Releasing ancestral karma

She stands before the fire, straight and tall as a flame, her fierce green eyes blazing. Irene stoops for a moment to make an offering to the fire, a pinch of tobacco, a sprig of sage. Then she carefully unfolds the first piece of paper. She reads aloud the following statement she has written: “I give to the fire all deep, encrusted feelings of powerlessness that drove my ancestors, our beloved men, into alcohol dependency.”

She consigns the paper to the fire, and the fire takes it hungrily.

She unfolds the second message and reads it in a clear, ringing voice so that even the people on the edge of the circle can hear her without leaning in. “I give to the fire the great sadness of my ancestors, the abandoned men, who never knew love and felt less than honored by their women, mothers and sisters, daughters and lovers.”

The flames leap higher as the second paper crackles and burns.

She bends to blow into the fire, adding soul, which travels on the breath, to her deep intentions.

When she stands again and turns to face the circle, there is a moment’s hush before we applaud her and celebrate what she has done, because we are amazed. In a fire ceremony like this, people bring many things they wish to release: old habits, fear or guilt, addiction or attachment. She has just sought to release a multigenerational history of stunted lives and toxic relations. Instead of casting out the men who blighted the lives of their women, she has asked to free them, back through the bloodlines, back through time immemorial. She has asked for deep ancestral healing, and she has asked as a woman of power with the right of the priestess to forgive and to intercede.

When we sat quietly together later that night, I asked where she had found those remarkable words. “Kate and Caroline,” she told me. “They were very clear. They had written everything out. They wanted to make sure I got it exactly right.”

She explained that Kate was her Irish great aunt, Caroline her German grandmother. Both were long deceased, but both had come through to her as spirit helpers in the soul recovery work we had been doing with the group. They had helped her recover a desperately sad and lonely six-year-old part of herself, who had been left in a foster home and cruelly separated from the father she loved, without explanation, and then beaten for mentioning him. Though she remembered Caroline as aloof and rigid, this grandmother now appeared as warm and loving, urgently concerned, wanting to assist in healing all the family, across the generations.

We were both filled with gratitude for the help that becomes available when we make ourselves available for soul work. Guided by strong women of her family reaching to her from the other side of death, Irene sought to free the generations of men in her bloodlines who were trapped in powerlessness, sorrow, and addiction. I believe she made a difference that night, bringing light into many lives across time and across dimensions. Her example may inspire us to seek similar healing for our ancestors.

Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo of RM leading a ritual of fire releasing by Jeanne Campbell

I will lead a new depth workshop on ANCESTRAL HEALING AND DREAM ARCHAEOLOGY in Barcelona over the weekend of April 14-15

