The Last Good Day, a Bird Invasion, My House Locks Me Out, and Bob Messes with My Phone

Exactly a year ago, April 3, 2023, my husband suddenly became violently ill with the pancreatitis that would kill him 10 days later. Right about this time in the middle of the evening, as I start to write this post. So very suddenly. He was fine and then he wasn’t, from one moment to the next.

I think of last April 3, the earlier part of it, as The Last Good Day. I’d had a pleasant, relaxed afternoon that included hanging out at a coffee shop and then the new library. Bob and I were at the beginning of a week of spring break, after working much more than usual in the past few months and hardly seeing each other, and were planning on a romantic getaway to take the waters in Truth or Consequences on the 5th. I had cooked a spring dinner of greens from the garden, with rice and parmesan, and he said it was good. It was the last thing he ever ate, and I haven’t made it since, can’t.

He took the trash out, as he did every week, and finished getting his tax records together for his business so that I could get the bulk of the tax work done and not have to worry about it the rest of the week. I gave him a little bit of a hard time for not putting everything in the right categories and making more work for me. Not the conversation I would have had with him, if I had had any idea what would happen just a few minutes later.

And then life as we knew it ended.

I figured that today would be difficult. It’s been tolerable, not as hard as it might have been, but of course I’m not OK. I can’t expect to be, shouldn’t be. It’s OK not to be OK. The next week and a half, I’ll be inevitably remembering, these days floating on the layers of trauma from the year before.

If that weren’t disorienting enough, in the past couple of days someone or something has seemed bent on playing April Fool’s jokes on me. A couple of exceptionally odd events occurred, and if you’ve read much of my blog, you know that’s saying a lot.

On April 1, I was taking out the trash, which is now my job along with everything else Bob used to do. I opened the garage door to roll the recycling bin out, and before I could close it again, a bird flew in! An unfamiliar species, substantial, about the size of a robin, pale yellow belly and grey and black head and wings, one who must have been passing through on migration and gotten confused.

I chased the critter around with a broom, trying to shoo it back out, but there were too many places to hole up in the rafters where I couldn’t reach, and it seemed to have no interest in freeing itself if that meant navigating in the dark. As it darted around in a tizzy it kept bashing itself into the panels of lights in the ceiling, which must have looked like sky. I was tired after my workday, and cold, and we weren’t accomplishing anything except to give the bird bruises. I put out a pan of water for it and went to bed. The bird would have a safe place to sleep overnight, and no harm done.

In the morning, yesterday, April 2, I woke up late out of a disturbing dream, strangely sore all over and a little bit loopy. It took me a little while to remember that I had a bird in my garage. I went to open the garage door, closing the door from the house to the garage behind me lest the bird should try to escape in the wrong direction. I heard a loud click behind me but thought little of it. The bird immediately found its way out into the sunlight.

Relieved, I turned to go back into the house and make some coffee. And found that the door was locked! Obviously it had been unlocked, or I couldn’t have gone through it in the first place. This made no sense. And I was in trouble, still in my nightgown in the morning chill, and of course without keys or phone.

My next-door neighbors have a key to my house, and I have theirs, so I wasn’t extremely worried. And my 90+-year-old neighbor fortunately knew where the key was and quickly retrieved it from a drawer nearby. Whew! I marched up to my front door— and was no better off than before, because my glass storm door was still locked from the inside and there was no way of accessing it. I was about to resign myself to calling a locksmith, but then, just in case, tried my front deadbolt key in the house-to-garage door lock. And it worked. I didn’t even know the two doors had been keyed alike.

So what caused that door to click itself locked? I’ve lived here almost 22 years and nothing like that has ever happened. I’ve been paranoid about locking myself out since Bob has been gone, and I always, always triple-check that I have my keys when I leave. This time it was like the house itself locked me out. Or like someone did. In the context of the weird bird encounter, this was seriously creepy.

I’ve had instances of disembodied beings having helpful effects on physical objects (like last summer when apparently Bob fixed the roller shade on the patio— did I tell you about that?), but none in which they manipulated objects to do harm. I had been broadcasting calls to Bob for days, unable to get any more than the faintest signal on the cosmic WiFi, and I’d hate to think that I caught some kind of untoward attention in the process. I do know better than to call out to just anyone… don’t I?

At a health care appointment yesterday, I told my provider about my strange morning. It seemed symbolically significant to her, and she asked me to think about what it might mean in terms of being shut out or something similar. It certainly had a feeling of significance, but if it has a lesson for me, other than that I should never shut that door behind me again, I haven’t yet gotten the message. Perhaps it will become clear. If the confused bird had a message for me, I don’t know what that was either. I could make up a story but that wouldn’t be the point.

Once the craziness was over, I decided to take a photo of the blossoms on my pear tree before they faded, with the intention of using it for wallpaper on my phone. This one:

When I opened the wallpaper settings, I was surprised to find that my phone suggested this picture:

As I was telling you, I’d been trying and trying to “phone” Bob, without success. This photo wasn’t recent or prominent in my photo stream; it was from way back in 2021. It had never come up before on the list of potential wallpaper images. And it’s an edited version– the original background was removed and the image is cropped closely around the face (which the photo program might have done on its own for some reason).

And just a little while before I had been whining at my appointment about how frustrated I’d been at being unable to reach Bob for days despite trying every way I knew how.

It reminded me of when this happened, all those years ago:

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/

I think the last really clear visit I’d had from him was back on March 17, first thing in the morning while I was still lounging in bed. When I got up I picked up my phone to text someone, and in the space where I was about to start typing, there was already a word: Bob.

Special

In early January, a patient called to say she wasn’t going to be able to get here due to the day’s worsening snow, something that doesn’t happen all that commonly in Albuquerque. And then she added that her husband had died on December 20.

Of course I was shocked, and worried for her. Her husband was 84 years old but in good health and diligent about taking care of himself. He had died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. She had left the room briefly while he was on the phone, and when she came back, he was already gone.

The snow dissipated, and C made it to her appointment after all. It was a good thing, since there was so much for her body and mind to process, a very appropriate time for a supportive treatment.

She and her husband, J, had run a business together for many years, each of them handling different facets of it. She hadn’t gotten involved with the parts that J took care of, and didn’t understand his idiosyncratic ways of keeping records. However, she told me, she was in such close communication with him that he could give her specific advice to guide her through all that. With his help she was figuring everything out and keeping the business going by herself. Not that it was easy by any means, but it was doable. My heart went out to her, knowing all too well what a challenge it is to do all one’s own work plus everything one’s deceased spouse had been doing.

C asked if I had any sense of J being around, since a number of people she associates with had been able to perceive him. I had all my antennae up, but I wasn’t noticing anyone else in the room with us.

