Kathy,

It is not productive to analyze biblical terms like “soul” and “spirit” in detail.  More intriguiing is the question of where our soul or spiritual body is located.   My views on this question are controversial.  So I’ll quote the relevant texts and let you decide.

(1) First, it is important to recognize that Jesus embraces the soul’s preexistence:
“As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth.  `Teacher,’ his disciples asked Him, `Why was this man born blind?  Was it the result of his own sins or those of his parents?’  `It was not because of his own sins or his parents’ sins,’ Jesus answered, `He was born blind so the power of God could seen in him (John 9:2).’”

Jesus’ disciples take for granted the possiblity of sinning prior to birth.  Jesus does not refute this possibility, but merely insists that the blind man’s current predicament has nothing to do with sin. Thus, both Jesus and His disciples assume that the soul preexists prior to birth.

(2) Reincarnation is not an option in the ancient Palestinian Jewish worldview.   But ancient Jews do believe that the soul, in its preexistent state, is capable of developing character and receiving an earthly destiny. In Jeremiah’s prophetic call, God seems to claim more than foreknowledge of Jeremiah’s future miinistry; God claims: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you (Jeremiah 1:5).”

The possibility of developing character prior to birth is implied by a Catholic Old Testament book: “I was a boy of happy disposition.  I had received a good soul as my lot, or rather, being good, I had entered an undefiled body (Wisdom of Solomon 8:19-20).”  The question of when the ancient Jews thought human souls were created is answered by 2 Enoch 23:5: “All souls are prepared for etermity, before the composition of the earth.”  It is impossible to know whether this view was widely shared by Jews in Jesus’ day.  Though all New Age attempts to detect reincarnation in biblical texts fail (r. g. allusions to John the Baptist as Elijah) , the New Ager might argue that reincarnation may be implicit in the Jewish doctrine of the soul’s preexistence.    

(3) This doctrine of preexistence may not imply the ‘ghost within a machine” view of the mind-body connection.   The biblical use of terms for “soul” are often nebulous, but the soul concept is often synonymous with life.   When we ask where our life is located, we are told that it is located not in our body, but in non-spatial heavenly dimensions: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).”  Paul often uses the term “body” as a reference to the total earthly self.  This adds signficance to his use of “house” as a reference to our spiritual body, which he locates in non-spatial heavenly dimensions: “For we are well aware that when the tent that houses us on earth is folded up,m there is a house for us from God, not made by human hands, but everlasting, in the heavens (2 Corinthians 5:1).”  The non-localization of the soul, or rather, the soul’s location in a heavenly dimension, seems implicit in Paul’s claim that the believer is already established in a union with Christ in a heavenly dimension: “ For God raised us from the dead along with Christ, and WERE ARE SEATED WITH HIM (Christ) IN THE HEAVENLY REALMS (Ephesians 2:6).”

Paul’s teaching seems potentially compatible with Howell Vincent’s astral observattions and experiences of “transmutation” amd the “integration” of spirit and soul described in my prior posts.  What will such experiences mean for the faithful who pass over?  Peter celebrates our destiny to ultimately “become participants in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4)” This seems to mean that we will become blinding light beings like Jesus: “Yes, dear friends, we are already God’s
children, and we can’t even imagine what we will be like when Christ appears.  But we do know that when He appears, WE WILL BE LIKE HIM, for we will see Him as He really is.  And all who believe this will purifiy themselves, just as Christ is pure (1 John 3:2).”

Don

Hi Don and all  The only thing we lose at death is the family we leave behind,who have all the suffering when we go to spirit, so we lose nothing at death ,but gain quite a lot,we have the love we wish the earth plain had ,no more worries or suffering,our spirit is free at last to fly anywhere it wants to,our thoughts can finally come true and we have no  unhappiness in the spirit world and there, we are fullfilling the commandment from God "Thou shalt love one another, also we are never going to part up from our loved ones in the spirit world as the ones we leave behind at death,will also be with us in the spirit world,so we lose nothing and we gain plenty.

Love and God bless   Love Juditha

I appreciate the conviction that some here that they have conversed with discarnate spirits who retain their earth memory.  But none of my respondents seem to have directly tackled the apparent inconsistencies of three common astral discoveries.  (1) The newly dead seem to retain some ability to communicate their survival to earthly loved ones in ADCs, but then generally seem to lose this ability, or at least rarely exercise it after about a year.  Thus, 50% of Americans report some contact with their deceased loved one within the first year, but rarely thereafter.  (2) Both Classical Channeling and competent astral exploration suggest that the earth memory goes dormant as the soul progresses and generally (but not always) remains that way.  (3) Yet modern channeling purports to contact the dead in all stages of development with chatty ease and NDEs suggest that greeting parties of deceased relatives welcome the newly dead.  Yet this greeting party often seems suspciously like  mere thought forms similar to the doctors and nurses Robert Bruce encounters in astral Healing Centers.  Bruce doubts that these are real souls.  I am simply puzzled by these apparent inconsistencies and am dissatisfied by the explanations offered to date.  So I would appreciate new and more coherent attempts to directly address the evidence I shall repost.