Breaking news from the Other Side

Anna dreamed she visited a friend who had recently died. He handed her a mobile phone with just two keys, green and red and told her she could call anytime. Nothing simpler – hit green to call, red to disconnect. Anna was delighted to discover that the departed now have speed dial.
     It seems that the communications technology of the departed keeps pace with innovations down here. Since the invention of the telephone, phone calls from the dead have been a familiar feature of many dreamers’ nights. One woman got a call from her mother, who had recently passed, in which her mother said, “I can’t talk for long since I just got here. I’ll have more phone privileges later on.” The dead send email and texts and their voices come through in podcasts in contemporary dreams.
    This all helps to facilitate contact since it indulges everyday expectations about how people keep in touch with each other. Back in the Victorian era, contact methods were different. The newspaperman and psychic investigator W.T. Stead, reporting back to his daughter after he died in the wreck of the Titanic, described a communications center on the Other Side where “travelers” were trained in hand-carrying messages to the living, where necessary by focusing their energy in order to produce the clear impression of a face during séances. Stead dictated a wonderful little book, The Blue Island, through a male medium that is one of my favorite sources on the Western afterlife.
     By my observation, contact with the departed, especially in dreams, is entirely natural (and would be quite commonplace, if we were more awake to levels of reality beyond the physical) for three reasons. Our dead may still be with us. Our dead come visiting. And in dreams, we go traveling in realms where the dead are at home.
     I’m using the word “dead” here the way the Irish do. Our dead are usually alive in our dreams, because indeed they are still living, "dead" only in the sense that they have left their physical bodies behind (though sometimes they are not aware of that). Interaction with our dead – again, especially in dreams – has been, in all cultures and all times, the principal source for the human belief that consciousness survives death.  
     Our dead are a constant source of breaking news, whenever we are tuned in. They give us news flashes, ranging from personal health alerts to next year’s headlines. The departed are not trapped by the illusion of linear time. If they have cleared old business and have an interest in helping survivors to do better, they can be very helpful guides in pointing out possible future events, and what we need to do to shape those events for our health and well-being. One of my personal markers that there may be unusually important information in a dream, especially relating to the future, to health, and to life-and-death issues, is the appearance of a departed person I trust, including beloved dogs who once shared my life.
    There is breaking news from the Other Side that may be even more crucial for a fully-realized life. Through our encounters with our departed over time, we learn about transitions and alternate living situations in the afterlife, the nature of reincarnation, and realities of the soul.
    A breakthrough moment on the roads of the afterlife is when a departed person discovers that he or she does not have to retain the same appearance they had when they checked out, which is often a broken and elderly body. Dreamer after dreamer reports the joyful surprise of encountering Mom or Grandpa in the body of a good-looking, energetic young person of about thirty. Such encounters are already an important education in the nature and malleability of one of the subtle bodies, or vehicles of consciousness, that survive physical death.
     I asked my friend Wanda Burch, the author of She Who Dreams, who tracks these things as closely as I do, to report on what she has learned through successive visits with her departed parents in their changing living environments on the Other Side. Here is part of the narrative she generously contributed for this piece:
     “My dreams of my father and mother's evolution have been entertaining and confirming of a great new life. In my favorite, I visit my parents in their new house. My mom looks younger, wearing smart little outfits from the days when she was dating my dad. She leads me to a beautiful pool that looks like a natural lake lined with stones, with lily pads in the water. I praise the beautiful house, and my mom says that my dad always liked my house and wanted one like mine. ‘But I don't have a house like this,’ I tell her. ‘You will,’ she says smiling. Then my mom drives off in a junky old car like the one they had in my youth. ‘Does she really need a car?’ I ask my dad. He tells me ‘No, but she enjoys it and there’s no harm in it.’
     “A few months later, I dreamed my dad was checking in on me to tell me he was moving on. I see a charming farmhouse set among pastures and fields of crops. I know this is one of many residences for my parents. I find them and join them in a car. My father shows me that he now has his own driver and then invites me to come with him inside a lodge where he has been receiving instruction, some of it – he says – involving ‘my things.’ These include early religions, dreaming, and exploration into spiritual matters.
    "He shows me charts of the heavens and points out stars and constellations, giving me lengthy and exciting explanations about the influence of the movements of the heavens on our lives and on our dreaming. I see a jumble of stars which he says he has just discovered. Humans have not been able to see them yet because they are too many light years away; but he is working with someone – I have the feeling this is an astronomer on earth - who will soon develop the technology to see them.
     “On the way back to the farm he shows me shops, including book shops filled with new books, not yet written, on wellness and spiritual development. We continue on to the farm where my mother settles into a comfortable routine. I turn and see my father coming toward me with arms wide open, ready to hug me. My father was not a hugger, but he is now. He tells me he is going away for awhile but I can still get in touch with him if it is important. He leaves. My mom, after an initial feeling of panic, settles down and seems fine. She loves her farm and farmhouse and tells me she needs to do some tidying. We say good-bye and I awake seeing her waving to me and smiling.”
     Over the years, the number one reason why people have shared dreams with me is that they have had an encounter with a departed friend or loved one that has touched them deeply. The most important thing we can do for each other in this respect is to offer confirmation and validation that these experiences are real - and then to reassure each other about a great truth that often goes unspoken in our counseling rooms and even our churches: healing and resolution and mutual support are possible, across the apparent barrier of death.
     So dying definitely need not mean hanging up on those near and dear. It seems an increasing number of people in contemporary society are taking that notion a bit too literally. Funeral homes report a steady increase in the number of clients who are being buried with their cell phones. When Manhattan criminal defense attorney John Jacobs died in 2005, his widow buried him in a Paramus NJ cemetery with his cell phone and continued to pay the monthly phone bill. She had his cell phone number carved on his headstone so others could keep in touch too. When she and others called, they got his voicemail, promising to get in touch as soon as possible. Dream phones offer live conversation, and you don't get a monthly bill.

