellew’s. Then and thereafter the George Pellew control and communicator (GP) showed a most detailed acquaintance with the affairs of the previously living Pellew. Out of a hundred and fifty sitters who were introduced to him, GP recognized twenty-nine of the thirty who had been known to the living Pellew (the thirtieth, whom he recognized after an initial failure, was a childhood friend who had ‘grown up’ in the interval). He conversed with each of them in an appropriate manner, and showed an intimate knowledge of their concerns, and of his own supposed past relationships with them. Only rarely did GP slip up badly, as he sometimes did when discussing, for instance, the philosophical questions that had so much interested Pellew in life. During the period of GP’s ascendancy, Hodgson became convinced (he had not previously been so) that Mrs. Piper’s controls and communicators were, at least in many cases, what they claimed to be, namely, the surviving spirits of formerly incarnate human beings.

 

“GP remained the principal communicator until early in 1897 (during this period Hodgson continued to keep very full records). He 1905 Hodgson died, and, predictably, he too then became one of Mrs. Piper’s controls. The purported communications from him were discussed in an interesting paper by William James. Mrs. Piper’s trance mediumship ended in 1911, perhaps in consequence of the harsh treatment that she received at the hands of two American psychologists, G. Stanly Hall and Amy Tanner."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Research on trance medium Mrs. Lenora Piper

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Trance medium Leonora E. Piper (1857-1950) of Boston was studied so extensively that the few volumes of case records are still unsurpassed in quantity and detail. She is also one of the very few mediums whose trance speech and writings have been subjected to a serious and extensive psychological analysis.

 

“Mrs. Piper was ‘discovered’ for psychical research by William James of Harvard University, arguably the greatest psychologist of that or perhaps any time. James was sufficiently impressed by his sittings to send some twenty-five other persons to her under pseudonyms. In the spring of 1886, he wrote an account of the results and stated, ‘I am persuaded of the medium’s honesty, and of the genuineness of her trance. I now believe her to be in possession of a power as yet unexplained.’

 

“The general procedure at a sitting would be this: Mrs. Piper would pass into a trance. There was never the least doubt that the trance state was, in some sense, ‘genuine’—William James and G. Stanley Hall, another well-known American psychologist, demonstrated that Mrs. Piper could be cut, blistered, pricked, and undisturbed by a bottle of strong ammonia held under her nose. (The test were so stringent that Mrs. P. complained bitterly about their painful aftereffects.)

 

"After a few minutes, Mrs. Piper would begin to speak with the voice of her control, who gave the name of ‘Dr. Phinuit.’ A soi-distant French doctor with scanty knowledge of the French language, Phinuit spoke in a gruff, male voice and made use of Frenchisms, slang, and swearwords, in a manner quite unlike that of the awake Mrs. Piper. Phinuit would give sitters accounts of the appearances and activities of deceased (and sometimes also of living) friends and relations, and would transmit message from them, often with appropriate gestures.

 

"On an off day, Phinuit would ramble, flounder hopelessly, and fish for information, and if given any, would blatantly serve it up again as though it had been his own discovery. But when he was on form he could, with hardly any hesitation, relay copious communications from the deceased friends and relatives of sitters, communications that would turn out to be very accurate even in tiny details, and far too accurate for the hypothesis of chance or of guesswork based simply on the appearance of the unnamed sitters, to seem in the remotest degree plausible.

 

"As a result of a report by William James, a leading member of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and an expert in the unmasking of fraud, Richard Hodgson (1855-1905), went to Boston in 1887 and assumed charge of the investigation of Mrs. Piper. He arranged for the careful recording of all sittings and took the most extensive precautions against trickery. Sitters were introduced anonymously or under false names and were drawn from as wide a range of persons as possible. For some weeks Mrs. Piper was shadowed by detectives to ascertain whether she made inquiries in the affairs of possible sitters, or employed agents to do so. She was brought to England where she knew no one and could have had no established agents; her sittings were arranged and supervised by leading members of the SPR. Sitters were for the most part introduced anonymously, and comprehensive records were kept. And still Mrs. Piper continued to get results.

 

"The thought of fraud was never far from Mrs. Piper’s early investigators. The case against it was powerfully summarized in 1889 by Frank Podmore, a highly skeptical writer, who points out that despite careful overseeing amounting at times to invasion of privacy, Mrs. Piper had never once been detected being dishonest. Yet successful communicators often addressed sitters in exactly the right tone and might unmistakably refer to trivialities of a wholly private significance. The charge of credulity, said Podmore, rested with those who, without consideration and without inquiry, could lightly attribute all the results to imposture."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Communications (and presence?) of the dead?

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Jeffrey Kane is an academic vice president and has a PhD in the philosophy of science; he has written and edited scholarly books on the philosophy of knowledge and educational policy.

