Tag Archives: death

Whitley Strieber’s Afterlife Revolution Breaks Little New Ground But Is Worthy Addition to Survival of Death Literature

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

The great thing about reading a Whitley Strieber book is that you’re getting a Whitley Stieber book.

The bad thing about reading a Whitley Stieber book is that you’re getting a Whitley Strieber book.

I’ve been a reader of Strieber since he published his first novel in 1978, The Wolfen. This was made into a fine feature film starring Albert Finney. His next work of fiction also got Hollywood treatment. That was The Hunger, published in 1981. The movie version featured a megawatt cast of David Bowie, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve.

Other successful novels followed. Whitley Strieber was like a more intellectual and elegant Steven King. His books may not have enjoyed spectacular Steven King-like sales, but he developed a significant following and was considered a premier fiction writer of his time.

Then, in 1985, everything changed for Whitley. That was the year he experienced what could only be described at the time as visitation by aliens, the ET kind, not the border-jumping kind. He wrote a book about it that came out in 1987 – the now famous and infamous COMMUNION. Whitely Strieber’s life would never be the same, including his standing in the literary community.

To add insult to injury to the collective egos of the snobby New York literary elites, Communion sold about a gazillion copies. It parked itself on the NYT bestseller list for weeks. It was also made into a bizarre movie starring Christopher Walken. The controversial American scholar Jason Reza Jorjani called the movie, “a surrealist masterpiece.” It was directed by Philippe Mora.

Communion also sent Strieber’s lofty literary career into a wild spin from which Strieber has never re-emerged. After Communion, he entered the Land of New Age Woo Woo – which can be a lucrative niche in and of itself – but his days as an “acceptable” mainstream author seemed finished.

It is difficult to tell if this fate for Strieber was by his choice or the result of the unexpected furor that erupted over Communion and careened out of control. But consider that he wrote several sequels to Communion. If Communion was an out-of-control situation – Strieber seemed to have decided to just roll with it. He was consciously choosing the path he wanted to take.

He remains a significant figure in the paranormal space – esoteric, New Age, occult, ufology, mysticism, psychic stuff – whatever you want to call it. The thing about Whitely is that his work straddles all these categories. Pinning him down as a just “UFO guy” or a “New Ager” will never hit the mark.

Anne and Whitely

So, this latest book is about the survival of death. THE AFTERLIFE REVOLUTION comes in the wake of the death of his beloved wife, Anne, in 2015. The gist of the book is Strieber’s belief and presented evidence that his wife has continued her existence in the Afterlife and has managed to reestablish contact with him. This book is billed as a bona fide collaboration with the spirit of Anne, who only departed physically. She remains an active, living presence for Strieber today. Anne Strieber is credited on the cover as a co-author.

To be honest, even though Strieber leverages the word “Revolution” in his title, I found very little that was revolutionary in terms of advancing the study of contact with deceased individuals. Don’t get me wrong – there’s some intriguing and authentic stuff offered in these pages – but Strieber offers little (in my view) that goes beyond the hundreds of other books written on this topic over many decades now.

Yes, Strieber is correct in calling it an “Afterlife Revolution.” It’s just that, it began about 150 years ago. (I won’t discuss what the Egyptians were doing in this realm thousands of year ago). In modern times, it was around the mid-1800s that an explosion of interest in seances, table rapping, automatic writing, Ouija board work, trance channeling, spirit writing and mediumship began to spread across European high society and elements of American society.

I’m sure I have read more than 300 books about making contact with the departed. I mention this because a lot of them provide evidence of survival than goes well beyond what Strieber is offering in Afterlife Revolution. I have reviewed many of them on this website. Here are just a few recent examples that you will find here:

RAYMOND or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Lodge — Published 1916

STRANGE VISITORS edited by Henry J. Horn – Published 1871

AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH KEN KESEY by William Bedivere — Published 2009

WOLF’S MESSAGE by Susan Giesemann

AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH HEMINGWAY by Frank DeMarco

THE BOY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK by Robert Moss

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES by P.M.H. Atwater

GHOSTS I HAVE SEEN by Violet Tweedale — Published 1920

I list this short selection to show just a few examples of works that make a more robust evidential case for the survival of death than does The Afterlife Revolution. There are others, of course, such as the work of DR. STAFFORD BETTY of the University of California.