When the dead hold seances for the living

I find myself drawn, again and again, into the world of the Victorian spirit hunters, especially that great and eloquent pioneer of psychic research and psychology, Frederic (F.W.H.) Myers, and his famous American friend William James. They joined in a great quest to provide evidence acceptable to science that consciousness can operate outside the body and survives bodily death. They drew to their cause many of the greatest minds of their era, including scientists, physicians, literary giants and a British prime minister.

     There is an amazing moment in one of James's sessions with Leonora Piper, the Boston trance medium James studied and consulted over many years and came to call his "white crow".* She was supposedly communicating on behalf of Richard Hodgson, a great friend of James who had been secretary of the American Society of Psychical Research. Though "tremendously athletic", according to James, Dick Hodgson had died suddenly playing handball, leaving two book projects unfinished - and a half-joking promise that, if he died first, he would communicate from the Other Side and provide evidence of survival.

     James grilled the Hodgson personality over and over, seeking proof positive that it was the dead man talking, through the revelation of personal secrets and codes neither the medium nor the sitter could have known. The demands this approach imposed on Hodgson's memory (assuming it was Hodgson) became ridiculous. Assessing the notes from these long sessions (James conceded) bored him "almost to extinction". 

     But then something will come through that is thrilling even to a skeptical reader more than a century later. Here's what excites me, in the transcript of a "voice-sitting" on May 21, 1906.    Speaking through Mrs Piper, Hodgson tells James that Myers (who died in 1901) is with him:

"Myers and I are also interested in the Society over here. You understand that we have to have a medium on this side while you have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate with you."

     The "Society" mentioned is the Society for Psychical Research, which was (and is) dedicated to producing evidence of "supernormal" (Myers' phrase) phenomena, including contact between the living and the deceased. Think about the statement made via Mrs. Piper's vocal chords.
     While there is a Society for Psychical Research on this side, there is a similar Society on the Other Side. They, too, hold seances or sittings with mediums. While James is listening to the voice of his dead friend through a speaker for the dead, Hodgson is apparently listening to the voice of his living friend through a speaker for the living. 

     Was this the ultimate folie de grandeur of a psychic charlatan, promoting her own profession - that of medium - to the status of indispensability on the Other Side? I have a notion that this part of the reading, at least, can be trusted. There are sensitives among us who are more able than others to pick up presences and messages from the Other Side. It's not such a stretch to suppose that in the same way, there are people on the Other Side who are better as inter-world communicators than others, and may even have the ability to call spirits of the living for a session with relatives or colleagues who are eager to talk with them.

*  Having concluded that Mrs Piper's communications were for real, even though the sources could not be determined beyond doubt, William James declared: "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper." [William James on Psychical Research edited by Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou. New YorK: The Viking Press, 1960, 41]

Image: Portrait of Leonora Piper by Eveleen Myers.