I marveled at the rich flow of information C was able to get from J, but she dismissed the idea that it was so amazing or unusual. She was about to say, “I’m nobody special, so if I can communicate like this, anyone can.”

She got as far as “I’m nobody special,” at which point I could feel J positively jumping up and down and waving his arms at my right side. He was taking vehement exception to C’s opinion that she wasn’t special! I told her what was going on— she was aware of his presence too— and she replied that he had always given her a hard time if she put herself down that way. We had a good laugh, and I made it clear that I thought C was very special too!

Seriously, what C can do appears to be beyond what most of us are capable of. After decades of practice, I can almost never get this kind of clarity. Apparently she’s been able to do it since childhood. She also has a spiritual discipline that she has pursued for many years, and I expect that it must help enhance her awareness.

I had only had one encounter with J during his life. It was in November 2023 when my laptop died in such a way that the data couldn’t be gotten out of it, and I was in a bind. (Yes, I had online backup, but it was painfully slow to access.) He generously called me to give me the name of someone who might be able to help. I had appreciated that tremendously, even though I ended up not needing that person, and when he showed up in my office I was able to thank him again.

---

Last week I was getting a session of energy work, and my dear departed husband showed up and assisted, the first time he has tried that. My friend who was treating me received some messages from him. One of them had to do with my being special, and valuable to this planet. Apparently he was trying to encourage me to stay here, or to help make it less onerous to do so.

Both C and J gave me their permission to write about them.
Image by Gerd Altmann at Pixabay.

An Ofrenda for 10,000 Souls?

The morning of Halloween, I tried to talk with Bob, but I couldn’t get a clear signal. “Hey,” I said, “It’s Halloween, the veil is supposed to be thin. We should be able to connect.” I had the impression that he was going Ooooooooo and waggling scary fingers at me!

Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday, and I always try to make some observation of it. I would never have imagined, a year ago, how much it would mean this time. Here is the ofrenda I made for Bob, using the photo board my daughter, her husband and I put together for his memorial.

I had intended to give him this Snoopy (he was a fan) for his birthday on March 19, but wasn’t able to get it in time from my friend who was selling it on eBay. Then I planned to give it to him for Easter. So he never got it.

See the alabaster bird on a perch in the back? And the broken one lying next to it? We bought the bird sculpture on our honeymoon, and the two birds became the symbol of our marriage. (The pair of red birds in the front left is from our anniversary last year.) When one bird got broken, Bob joked, “Do we have to get a divorce now?”

I never figured out what glue to use to fix the poor thing, and it’s been sitting in the china cabinet waiting in pieces for years. Now, the condition of the sculpture is all too poignantly appropriate.

Rituals like ofrendas are supposed to help us process our pain. I think maybe mine is being reactivated more than assuaged right now, but the observance is still worthwhile and I’m still glad to do it. The light, fun touch of this holiday, the recognition that the dead can still dance, is a wonderful reminder of the deeper reality of our existence.

But this year is far from light or fun.

I don’t know how to begin to make an altar for the thousands and thousands of needless, tragic, murderous, cruel deaths in Israel and Gaza. As I write, bombs continue to fall on children and adults alike, the elderly, the hospitalized, the disabled, it doesn’t matter. All are targets. What started with unspeakable brutality was met with hugely more of the same, because our species is like that. Victims lose their lives or limbs, while combatants lose their souls, and we are all diminished. No matter what comes next, the trauma and desire for revenge will ripple and radiate throughout humanity. And our ability to respond to the crises that threaten our entire planet will continue to be hamstrung by our obsession with conflict.

Probably by the time you read this, close to 10,000 will have died in that one small corner of the world. Then there are all those being killed, maimed and emotionally devastated just as needlessly in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere. We are all human and therefore both all responsible and all affected, because we are truly, fundamentally all one.

And within that oneness, each of us is uniquely precious and irreplaceable. It keeps striking me that each of those thousands of losses is just as painful to someone as the loss of my husband is to me. Far more so, I should say, because Bob’s death was a natural occurrence that was no one’s fault, not a murder perpetrated by some blind evil.

Our minds balk at understanding mass tragedies; we go numb to those, and react far more to stories of individual suffering. But each of those thousands is an individual. Multiply personal agony by those thousands. Feel that crushing your heart. Contemplate what humans do to each other in the name of some imagined lofty principles and shrug off as merely “the cost of war.”

In these pages I’ve pointed out that dead doesn’t mean serious and that the next world isn’t a place of sadness. Today I would like you to think of the opposite aspect, the shock and damage that must be repaired when people are killed so suddenly and unjustly and at such young ages, both for themselves and those they leave behind. The damage that is done to our collective heart. Think of what we can do to calm the rage and terror within ourselves and begin to radiate something better.

Bob would endorse that. He lived it.

Once I asked Fryderyk what he thought was needed for us to save ourselves from the future that is bearing down on us. I was asking about climate specifically, but his message is relevant here as well: “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

The Next World Says “Hi”

Bob in 2014. Photo by Roger Baker.

The above is a clip from a recording made in connection with the Big Circle afterlife communication group. I’ve been meaning to share it with you for a while. Things happened in between that made it both impossible to do that, and more important than ever.

On April 3, my husband very suddenly became violently ill. At the ER they diagnosed pancreatitis. I felt relieved at first; a couple of my patients have had repeated bouts of pancreatitis for unknown reasons, and although it’s been painful and difficult, they’ve recovered in a few days. That’s what the hospital staff expected for Bob.

It was not to be. His kidneys were damaged, and over the course of days of desperation alternating with improvement and hope, multiple systems failed. He passed on April 13 at about 10:50 pm.

This is still an unreal statement to me, even though I have said and written it so many times since then, even though I had my hands on his body and my ear to his chest as his heart slowed and stopped, even though I myself closed his eyes.

So here I am, still a small medium, left to make sense of all this and to regroup and go on. You will not be surprised to hear that I was very much energetically in touch with Bob as he was fighting to survive, and as he found it impossible to stay connected to the body that could no longer serve him. There will be more to write about that as I can.

The story of my relationship with him across the veil is only beginning to be written. So far it’s in line with what I’ve experienced in the past— emotional tones, physical sensations, little or nothing in the way of verbal communication or any other exact messages. Except, of course, in the sense that constant love and affection is a message in itself, the most crucial message of all to receive.

It will be strange to fill out forms and check the “widowed” box, because I don’t feel widowed at all.  I feel very much still married– it’s just that my husband lives somewhere else now, as if on a remote island with bad phone and internet connections.