That’s doesn’t mean Strieber’s book is not a worthy addition to the record. Also, because it is a Whitely Strieber book, it’s well written. I found the stories of Anne’s travails as she battled worsening illness and harrowing trips to hospitals and emergency rooms heart wrenching and profound. Whitley was at her side every step of the way and he masterfully captures the anxiety, fear, sense of hopelessness and desperation as it becomes increasingly clear that the days of his beloved spouse’s sojourn on earth are coming to an end.

My heart goes out to Whitely Strieber for his loss and ordeal, and I know all readers will feel the same.

But now a short additional discussion about Whitely Strieber:

I find Strieber to be among the most vexing of authors to read. He has done an invaluable service to his fellow human beings by sharing the sensational phenomena he has encountered in life — for which he has paid a heavy price.

He has been gleefully savaged by so-called skeptics who belong to the fundamentalist religion of material science. Sure, that comes with the territory for anyone willing to write about personal confrontations with the paranormal, but Strieber has been singled out like few others for some of the most vicious, caustic and flesh-tearing attacks I have seen. It’s largely unfair.

At the same time, it’s painful for me to admit, as an admirer, that Whitely Stieber has brought much of it upon himself. For starters, he has made public claims that are demonstrably untrue – such as saying he personally witnessed the 1966 infamous Texas Tower Shooting shooting at the University of Austin perpetrated by Charles Whitman and killing 17 people. It seems clear he did not, and he has changed his own story about the event a number of times. Even his mother said he wasn’t there.

But Strieber has also created genuine problems for himself by seeming to often mix elements of his fictional works with his books of nonfiction. His ever-hounding pack of critics has pointed to specific passages that appeared in his novels which reappear in his nonfiction. (Note: This can be more complicated because Whitley may not view the differences between reality and imagination in the common way — but that’s a complicated issue I must leave aside here).

Another way that Strieber gets himself into trouble – and this is subtle — is that he is a fantastic marketer of himself. Before he embarked on his literary career, Strieber was a bona fide “Mad Man” – as in the television show about the advertising business. I’m not saying Strieber was debauched ala Roger Sterling or Don Draper – but his advertising background comes across (to me, anyway) when I hear Whitely speak or tune into his podcast, UNKNOWN COUNTRY, where he frequently pitches his own books and other things he wants to sell, such as memberships to his Patreon site.

I know what I’m saying is fantastically unfair – Whitley has every right to promote his stuff and earn a living – but when someone is as good at selling,  one must fight off that notion that whispers into the mind: “I’m really being SOLD something here.” Again, I strenuously emphasize that it’s monumentally unfair of me to even say this – so why do I? It’s because my larger point is that — I think the smooth way he pitches his stuff tends to work against him in an unexpected, perhaps even subconscious way in the court of public opinion.

Now I’ll address what is the biggest factor which troubles me the most about Whitely Strieber. It’s the undeniable fact that he is a superb merchant of fear. I think of my sister who once told me that only two works of art prompted her to sleep with the lights on for three months. The first was viewing The Exorcist. The second was reading Communion. In fact, that’s one of the most common kinds of comments I have heard from people over the years who have read Communion. They all say something like: “That book really scared the shit out of me!”

Keep in mind that Strieber began his career as a writer of horror fiction. The Wolfen and The Hunger were not so much blood and gore as they were vehicles of deep psychological terror. But the contract we all have with fictional horror is that we agree to or ask for what is being offered. We willingly plunge into the pages of a horror novel eager for chills and unsettling scenarios – psychologists suggest we like to read horror because it serves as a kind of inoculation against real fear and terror, much the same way a weakened version of the flu virus in a vaccine serves as a prophylactic against the flu itself.