Call of the rainbird

There it is again, the call of the rainbird. But it can't be. I have never heard this bird in any part of North America, let alone this urban park in the Northeast. It has to be someone whistling for his dog. The whistle changes, a happy dog with flapping ears materializes through the maples, and my guess is confirmed.
    But for a moment, I am transported, back to a another park, in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, where my parents retired. I walked a path there, slowly, with my father when I visited him before his death. He loved to hear the call of the rainbird and would imitate it perfectly. even after his stroke. The Pacific koel - as ornithologists and bird-watchers call this kind of cuckoo - derives its familiar name from the fact that it is often heard before rain and storm. The males are black with red eyes, and their calls in mating season are very demanding.
    Strange and welcome, this vivid reminder of a scene from the other side of the world in the whistle of a dog walker. When I heard the rainbird, I was thinking about the content of a class I leading this evening in a teleseminar for The Shift Network. The theme tonight is "Partnering with Spiritual Guides." I was reminded that our spiritual guides include loved ones who have gone to the Other Side before us, and that they can become extraordinary life counselors.
    My father played a very direct role in healing old family wounds within days of his death. After the funeral, I sat out on a balcony with my mother. Emotions were raw, we were drinking rather heavily, and my mother started voicing an old list of complaints. When I responded curtly, she rushed inside the apartment.  I was deeply sad, and ashamed. In desperation, I spoke to my father. I begged him to forgive me for getting drawn into old, petty family disputes. “Dad, if you can, please speak to Mum. Please lift the burden and the bitterness from her.”

     The next instant, my mother flew through the door to the balcony like a leaf being blown by a strong wind. She stood behind me, placing her right arm over my shoulder, and her left hand over my heart. She spoke to me of love and forgiveness. She spoke of the deep love she had always felt for me, and apologized that she had so often found it impossible to demonstrate that love, and had been so prone to get distracted by things that really weren’t important.
     All the while, she had her left hand on my heart. When I mentioned this later, she was stunned. She found it hard to believe what I was telling her. She was never one for physical contact and had no idea that her hand was on my heart. This gust of emotion, this tremendous release, had come from someone who had been emotionally bottled up since I was very young, who avoided showing her feelings and did not hold me like a mother. She said, “I came back out on the balcony because something grabbed me and pushed me outside.”
    I was certain it was my father who had blown her back to me, and held her hand over my heart, to make peace between us, and bring us back to the heart center. I felt the depth of my father’s blessing, and deep gratitude for what becomes possible when we recognize that our dead are alive, and that we can help each other to live better and remember what matters.
    In the year that followed, my father visited me, and another family member, repeatedly. He confirmed the reality of life beyond physical death. He delivered messages for the family that helped us to navigate life issues. For example, concerned that my mother needed to move to a more sheltered environment, he visited me and insisted that I tell her to get in touch with someone named "Rodriguez." I had no idea who this might be, but when I duly phoned my mother, she told me that she knew a Ron Rodriguez quite well. He was a real estate agent. She followed my father's advice and Rodriguez helped her to sell her apartment and move to a new home in a retirement community where she made new friends and was happy in her last years.
    My father showed me something of his transitions on the side, and his eventual choice of a new life situation where he would no longer be available for communication on a regular basis. I think of him now, with deep love and gratitude for playing the role of family angel in so many ways. Thank you, Dad. And I thank whatever inspired that other dog walker to make the call of the rainbird today.

Part of this article is adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo of Pacific koel by Aviceda

You can listen to the call of the rainbird here. 

    

How active dreamers save a future world: Guest blog by Judith Moffett

Active dreamers will revel in the account of the role they can play in a future society in science fiction writer Judith Moffett's new story "Space Ballet." At a future Center for Dream Research, trainees go into "dream reentry rooms" and teams of dream trackers work together in group shamanic journeys. Here they must play space detectives to head off a catastrophe that imperils the world, and they do it by applying core techniques of Active Dreaming. Judy was inspired to learn those techniques after a "chance" encounter with Robert Moss on an airplane he wasn't supposed to be on. Her novel The Bird Shaman was shaped in part by a subsequent run of synchronicity and by Robert's books and workshops. In this guest blog, she tells the story behind the stories.

Guest Blog by Judith Moffett

I met Robert Moss under circumstances so astonishing that I think I must begin by describing them. 

