Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (2 page)

There’s nothing haphazard about some spirits’ determination to remain earthbound. Ghosts stay behind for a variety of misguided reasons—to care for a loved one, to protect a home or land they’re deeply connected to, to seek revenge, or, with sad frequency, to avoid facing God out of fear that He’ll turn them away (which is an impossibility).

No ghost is ever trapped on earth for eternity. Some of them are sent to the Other Side by people who are compassionate and educated enough, when they find themselves in the presence of an earthbound, to simply say, “You’re dead. Go Home.” (Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s worth a try.) Many more of them are eventually rescued by residents of the Other Side, who are well aware of them and can be counted on to perform persistent interventions for as long as it takes to pull these trapped, confused souls into the tunnel and on to the joyful peace that’s waiting for them in God’s outstretched arms.

Y
ou’ll come across several terms in Francine’s comments that could easily leave you scratching your head and saying, “Huh?” Rather than take the time to interrupt what she has to say by explaining each term as it comes up, I’d much rather give you these reference pages to turn back to and let you read any and all definitions that happen to pique your curiosity.

Astral Travel

Astral travel is the means by which loved ones on the Other Side come to visit us and we go to visit them. It’s also our means of transporting ourselves from place to place at Home, free of these cumbersome, gravity-challenged bodies we’re currently housed in. Astral travel brought us here from our real lives in paradise when our spirits entered their chosen bodies, and astral travel will take us there again when these incarnations are through.

Astral travel comes as naturally to us as breathing, whether we’re conscious of it or not. It’s a skill we were given when our souls were born an eternity ago, and that skill is ours no matter what dimension we happen to be living in, including earth. You and I travel astrally while we sleep—an average of two or three times a week, in fact. Astral travel is the truth behind some of our most vivid and memorable “dreams.” And we can thank astral travel for the fact that while victims of comas and severely debilitating illnesses are struggling physiologically, their spirits are joyfully darting from place to place, dimension to dimension, and loved one to loved one.

You’ll read more about the specifics of the Other Side’s visits to us in the discussion of spirits in this glossary. For now I just want to focus on our own astral travel and how we routinely take trips that, among other comforts, allow us to initiate reunions with an unlimited number of people and places we miss. And since our most frequent trips take place while we’re asleep, it’s natural for us to mistake them for dreams. But there are some simple ways to tell the difference:

• Dreams of flying without benefit of an airplane or other external means aren’t dreams; they’re astral travels, perfectly real, neither dreams nor your imagination. Not all astral travel “dreams” involve flying, though. Like everyone else, including you, I astrally travel to the Other Side several times a month while I sleep, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never had a dream in which I’m flying on my own power.
  
• Astral trips unfold in a logical sequence of events, just as our waking experiences do, rather than in that haphazard jumble of images, people, and locations that are so common in dreams.
  
• Any dream you’re not only part of, but actually view yourself in, isn’t a dream; it’s astral travel. We’ve all heard about or experienced the phenomenon of people watching themselves during surgery, deep meditation, unconsciousness, or a coma. The same thing can happen during astral trips for exactly the same reason—during those moments the spirit and the body are two separate entities. And take it from someone who’s been there, there’s a certain curious fascination in finding yourself able to look at yourself from outside your body as an objective observer. I don’t happen to love that feeling, and I much prefer limiting my astral travel to those hours when I’m sound asleep and my cluttered conscious mind isn’t ready to leap in and interfere.
  

So next time you have a pretty, peaceful “dream” about a departed loved one that unfolded in logical, sequential order and “seemed so real,” please know that it
is
real, and go right ahead and enjoy every bit of the comfort it gives you.

Cell Memory

You’ll find a reference or two in Francine’s comments about something called cell memory, or when a celebrity reacts during the most recent incarnation to an experience he or she had in a previous life. And since cell memory isn’t reserved exclusively for celebrities, but is common to all of us, it’s even more worthy of a brief discussion.

