In other words, Mystical Travelers devote themselves to the same eternal purpose that Mission Life Entities do: strengthening the divine spiritual connection between us and God as a thriving, active force. But while Mission Life Entities limit their focus to earth, Mystical Travelers volunteer to incarnate and continue that purpose on any inhabited planet in any galaxy. Most Mystical Travelers have experienced many lifetimes on earth and are ready to “graduate” to more expansive horizons. It’s as if their learning on earth earned them their Ph.D., and they’re yearning to go elsewhere for their postgraduate work.
Mystical Travelers have all the transcendent qualities of Mission Life Entities—the peaceful acceptance of sacrifice and discomfort, the uncommon empathy, the generosity, the kindness, the unwillingness to sit idle if someone needs help. The only two I’ve met in my six-plus decades had the added bonus of seeming to have taken and excelled in every theological course ever conducted, coming away with none of the rhetoric and all of the joy of actively loving and being loved by God. Both of these Mystical Travelers made me feel like a beginner, and neither of them lived long enough to reach adulthood. They came, they gave us a glimpse of our spirits’ greatest potential, and then they quickly left for their next assignment on the other side of the universe. You’ll read about one of them in this book.
Orientation
Orientation is an essential part of our transition from life on earth to our joyful lives on the Other Side. It takes place in one of the countless satellite rooms in the Hall of Wisdom, after we’ve studied our most recent incarnation through the Scanning Machine. During Orientation we’re debriefed on the lifetime we’ve just lived, with the help of our Spirit Guide, a team of trained Orientators, and any other spirits whose input can give us perspective.
For example, let’s say there’s someone your life deeply hurt, and watching your own cruelty through the Scanning Machine has left you devastated. The Orientators and your Spirit Guide can help you see if your actions might have resulted in some long-range unimagined progress in your soul’s journey or in the journey of the person you hurt. You can even summon that person (if he or she is at Home) or that person’s Spirit Guide to join the discussion. The point is to get an overview of the impact and inevitable ripple effect of your behavior, not so you can come away patting yourself on the back for what a great idea your cruelty turned out to be, but to give yourself enough perspective to make peace with the person you hurt and with yourself.
Another function of Orientation is to ease the transition to the Other Side for those spirits who were unprepared for the trip and are too confused or annoyed to be at peace when they first arrive, but don’t need the more intensive “therapy” of cocooning. As we’ve discussed, and as you’ll discover among Francine’s celebrity comments, not everyone is instantaneously giddy about going Home, and the Orientators are impeccably trained to help. After unprepared spirits experience the Scanning Machine and the debriefing afterward, they’re counseled by their Orientators to quiet their turmoil and resentment. They’re then given as much time as they need doing activities that brought them comfort on earth—reading, hiking, golf, soccer, chess, movies and television, computer games (let’s face it, there are those who wouldn’t consider it heaven, if there weren’t computer games), whatever will allow them to “decompress” at their own pace and renew their spirit’s awareness that our real lives are those we live on the Other Side.
Quadrants
As we’ve established, all of the earth’s continents exist on the Other Side, including the “lost” continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. And each of the continents at Home is divided into four quadrants. The division has nothing to do with government and politics, since there’s no need for those on the Other Side. (It’s sounding more like paradise by the moment, isn’t it?) Instead, the quadrants are simply areas devoted to specific purposes corresponding to the chosen vocations of our lives there. One quadrant of each continent is dedicated to Orientation, for example, not only the “decompression” activities of those who need them, but also the training of aspiring Orientators. Another quadrant is specified to house all the sciences. Another is the center for the creative arts, and the fourth is where all the research of Home takes place.
There’s complete freedom of movement among the quadrants, and as with all other areas of the Other Side nothing exists that’s off-limits to anyone. A sentry is posted at the entrance to each quadrant, but only to keep track of the whereabouts of everyone who works there and direct their visitors or collaborators from other quadrants to their exact locations.
To make our lives there even more convenient, if you go to, let’s say, the second quadrant of Asia to say hello to a friend, and the sentry tells you your friend left there to meditate in the Gardens of the Hall of Justice, as the “locals” love to do, you’re not facing a long journey to catch up with your friend. Free of our bodies, with our skilled spirit minds sharp and clear, we enjoy the gift of astral travel, which is effortless, instantaneous, and taken for granted—we simply think ourselves from one destination to another and we’re there.
The Scanning Machine
Once we’ve completed our overwhelming reunion in the meadow with all the beloved friends and animals who gather to welcome us Home, our Spirit Guide escorts us to an immense, sacred, private chamber in the Hall of Wisdom for our visit to the Scanning Machine. The Scanning Machine is a huge convex dome of blue glass, circled by curved white marble benches. And through that domed blue glass we watch every moment of the incarnation we’ve just completed replayed before our eyes, the ultimate home movie in three-dimensional hologram form. Because there’s no time on the Other Side, the number of “years” it takes to review our lifetime in exhaustive detail is a nonissue.