But with Communion, Whitley enters our minds through a loophole in the common literary contract. The work is offered as something that is true and real – and also something that could easily happen to anyone of us. It is extremely difficult to defend ourselves from this form of psychic intrusion. What if it’s real? What if bizarre aliens can come into our homes, into our bedrooms and do anything they want to us – including subjecting us to the most personal and intrusive manner of medical experiments. What if they can control our minds and manipulate every aspect of our lives? Are we little more than rats in a cage for them? What then?

By Calistemon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12853851

Even when Strieber is writing hopeful, inspirational books – such as The Afterlife Revolution – he can’t help but slip in an element of visceral horror. In this case, he relates an episode with frightening giant spiders – dripping with evil — which he said appeared over the bed of his wife and threatened to drop down on her sleeping form.

The same is true for another recent Strieber book – The Key. Here Strieber lays out for us apocalyptic scenarios that are unsettling to the core. Massive global warming, floods, natural disasters, death and destruction are part of the message Strieber’s messenger from another dimension regales him with during a series of mysterious meetings.

By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39809967

I could go on, but here’s the point: Strieber’s works have injected massive doses of fear into our society. This comes at a heavy cost. The opposite of love is not hate – the opposite of love is fear, although hate is a byproduct of fear. When millions of people are prompted to vibrate the energy of fear, the effect cascades across the collective consciousness of humanity. Think of the way a pebble dropped onto the still surface of a pond sends waves across the whole system. Or think of the way one section of a spider web getting plucked sends a shivering message across the whole network.

For better or worse – and even if we might say he is justified in doing so – Whitely Strieber tends to generate fear with his works, even when he’s attempting to relate us a story of hope and wonder, as in the glorious notion that we all survive death

That’s what’s vexing about Whitley Strieber. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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William and Susan Buhlman Explore Implications of the OBE in Fictional Form With “Astral Travel” Themed Short Stories

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

For decades William Buhlman has been among the world’s best-known and passionate advocates of the out-of-body experience (OBE). He doesn’t mind calling it “astral travel” now and then or referring to that place you go to when you are “out there” the “astral plane” or “astral world.”

The term out-of-body experience, or OBE, was adopted by many a few years ago, probably because astral travel seemed “Old World” or archaic. It hearkened back to times when this sort of thing was the realm of occult practitioners steeped in mystical or eastern religious belief systems.

It is the noted psychologist and research scientist Dr. Charles Tart who is credited with coining the term OBE. It was the great Robert Monroe who popularized the term. His three classic books about out-of-body travel, starting with Journeys Out of Body, raised the subject out of the esoteric and occult world into the mainstream — if it can be said out-of-body travel is mainstream today. Probably not yet but it’s getting there. At the very least, it has gained wider acceptance.

It was folks like Tart and Monroe who brought scientific methodology to the study of OBEs.

William Buhlman

Buhlman’s approach can be said to be scientific in that he pursued his study of OBEs with exacting documentation, dogged determination and constant experimentation. He is not a scientist, but neither is he a mystic. One might say he’s an ordinary guy who one day developed an extraordinary desire to not only study the OBE, but to take the experiences to the highest levels of experience and understanding he could achieve.

That theme – striving to go as high as and far as you can go – Buhlman has passionately maintained throughout several books as well as his many lectures and seminars. He teaches OBE practice at the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia.

Susan Buhlman

In this book of short stories, co-written with his wife, Susan Buhlman, the authors are leveraging the power of fiction to dramatize the many facets of what Mr. Buhlman has learned from his many years of exploring the “astral realms.”

It’s an attempt to illustrate the deeper implications of the idea that human beings are more than just a physical body. Buhlman says we are multidimensional beings. If we can learn to master the OBE, we can experience an unlimited number of exotic environments in far-flung trans-physical locations – or just call it Consciousness, with a big “C.”