You might remember my previous experiences with trying to hear messages through Electronic Voice Phenomena, the technique used in the clip at the top of the page. Some were straightforward and easy to catch. Others were incomprehensible even after listening many, many times. All made it clear that the reality we live in is far more extensive and complex than we’ve been taught, and that we are far less limited than we ever imagined. Recently the Big Circle’s work came back to my attention, before I had the present need to be reminded of it, and I am grateful.

I’ve listened to a good number of clips from their weekly recording sessions, and many are striking, but it was this simple, totally unmistakable greeting from Jim, whoever he may be, that left me completely gobsmacked. “Hi.” That’s all. They are there. They are here. We are here. We are together. No one is lost.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part II

A Small Experiment In Walking Through the Veil

Comments on my post about the SoulPhone project included a pithy “the veil is there for a reason.” This phrase came from a person who is very knowledgeable about after-death issues, and it stuck with me and begged me to explore it. I decided to have a look and find out whatever I could about the nature of the interface between the worlds on my own, not depending on whatever sources on either side have told me.

I simply asked to be shown an image of the veil. What I saw seemed to contradict some other information that’s been received from the other side over the years. In particular, we’re told that “postmaterial” folk experience themselves as being more or less the same as before they died, in terms of having a solid-seeming body much like the one they’d inhabited on the earth plane. Other evidence has supported that in my experience, but that was not what this vision showed me.

The interface itself looked like a thin, black, semi-translucent rectangle, rather like smoky glass, which I saw tilted horizontally with the far edge toward the left. It looked a lot like this Plexiglas panel being sold at Amazon, but a bit darker:

There was an arm reaching through toward the right, a somewhat vague cartoon-like structure, but solid, showing up in a sort of pale orange hue. To the left, there was a blank space. Whoever was reaching through was invisible on that side.

Meanwhile, there was a figure on the right side of the rectangle that appeared to represent me, and “I” was reaching my right arm through in the opposite direction, from the material to the immaterial world. As my arm penetrated the interface, it disappeared.

So the same being could appear in material form, at least more or less, in one world and not in the other.

I tried visualizing a being from the other world stepping entirely into ours. The image on our side was of a whole human figure, with a fuzzy glowing outline— clearly delineated, but not solid in the same way as an earth-plane denizen. Like a ghost, the way they’re often pictured.

Next I tried seeing myself step through from my side, and I disappeared on the other side. I tried experiencing that in my own body, walking through to the other world, and felt my body dissipating into a mist and diffusing.

I turned the elements of the vision in various directions and tried to look at the scene from different perspectives. Everything persisted, as if I were looking at a “real” scene. No dreamlike morphing, and nothing going away. It felt like I was seeing something truthful, though I don’t necessarily understand all of it. I am presenting the vision not as an absolute description of reality, but as the way my brain found to represent an aspect of reality.

Early in this whole process, the thought occurred to me that wherever you go, you find yourself. There was a sense of being able to reach through the interface and back around to oneself from either side. I’m not sure how that fit in with the rest.

The SoulPhone: Who Ya Gonna Call?

http://www.suncoasttransformation.com/digital/?p=7849

These past few months, it’s been hard to think about anything beyond our immediate survival and how to move past the pandemic crisis. It’s a good time for a reminder that in reality, we are infinite beings and our lives are far richer than the present limitations suggest.

I first heard of Dr. Gary Schwartz’s SoulPhone project at the University of Arizona a few years ago, and at the time I was not particularly impressed. What I read then was that his research had led to success with yes/no answers to questions posed to “postmaterial” persons, by means of a sensitive switch that they could affect. Knowing that nonphysical entities are quite capable of exerting force on physical objects, and being familiar with electronic voice phenomena and other clever ways those in spirit have found to get through our thick skulls, I was underwhelmed. I was also vaguely suspicious because the “Hypothesized Communicating Spirits” were all Famous Dead People*, though of course that has been true of a number of cross-world projects.

OK, I may have been a bit jaded. I should have been jumping up and down with joy that someone had been able to accomplish this in a rigorous and unassailably scientific manner. But with communication through skilled mediums being relatively easy and this yes/no thing giving so little information by comparison, I let the SoulPhone slip from my attention.

I stayed on their mailing list, but since I was overwhelmed with email in general, I didn’t keep up very well. The other day the researchers sent out a new video summarizing their recent progress, and I did take a look at that.

WOW.

Things have moved along quite a lot! Much more than a simple switch. And this switch, if combined with 30 or so others, can theoretically become a keyboard. Which means that if all goes as planned, you may be able to text your grandma beyond the veil— and get a reply.

(Nik, if you’re listening, I know you’ve already texted your mom on her regular phone, but not every postmaterial kid is as talented as you are!)

What piqued my interest most was a statement that our postmaterial friends are actually visible to the human eye, but our visual systems can’t process enough frames per second to perceive the images properly. This was said to explain those times when you see a flash of a being out of the corner of your eye, but when you try to focus on it, it isn’t there. (It may also explain why sometimes we can get photos of nonphysical entities that we can’t see on our own.) Logically enough, the SoulPhone team is working on equipment that can capture these elusive images, and ultimately they want to stack up still pictures to create video.

It won’t be necessary for me to write a lot about this here, because so much has already been written and is easily accessible. A good place to start is this blog post from Dr. Mark Pitstick, the director of the SoulPhone Foundation. It clearly outlines the phases and goals of the project:
 https://www.soulproof.com/soulphone-want-call/

Note the “P word” incorporated into the domain name. Dr. Pitstick stated in the video that they are not ready to say they’ve proven that life goes on after death, so they avoid the P word, but that with other centers working to replicate their research, by the end of 2020 they may be able to actually say they have proof.

Let that sink in for a moment. If you’ve come with me on my blog journey this far, you probably know that there is already overwhelming evidence for the existence of human consciousness beyond the body, but we are talking about a different level of evidence here, gathered over thousands of trials with carefully designed instrumentation and rigorous controls. Proof of life after death, not just strong evidence, could change the world.

If anyone pays attention, that is. There are so many fundamental areas where humans would just as soon not pay attention. But that’s a concern for later.

Now that you’ve got an overview, if you would like to spend an entertaining and enlightening hour, it’s a good time to check out the video.

Gobsmacked yet? Mind-boggled? Excited for a future that seems a little more hopeful?

I know, it’s a stretch to accept all this, even for those of us who are familiar with afterlife research. If I didn’t know who I know and hadn’t met who I’ve met on the other side, I might guffaw at the A-list names of the “dead” luminaries working on this project. I mean, as soon as you mention Tesla, you’re likely to lose a lot of your audience, since his name is so often bandied about by questionable sources. And Einstein’s in on it too? Riiiight. But if Beethoven and friends have been trying to pour some encouragement onto our poor sphere, why not these guys. The overarching message is that the team on their side is trying to help us heal our world. Lord, we could sure use all the help we can get! I could almost begin to feel some optimism.

