Hi Don, you have chosen the wrong method of afterlife contact to ask for "proof" from on a regular basis - as you yourself have surmised.  This does not, however invalidate Bruce's "imagination method."   But if I start imagining a conversation with a deceased loved one, and then imagine a helper coming and then i introduce them, I must start by making up some of the conversation.  So, its clear that these retrievals start out as fictitious imaginings.  But if one is relaxed and sincere, sometimes, the conversation will come back with responses that were unlikely to have been preset by our own minds.  Then the fun begins.

The premise is that stuck souls are still oriented in their thoughts to our plane only; that a helper in a higher plane of consciousness can't easily get their attention, but we can - for we incarnate humans are located exactly where the stuck souls have their thoughts so tightly focused.  With this reasoning, it makes all the sense in the world why we living people would be needed to rescue stuck souls.  Helpers may not be able to get their attention. 

The imagination method has strengths and weaknesses.  Its strengths include a method that any sincere person can learn, and that if carried through, the goal of getting through to the stuck soul may have worked, whether the person on earth got feedback or not.  Its weaknesses include the possibility of fooling ourselves with our own creative script writing.  This leads to a lack of factual evidence.  A pretend conversation that may become real does not lend itself to be put under the withering factual gaze of absolute verifiable proof.  Bruce has gotten his own verifications with information which could be garnered from no other living source.  He encourages us to explore on our own to get our own personal verifications.

Your request for verifiable proof would best be posed to mediums who claim to have frank and open conversations with the deceased without the use of imagination to get things going. 

I suspect that if the afterlife is real, as it appears, then there is a preset divine purpose(agreed to by a common consciousness) to the difficulty in communication between them and us.  Bruce likened it to spoiling the end of a movie for someone.  Would most people take life and death seriously if we knew with certainty that there was an afterlife? Would we have the same purpose in living, achieving goals on the earth plane? People on this board may, it could potentially be like Don said - equivalent to curing cancer but others might not play the game of life.  Shakespeare said that contemplating death gives every man pause.  "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all." This goads us into living out our earthly existence in earnest.


Matthew

Some more thoughts occurred to me.

-When you're trying to help a confused and stuck spirit, much of the time it isn't appropriate to start asking this spirit for a name of person you can contact, this person's telephone number, and information you can provide to the person you call.

Going my some of my retrievel experiences this is especially so, because reality isn't experienced in quite the same way. For example, as opposed to experiencing yourself carry out a sequence of steps in a linear manner, you'll experience yourself do so all at once. Linear time doesn't factor in as it does while in the physical World.

-It might be unrealistic to expect spirit helpers to know about names, telephone numbers, and whether or not it is appropriate to contact a loved one of the spirit you are helping. Also, the spirit helpers would have to provide information about the spirit you help, because you wouldn't want to call a person the stuck spirit knew, without being able to provide information that validates that you made contact. Plus, if you're working with a stuck spirit, you might not be able to communicate with the spirit helpers. In my experiences I haven't been aware of such helpers.

-Genuine mediums have come up with information that can be verified, yet their doing so has hardly changed the World. Instead, fake mediums tend to become famous, and the skeptics judge all mediums accordingly.

-I suppose that later on a person could make contact with his or her spirit guidance, and try to obtain confirmatory information this way. The question is, is it necessary to do so?

If you did try to gather information, called people, and compiled verification based information you can share, you would still need some sort of auditor who would interview the same people in order to validate what you report. Even then, some people might contend that you are in cahoots with the people you called, and/or even the auditor.  Some people might claim that you got the information from Satan.

Hi,

The conceptions I've formed here through retrievals are far better than the fear-based concepts I dealt with previously.

With retrievals we seem to have an active compassionate role in making some realms better off than they were.

Retrievals bring hope to both the retrievees and also to the retriever who finds that Helpers and guidance are available in ways beyond any personal imaginings .

I tried eliminating self/ego and ended up with nothing but a strange cottage cheese-like visual to contemplate while meditating. If that is selfless egolessness, then I'm not ready for it !

I've wilfully chosen retrieving as the best belief my consciousness is capable of at this time.

Bets

Cheese beats 42 as the answer to the ultimate question - the meaning of life, the universe and everything. (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)   Which incidentally I think had the most highly realised beings in the universe as mice - so maybe there's a reason for cheese Bets..

I wasn't knocking retrieval, only (again) playing with some of the peculiarities which seem to surround this business of ego which affects almost all of us.

As Alysia says it's something that with life experience and personal work seems to eventually fall away.

It's taught using lots of scenarios to describe the process, and as being a bit of a catch 22 issue though. It could be described as the result of your shedding delusion to expose the 'true nature of mind' (Buddhism), or as the result of the Holy Spirit helping you to drop unreal beliefs. (ACIM)

The catch 22 is that if you strive to drop ego then you've turned it into an objective that you are grasping for - which by definition actually strengthens the ego, and risks getting one into acting out all sorts of 'egoless' behaviours for appearances, or to convince oneself.

What's taught is that it's more a matter of the gradual and spontaneous emergence of a reality based view - the result of developing an equanimity that leaves us free to always go with the natural flow of a situation without bias creeping in as a result of ego originated selfishness (which is in turn based on fear).

The process is maybe a bit like the fog slowly clearing to reveal a beautiful vista.

Please pardon my off topic banging on about ego, but it's usually seen as th central issue on the path, and seen this way could be described as being the underlying issue in respect of all the issues arising around spirituality - misuse, exploitative teachers, wannabee students, beliefs and behaviours that block and/or cause suffering and so on...