The first offering – The Boy Who Could Fly — is obviously meant to be a children’s story. It’s one I dearly wish I had available to me when I was eight or nine years old. The fear it would have alleviated and the confusion it would have cleared up for my boyhood self would have been life-altering. During that time, I began experiencing almost nightly the fantastically frightening phenomenon of sleep paralysis. My mind would come awake in a physical body that was 100% numb and seemed frozen solid – the experience was infinitely more terrorizing because I simply had no of understanding what was happening to me.

I eventually discovered – but years later — that sleep paralysis is a fantastically good thing because it can serve as a launching pad for out-of-body travel. If I would have had this book back then – well, let’s just say it would have saved me a lot of grief!

The rest of the 13 short stories presented will serve a similar function for readers of all age groups. The OBE is presented as a natural ability that all human beings have access to. It should be plucked out of the realm of the paranormal, mystical or supernatural and be embraced as a pathway toward a greater understanding of what it means to be a nonphysical entity experiencing life as a physical being on the material earthly plane.

Just as the first story would have been a welcome resource for my 8-year-old self, I think these stories will be illuminating and helpful for people confronting some of the biggest and most difficult aspects of life that touch us all eventually – especially confronting death and dying and the grief associated with the death of a loved one. These stories provide a perspective on what the death of the physical body truly is – and isn’t. It’s not the end, it’s a transition. Furthermore, no one has to take the word of William Buhlman (or anyone) on this matter. We can all prove out these concepts for ourselves by trying our own hand at the OBE.

My initial overall impression of these stories is that they are simple and straightforward, almost to a fault. I sometimes felt they bordered on being excessively maudlin or even trite. But after reading all of the stories I came away thinking the Buhlman’s handled this delicate topic in just the right way. Their light touch brings lofty issues down to a universally accessible sense of understanding.

Readers from age 8 to 80 will benefit from the perspectives presented here on the true nature of our reality and what it means to be a human being – that we are multidimensional entities navigating a fantastic journey through an infinite field of Consciousness.

PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER BOOKS ON THE OBE TOPIC, LINKED BELOW:

EYES OF AN ANGEL by Paul Elder

CRASH & BURN by Peter Ludvick

EXPLORATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS By Frederick Aadema

BABE IN THE WOODS By Frank DeMarco

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

All NEW: KEN’S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

 

Afterlife Conversations With Ken Kesey (and Others) by William Bedivere resonates as an authentic, luminous and inspired conversation with the famous deceased author

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This is a slim volume of about 100 pages but is has the impact of a book perhaps 300 or 400 pages. It’s a major challenge to review because so many issues present themselves, sometimes even in a single paragraph.

In fact, I’ll go as far to say that there is “hidden” information encoded within certain tracts of this document – but am I going to discuss that? No way. (I’ll reserve that for the advanced class, another time).

Let me try to zero in here on a few things:

So this is a book in which author WILLIAM BEDIVERE has made contact with the afterlife personality of the writer Ken Kesey, most famous for his novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Both books were adapted to popular Hollywood films. Cuckoo’s Nest was a huge critical and financial success, winning the Oscar for Best Film in 1975, and several other Academy Awards.

Of course, Kesey’s other fame was that of counterculture icon status fueled by his high-profile LSD-soaked exploits that became a central element of the Hippy generation of the 1960s.

Kesey died in 2001 at age 66.

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Ken Kesey, photo by Brian Lanky

What’s utterly fascinating about this book is how the “Kesey Personality” at first comes on strong and feisty, spouting lots of groovy, wavy gravy pronouncements typical of hallucinogen-informed concepts and representing Kesey’s (early) lifetime personality.

He raves about the “War On Drugs,” framing it as a power struggle between the forces of evil (it’s the usual suspects: the government, CIA, establishment pigs, fearful fundamentalists, take your pick …) against those courageous Consciousness-O-Nauts who would dare smash the status quo by cracking the Collective Cosmic Egg of humanity with a selected line-up psychotropic kickers.

But then as the pages melt by, the Kesey Personality gradually recedes, giving way to a consciously expanded, yet softer Group-Mind Entity that continues to hold forth with mellower, yet profound transcendent concepts.

