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  During the period of time when I was actively involved in thanatological work, I visited a hospital in Miami. A physician there had just verified an unusual near-death experience of a Cuban immigrant woman. During cardiac arrest she had an OOBE in which she found herself back in Cuba. She was in a house where she had once lived but had not visited for many years. She recovered from the heart attack, but she was very upset by what she had seen during her OOBE. She reported that the people who now lived in the house had made some changes that she did not like. They had moved things around, had exchanged some pieces of furniture, and had painted the fence a shade of green that she found appalling. Her attending physician had been able to verify that she had accurately described the changes that had occurred in the house during her absence—including the fact that the fence had been painted an unusual shade of green.

  Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer.

  The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site—even before he got there or knew what he would see!

  While the early research of remote viewing involved men and women who had been chosen because of their psychic abilities, it was soon learned that virtually anyone could be trained to perform this task. Most researchers have been convinced that remote viewing and other telepathic abilities are normal human capacities. After experiencing remote viewing for themselves, many people report that the process of developing this skill does not involve new learning so much as it involves "unlearning" negative conditioning that claims these abilities are not "real."

  Good clairvoyants are able to access information about their clients' pasts or the history of a physical object with no visual or verbal clues. I have repeatedly witnessed psychics Anne Armstrong and Jack Schwarz access complex, detailed information of this kind. The ability to obtain information in this way suggests that memory may exist independent of the physical body, maintaining a cogent form that can be recognized by human faculties other than the five senses. Rather than being like a railroad track with a narrow route extending out into the distance in two directions (past and future), time may be more like an endless sea, every drop of which we can instantly access, regardless of where we might be standing.

  As a researcher of human consciousness, it is very clear to me that along with our experiences of extraordinary perception there often comes a deep metaphysical fear, just as I experienced when confronted with the possibility of projecting myself through space and time to my parents' apartment. This fear is rooted in the fact that such experiences challenge and undermine fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality. When this fear occurs, it so threatens the basic assumptions by which we operate in our daily lives that it is usually much easier to deny the existence of the perception than it is to embrace and trust what we have experienced. In other words, when confronted with a choice between accepting a new worldview and quelling our fears, we often choose the latter.

than this. We may also encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities, demons, and suprahuman beings known from myths and fairy tales.

"Myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system;
they come out of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with
ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience
is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things. The
myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something
 
that informs the fact."

—Joseph Campbell,
An Open Life: In Conversation with Michael Toms

There is a large category of transpersonal experiences that goes beyond both the time-space continuum and the reality we know in our everyday lives. Here we experience the world of myth, apparitions, communication with the dead, and the ability to see auras, chakras, or other subtle energies not generally recognized or verified by modern scientific methods. Here we might also experience meetings with spirit guides, "power animals," and various superhuman or subhuman entities, or we might go on fantastic journeys to universes other than our own.

  The late Aldous Huxley made the observation that the extraordinary world we encounter here is not to be too quickly dismissed as purely mental fabrications with no particular purpose. He said:

  In this chapter we will be exploring these remoter regions of consciousness in some detail, drawing from descriptions of experiential sessions by a variety of people. We will begin with one of the more controversial areas in this realm—communication with the dead.

In this category we include spiritualistic seances, research into the possibility of survival of consciousness after death, telepathic communication with deceased relatives and friends, contacts with discarnate entities, and experiences in the astral realm. In the simplest form, people see apparitions of deceased people and receive messages from them. For example, the day following her husband's death a woman saw her deceased husband sitting in his favorite chair in the living room. He greeted her and asked how she was doing. She answered that she was okay. Then he told her where to find some legal papers she would need for finalizing his estate. She had not known of their whereabouts and the information he gave her was useful, saving her many hours of searching. Experiences of this kind have been reported by clients in experiential psychotherapy, and psychedelic sessions, in the work of psychics, and by people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs).

  In a more complex form of these experiences, a medium goes into a deep trance and in the process undergoes grotesque changes in his or her physical appearance. The medium's postures, gestures, and facial expressions can appear quite alien, while the voice may undergo changes in inflection, accent, tonal quality, and cadence. I have witnessed people in these states speak in languages they did not know, and could not remember ever having heard or spoken in their normal, non-trance states. I have heard people speak in tongues, seen them do automatic writing, paint elaborate pictures, and produce obscure hieroglyphic designs. Intriguing examples of this can be observed in the Spiritist Church in the Philippines and Brazil, inspired by the teachings of Allen Kardec.

