2023 BOOK FROM AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
STATES THERE IS LIFE AFTER DEATH – IT IS AN ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
By Rev. Karen E. Herrick, PhD
Death as an Altered State of Consciousness by Imants Baruss, a Canadian researcher, discusses a new term that is most helpful in attempting to understand spirituality and the paranormal. Much of his research was found in the after-effects of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). The Boggle Threshold indicates the level which the mind reacts with a negative reaction that is caused by bizarre ideas and the improbability of a phenomenon. Many time spiritual phenomena is beyond our boggle threshold, until we have experienced it. So, to anchor this threshold, I believe more education is needed. People need to decide “I can accept this. I can’t accept that.” Idle talk and curiosity sometimes places one in a “groundlessness” condition of confusion.
Characteristics happening while a person is dying:
- Deathbed Phenomena – synchronistic occurrences around the time of someone’s death.
- Extraordinary sense of peace – seeing visions of the person leaving, breathing stops and starts.
- Dying person seems to sense the time of arrival of relatives’ spirits – who predict they will go “home” soon.
- Dying person mentions: “They see a lot of people (spirits) in their room. (Authors Note: These spirits of deceased relatives usually are seen as coming from the left-hand corner of the ceiling.)
- The attempts of dying people to describe: what they are experiencing may be misunderstood or ignored by the living. This aggravates confusion in the room.
It’s important to realize that as a human being we have two bodies. A physical body and a spiritual/etheric body. St. Paul discusses this in the Bible where he states that we come in on the physical and leave on the spiritual. Baruss names this the subtle body that coexists with the physical body while awake but has the ability to function independently of the physical body while asleep or deceased. (This could also be called a ghost.)
Baruss discusses his research from the perspective of a spirit. This is a person who had a physical body which is no longer there. There are sixteen dimensions of alterations as a person approaches death. They are:
- The physical body ceases to function and enters a state of decomposition.
- There is a physiological shift where the spiritual/etheric body becomes atoms, chemicals, etc.
- You are now a spirit with a stream of consciousness with extraordinary quality. This is named phenomenal consciousness – thoughts, feelings, images, etc. from a person that is meaningful.
- Time sense – a sequence of events occur yet appear to be simultaneous.
- Thinking is sometimes clearer and more rational as judged by descriptions of NDEs.
- Memory – appears to be intact and can include lives previously lived although some are dream-like.
- Sometimes problems figuring out one is “dead.” Many times, a spirit thinks he/she is dreaming.
- Affect – Emotional experiences occur with greater feelings of love.
- Motivation – Different types – meeting one’s desires, engaging in self-improvement, or interacting with the living.
- Attention – seems to function the same except there’s an ability to be in one-hundred places at once.
- Perception – the presence of Mindsight. The psyche (conscious, unconscious, the mind, and the soul*) “sees” in the sense of some combinations of perception and knowledge. Sometimes this is described as “seeing with their whole body.” This is an expanded state of consciousness. (*Please note the Soul is not mentioned in Baruss’s book – Rene Descartes (1596-1630), a French philosopher, is called a dualist – that the world consists of two basic substances – matter and spirit. Matter is of the physical universe, of which our bodies are a part. The human mind, or spirit, interacts with the body but can, in principle, exist without it. Descartes dualism has influenced psychology and many other topics to NOT include spirit in any part of their philosophy. This author believes this to be a detriment to psychology and to our everyday life.)
- Communication – appears to be telepathic.
- Decision-making appears to be the same.
- Meaningfulness – is preserved to the extent of phenomenal consciousness. There are no words to describe what you are seeing and feeling.
After-Death phenomena teaches us that we are much more expanded as a human being than we believe. According to Baruss, clinicians and those interested need to be exposed to phenomena such as:
- Deathbed phenomena
- After-Death Communication (ADC)
- Possession
- Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
- Past-Life Experiences
- Mediumship
Wm James stated there was an invisible world around us. If you read the above phenomena that Baruss wants us to be more exposed to, there’s your invisible world. None of those six items appear in our sensory world alone. They cannot be explained rationally. They also need the clairvoyant world, for which we need clairvoyant researchers to explain. When will our material world finally call for this type of clairvoyant research that was started by Wm James and Carl Jung?