This transition is highly significant and provides an important insight into what all of us need to understand about the nature of our existence, who and what we are, the nature of the afterlife — and I’ll expand on this more in a bit.

But first, the big issue that must always been dealt with for manuscripts which purport to offer information coming from the dead is the question of authenticity. This is especially true for those readers who are new to what traditionally has been called “spirit writings” or “automatic writing” but in our New Age is more often called “channeling” or maybe just “after-death communications.”

This document conveys all the tell-tale signs of authenticity – that is – I’m satisfied that the author is in no way a charlatan spinning tails of pure imagination, or simply attempting to leverage his familiarity with Kesey’s works to create a narrative that merely parrots what a deceased version of the author might have to say.

One such marker of the bona fides is a measure of the author’s agony. In this case we can feel the nagging pain of Mr. Bedivere dripping off the pages. A plodding kind of existential angst smolders throughout, and even more so, a plaintive longing for … for … what is beyond … and for meaning.

Those famous lines from that George Harrison song comes to mind:

Now, I really want to see you

Really want to be with you

Really want to see you lord

But it takes so long, my lord

When you combine this painfully urgent need to know, to understand, to seek, to find, to discover, to explore – with the one of the worst sufferings of them all – self-doubt – then you get some measure of the intellectual courage it takes to take on these kinds of tasks, and where you find courage, you’ll find authenticity.

Again, the author demonstrates all of the above. (As novelist Rita Mae Brown said, “A writer cannot hide on the page”). So, I am impressed with an overwhelming sense that what we have here is a genuine afterdeath contact and dialogue with, yes, the “real” Ken Kesey – although I beg the reader not to over-simply who or what the “real” Ken Kesey might be.

After our physical body dies, the consciousness that is the ego-based personality survives. NASA physicist and early MONROE INSTITUTE research pioneer TOM CAMPBELL calls this a “Free Will Awareness Unit.” (FAU) (I’m borrowing a couple of Campbell’s terms here because he has coined some of the most lucid and descriptive jargon for all of this).

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Tom Campbell “It’s all just data.”

The FAU is part of or an aspect of an Individuated Unit of Consciousness (IUC) – this is the aspect of the person who “operated” the FAU while it was “alive” in physical 3-D reality. The ICU is not in physical reality, but in the nonphysical realm composed of Consciousness.

The IUC in turn is almost certainly a part of a larger organized system of consciousness that we might call an “Oversoul” (a more traditional term, not Campbell’s). The Oversoul if a kind of “group mind” being that encompassed dozens, hundreds, but most likely thousands of “people” or individuals that also once manifested in our 3-D physical reality as Freewill Awareness Units (people) here on our planet Earth.

And I could continue going “up the ladder” to higher and more complex organizations of consciousness, indeed, all the way to “The One” or “All That Is” – but that is a long journey indeed, so let’s stop here.

So when a medium, or someone like our writer William Bedivere, makes contact with a specific individual, in this case the famous Ken Kesey, he can at times be communicating with:

• That which was the Freewill Awareness Unit that was Ken Kesey.

• That which was is the IUC, the Individuated Unit of Consciousness that operated the FAU of Ken Kesey.

• Both the FAU and IUC at the same time.

• The Oversoul of Ken Kesey

• Those continuing upper levels of “Group Consciousness” organizations to which all the “lower” Ken Kesey elements belong.

• All of the above.

What is clearly demonstrated in this book is how the author comes to get a sense of this larger multidimensional nature of the Kesey personality. The “Greater Ken Kesey Consciousness Organization” (my term) slowly reveals itself as the pages go on from beginning to end of this book.

There is something important to point out here:

If we want to, we can focus our conversation with a deceased individual on communication that is strictly limited to just the Freewill Awareness Unit, or that which was the ego-based consciousness once manifested in 3-D, physical matter reality.

But can it be said that this “version” of Ken Kesey is the actual Ken Kesey?