Cell memory is the cumulative body of knowledge our spirits have gathered during all our lifetimes on earth and at Home, and it is accessed by every cell in the body the moment we “take up residence” in the fetus. It’s what lies behind countless health problems, phobias, psychoses, chronic pains, and so much other supposedly unexplainable “baggage” we arrive with when we’re born.

The basics of cell memory go like this:

• Our bodies are made up of billions of interacting cells.
  
• Each of those cells is a living, breathing, feeling organism, responding literally to whatever information it receives from the subconscious mind.
  
• It’s in the subconscious that our spirit minds live, eternally intact and with total recall, no matter how healthy or unhealthy our conscious minds might be.
  

The instant our spirit minds enter our physical bodies for a new incarnation, the familiarity of being in a body again triggers all the memories and sensations our spirits have retained from every past life we’ve ever lived. It’s not unlike an experience you’ve probably had when you returned to a place that holds powerful memories for you—your childhood home, maybe, or the site of your first school dance—and been stirred both physically and emotionally by the impact of the present colliding with the past. On a larger, more significant level, that’s exactly what our spirits feel when they find themselves in a body again. Like all the other information our subconscious minds transmit, our billions of cells are instantaneously infused with an eternity of memories and sensations and physiologically react to them as part of their reality.

Through regressive hypnosis, I’ve helped thousands of clients access those cell memories and learn to recognize them as part of lives and deaths that have long since come and gone. But make no mistake about it, we, and the celebrities you’ll read about, are unavoidably impacted by cell memories from other lifetimes, for better or worse, some of us more strongly than others.

And just to clarify an important point that some people find confusing: please remember that living several lifetimes doesn’t mean that in the course of eternity we become several different people. We’re always the same spirit, always ourselves, on one infinite journey, growing and learning along the way, no matter how many different bodies we might inhabit. For an effective analogy, think of your journey in this lifetime alone, every step of which led to who and where you are at this moment. From birth, through infancy, through potty training, through kindergarten, through high school, through whatever stage of adulthood you’ve reached now, you’ve gone through countless changes, physically, mentally, and emotionally, but you’ve always been
you,
the sum total of everything you’ve experienced so far. The eternal journey of our souls works exactly the same way. Through all our incarnations that temporarily take us away from Home, all our physical, mental, and emotional variations during our time on earth, and our exquisitely busy lives on the Other Side, we always have been and always will be no one but
us,
utterly unique as God created each of us, constantly learning and growing and becoming wiser through experience, whether we’re at Home or here, in this rough school away from Home that we’ve elected to attend.

The Chart

It’s worth repeating as often as it takes: earth is not our Home. The Other Side is our Home. We had joyful, busy lives there before we came here, and we’ll return to those lives after we leave here. We make these brief trips to earth to learn, the hard way, through hands-on experience, for the growth and progress of our spirits along the path of their eternal journey. It’s a completely different kind of education than we have access to at Home, because on the Other Side everything is infused with God’s perfection. And as Francine has rhetorically asked me a million times, “What have you learned when times were good?”

We choose to come here, as rarely or as often as we decide we need to, and we choose what we’re interested in learning and working on this time around. There’s nothing haphazard about our incarnations. Just as we would never head off to college without having decided which school would serve us best, what courses we’ll need, where we’ll live and with whom, and countless other details to maximize our odds of accomplishing our goals, we wouldn’t dream of coming to earth unprepared.

And so, before we come to earth for a new lifetime, we go to a vast room in the Hall of Justice and write an exhaustively detailed chart of our upcoming incarnation. From the broad strokes to the most trivial moments, we leave nothing to chance in pursuit of our goals.

I don’t know any individuals, including myself, who can imagine having deliberately chosen some of the unpleasantness, ugliness, and tragedy in their lives. But again, our sole reason for incarnating is to learn to overcome challenges, negativity, and despair, none of which even exist on the Other Side, for the advancement of our souls. And then there’s the fact that we write our charts in the blissful euphoria that is our constant state of mind on the Other Side. We’re fearless there, we’re utterly confident, we’re our most loving selves, and we’re surrounded by nothing but unconditional love from each other and from God. There’s nothing we feel we can’t handle, nothing we’re reluctant to take on in our pursuit of spiritual growth. I guarantee you, no matter how challenging your life is, you were in the process of planning something even more astonishing for yourself until your Spirit Guide and the Council convinced you to tone your chart down to something a little more realistic.