Rather than simply being a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, our session at the Scanning Machine is essential to the journey of our spirit. We all slog along through our lives on earth with no conscious awareness of our charts—in fact, even if we astrally travel from earth to the Hall of Records and locate our current chart, we’ll be staring at a blank parchment scroll, since our own charts are off-limits to us until we’ve done our best to live through them. But once we’re Home again, we have total recall of our charts, and the Scanning Machine provides the means for us to literally see how our intentions stacked up against our actions.
I find it fascinating, and so logical, that it’s not God who evaluates how well or how poorly we did. We evaluate how well or how poorly we did, stripped of the earthly devices of defensiveness and ego-driven self-justification. We come face-to-face with the unfiltered, unedited reality of a lifetime of actions, for better or worse, and it’s ours to deal with, process, and learn from.
And by the way, next time you read about others’ near-death experiences and they mention the fact that their whole life flashed before their eyes, you’ll now know that they got as far as the Scanning Machine before they were resuscitated and came back to “life.”
Soul Mates
The true definition of a soul mate, as opposed to the hyperromanticized definition that’s become such an unfortunate myth, is simply this. Each of us is created with a spirit that has both male and female aspects. At the moment our spirit is created, an identical twin spirit is created right along with us. That identical twin spirit’s male and female aspects are mirror images of our own. And that identical twin spirit is our soul mate.
While we’re living our lives on the Other Side, we’re more emotionally connected to our soul mate than we are to any of the other spirits we know, just as most identical twins are uniquely connected. But we also have separate and complete identities. Our soul mate is not the other half of us, nor are we the other half of our soul mate—none of us is half a person in need of completion. We and our soul mate at Home each have our own friendships, our own interests, and our own pursuits, while loving each other freely and unconditionally. Again, don’t think romance, think identical twins, and you’ll have a much healthier,
more accurate idea of what a soul mate is.
Like all spirits on the Other Side, both we and our soul mates choose when, if, and how many times we feel it will benefit our growth to come to earth for another incarnation. Because we’re separate, complete, and on our own unique journeys, we make the decision to incarnate independently and for intensely personal reasons to do intensely personal work on ourselves. Which makes the chances very slim that our soul mate would incarnate at exactly the same time we do, let alone that we would choose lifetimes on earth in which we’re going to be together, since we see each other as often as we want on the Other Side. It frustrates me to no end when clients complain to me that they can’t seem to meet their soul mate, when the truth is, it’s highly probable that their soul mate is joyfully busy at Home and, when the time comes, will be the first to greet them when they emerge from the tunnel. So if you find yourself surprised or even disappointed by the scarcity of soul mates among the famous names in this book, now you’ll understand.
Spirit Guides
Since my Spirit Guide, Francine, is the coauthor of this book, it only seems fair that I elaborate a little more on who Spirit Guides are and their role in our lives. As I said earlier, every one of us has a Spirit Guide, someone we literally trusted with the well-being of our soul on the Other Side, who agreed to be our constant, vigilant companion and helpmate when we decided to experience another incarnation on earth.
It’s a requirement that Spirit Guides have experienced at least one lifetime here, so that the problems, mistakes, temptations, fears, and frailties inevitable in humans won’t be completely foreign to them. In fact, most of us either have been or will be someone else’s Spirit Guide during our soul’s journey. But to clarify a point I’m frequently asked about, your relationship with your Spirit Guide was established between the two of you on the Other Side before you were born, so it’s impossible for your Spirit Guide to be someone you’ve known in this lifetime.
Spirit Guides are responsible for encouraging, advising, and supporting us toward the goals we’ve set for ourselves here on earth. And they’re equipped with plenty of information to help them live up to the astonishing challenge they’ve agreed to. They study us closely and objectively on the Other Side, once we’ve mutually signed on to this relationship, and they memorize and then continually refer to our charts every step of the way, while we lose conscious awareness of our charts the moment we’re born.
Even when we think we wish they would, Spirit Guides never interfere with our charts or deprive us of our free will, no matter how far off track we seem to wander. At best, they’ll steer us toward possible alternatives and give us warnings along the way. But our sacred pact with them is based on the fact that we’ve incarnated for the further education and growth of our souls, and those things can’t be accomplished if our Spirit Guides are constantly shielding us from the exact lessons that we designed for ourselves in the first place. They’re Spirit Guides, after all, not Spirit Bosses, Spirit Police, or Spirit Superheroes, doing precisely what God and we ask of them for our maximum benefit.
Spirit Guides communicate with us in several ways, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t have the advantages I do of clairaudience and the ability to channel. The vast majority of the time they express themselves telepathically and through infusion, directly from their spirit minds to ours. What you might habitually define as instinct, your conscience, or the ever popular “something told me” is really most likely to be your Spirit Guide sending you messages, and it’s up to you to remain open-minded and alert enough to pay attention.
They’re also the very last to say good-bye to us as we leave the Other Side to come here, and they’re there when we return Home, among the crowd that welcomes us and the sure, steady hand that leads us to the Scanning Machine to start making sense of the lives we’ve just finished—in other words, our relationship with our Spirit Guide is one of the most unique, steadfast, and invaluable alliances we’ll ever experience.