Astral adept Emanuel Swedenborg  discovers that the earth memories of the deceased eventually become dormant, but also learns that these memories can occasionally be revived by divine discretion.   One might conjecture that their earth memories are revived to allow them to encounter their newly arrived loved ones.  It must be stressed, however, that this is mere conjecture.  Three aspects of ES's claim strike me as significant:

(1) ES has by far the most convincing verifications for his astral gift and his claim of eventual memory loss finds independent confirmation in Classical Channeling.  
(2) Memory loss is not likely to be invented by wishful thinking.  
(3) Loss of earth memory seems the best explanation of why so few of the dead fail to confirm their survival in an unmistakable way to their earthly loved ones.  Most of the newly dead would realize that a simple appearance in their family's dreams would not be very convincing or comforting.   Full-blown apparitions or clairaudient communication would be far more compelling.   Yet such manifestations are rare.   If our deceased loved ones have this capability, why don’t they demonstrate it more frequently to comfort their family and inspire the world?  

What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?  Leonora Piper is one of the most impressive mediums ever.   She had the uncanny ability to channel two entities at the same time, one through automatic writing and the other through entranced speech.   Psychologist G. Stanley Hall had a trick up his sleeve when he went for a sitting with her. She was currently using the spirit of Richard Hodgson as her control.   Hodgson had formerly investigated her, but had recently died of a massive heart attack.  Hall asked Hodgson's spirit to contact Hall’s niece, “Bessie Beals,” so that he might speak with her.  Miss Beals was duly introduced and proceeded to communicate with Hall through Mrs. Piper.  Actually Bessie Beals did not exist.  She was a figment of Hall’s mind.  "Hodgson" in embarrassment tried to wriggle out of the situation, saying that he had been mistaken about the name.  He said that the person brought was a Jessie Beals, related to another sitter.  Dr. Samuel Soal...visualized incidents with an imaginary friend, John Ferguson.  He then went for a sitting with the medium, Blanche Cooper.  The incidents he visualized came forth as though communicated from beyond death!  These cases demonstrate that mediums can unwittingy gain information about the ceased by reading the sitter's mind.  They then routinely dramatize this ESP by inventing a phony personal contact.  One might expect the telephatic abilities of their spirit controls to detect this sort of ruse.   Clearly, the spirit controls were also a fake.

For some, such studies refute all mediumistic claims to converse with the dead.  Others will want to keep open the possibility that some channeling might be genuine.  The latter group might contemplate an apparent contradiction in the claims of Classical Channeling.  On the one hand, mediums routinely claim to put their sitters in contact with the dead.  On the other hand, some of the  best channelers have claimed that, as the  dead, progress, their earth memories become dormant.  So how can they communicate with loved ones whom they cannot recall in any detail?  Does the medium retrieve earth memories from Universal Mind or the so-called Akashic records and present this information as an illusory contact with the deceased loved one?  In that scenario, channeling might be compatible with the grim possbility that we don’t survive death.  Or do some mediums draw from the memories of the deceased without their being aware of it and reissue these memories as bogus conscious contact?  That possibililty might be another implication of  both G. Stanley Hall’s invention of fictional deceased relatives to discredit channeling and the Gordon Davis case in which Davis is channeled as if dead, when in fact he is still alive and unaware of being channeled.    

I will again repost my summary of the Gordon Davis case for the benefit of newbies.  At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.”  Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper.  Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I.  Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.”  Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent.  The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech  (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”).  Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation.  He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days.  At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.  

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him.  A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct.  But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting!  Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients.  Only around the time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time.   But Davis did not move into the house until a year later.  More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance!  Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird.  Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings!   So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177).  

Why is channeling not discredited in this way more often?  Well, ask yourself how often you are mistakenly informed that your friend has died.   Was the medium able to exploit Soal’s mistaken faith in Davis’ death as an aid in the process of reconstructing Davis’ personality and future by precognitive telepathy?  Or were the medium (Blanche Cooper) and sitter (Sam Soal) duped by an impersonating spirit?

Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent.  While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892.  The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium.  But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced.  Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself o be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor.   But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemed to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.”  In my view, Hodgson's change of mind is misguided.

Shamans understand their mediumship to put them in contact with spirits and demons as well as with deceased people.  In earlier centuries Neoplatonists also practiced trance mediumship, but attributed it to the agency of gods or demons rather than to discarnate humans.   Likewise, witches from the 17th and 18th centuries ascribed their channeled material to demons.  Perhaps the modern attempt to identify spirit controls with deceased personalities reflects the wishful thinking of modern cultural prejudice.  Why is Leonora Piper’s spirit control (Phinuit) lying about his true identity?  Why did Sam Soal’s alleged brother lie about bringing Gordon Davis’ spirit through?   Or were these people simply deceived? I am not claiming that there is one devastating explanation of all channleing and astral contact with the dead. I am merely trying to reconcile contradictory claims and am seeking noew input.