The answer is mostly “Yes!” but it comes with this critical distinction, or perhaps acknowledgement:

The “real” Ken Kesey” has actually moved on to other, higher realms of consciousness. His mission on earth is done. He has little no reason to just hang around for years on end merely in the event that someone like William Bedivere (or anyone) wants to have a conversation with him.

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However, we can still have a perfectly legitimate communication with that individual we once knew as Ken Kesey, as he once was. That’s because we can connect with the sum total of the “data” that was once Ken Kesey – Tom Campbell calls this a “supremely complete probability record” of Ken Kesey.

This “supremely complete probability record” might be compared to a computer file that has been saved, but it is an utterly complete file that contains absolutely everything that Ken Kesey once was down to the very last atom, electron, neutron, quark – everything! So in essence, IT IS KEN KESEY – albeit a perfect “saved copy” of the original.

Let me emphasize, even though the “real Ken Kesey” has moved on, this “supremely complete probability record” that we can now communicate with is in fact Ken Kesey because it is an absolutely total, perfect and “supremely complete” copy of what was once the “real” Ken Kesey.

(Note: For an excellent discussion about the legitimacy of a “perfect copy” of a human being after death and “resurrection,” see this book: The Physics of Immortality, by Temple University Professor of Physics, Dr. Frank Tipler).

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Note that because the “real Ken Kesey” has moved on, the “Perfect Copy” of Ken Kesey that was once his Freewill Awareness Unit no longer has free will – although it can seem like it has free will because it can answer our questions based on an almost infinite number of probability choices.

For example, we can ask a question in 10 different ways with 10 different intents, and the FAU of Ken Kesey will respond differently to each one based on the nature of our intent and the way we ask the question. But left to itself, the FAU of Ken Kesey cannot innovate on its own because the “real” Ken Kesey has moved on and the FAU is now a “closed system.” However, innovation and free will awareness can“bleed” into the responses we get if higher aspects of the FAU get involved.

A spectacular example of this is the work of author FRANK DEMARCO He has engaged in extensive afterdeath conversations with the deceased writer Ernest Hemingway. It’s proper to bring DeMarco into this conversation here because Mr. Bedivere acknowledges DeMarco as the inspiration for his work with Kesey.

Bevidere is a reader of DeMarco’s blog, where he engages in ongoing conversations with a variety of afterdeath personalities. (Find DeMarco’s blog here: I OF MY OWN KNOWLEDGE.)

This includes an in-depth conversations with the deceased Hemingway. DeMarco has also published a book of his conversations with the great American author titled, AFTERLIFE CONVERSATIONS WITH HEMINGWAY. (See my review of that book HERE.)

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In my opinion — and perhaps DeMarco himself may not agree totally – the bulk of the information DeMarco is channeling from “Hemingway” is that “saved copy” of what was once the Hemingway Freewill Awareness Unit – although from time to time, “higher aspects” of the Multidimensional Hemingway do come forth to further inform (and innovate with free will) the communications between DeMarco and Hemingway.

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Frank DeMarco

However, most of the time it seems to be DeMarco’s intent is to keep his communication with Hemingway focused as close as possible with only the ego-based Hemingway we know from history. That’s because DeMarco is fascinated with commentary on the life and times of the “real, physical” Hemingway, and the specifics of his body of literary works, his politics, beliefs, etc.

If DeMarco “intended” more or otherwise, he could certainly “climb the Multidimensional Hemingway ladder, so to speak. (And sometimes he does, I speculate).

The case is similar with this book on communication with Ken Kesey.

Another example I must mention is that of Jane Roberts, author of the famous Seth books. Roberts also channeled a book-length document in cooperation with a great deceased personality, that of philosopher and proto-psychologist William James, producing, The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher. The book is a masterpiece.

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What’s interesting to note is that Roberts was highly circumspect about just who or “what” she was actually communicating with. She speculated that she was not so much having a conversation with the “real spirit” of William James, but rather the existent and detached “World View” of William James, which was somehow stored out there in the greater realms of the Conscious Universe – this sounds an awful lot like Campbell’s model, the Freewill Awareness Unit.

