All I am saying is that assumptions... both for and against the afterlife are meaningless and pointless. The cold hard fact of whether it does or does not is all that matters.

What does afterlife or no afterlife have to do with divorce..unless you believe in the afterlife and your religion forbids it...ok then.   If you don't believe in the afterlife why not just go on a wild ride for the rest of your life and screw it all.   Or,  you can be a grown up and decide about your life and your wife and what you need and want and hopefully happiness will follow.  Regardless of life after death, you should do what you are inclined to do unless it is a crime against humanity.      No one will ever prove to you what you want to know.   We can go to mediums and we can be fooled or we can hear from our loved ones or we can believe because it makes us feel better or we can disbelieve because we don't believe in anything at all.   

Ask yourself, what would convince me ...without a doubt that there is an afterlife?  Does your friend who passed over need to sit down with you and have a conversation?  or would you just convince yourself that you were hallucinating? 

Live your life as a good person. period.   I do not think anyone here can prove to you that the afterlife exists.   It is so personal.  When you know, you will know and no one will be able to persuade you from what you feel inside to be the truth. 

you seem intent on torturing yourself with this.o  Start feeling good on the inside and worry about the rest later.  The only way I know to how to live forever is to believe in the afterlife....or become a vampire.   As they say, two things are certain taxes and death.   

You said "THANKS, I LOVE YOU ALL."

I love you too. Believe what you want. If there's a back door and I find it, I'll make sure that door is open for you, anytime.

Heck, I know several people who have witnessed phenomena in a group - stopped the others from describing what they saw and had them write it down and compare notes (which matched), and some folks *still* didn't believe it.

It was "mass hallucination" (or hysteria, or whatever).  Couldn't explain how they matched, just blew that off.  Sigh.

[Matthew:] “Your experience with the card reader in no way shows mental telepathy.  These precognitive readings appeared to show future happenings.  This for me, is, as extraordinary a phenomenon as afterlife contact in its own right.  Even if we could agree on what "mind" was and how it could be "read" in the physical world, if this fortune teller told you of events in the future, she would have to access an area that has nothing to do with anything we hold as part of the "real" world.” 
_____________________________
(1) The replicated results in which psychologists dupe mediums by inventing a fictional friend and having that friend accurately channeled clearly implies that the mediums derive their information from the psychologist’s mind.  What is even more damning to the New Age cause in not the retrieval of information through ESP, but the mediums’ self-deception in reissuing this channeled information as communication from the dead!  So defenders of channeling bear the burden of proof to show that ESP is not the preferred explanation in every comparable case.

(2) Don’t confuse mental telepathy with ESP.  Parapsychologists do not conceive of ESP as confined to communication between incarnate minds. ESP is “extrasensory perception” and, as such, might contact the collective unconscious in such a way that does not imply an afterlife.

(3) Nor does channeled access to the future imply contact with a discarnate spirit who knows he is being contacted and actively participates in the contact.  In the Gordon Davis case, the real Gordon knew nothing about the accurate information being channeled; and yet, Blanche Cooper channeled details about the layout of Davis’s new house that the real Davis did not yet know!    .So clearly, Cooper did not glean these details from Davis’s mind.  A more plausible source is something like the collective unconscious operating at a level that transcends time.

(4) Parapsychologists have established that genuine spirit contact, if it exists, can be verified through a channeled demonstration of a skill, like speaking a language unknown to either the medium or the sitter.  Mere ESP tends to be sporadic and an highly limited as in the communication of a word in the sitter’s unconscious.  In Terethian’s case, the song title was not revealed in the channeling, only one word from the song. And that word was only revealed after two questions to set up the ESP reading.  Nor was the artist, “Meatloaf,” revealed.   You won’t find any responsible parapsychologist who takes this as evidence of genuine contact with the deceased. 

(5) Consider the view that God is universal Self and all human spirits share illusion of being separate individual selves.  Suppose further that this illusion is removed after death.  There is no reason to believe this model implies some form of survival.  Survival implies self-consciousness and the potential for some continuity of memory between incarnate and discarnate mind.

Swedenborg demonstrates how fluent discarnate spirits can be in OBE contact.  He learns the exact location of a lost jewelry receipt and, in another case, reconstructs the entire last conversation that the deceased had with his inquiring incarnate friend.  Once the possibility of such specificity, it is merely wishful thinking to settle for something as trivial as the word "dashboard."  No medium will be able to demonstrate a skill that his deceased friend had to demonstate survival because mediums rarely, if ever, contact the deceased.   

Don

I guess it troubles me that we tend to speak with such certain authority about what "is" and what "is not" because, first of all, it is amazing that so many people are so desperate to prove with certainty that there is no afterlife, no god, no elves or fairies, no esp, no true mediums, no this, no that...fact is, we know very little at all about anything and it behooves us all to try to be cautious about our conclusions. It was not so long ago we discovered for the very first time that the material things around us and our bodies are just collections of atomic energies behaving coherently, for reasons we still are not clear about. When I was in school, nothing was smaller than the atom and we knew nothing about what made up the atom. When we discovered electrons and protons and neutrons, school was suddenly taught differently. We still don't understand more than a thimblefull of certain fact about our world and the universe, either seen or unseen. It's like the interesting posts about suicide on the other thingy there, really nobody knows for sure unless they are dead. One good thing to remember is that our brains are not all made the same, some people have brains that are built for finding pleasure in debate and skeptical argument. Others among us can't tolerate such argument and would rather go for a walk in the park. Anyway. I have worked as a "psychic" person in different parts of the world for over 40 years and the most skeptical people who try to prove me wrong or false, are the ones who appear to have absolutely no metaphysical gift of any kind or degree, although in fact they probably do, only smother them. It seems there is an attitude of, Hey, if I can't see it, feel it, hear it, then neither can you, you must be lying. That's their problem. It strikes me funny now that, although I did various kinds of readings for people all my life, for a large part of my life I was a cynical atheist. I could connect with people's current, past and future, often accurately, sometimes not, and yet I dismissed all possibility of a God or an afterlife. Go figure. A lot of time, cynicism does not even make sense. Vee