Don

Hi Don-
We've got a lot of stuff here, but with respect only to recall of prior lives, I do have some clinical experience. This is not a proof, but merely what is reported. However, it seems consistent, and is definitely not produced though guiding or biasing the regression.

I have observed that obvious attachment to the prior life, and ease of access to its content, often is connected to severe anxiety. It seems that people who have great fear of the afterlife tend to cling to the mental levels, since the physical ones have fallen away, and also to the lower astral situation in which they find themselves. This seems to be an effort to avoid either prior companions who are feared, or avoidance of "hell", which they don't understand, or some similar major effort at self preservation. Just as Bruce tells of people who build a BST and stay in it, we evidently have the same thing in the clinging to the material world during the interlife transition. 

The thinking ability of these spirits is one tracked - they can follow a single thread of reasoning, but do poorly with abstractions. This is also true of entities who are being liberated from their hosts. In general, the process of thought is a matter of urges and tendencies without any abstraction at all (primary process - raw emotional stuff - not "thoughtful", but entirely "reactive". Typically, these involve flight from feared past events, an effort to escape the prior situation, feelings that to escape the prior situation is dangerous, clinging to the material world as an escape vehicle, which stimulates recollection of past events.  Actual memories and so on tend to arise after intervention has entered the otherwise closed system of definitions of self for the frightened spirit.

You can personally do regressions and check this out - all it takes is a little patience, and great care to not lead people, since they'll build any kind of structure you hint at if you infer that that's what you're looking for. I think you'll find that you can directly observe this stuff more effectively than trying to extrapolate it out of other people's writings. Also, the same information that you get by regression methods should be easily verified by experiences retrieving stuck souls, since they're essentially the same.

Most definitely, one does not lose everything and wind up tabula rasa.  However, there seems to be something about secondary process thinking, the ability to abstract and carry multiple threads of logic, that uses the physical body and brain in a manner not generally available in regression, and presumably not available in one's spiritual existence.

d

Hi Matthew - hope you are well

Steiner tells us the condition of the recent past life memories becoming an outer reality lasts for a couple of days and then a new kind of consciousness appears after this.  It seems this consciousness is inherent with us all the time however in the afterlife it does not need the brain process to think - it is more of an awareness ..

OK Don- we agree on this for sure. The modality of awareness when you had your "night in heaven" was primary - just as is the mode of awareness in dreams. However, as Caryn mentions, there is a subtle kind of "thinking" that works on the primary level in meditation. It is non-verbal, and seems to carry basic meanings, rather than analytical interpretations. This is the normal "thinking state" in meditation.

Matthew - I personally don't need to analyze ideas when they are self evident - "God is love" is an analytical expression that totally misses all but my opinion about God. The experience of directly facing God is, in itself, sufficient - it doesn't need to be analyzed. This doesn't feel awful at all. In fact, it feels as if the thinking process is far too often interposed between me and reality, and that only by ceasing to "think" can I be directly present in the events of the moment.

Many people "meditate" by abstract thought. This is actually the beginning of the meditative sequence, and more often is called "concentration". It's a good skill, but still binds us to the material world. A useful exercize is to chant "Om" (or any other desired syllable - I like Om because it is associated with the transcendental) and do it four times -  (a) First time, chant aloud with volume. (b) Second time, chant at low volume. (c) Third time, chant it only in your mind. (d) Listen very intently for the surrounding world to chant it. - Now, notice the kind of "thinking" that happened while you were listening, and before your mind started to tell you that "Hey, look, I'm listening." - That gratuitous verbalization, or its equivalent, is a useless activity, since you're already doing what it says. All that these verbalizations do is isolate us from the moment of experience.

After a while, the mind gives up and shuts up until you call on it for something, which is sometimes called "the sound of silence". I think you'll like the experience, but it marks the end of dependency on secondary processing.

dave

If one watches people closely, are they abstract thinkers, or do they think according to their overall psychological conditioning? Perhaps until a Soul reaches a point where it is the master of its thought energy, rather than a being who is lost within it, there is no such thing as complete abstract thought. A lack of a physical World to set limits, really causes a reactive belief way of thinking to get the best of a person after he or she dies.

Perhaps the subjects Dave hypnotized never got to the point in their previous lifetimes where they could honestly question their belief systems and way of thinking. Therefore, when they died, just as when they were alive, they lived in a reactive manner rather than a proactive manner.

How often do you run into a person who will seriously question his or her beliefs, or doesn't reactively respond to circumstances in an emotional way? Just watch a cable news program and see how unbending people are when they discuss differing viewpoints.