ANYWAY …

Anyway, I have rambled on far too long, and yet, have not touched on even a fraction of the rich load of material and implications suggested by this intriguing manuscript.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Mr. Bedivere’s book is well written. And don’t be quick credit for the lively prose to Ken Kesey – far from it! I can guarantee that the credit belongs to Mr. Bedivere, but if I try to explain why, I’ll be off and running through several more pages.

I should also mention that are instances of true hilarity! In a couple of cases, Mr. Bedivere sees fit to ask his transcendent connection with an ascended great author incredibly mundane questions – such as what to do with a problem he is having with his taxes! Ha, ha! It’s great!

On another occasion, Bedivere asks for advice on what to do about some very typical marriage problems his daughter is having – and here Kesey coughs up:

a) A bit of non-advice, and,

a) b) A dollop of sensationally bad advice!

Oh man, it’s so funny!

Never discount humor as an important marker of authentic afterdeath communication, or the channeling of legitimate transcendent information. I’m reminded of philosopher Bertrand Russell who said that he was troubled that the Bible seemed to contain no humor, and at least for him, that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Holy Book.

Ahhhh … I wish I could go on and on … but it’s past time that I pull the chain (as they say in the Hood). Suffice it to say I consider this small book a gem, and authentic example of afterlife communication that bears reading and rereading, each time delivering a different set of insights to the open-minded, yet skeptical, but always intuitive-oriented reader.





Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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The Ghost of Ernest Hemingway: Still Eloquent in the Afterlife

51fl3+IFDmL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_KEN KORCZAK:

This is the second FRANK DeMARCO book I’ve read. The first was “A Place To Stand,” and I think anyone who reads both of the above will be sufficiently impressed that here is a guy who not merely another frivolous New Age writer raving from the fringe, or some person seeking to capitalize on the name of Hemingway merely to sell a book.

This is an intelligent book of substance that should intrigue long-time Hemingway fans, and give us pause to consider the implications of what it might really be like to have a one-on-one chat with an American literary giant.

There is ample historic president for these kinds of books, in particular, Jane Robert’s (author of Seth Speaks), “channeling” of the American philosopher William James. That book came out in 1977; James died in 1910.

Another famous example: Emily Grant Hutchings and a medium using an Ouija board took “dictation” from the spirit of Mark Twain to produce an entirely new novel, “Jap Herron.” It was published in 1916, six years after Twain’s death.

In 1869, a medium “downloaded” a fresh novel written by the deceased Emily Brontë; It’s presented in a book called “Strange Visitors” edited by an esteemed legal scholar, Henry J. Horn.

So DeMarco is backed by solid tradition, and the precedent of others who have written amazingly high quality books in this way.

Beginning in 2004, DeMarco, using the time-honored, method of automatic writing, made psychic contact Hemingway and engaged in a vigorous post-death conversation with Hemingway. The dialogue resulted in this book.

In it, Hemingway clears the deck on dozens of misconceptions he says numerous biographers and academics have besmirched upon his life, work and legacy over the years.

Not that he’s particularly angry or blames living biographers who, after all, only gave it their best shot. It’s just that, Hemingway says the game is rigged. Writing a truly accurate biography is fundamentally impossible. The deceased author tells DeMarco:

“To write a true biography you would need to do impossible things, such as:

* See and feel and think and react as the subject would have done.

* Contain within yourself all the subject’s background, including people, places, books he’s read, the news of the day (day by day), the daydream he had, the talents and aversions and every aspect of his personality.

* Know everything that had ever happened to him and some that happened only around him, and from multiple points of view.

* Know every strand that operated within him, and in what proportion and in what circumstances, including the tremendous amount he didn’t realize himself.

*Know at least something of why he came into life (or, you might say, what the potential or that particular mixture of elements was) and see how one thing could express only at the expense of others, and hence what tensions set up.”