     Background:  My husband, Ted Irving, died of lung cancer in Cincinnati in March 1998, shortly after we had moved there.  When the academic fall semester began I returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where we had both taught before Ted’s retirement; I was trying to decide whether to come back permanently to Philadelphia and to Penn.  A few weeks into the semester I flew back to Cincinnati for a long weekend of work in our house there.  What follows is my lightly edited journal entry from October 4, 1998.

“A very weird series of events occurred on Friday, the day I flew to Cincinnati.  I got on the plane to find an older woman sitting in my assigned seat.  When it became clear that she was traveling with the woman in the seat beside her, and that her proper seat was right across the aisle, I offered to switch with her.  The small fuss attracted some attention.  After I sat down I fished the Raymond Moody book on mirror-gazing out of my backpack, whereupon the gent seated in the row ahead of the two ladies turned and inquired, “Is that one of Raymond Moody’s books?”  He was a large, ruddy, white-haired bloke; I’d noticed him earlier.  When I acknowledged (with embarrassment) that it was, he said he did work along the same lines, and passed me two trade paperbacks with New Age looking covers [a false impression], both something about dreaming.  Hm.

     “He asked me to write down the titles of some of my books, which I was doing when the guy sitting next to him decided to move to an empty row.  So I took the vacated seat next to the dream-book writer.  Turns out he wasn’t even supposed to be on that plane, he was supposed to be on a direct flight to Cincinnati from New York, and that such developments, he said, usually meant he was supposed to meet somebody on the plane; it had happened before.  His name was Robert Moss.     

  "In no time flat he’d found out about Ted.  In no time flat I was bawling my eyes out—through almost the whole flight, in fact   He said he sensed Ted’s presence, wanted to know if I’d been contacted by him since his death, said T was enjoying himself a lot—he picked up on the copper mask from the Sutton Hoo burial, nosepiece and cheek pieces, some sort of metal [Ted was a Medievalist who had worn a cardboard copy of that mask into his Old English classes]—but that T was also very concerned about me.  Robert suggested that I needed to release him, that my grief was holding him back, or soon would be, and that writing would be the best way to work everything through.  The whole encounter was astonishing, given that the guy was a total stranger and that sitting there within his aura I had no control, I couldn’t not cry.  I cried and cried.”  I had been crying a lot, but never in public, and was shocked by my absolute inability to contain my grief.

Robert was flying to Cincinnati to conduct a weekend workshop, and also to give a lecture that same evening at a Quaker meeting.  When his contact person arrived at the airport to collect him, she took my phone number and said she’d try to arrange a ride for me so that I could attend the lecture.  I thought then:  if it’s supposed to work out, it will; but actually I was thinking of taking a taxi clear across town, I was that intrigued. In the event I’d been home only a few minutes when the phone rang:  a ride had been arranged, everything had fallen perfectly into place.  I spent that evening hearing Robert speak and fighting tears.   Back in Philadelphia a few days later, deep into Conscious Dreaming, I was still wondering what had hit me.

    In the fifteen-plus years since that remarkable encounter, I have followed Robert’s trajectory and bought each of his books as soon as it appeared.  His subject matter initially drew me in, but what insured my dedication over time was the quality of the writing.  For me, good writing authenticates the substance of what it’s being used to say.  For me, then, Robert’s excellent prose gives him authority above that of every other writer on my dream-book shelf.

     I had been logging my dreams and working with them for years before we met, but my focus had been on searching for evidence of repressed memories—treating dreams as windows on the past, rather than the present or the future.  Robert’s books helped change that.  Something he said also brought about a paradigm shift in my personal life:  that people often interpret dreams too symbolically and lived experience too literally.

      The book besides Conscious Dreaming that gripped me the hardest was Dreamways of the Iroquois.  I found the idea of shamanic dreaming deeply fascinating, and practiced hard to get somewhere with it myself.  My efforts weren’t entirely unsuccessful, but I had to realize at some point that a shaman dreams on behalf of his/her community, and that I wasn’t making better progress because I had no community to represent—and also, alas, because I’m not, except in special circumstances, a particularly gifted dreamer. 

