Talking To The Dead

Gravelly-voiced Sylvia Browne is a familiar face in most American homes because she makes regular guest appearances on CNN's Larry King Live and NBC's Montel Williams show.

The oddity about Browne's popularity is that she is a Spiritualist who makes her living talking to what she says are the dead.

The 68-year-old Browne, a former English and theology teacher in a Catholic parochial school, now heads a spiritualist church organization in California, is the author of more than two dozen books, and has gained the kind of fame that the late Edgar Casey once enjoyed because of her links to the paranormal.

Another popular communicator with the spirits is John Edward whose show Crossing Over also has drawn national interest.

Browne and Edward achieved fame at doing what I believe a lot of people have been doing quietly for thousands of years. There always has been an ability on the part of certain "sensitives" to tap into so-called messages from the spirit world.

I know because I live with a woman who does as well as Sylvia and John when it comes to bringing up information from the other side. She kept in touch with her long dead father and a brother who she says were waiting for her in a garden in the light right at the other end of the dark tunnel of death. For a time, friends called upon her to communicate for them with dead parents, children or other relatives.

That television programs focusing on this subject would gain so much popularity in America, where the political leadership is caught up in angelic inspired Christianity, seems somewhat ironic.

Yet national polls show that people of all faiths now share a belief that the dead can somehow communicate, either through contact with a medium or by ghostly visitation. A Gallup poll in 2001 found that half or more of the population believed in psychic or spiritual healing and extrasensory perception. Another 28 percent believed in spirit communication between the dead and the living.

A recent Harris poll showed that 27 percent of Americans believe they have been reincarnated.

Regular readers of this site know that I have had a variety of experiences with ghosts. My wife, Doris and I have rarely lived in a home in recent years that has not been shared with a former occupant. They have made themselves known by the sound of footsteps on the floor, frightening our pets, and even moving objects. We once lived with the spirit of a child, killed in a tragic farm accident in Arizona, who loved to play practical tricks.

Something has happened in the spirit world in the past year, however, and we dont know exactly what it is. The spiritual forces around us are not as benevolent. And trips out of the body into the astral can put you face-to-face with chaos.

Attempts to communicate with spirits of the dead now end in silence, Doris says. She says there is a strange void in an area where the spirits once indicated an urgency to communicate. Something has happened and it does not seem to be for the good.

Aaron C. Donahue recently wrote these disturbing words about death:

"The dead are not with us and they do not continue," he said. "Those who claim to speak to the dead are delusional so long as they believe that the dead are alive as we are. The dead are permanent records of history and nothing more. They cannot know a presence for they are not here. They cannot foretell a future for they do not exist."

What Aaron is saying is that in the death process, our essence, or spirit, may hang around for a while but eventually it goes on into the light, or energy from whence it came. Some call this God.

I used to believe that the spirits of people could sometimes hang around indefinitely, mainly because people did not realize they were dead. They consequently remained in a kind of hell, reliving their death experience and staying at that point in time until something came along to rescue them.

After all, there have been a lot of ghosts haunting the older buildings of this world.

But Aaron maintains that what we perceive as ghosts are only recorded historical events that get played over and over. People like Sylvia Browne, John Edwards and even my wife, Doris, are merely tapping into these recordings. They are not really talking to a dead spirit.

Doris thinks the recordings have been somehow shut off. She didn't realize this until we recently were asked by a friend to contact a dead person. Doris said she immediately had an image of great sadness prior to the moment of death, but then there was silence. She said she was shocked when she received no signals from the void beyond.

All we know is that Sylvia Browne and John Edwards are conning us if they are claiming now to talk to the dead. We don't know why, but the spirits of the dead have gone silent.