And so, hard as it may be to believe, before you came here, among countless other details you chose your parents, your siblings, and every other family member; every aspect of your physical appearance; the exact place, date, and time of your birth; your friends, your lovers, your spouses, your children, your bosses, your co-workers, your casual acquaintances, and even your enemies; the cities, neighborhoods, and houses you’ll live in; your preferences, weaknesses, flaws, sense of humor (or lack of one), skills, talents, and areas of incompetence; every minor and major injury and illness you’ll experience; and even your hobbies, interests, passions, and private little quirks that no one else might know about but you.

Not that our charts deprive us of free will once we’re here. We actually arrive on earth with countless choices surrounding every detail we’ve designed. If, let’s say, one of those enemies you charted, maybe even someone you knew in a past life, shows up as you planned for, it’s your choice whether to avoid that person like the plague, be polite but keep your distance and watch your back, or engage him or her and suffer the inevitable consequences. Or if you charted yourself to catch a cold when you’re twenty-two, it’s your decision whether to take care of yourself and get over it or to keep pushing your luck and run the risk of letting it develop into pneumonia. A charted life is absolutely a life filled with options, and beyond that it’s proof that the success of our souls isn’t measured by the obstacles we face, but by how we handle them when they come along.

And just to give you an idea of exactly how unimaginably vast the Hall of Records really is, I should add that every chart of every incarnation of every person who’s ever lived on earth is carefully preserved and catalogued there, handwritten by us on scrolls of parchment, for our own review when we get Home and for others to study when and if the need or curiosity strikes them. I’m on my fifty-second and final incarnation, so I’ll leave it to you to do the math on how many charts are housed there among the countless other treasures I mentioned earlier.

Cocooning

Cocooning is a compassionate, loving, expertly devised and executed process that takes place in one of many designated chambers in the Hall of Wisdom. It’s reserved for those spirits who aren’t able at first to make a peaceful transition from earth to the Other Side for a variety of reasons. Some spirits, even when long illnesses would seem to have given them time to prepare for their lifetimes to end, arrive Home deeply troubled, confused, and unable to find comfort in the blissful Homecoming rituals of reunions, the Scanning Machine, and a return to their perfect lives. It’s an especially common experience for victims of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, substance abuse and addiction, and such severe mental afflictions as schizophrenia and psychosis, that is, any disorder that separates the spirit from its God-given identity and its clear awareness of reality.

When a spirit returns to the Other Side in need of the intensive care of cocooning, it’s taken by a team of brilliantly trained medical and psychological experts to begin the restorative procedure: twilight sleep, constant care and reassurance, and whatever other healing treatments are necessary to peacefully and safely guide the newly arrived spirit through the “withdrawal” period of leaving earth. The spirit is cocooned for as long as it takes to be completely healthy, whole, and joyful again. And on very rare occasions, as with one of the celebrities you’ll read about, a second cocooning will take place if the spirit emerges from it too soon.

But never does cocooning fail in the long run—which, in the eternity of Home, amounts to no more than a heartbeat or two. Eventually, every spirit on the Other Side is euphorically happy and healthy again, more alive than ever in God’s sacred embrace.

The Council

The Council is its own phylum of eighteen highly advanced male and female spirits whose function is essentially to be God’s voice on the Other Side. Their wisdom is revered, and because they’re their own species, never incarnating and appointed for eternity, they’re exempt from the rule of everyone at Home being thirty years old. The men of the Council wear identical white or silver beards, and the women have long white or silver hair. They dress in long flowing robes and preside at a gleaming white marble U-shaped table in a massive white marble room in the Hall of Justice.