     So instead I gave my ambitions to a character in a science-fiction novel I was working on, whose “community” in this case was the human race.  (I hadn’t exactly “worked through” my grief by writing, but writing did prove to be a superior distraction from it.)  My character, a young woman called Pam Pruitt, is a very reluctant shaman, but I endowed her with all the native abilities I lacked myself, deriving these from my general research but especially from what Robert had written on the subject.  When a child in her custody is abducted, Pam has a whopper of a conscious dream that shows her where to look.  (Pam’s dream is partially modeled on a passage from Robert’s novel The Interpreter.)  When a friend who should not be fertile conceives a child, Pam learns about it in a dream.  After more such episodes, even she must finally concede that she can do what shamans do, and must embrace her fate in order to help her people.

One episode in that novel fictionalizes something that actually happened to me. A Cooper’s hawk flies into Pam’s window, breaking its neck.  The event, in context, demands to be interpreted.  The day it happened to me, I wrote up this disturbing experience and emailed it to Robert, who made time in the midst of a weekend workshop to suggest an interpretation, and also to advise me what to do with the hawk’s body—advice that got worked into the novel as well.  The book is The Bird Shaman and the bird shaman is Pam.

More recently, I was approached by David Hartwell, an editor at the online fantasy and science-fiction magazine Tor.com, with an invitation.  Editors of the old-time pulps would sometimes acquire an illustration they thought would make a first-rate cover for their magazines.  They would then show it to several writers, in hopes that one of them at least could write a story that the painting would appear to illustrate.  Readers, of course, would assume the story had come first.  David thought it would be fun to try this and see what happened.

     

When I first saw Richard Anderson’s painting “Jellylite,” I thought I would have to turn the invitation down.  I couldn’t come up with a single story idea that could be set in the world depicted there, whose space ship and tethered astronauts suggested “hard” science fiction—robots, rockets, computers—which I don’t write.  Then, cudgeling my wits for ideas, I suddenly thought:  what if the picture could be treated as a picture in the story, rather than as a setting?  And immediately after:  what if it’s a picture of a dream?

     That prospect was exciting.  I told David I would accept his challenge.  In fact, once I’d had the idea, the treatment came easily.  If this was a picture of a dream, it begged to be interpreted; what if there were an institute for training gifted young dreamers to interpret their dreams?  A reason for establishing such an institute had to be devised, but that was easy too:  what if society had been forced to take precognitive dreaming seriously, as a viable means of preventing catastrophes (lots of backfill to establish how this had come about).  I didn’t have a clue what possible catastrophe the picture could be illustrating, but that’s the fun of creative work:  as you start to tell the story, your unconscious busily begins to organize a solution to your conundrum, which you will discover as the story takes shape around it. 

      And my strategy for pursuing the solution?  That was a no-brainer:  the students would use Robert’s techniques for dream exploration, which I had learned and thoroughly internalized years earlier. 

      Just as the true-life story of the Cooper’s hawk got woven into The Bird Shaman, something personal went into the new story, “Space Ballet.”  Bob Christian, the professor who teaches the dream interpretation class, was twelve years old on the eve of 9/11.  He has a dream anticipating that event and tells it to his mother, who writes it down.  What she writes is quoted in the story.  In fact, Bob’s dream is mine, one of the few precognitive dreams I’m sure I’ve ever had.  The description is adapted from my dream log entry for August 8, 2001, which I emailed to Robert after the attack.  He replied that others had sent him similar dreams.  That fact—that reports had come in from multiple sources—becomes part of the rationale, in “Space Ballet,” for setting up the Center for Dream Research.   

     I didn’t consult Robert’s books while writing the story; I didn’t need to.  And I figured out what the picture was saying at the same time the students did, just by letting them follow Robert's methods and giving my imagination a loose rein.