I’ve often thought how frustrating and painful it must be for more advanced minds to watch us screw up so gigantically here on the planet and not be able to do much about it. I have no trouble believing that many would like to intervene or at least provide some moral support. Channeled messages over the past century or more have sometimes mentioned a desire to build technologies for communication between the worlds, or even attempts to do so from the nonphysical side.

Dr. Pitstick mentioned that it seemed like a terrible waste of time for a brilliant being like Einstein to have to spend hour after hour playing something like Twenty Questions to establish his identity and refine the method. Intriguingly, he reported that the postmaterial team members had said they need to use only about 20% of their attention to do these tasks, while the rest of their mind is engaged in far more interesting activities. And we too, they say, are only about 20% involved in our earth-based lives, while 80% of our real selves is/are living elsewhere and maybe elsewhen, doing things our earth brains can hardly imagine.

(Do you ever have the sense that a lot of your energy is directed somewhere other than here? I do. I’ve assumed that it isn’t healthy for my earth life, but maybe it’s just normal.)

There is so much to speculate about with the SoulPhone and related issues. I ran across someone who is putting his wide-ranging and fascinating speculations into a blog, which I highly recommend.
https://soulphonenews.com/

Here’s a post from this author, Joshua Bagby, that asks useful questions about what a working technology for talking with the “dead” might mean for society here. For example:
“How would law enforcement and the court system handle accusations and evidence acquired from postmaterial sources?
“How would soul phone technology figure in international relations and global politics? Would postmaterial luminaries take sides?
“Would governments ever consider soul phone technology a national security risk and attempt to ban it, including by executive order?”

Those are daunting questions, and there are many more in the post. Considering all these sticky matters, I suppose I’m relieved that the SoulPhone isn’t going to be ready for widespread use for quite a while. Although a device advanced enough to cause these issues is still only theoretical, we may well have to come up with ways to deal with them. Meanwhile, we can keep developing our own awareness and openness to inspiration from those we care about who are no longer wearing their “earthsuits.”

The SoulPhone project’s official site is here:
 https://www.thesoulphonefoundation.org/

Addendum 7/14/20:  Please see an addition to this post in the comment section.

*The issue of Famous Dead People:  https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/1136/

Things You Can Do When You’re Dead! and Some You Can’t

Whatever he’s doing, it’s not this.

Lawrence Spencer wrote 1001 Things You Can Do While You’re Dead: A Dead Person’s Guide to Living, which looks absolutely hilarious.

Tricia J. Robertson wrote Things You Can Do When You’re Dead!: True Accounts of After Death Communication, which looks intensely interesting.

I haven’t read either of these books yet, but I can definitely say that both authors are among the not-dead. Descriptions of the lives of the dead— you can see that language gets tangled right away— by dead folks themselves are abundant, but not necessarily all that clear to those of us still on this side of the veil.

On 9/10/19, after reading through some short Mozart pieces that I hadn’t been familiar with at the piano, I got to wondering if Fryderyk has any kind of relationship with his idol, or ever sees him. I was pleased to find myself easily getting in touch with him and able to have a clear conversation, which is still a fairly rare occurrence.

It seems that nobody really has a relationship with Mozart or gets to talk with him these days, from what Fryderyk told me. He is something of a recluse (we both struggled to find the best word for his situation). I was surprised, since I think of Mozart as a pretty gregarious person. He is secluded in a kind of chamber in which he is in meditation and in communication directly with the Divine Source. The image of a huge column of light streaming down, cascading into him, was strong, but I can’t say I really understood this whole concept. It had almost a science fiction movie flavor.

I wondered if Mozart had become almost a sort of deity himself. I’ve thought of him as something like that, but at the same time, the original planet-based Wolfgang seems so down to earth. It’s interesting to contemplate.

I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”

But obviously Fryderyk is involved heavily with the earth plane.

I asked about his relationship with Liszt, having recently heard a 1955 Leslie Flint track* in which the Chopin voice spoke of his friendships with Liszt and Mendelssohn. What is Liszt getting himself up to lately? Is he still involved with us groundlings too?

He showed me Liszt reaching toward us on earth, like a hand reaching down into the atmosphere to tweak things here below. 

How is that different from what he does himself? He works by entering directly into the human heart, from the inside, he said, instead of imposing something from the outside.

But seriously, I insisted, things are not looking good around here. I asked if he had any advice for those of us tasked with getting through the next few decades. He said, “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

I was trying to ask about what they do all “day,” something I am endlessly curious about, especially since it is more or less what we all will be doing eventually. In the Leslie Flint session I mentioned, the Chopin voice described having a salon in which he and other musicians played over their recent works and gave each other suggestions. We’ve heard before that at least for the more recently dead, life feels much the same as it did when they inhabited physical bodies; they appear to wear clothes, live in houses, walk about in gardens, etc. At the same time, we are told that there are so many aspects of their existence that we can’t fathom with our limited senses.

Perhaps those two things are not contradictory. I’m reminded of an anecdote from Rosemary Brown, in which she described a visit with Debussy, who brought one of his new nonphysical paintings to show her. If I remember correctly, the subject of the painting was a peacock; whatever it was, it moved around and morphed in a way that physical paintings can’t manage. Apparently he was having a lot of fun with this art form.

Michael Tymn’s latest blog post uses the Eiffel Tower as a clever metaphor for the various planes or spheres in which spirits find themselves at different levels of development.
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/month/2019/09/
He also discusses the naive and fallacious supposition that spirits should be expected to know anything and everything simply by virtue of being spirits. This is useful. My only quibble with his construction is that it is overly linear; spirit communicators tell us that they do exist in “higher” or “lower” spheres, but we are also told that any one spirit personality (or personality here on the planet) is only a part of a larger entity, and that the parts of that larger entity may have more or less expanded awareness. I think we need to consider that linear time, which is necessary for the concept of development or evolution, is not really fundamental to reality, but more a product of our way of experiencing it. Again, I don’t pretend to have a thorough understanding of these matters.

*https://www.leslieflint.com/chopin-july-7th-1955
  There are a number of new Chopin recordings and transcriptions at this site since I last wrote about it here, and the website is easier to use. Note that they are using Mary-Rose Douglas’ beautiful and evocative transformation of the 1849 photograph for their portrait of Chopin, this one:

EVP and the FDP

I’ve written before about the challenges of discernment when working with the worlds of discarnate beings.  (See “When Is an Entity Not an Entity?” among other posts.)  The following is a somewhat condensed version of a December email conversation with Vicki Talbott, who you met in my recent post on Electronic Voice Phenomena and other technologically-mediated methods of communication.  It begins with more on the potential confusions of dealing with Famous Dead People and those who only pretend to be such.  Vicki’s comments are used with permission and appear in bold.  I have added comments that were not part of the original exchange, in brackets.