Mediumship started in the United States in upstate New York with the Fox Sisters in the 1840’s. They were two teenagers who when they went to bed at night started to hear taps on their bedroom wall. They developed a system of answering taps meaning “yes” and “no.” The spirit in the wall told them that he was a traveling salesman who was killed in the basement of their house before they moved in. The basement was dug up and parts of a human skeleton were found and a salesman’s valise. Spiritualism is also a religion of which approximately twenty percent of the population in late 1800s and early 1900s followed.
Wm. James, sometimes called The Father of American Psychology, studied mediumship with his colleagues in Boston, Massachusetts. He and his wife had lost a toddler son; therefore Mrs. James wanted to visit with mediums. James and his colleagues called mediums “mental healers.” They wanted to prove telepathy and believed that when you, the sitter, came to a reading with a medium that the medium was reading your mind for the information. However, when the medium then started telling you things you didn’t know about your relatives and ancestors, they wondered where this information was coming from. Once this information was validated by others in your family, much of the medium’s ability was not understood. James said that they best way to understand a medium was to make an appointment with one.
According to Baruss, three types of information appear to be commonly conveyed by mediums. First, they identify the deceased person’s appearance, how they speak, what they are wearing, their personality, favorite activities, foods events, places, etc. Second, a deceased person appears to convey information through a medium about matters that would have been of interest to the deceased but that occurred on earth after their death. Third, mediums give messages to those who are grieving.
In my practice, I have found suggesting a medium visit to be very fruitful in working with clients in chronic grief. Many times, the person who is grieving has a spiritual experience of their own. Once they learn that love never dies and that their loved one can communicate, especially through dreams, this is one of the spiritual experiences they wanted. Baruss brought a medium into his classes for nine years. She was popular among his students. His academic dean then put a stop to her attending his classes, which was disappointing.
Finding a medium yourself should be done as you would look for any professional – through someone who has been to one. Many speak at psychic fairs, spiritual conferences and if you have a Spiritualist church nearby, they may have a list. As Baruss pointed out, a medium should be giving you information – not asking you a lot of questions. A couple of questions to clarify is fine. My oldest daughter is deceased and anytime she has come into a medium visit, I have felt her presence and also I know it is her from the information she is telling the medium. You KNOW it’s your person. I have the name of a medium whom I trust who works through Zoom if anyone would like it.
Mediums receive information through their psychic centers called chakras. I’ve heard that they have bigger chakras than the rest of us which makes them more sensitive to the information sent to them. A good way to explain their gifts is clairvoyance, the receiving and understanding of this information, is like our intuition only stronger.
Until I become a spirit, I will be attempting to teach this new APA information and Jungian Psychology as often as I can. I have a three-hour online seminar on CEYOU.com, which is given every few months. It’s entitled LIFE AFTER DEATH on Cultural Competency and NDE’s – NEW APA BOOK (2023). I am also on a quest to find other organizations who want this information taught. If you have any ideas or questions, please email them to me at . My new website is www.karenherrick.com. I would love to hear from as many of you as possible with questions and comments. Thank you for reading!
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Rev. Karen E. Herrick, PhD, created the Center for Children of Alcoholics, Inc. in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1987. She was ordained at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and uses her Interfaith ministry to be actively involved in Spiritual and Transpersonal Psychology. She hopes to aid in a consensus that spiritual experiences are happening, which will increase discussion and raise the percentage of the population experiencing them from 40% – 50%, in the United States and Great Britain, to well over the 50% mark. She suggests a medium visit to those in chronic grief, which helps the person in grief realize that love never dies and that their loved one is still in the etheric world. She now works in her part-time private practice in Nevada.