Spirits
Just to clarify something right up front, we’re all spirits. The only difference between us and the celebrities in this book, not to mention our deceased loved ones, is that we’re currently inhabiting a body and they’re not. So in this discussion of spirits who’ve moved on from their bodies, when I use third-person pronouns like “they” and “them,” please remember that not that long ago “they” were “us,” and not long from now we’ll be them again, just as we were before we incarnated.
The spirits we’ll be talking about are those who’ve made it safely to the higher-frequency dimension of the Other Side, three feet above our own ground level. You know those countless descriptions you’ve heard of visiting spirits looking as if they’re floating a few feet above the ground? They’re not really floating at all; they’re simply moving along on their own ground level, exactly three feet above ours.
Once spirits arrive Home and go through any Orientation or cocooning processes they might need, they’re living in a very real place of perfect bliss, where the atmosphere itself is charged with God’s immediate presence, peace, and eternal, unconditional love. Living in that state of bliss, reunited with their memories of all their past lives on earth, and now at Home and back on the “time clock” of eternity again, they’re literally incapable of the strictly human emotions of unhappiness, anger, resentment, pettiness, worry, fear, and negativity. Any emotional and physical burdens a spirit carried through an incarnation are resolved in the white light of the Holy Spirit on the Other Side. So if you ever encounter a being who seems sad, mean, or troubled in any way or who shows even a hint of wounds, disease, or other challenges, I promise you’re dealing with an earthbound ghost, not a spirit. And if you ever find yourself worrying if deceased loved ones at Home are angry with you, if they’ve forgiven you, or if they are as ill or unhappy as they were during their lives, you can ease your mind. Needlepoint it on a pillow if you need to, because you can count on it: if they’re Home, they’re happy.
Unobstructed by our earthly limitations, spirits have any number of advantages over us on earth that we all have to look forward to:
The natural ability to communicate with each other, and with us when they visit us, through the use of telepathy—that is, the instant transference of information from one entity to another without the use of the five physical senses. One of the most common observations you’ll hear from people who’ve experienced spirit visits is that an entire conversation took place between them without either of them saying a word.
The natural ability to bilocate—that is, literally be in two places at once. For example, deceased loved ones can easily visit two family members simultaneously who live hundreds of miles from each other, and each visit is unique and absolutely real.
The ability to manipulate animate and inanimate objects on earth to get our attention. Spirits can easily communicate with our animals and cause them to respond to telepathic commands, so that, let’s say, a conspicuous number of birds, butterflies, squirrels, or whatever will be impossible for the recipient of the visit to ignore, or a family pet will suddenly perform tricks it only used to perform for the visiting spirit. The variations in the use of inanimate objects as spirits’ way of waving at us are literally countless. They’ll move photographs or keepsakes, they’ll rock their favorite rocking chair, they’ll play a “broken” music box and make dormant toys spring to life, they’ll hide keys and eyeglasses, they’ll leave little clusters of coins in places that make no sense, they’ll superimpose their own image on a painting or snapshot just long enough to be seen—anything it takes, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, for a spirit to try to express, “I’m here!” and be noticed.
The ability to dramatically affect electrical devices. Spirits, after all, have to cross from the dimension of the Other Side into ours in order to visit us, and they often find it helpful to attach their energy to such readily available conductors as electricity and water (which is why the old movie cliché is true—the spirit world r
eally does love a good thunderstorm). They can create utterly bizarre behavior in TVs (a popular favorite is changing the channels over and over and over again, as if someone’s sitting on the remote control), appliances (particularly instances of doors of microwaves, refrigerators, and ovens swinging open and closed over and over again “on their own”), telephones (they don’t call it “phantom ringing” for nothing, and if you’ve ever answered a ringing phone to nothing but blaring static, it’s safe to assume you’ve been visited), and countless other electrical and electronic devices.
In almost all of Francine’s comments you’ll see that she mentions specific people on earth whom celebrities come to visit. It’s my hope that those receiving visits—and all of you as well—pay attention and know what to watch and listen for. They’re so eager to assure you that they really are alive, well, and with you, and I’d hate for you to miss them.
Visages
Through casual, completely unscientific polls among countless clients over the years, I’ve become familiar with the popularity of the myth that when we leave our bodies and rejoin the spirit world, we assume the form of wispy, shapeless blobs of fog. I guess a case can be made that with the gift of eternal life to be grateful for, it’s petty to worry about what we look like at Home, but living eternally among an endless sea of floating fog blobs doesn’t sound like a lot to look forward to either.
The truth is, we all have very distinctive individual identities on the Other Side that we return to when our lifetimes here are through. We have bodies of various shapes and sizes. We have faces with unique features, just as we have on earth, as well as a variety of hair colors, eye colors, and skin colors. We have eyes that blink, and mouths that smile. In fact, we even have hearts and other “human” organs, but their placement is a mirror image of our earthly bodies, so that everything is reversed from left to right. I once asked my Spirit Guide, Francine, why we have organs at Home when we no longer have to bother with annoying functions like digestion and waste elimination. She replied, “Because that’s the way God made us.” For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a good follow-up question.