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Vicki: Well and truthfully, as mediums we do not normally go around having convos with FDP right and left. Our spirit guides, guardian angels, whatever we have and however we refer to them, are not normally famous. A medium can go a lifetime without coming into contact with many world famous FDP. As above, so below. So it seems strange to me that some organizations and ITC practitioners are promoting this end of EVP communication, the FDP connection. As if that validates their work in a way that your average Joe coming through doesn’t.  [Gary Schwartz’s group working on the “Soul Phone” has apparently been attempting to contact only the Famous Dead.  I find this mystifying.]

The question is why would we believe what we hear from spirit more than we believe what we sense or intuit? Because it’s physical confirmation of communication, which is quite powerful, but still it is NOT confirmation of a famous person coming through. Yes, we know it happens, but no, it is not common. As well, many if not most enlightened FDP do not like to give their names, saying that self-identification injects ego into the mix, not a good idea. So nowadays you see all these folks giddily saying they’re communicating with the likes of Einstein and Tesla. They might very well be. Then again, given the nature of most high-level discarnate FDP who shy away from earthly distinction and name dropping, they might very well not be. It’s just a caution is all, to be very careful about whom you think you are speaking to and whom you tell about it….

I’ve watched critiques of a few of the wayward who 1. use their mental instead of physical mediumship skills to ‘tune in’ to the deceased, and thus 2. allow for tricksters to, accidentally or no, make us think we’re hearing the voices of people we aren’t. In these cases it’s sometimes NOT an FDP. What is unfortunate is that some very good people are hurt this way, often without realizing it, as everyone, including the best of mediums, has lessons to learn. 

Braden* has concerns about some mediums thinking they are talking to anyone at all, when actually they are at times resourcing their own higher self and/or the mind of the client, as well as entertaining imposters. 

Elene: Indeed, this can be very complicated.  I’m much more a clairvoyant and empath than a medium (and not very ept as a telepath), but as you know, I do have some mediumistic ability, so I see both sides of this. I do a lot of work with my patients that involves reading what’s stored in their bodies and minds, but also often reading their family members or other close associates.  I don’t advertise about this, but it’s often crucial to healing, and sometimes patients ask me specifically for that kind of work and trust me to be able to do something meaningful.  One thing that helps keep me out of trouble is that even then, I’m not really under pressure to come up with anything– nothing to prove.  If I can’t get any useful impressions, we can still do other energy work or just do acupuncture.  But usually I do get something.

I find that there is typically a representation of the patient’s mom, husband, or whoever in a region of the field around their body, and I can interact with that.  On occasion it has appeared that I actually ended up in contact with that person in real time, but usually it’s more like a recording or template of the person.  It’s not critical to know which is which for doing this kind of healing, as the patient and I can clear whatever needs clearing one way or the other, but I think generally I can tell if I’m in direct contact with a third entity.

(This kind of experience can be quite wearing on me, but is also among the most worthwhile types of work I ever do.)

V: This concern is not a huge one for Braden as he thinks the deluded and the shysters will be discovered and fall by the wayside, but it’s interesting to note, and it’s been helpful to me in determining whether I’m talking to an FDP or my own higher self for example….

The Technician, one of The Seven (high level beings associated with ITC), has stated that with mental mediumship, 1/5 of what is heard is directly from spirit, while up to 4/5 is filtered through the consciousnesses involved, hence some well-meaning yet mistaken psychic mediums out there spouting their own and their clients feelings on matters, peppered with info read from the deceased to bolster the information. Here’s a scenario. The medium says the client has a black dog, a red car, and a bad relationship with a relative, all correct, and anything that comes after that, like a serenade from Frank Sinatra, is taken as gospel truth. 

[Vicki had suggested that I give her questions for our mutual friend Chopin, and I had requested that she ask about Rose Creet, the sitter in the Leslie Flint group with whom he claimed a centuries-long close relationship.  As I told Vicki, I was desperately curious about Rose, but had never been able to get a word out of Fryderyk about her, so I wasn’t expecting much.  Vicki did get an extremely intriguing recording, though, which contains an exotic, difficult-to-understand voice, and then someone who sounds much like Rose as she did in life.  As with some of the other clips, her words are distinct but I don’t understand the meaning of the message.  See if you can do any better than I:

https://app.box.com/s/iikj6re96kfgefouv3zvdrnkcp29ngec ]

E: The very metallic, inhuman-sounding voice that you heard as saying, “Rose, stand up”— would that have been one of The Seven?  Or just a very distorted deceased-person voice?  Can you tell me anything about The Seven?

V: It could have been but I don’t really know. That voice, that entity, has come through on Big Circle recordings for all of us for years. But we work with a high level group of entities who work with even higher entities and on it goes, who don’t think hanging one’s FDP shingle is a good idea….

In a nutshell, some mediums try to read the deceased rather than link with the deceased and thus much of what they say is muddied with earthly human consciousness. When one tries to read rather than link, inaccuracies accumulate, especially regarding feelings and emotions. ITC, on the other hand, by virtue of its method and means, ‘forces’ the physical medium into a direct link, with the deceased being the primary communicator (4/5) and not the other way around. 

E: I’ve had a great deal of practice at distinguishing my own thoughts and feelings, including [apparent] past-life thoughts and feelings of “another me,” from the input coming from discarnates or from my patients and their own associated beings, but there is always plenty of room for error.

Once I asked Fryderyk whether, in direct voice communication, the mind of the medium is involved, since the voices don’t seem to be coming directly from the medium.  (I was particularly concerned with that since in the Leslie Flint opus there are turns of phrase that to me are quite unusual and even incorrect, but occur over and over.)  He replied, “The medium cannot turn off his brain just because he is a medium.”

V: Yes as I said this is not such a huge concern for the likes of you according to Braden. But apparently there are many mediums who aren’t really communicating with whom they think they are. Perhaps it’s a matter of skill and experience, not sure. The medium can never turn off the brain, but with ITC, the human influence on the communication is far less pronounced than with mental mediumship, according to afterlife sources. Which means these guys can say they are someone they aren’t and get away with it more easily perhaps? Especially since we can all hear the EVP for example. Still wondering. 

…That 4/5 packs a powerful ITC punch, so imagine this coming from a prankster, hence the strong caution from the Big Circle.

