Dying and Living to Tell About It

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES May 23, 2009
By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…

One of the things science finds impossible to explain is “returning from the dead”. Medical science refers to this frequently as “near death” experiences, almost all of which are discounted as dreams and/or hallucinations. This occurrence, which is not uncommon, is one of those paranormal things that must be looked at closely and carefully:

Whether we are looking at a scientific or spiritual view of the world, there is one thing that cannot be refuted: There is one and only one universal order to the world in which we live: We are born, we grow-up and mature, and we die. What we accomplish or fail to accomplish while we are alive is an individual thing, but the fact that we enter this world, mature in it and leave it, cannot be refuted.

The way we are raised and our own consciousness will determine, to a large extent, what we will do while we are alive, but there is a universal order to the basics of life and death.

Just about every religion and philosophy teaches us that life here on Earth is followed by a life-after-death. A good question might be, ‘How is it that all these hundreds of scholars came to the same conclusions?’ There are relatively few religions that believe that death is the end. Some religions teach people that death is a celebration of entry into a new dimension and a rejoining with their loved ones. Far Eastern religions, generally, teach that death is merely the entry to a different life. Their funerals are happy occasions. Catholics teach that life is merely preparatory to life-after-death and that, upon dying, your life will be judged. Zoroastrians teach that living the right life enables us to communicate with those who have passed-on.

There is a clear disparity in what people are taught during their lifetimes. Yet virtually every “near-death” experience (stories told by people who were pronounced clinically dead) are identical! The way clinically dead people describe other dead people when they have entered the after-life dimension will vary, markedly, depending on what they had been taught during their lifetimes…i.e. some see their dead family wearing flowing robes, some will see the spirits of the dead wearing the clothes in which they were buried …but there is a universal order to what they report: All their dead friends and family appear very much alive as they were when they were about thirty years old (unless, of course, they died when they were younger); all infirmities they had during their lifetime are gone…and everyone appears happy.

You should ask yourself how it is that people from totally different cultures…who speak different languages…who come from a wide disparity of economic circumstances…all report the same thing? Observe what some who have been declared clinically dead had to say:

Mrs. Virginia S., a resident of California, had formerly held various responsible jobs in management and business. On March 13, 1960, she underwent surgery. During surgery, she lost so much blood she was declared, clinically, dead. Nevertheless, surgeons worked feverishly to bring her back and she did recover. Mrs. S. said: “I was climbing a rock wall and was standing straight in the air. Nothing else was around it; it seemed flat. At the top of this wall was another stone railing about two feet high. I grabbed for the edge to pull myself over the wall, and my father, who is deceased, appeared and looked down at me. He said ‘You cannot come up yet; go back you have something left to do’. I looked down and started to go down and the next thing I heard were the words ‘She’s coming back’.”

Mrs. June L.H., a Canadian, was on her way back from her stepfather’s funeral with a friend, Clarence, when they were involved in a terrible automobile accident. Clarence was killed instantly and June was declared almost dead while surgeons tried to save her. “I don’t remember anything except seeing car lights coming at me, for I had been sleeping”, she explained. “I first remember seeing my dead stepdad, George, step forward out of a cloudy mist and touch me on my left shoulder. He said, ‘Go back, June, it’s not time yet.’ I woke up with the weight of his hand still on my shoulder.”

Mrs. L.L. of Michigan was in an automobile accident with her husband on December 19, 1968. Her husband was killed and she was hospitalized, and given up for dead by the doctors. Her sister visited her while Mrs. L. was still unconscious. Although unconscious her sister reported that Mrs. L. spoke freely about a place she was seeing and her dead relatives she was in contact with. She knew her husband had died, and also knew that her time had not come…that she could not stay on the “plane” she was temporarily visiting. The sister asked whether Mrs. L. had seen God or visited Heaven. The unconscious Mrs. L. replied that she had not seen God or Heaven but was visiting a different “plane” of existence. The sister thought this was all nonsense but related what Mrs. L. had said to other members of the family. Mrs. L. remembers nothing about what she said while unconscious, but quite clearly remembers how life returned to her: “I felt life coming to my body from the tips of my toes to the tip of my head.”

These are merely three of thousands of examples of people, living great distances apart, with totally different family and religious backgrounds who experienced an almost identical phenomenon: the transition from the dimension of life to the dimension of after-life. Death is not a word to be feared. It is merely your soul’s or aura’s shedding of a worn-out or infirmed body to be replaced with another, younger, body.

If you’d like to hear more about other “near-death” experiences, let me know. Contact me at stebrel@aol.com

As I said…nobody asked me.

Where or When

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES May 17, 2009

By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…

“It seems we stood and talked like this before…

We looked at each other in the same way then

But I can’t remember where or when…”

The lyrics of the haunting song, “Where or When” by Rodgers and Hart first came out in 1941 with the Benny Goodman band playing for a 21-year-old Peggy Lee. It was far from being the first song whose lyrics talked about a déjà vu experience. There have been stories, songs and even poems about “haven’t we met before”, “haven’t we known each other before” and “haven’t we had this conversation before” dating back to Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” written in approximately 400 BC.

