That may apply to some people.  But to my knowledge, no study indicates that the prospects for postmortem communication are greatly affected by paranormal capaciites prior to the death.  Nor does  it seem plausible to blame the lack of communication on the close-mindedness, stress, or lack of attunement of living loved ones.  If anything, I most often find an openness to the point of naivite and total vulernability to contact experiences generated by wishful thinking.  No, I think the most common reasons are traceble to the memory problems and psychic capabilties of the newly deceased. Robert Bruce even found that deceased parents "descending" to visit their recently deceased children in a "spirit hospital" were incapable of describing their home plane in any specific or meaningful way.  This is a puzzle, but an extremely important one for afterlife evidence.

Don

Matthew,

I begin with this premise: if our loved ones care about us as much after death as they did in life, then reassuring us and communicating with us would be a top priority for them.  To the degree that the M-band poses a barrier for such communication, they would thoroughly research the problem and there would be astral schools to teach solutions.  As you know, in several cases our beloved dead do seem to solve this problem, so that many incarnate people experience marvelous ADCs.  Many discarnate souls would band together to pool their wisdom and teach others to break through the M-band barrier as well.  So why haven't they done so?  I don't buy the explanation that many of us just make poor receivers for such contact.  So many people miss their loved ones so badly that they are gullibly open to interpreting dreams of the deceased as true contact.  Besides, why wouldn't our loved ones just communicate to us through more receptive friends or relatives and ask them to relay their message to us?  Of course, this does happen, but is not common.

Only 4 possibilities strike me as plausible.
(1) They have not survived death, but their personalities are preserved in the collective unconscious and our conscious and unconscious longings can occasionally create the illusion of soul-to-soul contact.  This distasteful possibility looms large in the absence of a better explanation.

(2) The death experience totally transforms our minds so that we lack the same empathy and passions that we had in life.   It rarely occurs to the dead that it would be the ultimate kindness to reassure their incarnate loved ones that they too will survive death and enjoy glorious family reunions.  I can imagine few higher priorities after my death than to track down all my loved ones and to retrieve any of them who are held back by toxic belief systems or underdeveloped spiritualities.  The possibility that my mind will be so altered that such reassurance would not seem important is tantamount to saying that I never survived death as the person I always thought I was, with the same unselfish priorities and desires to enhance the wellbeing of all I encounter.  In any case, the alternative that we don't survive death strikes me as more plausible than option (2).       

(3) The restoration of earth memory is reserved for past life reviews that are occasionally allowed to aid our progress (so apparently ES).  These past life reviews are private affairs and our earth memories are once again dormant after the reviews are complete.  This system allows no training in astral schools for contacting our loved ones. If this explanation is valid, then occasional ADCs are most likely illusory creations from the Collective Unconscious rather than genuine contact with individual surviving souls.  So are the members of the greeting party that meets NDErs merely thought forms without ensoulment?  Why don't they ever offer the NDEr profound new insights into the afterlife that would transform their restoration to earth life?  The greeting party generally seems content to insist, "It's not you time yet; you need to discover and complete your purpose."  The uniformity of this vague and cliched response strikes me as suspicious. 
And it seems unlikely that their memory would be restored only for the duration of the greeting party's role.

For many reasons detailed in former threads, I discount the authenticity of most channeling.  But what if much channeling were genuine?  Deceased loved ones seem to communicate with us through mediums with chatty ease.  So a dormant memory would pose no problem if channeling is valid.

(4) The astral planes closest to earth are inhabited by selfish and evil souls who delight in spirit impersonation and in hampering efforts at postmortem contact with our loved ones.  This barrier is almost always too great for higher souls to overcome and contact us.  This barrier also creates the danger that we will seeker further contact and thus be deceived after receiving an initially genuine contact.  If so, are deceased loved ones who communicate clearly and encouragingly exercising rcckless disregard by putting us at risk? 



Don    

Don-

I would add just a few other possibilities.

1.  There is no afterlife.  When we die, we die.  End of story. After all, nothing scares the ego more than to contemplate its own extinction.  So it stands to reason that it will conjure up all sorts of rationales to support the hope/belief in its perpetuation.

The ego, not content with its own survival, even goes so far as to believe that its favorite pets will also survive death, and will be waiting for them in the afterlife for a happy reunion.  I suppose if someone had a beloved trained seal, it would also be there in the wings, waiting for us to toss it a fish or two.

2.  There is an afterlife, but we aren't part of it.  In other words, our own physical dimension is just one of thousands/billions of other dimensions which support all sorts of life forms.  There could be a dimension that parallels earth that teems with life forms, and who knows, maybe as a form of entertainment, they tease us with apparitions designed to fool us into thinking we survive death.