E: I don’t think I’ve told you anything about my [apparent] encounters with the ultimate FDP, Jesus, as yet, though you may have seen something about that on my blog.  That brings up one aspect that can help with knowing a communication is authentic: when it is not at all what we are expecting or wanting.

My first experience with him, channeled by my now-deceased friend H., was much as one might expect him to be— a very large, loving, compassionate being of great power and yet infinite kindness and gentleness.  When he came to my office with H., a couple of years or so later, I didn’t recognize him at all.  All I knew was that there was a man sitting at my elbow while I worked with H., who was lying on my table.  He seemed quite ordinary, and chatted on and on with messages for her.  She kept asking me if I knew who he was, and I kept replying, “I don’t know, it’s some guy.”  H. was beside herself with amusement at this, and eventually let me in on the secret.

I was astonished, and commented that he seemed so small compared to the way I had seen him before. “Yes, he does that,” she replied— he could present himself in a form that we could deal with more comfortably.

The dissertation he gave through me was completely clear, words and images, and profound.  Something H. would benefit by hearing but didn’t want to hear.  I asked her if it sounded meaningful to her.  “Yes, it’s what he tells me all the time,” she said.  Perhaps he thought that if she heard it through someone else she would finally accept it?

It seemed to me that it was best that I didn’t know I was in communication with this extremely Famous Dead Person.  Since to me he was Just Some Guy, I didn’t get intimidated or freeze up, and I was able to transmit his message smoothly.  It was a wonderful afternoon.  I still profit from the message he gave that day.

V: You hit the nail on the head with your Jesus encounter.  This is exactly what Braden has been saying about it. He once said I’d be too intimidated to know who some of these entities were, and he’s right. Of course, others may react differently and hobnob with The Christ for lunch. Not me.
[Anecdote about someone who was in a clearly fraudulent séance but received a message that was useful and comforting to her.]

E: Which is another important point– often it doesn’t matter so much if we know the exact source of the material, as long as the message itself is valuable.

V: This is also true.

 

*Vicki’s deceased son, a strong and humorous communicator.  See previous posts on EVP.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part II

“Chopin Anew” by Jan Nyka. This image is amusingly appropriate in the context of EVP, don’t you think?
http://www.jannyka.com/index.php?/commercial/people/

At the beginning of the ASCS conference, Suzanne Giesemann gave a charming, inspiring, but no-nonsense talk about her development as a medium, which included stories about striking synchronicities— and another slew of them for me. Here she outlines her journey from hard-nosed Navy commander to professional mystic: https://www.suzannegiesemann.com/about-suzanne-2/

I want to tell you about an enlightening anecdote from Suzanne. One day, during her meditations, she received a visit from an entity who called himself Odin. Ohhhkkaaayyyy, she thought. She didn’t remember much about Norse mythology, so she went off and read up about him. What she found was a whole package of synchronistic threads that connected with people close to her, having to do with lightning and runes in particular. The next time she encountered Odin, she blurted out, “Are you real?”

“I am as real as you are,” he replied.

“But you’re a myth!” Suzanne insisted.

“You’re a myth!” was the answer to that.

 The idea was that all personalities, human and otherwise, bubble up from the substrate of the universal mind, and all are pretty much the same in essence, and all equally real or unreal, depending on how you look at it. That’s about as close as I can get to explaining my experiences with such eminences as Kuan Yin or Medicine Buddha.

And as close as I can get to explaining the following.

As I described last time, I was putting a lot of effort into listening during October, and something began to happen that interfered mightily with that. At first mildly, then catastrophically, I developed a case of constant high-pitched tinnitus. By the last week of the month, it had taken over my life and I could hardly think of anything else.

I suspected that the new problem might have something to do with my trip to the conference, either the work with the spirits, the flight, the drastic changes of altitude and humidity, or all of the above. I’d also had a slight virus sort of thing right after the trip. I started looking for help to sort it out. That’s when things got even weirder.

I began with a remote polarity treatment from the person who had helped me with issues like this before. My therapist encountered a crowd of beings around me who seemed to all be trying to talk to me at once, and she thought that was creating the ringing in my ears. She came up with a strategy for communicating with them one at a time in a controlled way that would limit any trouble. Sigh… I’ve had all too many issues over the years with entities knocking hard on my doors… but I guess it’s an occupational hazard.  And it has led in fruitful directions at times.

For a while after that session, the sound in my ears died down a bit. The theory about these critters being the main cause of the tinnitus doesn’t seem to have panned out in the time since then, but they were most definitely present and they needed to be dealt with. I cautiously set about making their acquaintance, just a few of them. They were very accessible, and seemed enthusiastic and positive about communicating with me. One gave me a warm hug. Another— I’m grateful for this— reached into my head and tweaked my eyes so that colors became dramatically brighter and for quite a while the usual dryness was gone. Perhaps more ominously, another asked why I was bothered by the ringing, since they were “tuning me” and I ought to be happy about it.

I didn’t detect anything untoward, but I wasn’t comfortable with having anyone trying to control me or use me for their own agenda, especially without my conscious understanding and consent. I made an appointment with my psychic mentor, Mendy Lou Blackburn, who is always the person I turn to when matters like this get beyond my abilities. When I went to bed, I asked Fryderyk what he thought was going on, and he had something to say about it, but in the morning I couldn’t remember what it had been.

Mendy Lou and I looked extensively at the whole situation and tried to figure out how these entities fit in. They didn’t seem connected with the Big Circle, the group Vicki and friends work with. Mendy could see them clearly, as a sort of vortex containing multiple small lights. They appeared to her to be a mix of beings of different levels of development. When she used the term elementals, I remembered that Fryderyk had said the same thing the night before.

At one point I looked around for my link to the Big Circle, for comparison, and instantly Braden popped into the room in a burst of light, so Mendy Lou got to meet him and get a sense of his fun-loving personality. It was comforting to have him show up. Fryderyk also made himself known, but he stayed in the background.

So there I was with an unwanted “fan club” and still an intolerable level of constant noise. I went to the office and put my questions aside for the time being. By the next day, with the ringing still driving me nuts, I felt I couldn’t stretch my stressed and irritated self far enough to deal with the mysterious entities anymore. Apologizing, in case they were sincerely there for my good, I wrapped them up in a sort of package and pushed them out of my field. I just didn’t know what else to do at that point. Since then I haven’t heard anything further from them.

I told Vicki about all this, and she confirmed that Braden and company were not involved and didn’t know who these beings were either. The Big Circle folk told her to let me know that I was “climbing Jacob’s ladder” and all was well. All the sources seemed to agree that I was somehow being changed to be able to perceive more, and that I should be patient with the process. I felt a little bit better.