Judith Moffett is a retired English professor and the author of fourteen books in six genres:  science fiction, poetry, Swedish translation, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and memoir.  Her work in science fiction includes four novels and a story collection, as well as a number of uncollected stories.  Her novel Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award; her short fiction has been nominated three times for the Nebula Award and once for the Hugo.  In 1987 her first published story, “Surviving,” was given the first Theodore Sturgeon Award for best science-fiction story of the year; the following year she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.  Judy lives with her poodles, Corbie and Lexi, in Lawrenceburg KY and Swarthmore PA.  Contact her through her website. You can read her story "Space Ballet" here.

Dream legacy from a Victorian psychic researcher

Dreams give us assignments. In my first cycle of sleep, I dreamed I discovered a rich trove of materials from Frederic (F.W.H.) Myers, the great Victorian researcher of the paranormal. The materials were both manuscripts and recordings. Some of the transcriptions were faulty and needed to be revised; some of the recordings sounded as if the speaker had a cleft palate. But there were riches here quite unknown to the public. Walking a familiar city street,  I announced to a friend, with high excitement, that I intended to produce a corrected version and make them known. I sensed a stir of spirits around me as I talked, fluttering like birds or bats. There was nothing sinister about these lively shades; their presence added to my enthusiasm for my project.
     This dream will drive me back to my study of Myers; I wrote a little about him in my Dreamer's Book of the Dead. The quest that drove him was to provide evidence of the soul's survival of physical death, evidence that would pass muster with the scientists of his time. "To prove that man survives death would be to transform and transfigure his whole life here now," he wrote in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. That masterwork was unfinished at the time of his death and was published posthumously.
     Some believe that Myers continued his work on the Other Side, and fulfilled his promise to his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research in England to supply first-hand information once he got there by dictating a series of new works via psychic mediums in the years after he passed over. The most interesting of these channeled works, received via Geraldine Cummins, are titled The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, and describe a series of transition zones after physical death.
     I have long felt an affinity for Myers not only because of his quest, but because of his love of words and of wordplay. A poet and classical scholar, he tried to give us a fresh vocabulary to describe interactions of mind and matter, levels of consciousness, and transits of spirit. His love of words and his sense of the importance of how we name things was so great that he inserted a glossary at the beginning, rather than at the end, of his magnum opus Human Personality. It is studded with terms that are his own invention. Some of his coinages, like "telepathy" have become household words. Some will probably never enter common English or even the technical lexicons of parapsychology, but stimulate all sorts of ideas, as with:

           Psychorragy – a bursting through of psychic phenomena. 

Cosmopathic – Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion, apparently from the transcendental world, but whose precise source we have no way of knowing.

Methectic – of communications between one stratum of a man’s intelligence and another; as when he writes message whose origin is in his own subliminal self.

     So, dream-directed, I return to what Myers has left us, in his own hand or through the hands of others. My eye falls on a passage in Beyond Human Personality, the second of the works received by Geraldine Cummins, in which he speaks of how we create our after-death environments according to our imagination. Speaking from the Other Side, Myers declares that it is through the imagination (or lack thereof) that man approaches paradise or falls into situations far short of that:

Imagination plays an important part in his conceptions of paradise. If it has become perverted through his deeds and thoughts when he was a man, it may create sinister surroundings for him, or perhaps, kindle the old fires of hate till they blaze again and continue to flame until their folly becomes apparent and thus, in time, he wearies of the sameness, of the monotony, of this particular kind of experience. Love, on the other hand, will draw about the soul the conditions necessary for its fulfilment. And in this world beyond death, very beautiful surroundings may be built up by the imaginations of those who truly love. These latter are not, however, as numerous as is commonly believed. If there be any soil or stain, any weakness in their love, the picture which they have created as their background will in some way be faulty, and, though it furnish temporary satisfaction, be far from the ideal of the seeker of Heaven.

All good stuff, but the style is inferior to the best of Myers' writings when he was still on the earthly plane. Maybe, as in my dream, there is need for a better transcription.

Illustration: "Fred" Myers. Drawing by Robert Moss with digital effects