 

“Jeff’s oldest child, Gabriel, died in a car crash in June 2003, four days before his twenty-second birthday. In 2005 Jeff wrote Life as a Novice, a powerful book of meditative poems describing the journey of his deep grief, inspired by his son’s continuing presence in his life. A profound, gifted poet and a true contemplative, Jeff describes repeatedly waking up in the morning to ‘a hole torn in the side of the world where once you stood.’ Jeff’s connection to his son seems to be as strong as any human bond could possibly be.

 

‘Perhaps the shock and incomprehensible nature of the loss of a child leave the parents somehow more receptive to messages from the spiritual realm,’ Jeff told me. ‘We are often so confused that the comfortable realities of daily life no longer hold their solidity. The real becomes unreal; the sounds and sights of a familiar room seem as if they come from a foreign land. There is not so much pain as utter confusion about how a child you watched come into the world is no longer in it.’

 

"On Gabriel’s birthday just days after his death, Jeff and his wife, Janet, heard a crash inside the house somewhere but didn’t think much of it. When Jeff went into his walk-in closet before going to bed, all the shelves on the right side had collapsed onto the floor, so that everything slid off them to the center of the closet. There had not been any changes to the closet shelves, or the items on them, for years and there was no explanation for why all the shelves on one side would suddenly cave in. And there, on top of the pile of clothes, shoes, and photo albums lying in a heap on the floor, square in the middle with its front cover facing Jeff, was the album of Gabriel’s birth. None of the photo albums had been touched for seven years prior, yet on Gabriel’s birthday, his birth album lay there staring Jeff in the face. This was the first tangible event that occurred, and Jeff interpreted it as ‘either cruel fate or meaningful.’ It was at least enough to leave a question in his mind saying perhaps this was more than coincidence.

 

"Soon after, Janet had a reading with a medium, who told her Gabriel would leave dimes for them to show he was around. Jeff told his wife this was ‘absolute nonsense’: the medium had planted the notion in their minds to look for dimes so that it would become a circular and self-fulfilling prophecy. A few days later, Janet and their daughter Emily went to the beach, and while in the water swimming, Emily felt a dime float into the palm of her hand. How often does such a thing happen? Still, Jeff attributed that to an ‘amazing coincidence.

 

"Yet a few days later he questioned that interpretation. He was sleeping, woke up and in the dim light saw something that looked like a dime or a penny about seven or eight feet away on the floor. He mused cynically to himself, snidely dismissing the idea with sarcasm: ‘Oh, I wonder if that’s a dime from Gabriel!’ He turned away and then suddenly heard Gabriel’s voice. ‘I absolutely heard him, clearly, in English; it was loud and precise and unmistakably his voice,’ Jeff told me. The voice said, ‘Aha! Check the date. It’s a 1981!’ That was the year of Gabriel’s birth. Jeff picked up the coin—a penny—but couldn’t read the date on it, so he woke his wife. It was 1981. ‘He was telling me something I couldn’t possible have known,’ says Jeff.

 

“That summer, Jeff and Janet went on a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, and were driving in Acadia National Park. ‘I wish Gabriel could give us some kind of sign to let us know he’s around,’ Jeff said. At that moment, the car clock jumped one hour. They both saw it. Was this a sign from Gabriel? They drove around to see if somehow they had entered a different time zone, or had been affected by a nearby tower, trying to find a rational explanation—without success. Three days later, they were driving again and Jeff mentioned to Janet that, yes, the hour shift might have been a fluke caused by a malfunctioning cell tower or something. He added that if the clock changed by two hours, that explanation would not make sense and there had to be something else going on. Within two or three minutes, the clock changed by two hours."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

A brilliant, loving light that appears near death

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Light is a predominant feature of the NDE and plays a part in the dying process as well. It is seen not only at the time of death but in the days or even weeks before. In both situations, its qualities are described positively, as warm, loving, peaceful, compassionate; and people feel drawn toward it. After an ELE (end-of-life experience) involving the experience of light, the dying person describes it to others, just as the resuscitated person does after an NDE.

 

"Occasionally caregivers or relatives who are sitting with the dying see light at the moment of death, as though they are somehow sharing the same vision. They usually describe the light as bright and white and associated with strong feelings of love that at times permeate the whole room. It is often emanating from or surrounding the body, and it usually lasts over the time of the death process. It can be radiant glowing light or more like ‘spiritual’ globules of light. Three accounts are as follows:

 

“Suddenly there was the most brilliant light shining from my husband’s chest and as this light lifted upward there was the most beautiful music and singing voices, my own chest seemed filled with infinite joy and my hear felt as if it was lifting to join this light and music. Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder and a nurse said, ‘I’m sorry, love. He has just gone.’ I lost sight of the light and music, I felt so bereft at being left behind. (Wife’s account)

 

“Sometimes I’ve seen a light, which is in a corner, like candlelight, it’s a golden light. It’s not electric light and it’s not one of the hospice lights. It just appears sometimes. It goes when they die. They take their last breath, and everything settles down and the light goes out. (Hospice chaplain)

 

"When her mother was dying this amazing light appeared in the room. The whole room was filled with this amazing light and her mother died. (Pastoral caregiver in hospice)”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).