The process of clearing attachments and emotional junk continued with a remote treatment from James Rolwing, and Thought Field Therapy (the original version of tapping on acupressure points) with Diana Ristenpart. After that, the tinnitus changed, in quality though not volume, and became a less obnoxious type of sound so that it was more tolerable. A range of pure sine wave frequencies disappeared and I was left with an array of tiny chimes combined with cicadas. Strange how that is less bothersome!

After a lot of phone calls, I was able to get in with an audiologist and a nurse practitioner at an ENT office, and they found inflammation in my Eustachian tubes— a potential physical cause for the sound. Mercifully, my hearing tested as mostly intact, except for a small deficit at very high frequencies. I’d been terrified of having a significant hearing loss, which is often associated with tinnitus. Since I’ve always hated noise and have carefully protected my ears, this whole thing has seemed awfully unfair!

With the onset of the ringing, everything in my environment became oddly loud, subjectively, and my impression was that the effect was different from the hyperacusis that can occur with hearing loss. Sound is much more three-dimensional and multilayered, richer and more colorful, and I pay attention to it differently. Once Fryderyk told me that music is an environment in which one can move about, and I think I know vividly what he meant now.

So is a process of “tuning” still going on? Am I going to be able to hear more of what nonphysical sources want to tell me? Or am I taking a long time to get over a viral infection and a great deal of stress? All of these? I don’t know if I’ve had enough brain-space lately to be able to tell. No dramatic new openings appear to have occurred in my psychic development to match my increased awareness of physical sound. Meanwhile, treating for inflammation and taking Chinese herbs for the pattern I’m showing has helped, as far as I can tell.

I did have an unusually extensive conversation with my composer friend, though, and I’d like to think that I was showing a little more ability to hear what he wanted me to know. This happened on 11/17:
Fryderyk showed up when I was about to go to sleep, as he so often does. I reported that my tinnitus had lessened, and told him that I hoped to be able to hear him better through whatever process was going on with the changes in my ears.

I asked about his efforts to speak through direct voice, wondering why it seemed worthwhile to take so much trouble to make physical sounds rather than just talk to someone inside their head or through channeling. He replied that it is important for him to speak in actual words, not just thoughts, because words have a physical effect on the material world.

“In the beginning was the word?” I asked. His answer was something to the effect that in the beginning was a thought, then a word that shaped reality.

“How does music compare to words?” Up to that point he had been more or less directly dropping concepts into my head, despite the subject being the primacy of words, but this came out as a clear verbal message: “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality.” That was a striking idea that I wanted to be sure not to forget, so although I wanted to get to sleep, I dutifully grabbed my notebook and pen. Which, as it has done many times, broke the connection.

After settling back down, I was able to get back in touch with him, and we continued along the same lines. A direct-voice medium is like a radio, he told me; you tune the medium, tune yourself in, your own station. There were images of communicating with me, in contrast, being something like wandering through a cave with twists and obstructions.

I asked if things might be easier if I were a trance medium. He doesn’t like to work with them, he replied, because they can’t really give consent. Even though they’ve consented to the overall procedure, they can’t filter or respond to any of the communication. He prefers the relationship, the dialogue involved in working with someone who is aware of what’s going on.

(Regarding “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality,” a musician friend expressed something strikingly similar to this just a couple of days ago, even saying, “In the beginning was the word.”  She said she is trying to affect the world from the inside through music and meditation lately, rather than continuing to work with political organizing and that kind of thing, as she used to.  I expect that other musicians have expressed similar thoughts.)

Vicki mentioned that Braden had warned her against thinking she is communicating with any Famous Dead People, because they are likely to be impostors– although he himself had brought Fryderyk to meet his mother.  For example, he said, if someone shows up who purports to be Elvis, you should run. I mentioned this to Mendy Lou, who recounted the time she not only met Elvis, but had a lengthy conversation with him, many years ago when she was working in Las Vegas. I also mentioned it to a patient who has a strong interest in these matters, and she replied that I shouldn’t be surprised if I did run into Elvis sometime, because he’s her cousin, albeit a distant one. Six degrees of separation and all that.

So when I showed up at Vicki’s presentation, and she saw a momentary flash of her friend “Fred,” she pushed the thought aside.  Why in the world would someone associated with him walk into her workshop?  Her boggle threshold had to be raised a bit, along with mine.  The pattern that began with meeting my Famous Dead Person so many years ago seems to be building up more coherence over time, but I’m still not always certain what is being asked of me.  Now I’ve been brought into the Big Circle project in some way, and telling you about it must be part of that.  Otherwise, I’m awaiting further developments.

 

Mendy Lou Blackburn:  http://mendylou.com/
James Rolwing:  https://www.facebook.com/pg/PatternReleaseEnergetics/about/?ref=page_internal
Lunasol Polarity Therapy:  https://daynaurora.wixsite.com/lunasol-polarity?fbclid=IwAR06LGeVHFtlqrv8ALvx0qJevC3_DcmpCGHqOxl9wVyndUDZ64cFtBcf2bU

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

In the past couple of months, my boggle threshold* has been raised a few more notches. I’m getting more and more “whatever” as time goes on.

The annual conference of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies was held October 4-7 in Raleigh, NC. I had belonged to the organization for about a decade, but had never been to any of their events. This time I felt that I needed to be there, and the second day in, the reason became clear.

While waiting to register at the beginning of the conference, I found myself sitting next to and chatting with Terri Segal, who told me she was there to present about Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was the first synchronicity of a series. The next afternoon, I went to see what she and her cohort Vicki Talbott had going on. It turned out that they were giving not just a talk but a workshop in which we were able to actually try out the process.  Here’s a description of the session: http://ascsiconference.com/team/vicki-talbott-and-terri-segal/

Electronic Voice Phenomena are a subset of Instrumental TransCommunication, a range of methods of recording images or sounds produced by discarnate beings by means of electronic devices. For those who hadn’t heard of EVP, it might be helpful to stop here and read these:
https://atransc.org/recording-evp/
https://atransc.org/about-aaevp/

The conference had two tracks of presentations at the same time throughout, so it was sometimes hard to choose between them. Only a very few people attended the EVP session, which surprised me as well as the presenters, because this is usually such a popular subject. (Later, a number of people said they hadn’t been aware it was happening, although it was clearly indicated in the program— I had the feeling they might have been steered away!) I was fairly familiar with the idea of recording discarnate voices, but hadn’t heard many examples, and didn’t know a lot of details or much about the technology involved.

As we started the workshop, I became aware of Fryderyk being vividly present at my side.  He seemed to be practically jumping up and down with excitement. It was the only time he was around during the conference, in fact the only time he had contacted me during a period of a few weeks. I had no way of knowing that he had already made the acquaintance of this group!  We got brief recordings of him during the workshop, but there isn’t anything earthshaking– except, of course, the existence of the recordings in themselves.