So, why do skeptics and the so-called scientific community keep denying the possibility of having lived before? Or perhaps that we may be living the same life more than once in a different dimension?

Granted that nothing paranormal can be proven scientifically. But, even the claims of science are virtually not provable by their own standards. Still, if we look at the few things that science claims they can prove we must ask ourselves where they are headed? The answer is that they are headed for paranormal answers…and back to God.

If you look at the Super String Theory (which even very few physicists seem to fully understand) the existence of other dimensions containing planets just like Earth is now becoming a scientific reality. Is this really fact or is it science-fiction?

One of the questions no one seems to be able to answer, as of yet, is where these other dimensions are located and/or how we can communicate with them. Some quantum physicists believe these other dimensions are in our microscope; others believe they are too large to be seen with our telescope; still others believe they exist parallel to us.

In my book, “Explaining the Unexplained” I set forth a scenario wherein we are existing in some giant world’s microscope. I don’t say that this is the way things are, I just set it out as a “possibility “ to stimulate the imagination. Yet, there are some factors that are undeniable: Bodies in space act like bodies under the microscope. There are undeniable similarities in the way electrons spin about a nucleus and the way planets spin about the sun. The seemingly absolute limit for any atom is to have eight electrons spinning around it. For many years, we thought we had nine planets spinning about our sun, but just last year, astronomers decided that the planet, Pluto, was not in our solar system and that our system had only eight planets. Coincidence?

It is not my position to state that my little scenario is true, but if it doesn’t get you to start questioning things about our existence, then I’m not doing my job well.

I haven’t seen the film “Angels and Demons” yet, but I have read Dan Brown’s book. It starts with the premise that science and religion are mortal enemies. It’s an excellent novel, but it creates lots of so-called “facts” in an attempt to justify that premise.

The truth is that science and paranormal phenomena are one! The research and discoveries of science only serve to create questions that science cannot answer. If science cannot answer them we must look elsewhere for answers. We must come to the conclusion that there are things out there that lie somewhere outside of science’s limitations. Paranormal? Perhaps something or someone far beyond us that created everything? Science, alone, will never provide the answers.

It’s silly to believe that the heavens and the earth were created in six days or that Noah put two of every living species on an arc to survive a planetary flood. To me, it’s just as silly to believe that man came from the sea via a walking or flying fish and evolved, through monkeys, into human beings. There are so many basic differences between humans and every other species that inhabit this planet that Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution” makes about as much sense to me as the theory of our world starting less than six thousand years ago with Adam and Eve.

So why does science fight everything connected with religion? Why do they try and label the paranormal as pure fiction and its believers as less-intelligent people? Why does science say that déjà vu is impossible when billions and billions of people have experienced it? Why does science continue to call millions of people “liars” and “frauds: when they claim to see UFOs or when they have claims of recalling a past life?

The fact is that the closer science comes to the truth, the closer it comes to belief in a Creator and in the paranormal.

“...And so it seems that we have met before…

and laughed and loved like this before…

but who knows where or when.”

If you’d like to comment, send me an e-mail at stebrel@aol.com

As I said…nobody asked me.

PROOF

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES May 9, 2009

By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…

There are several really good paranormal blogs on the web, and if you have a genuine interest in such things as ghosts, psychic communication, communicating with the dead, UFO sightings, etc., these blogs should be read or, at least, reviewed. Probably the best one is called “Phantoms and Monsters”. I like this best because it is not merely someone’s opinion, but it extracts paranormal news items from around the world and reprints them. You can visit them at www.phantomsandmonsters.wetpaint.com and subscribe to their daily reports. It’s free.

Another one of the better sites is paranormal@google.com. The Google site provides an even greater variety of reports than does phantoms and monsters, but the quality of the items leaves a lot to be desired.

Another good one offering a variety of reports is www.area51.org . The only problem this site has is that the reporting tends to be slanted towards their own beliefs. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading.

More than any other single thing people write to me about is “proof”. What proof do I have that the UFO reports are not made by people seeking their 15 minutes of fame? What proof do I have that John Edwards or Patricia P. can’t really talk to the dead? What proof do I have that some psychics have pulled memories out of inanimate objects, etc., etc.

The answer is very simple: There is no “proof”! How can I prove that a dream I had about another life was for real? It can’t be proven. There may be all kinds of evidence to show that a life such as the one I dreamed about actually existed (although historical records of simple people like myself either don’t exist or do not go back many years)…but even if we can prove that such a life existed, how can we possibly prove that I was the person in that life? You may ask questions as to how I got that memory…but that really doesn’t “prove” anything.

Then, too, for every person who acknowledges the existence of paranormal phenomena, there will be someone who feels it’s merely a lot of baloney. Take the case of Bridey Murphy where a hypnotist, regressed a Wisconsin woman back to a previous life: she spoke with a heavy Irish brogue and described her life in a small village near Cork, Ireland including a description of her husband and children. This caused a veritable barrage of skeptical newspaper reporters to go to extreme lengths to prove her statements were false. A few of them even went to the extent of making-up stories to try and prove that there was no previous life for the woman. The fact is that she had never been to Ireland and yet was able to describe the landscape there…her home…her type of life, etc. How do we really prove that some memories were not implanted in her? The answer is, again, we can’t!