  The Brazilian psychologist and psychic Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, closely related to the Spiritist Church, is capable of painting in a light trance in the style of a wide variety of painters of different countries of the world. Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe him closely during a monthlong seminar at the Esalen Institute. What impressed me as much as his ability to produce paintings that captured the essence of the masters, was the tremendous speed with which he worked as he "channeled" the dead masters. During the periods in which he worked he produced as many as twenty-five canvasses per hour.

  Gasparetto is able to work in complete darkness or in a red light that makes it virtually impossible to distinguish one color from another. Many times I watched as he executed two paintings at a time, one with each hand. He occasionally painted with his feet under the table and hidden from his own view, nevertheless producing paintings that were aesthetically pleasing and with the subtlety of color, style, form, and composition of one of the deceased masters.

  If all communication with discarnate entities involved only visions and a vague, subjective sense of interaction with them, we could easily dismiss these experiences as figments of imagination or wishful thinking. But the situation is not quite that simple. There is often information given by the "discarnate being" that can later be verified. The following is a typical example of this, from the transcript of an experiential session of a young depressed patient whom I quoted in chapter 8 and have called Richard.

  Richard experienced being in a space that had the characteristics of the astral realm. He reported seeing an eerie luminescence that was filled with discarnate beings. These beings were trying to communicate with him in a very urgent manner. He could not see or hear them, but he sensed their presence and was receiving telepathic messages from them. One of these messages was so concrete and specific that I decided to write it down.

  He received a request to communicate with a couple in the Moravian city of Krom íž. He was to let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was being well cared for. The message included the couple's name, their street address, and their telephone number. There was no way that these data could have been known to either me or my client. The experience was extremely puzzling in terms of Richard's biographical background and the therapy themes he was working on. He seemed unable to make a connection between his communications with the entities and anything in his own life.

  After some hesitation, I finally decided to do what certainly could have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes had they known. I went to the telephone and dialed the number in Krom íž. A woman answered and I asked her if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment she began to cry. When she calmed down she finally managed to tell me: "Our son is not with us any more. He passed away. We lost him three weeks ago."2

  A second example illustrating this realm of experience involved my close friend and former colleague Walter N. Pahnke. In 1971 he, his wife Eva, and their children went for a vacation in Maine. One day he went scuba-diving in the ocean by himself, close to the cabin where they were staying. He did not return. An extensive search failed to turn up either his body or any part of his diving equipment. Under these circumstances Eva found it extremely difficult to accept his death and complete the mourning process that normally helps people bring some closure to their grief. It seemed virtually impossible for her to believe that Walter was no longer a part of her life. Her last memory of him was as he left the cabin, full of energy and in perfect health. Unable to confirm his death she could not start the next chapter of her life without him.

  Being a psychologist herself, Eva was qualified for an LSD training session offered through our institute for mental health professionals. She signed up for the training with the hope of gaining insight into how she might find closure and complete her grief over her husband's death. In the second half of the session, she had a particularly vivid vision of Walter, during which she entered into a long and meaningful dialogue with him. He spoke to her about each of their three children and released her to start a new life of her own, unencumbered by a sense of commitment to his memory. At the end of the session, Eva felt profoundly liberated.

  Just as Eva had begun to question whether she had perhaps just fabricated this dialogue with Walter in order to fulfill her own wishes, Walter appeared again, with a specific telepathic request. "I forgot one thing," he told her. "Would you please do me a favor and return a book that I borrowed from a friend of mine. It is in my study in the attic." He proceeded to give her the name of the friend and to tell her exactly where the book was located on the shelf. After completing the training session, Eva went home and followed the instructions Walter had given her concerning the book. She was able to find and return that book to its owner, in spite of the fact that she had had no previous knowledge of it.

  Through her work in transpersonal consciousness Eva was able to bring closure to her husband's death in a way that even months and months of therapy in the biographical realm might have only partially accomplished.

  As I thought about it later, it certainly seemed to me that it was completely in character for Walter to provide Eva with some way to verify her experiences. He had been a close friend of Eileen Garrett, a famous psychic and president of the American Parapsychological Association. Before her death, Walter had discussed with her the possibility of conducting an experiment after her death that would prove the existence of the Beyond.