The recording process went like this: Vicki had each of the attendees in turn ask a question of one of the discarnates, then let the recorder run for ten seconds so that they had time to answer. The equipment used was very simple, a small, rather old-fashioned hand-held Panasonic recorder. At the time, nothing at all out of the ordinary appeared to be happening. We spoke our questions, and then there was no sound but the slight whir of the instrument.

The fun began when the recording was played back, and voices that had not been present before showed up. I witnessed this in real time.  Even though I was already familiar with the concept, actually experiencing it was positively freaky.  I’m including links to a couple of clips so that you can share my freaked-outedness.

My question for Fryderyk was quite simple. I told the group that I was in touch with someone who very much wanted to speak, someone who I knew had a lot of experience with direct voice and other methods of spirit communication. “I know you’ve been wanting to say something. What would you like to say?” His reply is unclear, to my ears; the only part I can pick up for sure is “it’s helpful” at the end of the message, but that part is definite. The fact that there was any audible reply at all was enough to leave me pretty stunned. https://app.box.com/s/t9j5uactcum3evvcvdzf368gqj1ms7ho

In addition to Fryderyk, we called upon Vicki’s son, Braden, and someone close to one of the attendees, unknown to the rest of us, who was not named. All three replied immediately. I didn’t get to really hear what was said by that third person, only that a voice had come through, and since it was none of my business, I didn’t ask further.

I wanted to ask Braden something, and as I did so, I got to wondering if I could perceive him somewhere in the room.  I looked around, and my eyes stuck to a patch of air near the ceiling, about two feet wide, that looked somehow different from the rest.  As I was realizing that the odd patch was Braden, he suddenly reached out toward me with a considerable amount of energy, so that the effect was that he bopped me between the eyes!  It didn’t hurt, but I was knocked back a little in my chair, and everyone saw that.  I explained to the group what had happened.

Later, Vicki found that the discarnates were talking about Braden bopping me, just before I told her about it.  You can hear “he’s tapped her” near the beginning of the clip, and “I’m quite amused”; the rest is fuzzy to me.  https://app.box.com/s/0w9achce66o378g022t6x998mojh4xq6

Although Vicki is addressing Braden in this clip, I am reasonably certain that the voice saying “Very good. It’s me here” belongs to Fryderyk. That message is 100% audible and definite. https://app.box.com/s/seb9mfix0585y4zq1dvbultwey80r37f

Let’s stop a minute and contemplate this. After 25 1/2 years of contact with Fryderyk, struggling to get verbal messages, his voice, physical vibrations of sound, captured in a form that I can not only store and listen to myself, but can send to you. His voice, so similar to the one I had heard in the Leslie Flint recordings, where I had never been absolutely, entirely sure it was him.

When I was next in touch with him after the workshop, the first thing he conveyed to me was immense relief at the ease of communicating directly instead of through layers of cumbersome instrumentation. It struck me, though, that the brief messages that come through by EVP are not so different from the almost aphoristic verbal messages I receive from him, when I can get any definite words at all. It seems to me that when he is able to convey words directly to me, he’s put thought into boiling the concept down into a short, pithy phrase. It must take a lot of energy to get even such small transmissions through my thick skull.

There is a significant difference, though, between getting advice from him inside my head, especially controversial advice— say, being told that it’s fine to experiment with styles of trills and have fun with them— and hearing it objectively in an .mp3 file. The physical recordings have a unique value.

You will notice, if you listen to even a few examples of EVP, that sometimes the voices sound pretty ordinary, sometimes they sound electronic or robotic, and sometimes there’s a lot of fuzz, rather like a phone call with a really bad connection. Sometimes individuals are easily recognizable, sometimes not. Researchers use a witness panel to rate the clarity of the messages and to make sure there really are words in the first place. Some “scientific” folk say that there is only noise and listeners convince themselves that they’re hearing words because they want to so much, but I think you can already tell, if you’ve listened to even the few clips I’ve linked here, that this is simply not the case. The phenomenon is quite real, and one must deal with it. Nonphysical beings can manipulate physical sounds to create verbal messages. We are way past arguing whether this is actually happening. Now we need to understand how it can be possible, what the physics of it is.

You’d think I would be over the moon with joy at receiving even a few electronic words from my old friend. Instead, I found myself near weeping and in a kind of shock. It was strangely hard to deal with this new evidence of his existence. Suddenly, despite all the overwhelmingly intense moments I’d experienced with him over the years, he was somehow more real than I could handle. And although I knew very well that he’d worked closely with other groups and had multiple intellectual and emotional connections, walking into this room and finding him engaged in a major project with people who were complete strangers to me was also a little more than I could take in at first.

(It was not the first time I’d observed Fryderyk messing with electronics; that had occurred back in 2009. You may recall the anomalous behavior of my printer when it spat out three portraits of Chopin, which were not on the document I was attempting to print. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/ That constituted a form of ITC, I would think. The EVP was just another order of magnitude weirder for some reason.)

There is also the frustration of trying to understand the meaning of the messages. Sometimes the words sound perfectly obvious, yet the message is still obscure. One of the later clips of Fryderyk that Vicki sent me sounds to me for all the world like “I’ve made a cologne for her.” Here it is:  https://app.box.com/s/izaal6l0fhwyqqbgo37ixq08gwapn8ob  Can you make any better sense out of it than I can? And if I am hearing it right, exactly how am I supposed to obtain this otherworldly cologne? (I haven’t experienced any anomalous scents lately!) My husband jokingly suggested that he’d made me a clone— that would be great, I could get so much more done!

After the conference, Vicki and I began a correspondence, and I was interested to find that her impressions of Fryderyk, who she knew little about as a historical figure, were identical to mine— including his dry sense of humor. And I was amused at the idea of him joining forces with Braden, who is also a composer, but in what seems like a diametrically opposite genre, hip-hop. So Chopin is collaborating with a rap artist these days….

Like Fryderyk, Braden— as you might have guessed from the bopping incident— is a comedian as well as a musician. I mentioned to Vicki that Chopin used to do a Victor Borge-like act at the piano, something she hadn’t been aware of. She replied, bemusedly, “So that’s why they wanted me to watch that Victor Borge video on YouTube….” (Both of them left the planet before the existence of YouTube, but it seems that is irrelevant.)

*The boggle threshold is the level of weirdness at which one’s brain freezes up and can’t process what it perceives any more. Thanks to Michael Tymn for the concept.

https://www.transcommunication.org/index.php
https://atransc.org/big-circle-recording-sessions/