Using logic and common sense we begin to realize that the efforts of hundreds of skeptics to prove she didn’t have a previous life in Ireland were far more ridiculous than to accept the possibility that she did live before. That’s where common sense and logic must come into play: There will never be “proof” that we lived before…but, if you stop to think about it, there will never be “proof” that we didn’t. It’s a matter of what you choose to believe…and, of course, taking a close look at the evidence:

There have been, literally, “millions” of reported ghost sightings throughout history. I find it difficult to believe that in each case people were only seeking their fifteen minutes of fame or that they were hallucinating. There have been thousands of cases where information ostensibly known only to the dead was conveyed to the living via dreams, via visitations and/or via “automatic writing”. There have been millions of reports of communication of one sort or another with dead people; millions of cases where objects physically moved from one place to another without explanation. Similarly, there have been millions of cases of UFO sightings, of psychic phenomena, of déjà vu experiences, etc. It would take an enormous amount of arrogance to call all of the people making these reports “liars”, “phonies” or “psychos”. Yet, that’s exactly what the people insisting on scientific proof are doing.

Science can’t tell us why we’re here or how we got here…with any scientific proof. The Darwinian Theory of Evolution has almost the same number of “holes” in it as does the Biblical story of Creation. Neither can be proven scientifically.

In my opinion, the evidence is conclusive that there is more to our lives than our five senses can detect from the time our body takes its first breath to the time our body takes its last. Proof? Of course not. But neither is there any proof that what I believe is not so.

I feel very sad for people who refuse to allow for the possibility…even when the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming…that things genuinely exist that are outside of the range of our senses. They are living a life without meaning. If some people want to be skeptics…fine! But they should never allow their skepticism to preclude or “pooh-pooh” paranormal reports. Remember, there is no more scientific proof the skeptics are more correct than we are.

If the non-believers of the world would simply allow those who believe to tell their stories without being “put-down” by the skeptics, I’d be willing to bet that there would be millions of additional reports that would be impossible to explain scientifically.

The fact is, that as the science of quantum mechanics discovers more facts concerning our universe, it tends to give significantly more credence to some paranormal claims. Interesting!

If you have any questions, write me at stebrel@aol.com.

As I said…nobody asked me.

What Do UFOs Look Like?

EXPLAINING LIFE’S MYSTERIES May 2, 2009
By Stephen Ellis

Nobody asked me, but…

A number of people are asking a very practical question: What does a UFO look like? Most people have never seen one and wonder if they would even know it if they did see one.

The answer may be a bit surprising: The first UFO sighting around 1946 was by a pilot of a propeller driven aircraft who said he saw a saucer-like object flipping through the sky. This is a far cry from what we now call UFOs. First of all, most of the UFOs people claim to have seen do not “flip” through the sky…they sail along quite smoothly.

The shape of UFOs seems to change with almost every sighting: at first, they were called “Flying Saucers” because they were shaped like a disc or a saucer. There have been some reports of bell-shaped objects. Recent sightings have been much more detailed: Some say they have seen a huge triangular-shaped object; some have said that they saw a diamond-shaped object; some have said they were surrounded by white lights while others claimed they were surrounded by multi-colored lights. I want you to look at the pictures above and tell me what you think. These sightings were made over North Carolina. The objects stayed in the sky and “hovered” long enough for the photographers to run, get their cameras and snap the pictures before the UFOs (allegedly) shot off silently at super-high speeds. I’ve been told that there were about 50 witnesses to these objects in the sky.

Note that the shape of the object in the top picture appears to be significantly different that the shape of the object in the lower photo.

Also note that these are the first night photos I have seen of UFOs where the objects were in glorious Technicolor.

Clearly, these are not what our astronomers call “sprites”. They are nothing at all like natures lights such as the Northern Lights. They could possibly be some sort of kites or weather balloons with an electrical apparatus attached…although since the upper photo’s lights, where the object is much further away from the camera, are significantly brighter than the more close-up shot, that doesn’t make sense, either.

We have to conclude that either (a) this is the result of an Adobe Photo Shop and the approximately fifty witnesses are all conspirators, or (b) that there was some genuine object in the sky unlike any we’ve encountered before.

Now, let’s get back to the reports of different shapes in the sky: Is it possible that what UFO spotters are seeing is something that changes its shape? These photos would certainly indicate that...as would reports of diamond-shaped, triangular-shaped and disc-shaped UFOs. I have difficulty believing that we are being visited by a rash of different people who fly differently shaped craft.

How can something change shape in ur atmosphere? These photos do tend to support my statements that I believe our “visitors” are from a different dimension…probably a dimension where shapes can change as needed. To me it is next to impossible that a multitude of varied craft can visit us and make no attempt at contact…if they could. The reason they can’t is because they are from a different dimension and no means of communication or contact has ever been established between dimensions.

As I said…nobody asked me.