3.  Or maybe there's a dimension populated  by what we think of as angels.  These angels are highly evolved spiritual beings, and they do intervene to help us, but that's because by so doing they are enriched spiritually.  Maybe we are training wheels for them.

4.  Maybe we exist both in the "afterlife" and in this life simultaneously.  We are comprised of energy, but maybe this energy is split between this life and the next.  So for example, when a loved one dies, part of us is already in the afterlife along with the part of the loved one who remained, so there's really no need for an earthly reunion.  We just aren't aware of it.   

Of course, none of this explains a Leonard-type scenario.  Unless Jeff was an impersonator......a counterfeit who thought it would be amusing. 

Maybe RAM's W.C. Fields alien finally found a way to bring humor back to his planet!

R

Apologies if this has come up before ( but looking through the thread I hav'nt seen it ) it seems strange not to mention Bill and Judy Guggenheim's work  (of 'Hello From Heaven' fame). They have a website devoted to ADCs at http://www.after-death.com/.

[Kathy:] "For some it may indeed be beneficial for an ADC to take place, but not necessarily for everyone."
...Spiritual growth is more important than feeding an ego need for comfort."
___________________________________

True, and in my view, many Christians and posters here strike me as more comfort seekers than truth seekers.  Truths hard won in the school of hard knocks are far more transformative than truths embraced to conform to a Ghetto mentality and its attendant approvals.  One of the most neglected yet intriguing aspects of Jseus' pedagogy are 4 aspects of the Messianic secret in Mark's Gospel.  (1) Jesus never explains His parables to outsiders; rather, He wants them to meditate on parables so they can spiritually discern the truths without being spoonfed.  (2) Jesus never openly proclaims Himself the Messiah; rather, He waits for His followers to discern His identity at their own pace (Mark 8:27-30).  (3) When Jesus performs exorcisms, the demons eagerly blow His cover and proclaim His exalted identity and Jesus shuts them up to minimize such disclosures--the reversal of what one might expect.  (4) In Mark, when Jesus performs miracles, He discourages disclosure of these miracles whenever no outsider is present.  This pattern is masked by His failure to do so when a large crowd is present and it would be impossible to prevent publicity.  Jesus is skeptical of the power of miracle stories to convert people when shared 2nd-hand.

On the other hand, I have observed how blown away  seekers are when they discover recent miracles in my congregation.  I usually celebrate these, but wonder at times if I am doing so in the wrong way.  Perhaps it would be better for these people to be blown away by our loving community and to discern God's presence in this love.  I wonder about the relevance of Jesus' secrecy to my wish for more regular ADCs.

[Kathy:] "If an ADC is deemed productive to that end it could take place, otherwise awareness would remain constrained."
_________________________________

That has been my working premise, but I feel the need to test this.  I wish that Christ or the Being of Light would confirm this during NDE and OBE encounters.  I wish that Swedenborg had directly asked postmortem spirits why they don't more often manifest to the living.  Instead, he and Robert Bruce stop at reporting postmortem memory problems.  And I suspect there is another factor that I have overlooked in the speculation I've offered so far in this thread. 

Many Christians mistakenly believe that they are suddenly virtually omniscient and morally perfect in their newly acquired spirit body.  In fact, they are basically the same person with the same level of development that they were prior to death.  So again, my basic question is this: why don't the newly dead provide the frequency and quality of ADCs that I would try to provide if I were capable of doing so immediately after my passing?

Don

Don,

I have wondered about Jesus' secrecy and have thought of it as a teaching of sacrosanctity. I see nothing wrong in celebrating miracles, especially those in which the joy of love and gratitude are shared within the communion of those involved as well as those in celebration. In my own experience of ADC and in the experience of individuals who have shared their ADC stories with me there is a "blown away" factor, but underneath is an awe that is most holy and sacred to the individual experiencer. Something indefinable, ineffable, yet has an awakening impact on their spiritual growth and, if shared, perhaps within the community as well.

If ADC were commonplace, I wonder what would happen to the sacrosanctity? At least with me, it is the mystical union and the deep intimacy experienced within that union that draws me toward learning, understanding and spiritual growth, as well as a resulting component that I can only describe as an intimate blending of physical and non-physical reality that has manifested in my daily life. The latter, I believe comes quite naturally as spiritual growth occurs, yet most of the specifics are not completely understood or easily explained. In other words, there remains a mystery, a secrecy about them.

Kathy

Starcraft,

Welcome to the site.  Like you, I doubt whether such paranormal channeling really means contact with the deceased survivors.  I'd appreciate your response to my thread, "Verified Channeling: ESP or Genuine Contact?"  But suppose that your channeling did produce genuine contact.  Would that easy success not create the expectation of far more regular ADCs?
If channeling is like a telephone hook-up to other worlds, then why wouldn't the dead ROUTINELY contact us convincingly in other ways (e. g. waking visions, audible voices)?

Don