That all makes sense, when you think about it. Certainly, the dead Hemingway has a knack for bringing an unclouded, common-sense kind of wisdom to vexing questions and thorny issues.

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Frank DeMarco

Another example: DeMarco asks Hemingway to explain something controversial the macho-man writer once said, that he would “rather beat someone up than read a good book.” (This in light of Hemingway’s well-known love of boxing and barroom brawling).

Hemingway, from his perch in the Afterlife, defends his statement this way:

“All right … who are you talking to? In this case I mean, what age Hemingway? The answer you’d get from a 20-year-old isn’t what you’d get ten years later, or thirty, or after-the-fact entirely … the whole point of living is not to be the same year by year, but to change — I didn’t prefer beating somebody up to reading a good book. Just count the number of people I beat up and the number of books I read!”

Still eloquent in death, Hemingway scores again!

DeMarco’s book is loaded with gems like these. Hemingway’s quips zero in like sharpened darts, hitting dead-on rhetorical bullseyes time and again.

If this is not the actual spirit of Hemingway speaking through DeMarco, then DeMarco himself is one clever wordsmith.

But wait a minute — DeMarco cautions us that just who is actually communicating here is a tad more complicated than you might think. Here is the way DeMarco struggles to define his trans-death connection with the deceased writer:

“I think you mean to say that Hemingway 1899-1961 and DeMarco 1946-20-whatever do not touch, and that I have been thinking that DeMarco-46 was touching the spirit of Hemingway-99, but it may be more accurate to say that the larger being of which DeMarco-46 is a part is communicating with the larger being of which Hemingway-99 is a part, and the two time-bound parts are having a sort of virtual conversation.”

In other words, most people assume that when you contact the spirit of a dead person, you are speaking to the exact person/ego-construct/personality of that same person when he or she was alive.

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Papa

But there is not a Person A = Person A situation vis-a-vis the live version of a person and the afterlife version of that same person.

After we pass over to the other side, we apparently expand our consciousnesses to embody the “whole self,” or perhaps “soul self.” We become aligned with the so-called Oversoul.

For the dead, the ego-self recedes into the background because the ego is actually an elaborate, artificial coping/defense construct designed to function in the environment of our earth-bound, physical matter reality. The ego is too often shaped by fears and desires, and is a reactor rather than an actor within a material system. Yet, after death, we can still operate from an ego-based platform if we want to …

What I really like about Afterdeath Conversations With Hemingway is that it reads not like the typical spooky and/or smarmy medium-channeled stuff, but as an insightful, intelligent and piercing series of observations by a savvy writer, who just happens to be positioned in the non-physical realm.

DeMarco’s book makes the extraordinary situation of speaking with the dead seem as commonplace as chatting with your Uncle Ned via Skype.

With dogged attention to detail, DeMarco combs through the issues that were the passions of Hemingway’s vigorous life — World War I, the Spanish Civil War, the American psyche, the artistic culture of Europe, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, writing and literature. Hemingway discusses what it meant to be an American, an emerging modern man in a nation straining to become the next superpower.

What about his suicide? Hemingway is actually rather blasé and dismissive of the whole issue. He called suicide “the family exit.” Hemingway’s father committed suicide, as did his brother, Leicester, and sister, Ursula. The dead Hemingway says of his suicide:

“When I left the body — when I blew myself out of that situation — I knew what I was doing, and why. I wasn’t emotionally distraught, I wasn’t out of my mind, and I wasn’t even depressed — once I figured out how to get out … the bad effects of suicide have a lot more to do with attitudes that with the given act.”

After his death, Hemingway tells DeMarco that he now manifests himself in the spirit world as a 30-something-year-old.

“I went back to being in my mid-thirties,” Hemingway said. “I was happy then. I’d taken my lumps and I’d already left Hadley, (first wife Hadley Richardson) which was a stupid thing to do but there you are, and I was in the prime of life.”

The bottom line: This is a marvelous read, well worthy of five stars, and gets my top recommendation.


Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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