… And why we need a culture that embraces that death is not the End.
Today’s full moon takes place at the 23 degrees, 52 minutes of Gemini at 9am UT. Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, stations direct in Sagittarius today as well — time to harvest our insights and “ahas” from the last three weeks, and let some forward motion be restored! (“Some”, because Mars — planet of action, momentum and drive, will continue to retrograde until February 2025, so some things are still simmering.)
In honor of the messenger god, and today’s Moon in the Mercury-ruled sign of the Twins, today’s newsletter is a winding metaphysical tale of how a little ghost story — about magician Harry Houdini communicating from beyond the grave—changed the trajectory of my life.
Midway through writing this piece, I wondered if Houdini himself had had any Gemini placements in his natal chart — you know, just a hunch. Astro Databank tells me his natal Moon was indeed in Gemini — at 23 degrees 13 minutes, just minutes away from the degree of today’s Full Moon! This synchronicity felt like a confirmation to share this chapter of my story and the bigger-picture philosophical perspective it provided.
It was exactly this time of year, a handful of years ago, that I stumbled upon a fun, thought-provoking internet article.
It was about the famous magician and escape artist Houdini, and the saga of how he communicated with his wife from the afterlife, through a medium. Houdini had set up a unique coded message shortly before his death, to let his wife, Bess, know if there was life beyond death. If Bess were to receive the exact code through a medium, it would serve as incontrovertible proof that Houdini’s spirit had survived the passage into the afterlife.
The thing is, Houdini had become a vocal skeptic of Spiritualism, actively seeking to prove that the then-popular practice of mediumship séances consisted only of trickery and sleight of hand. After his mother’s passing, seeking solace from grief, he’d sat with a medium who was faking the spirit activity during the séance through the use of illusionism and props. Being an expert magician, Houdini noticed and exposed the medium’s fraudulent setup, and became a public debunker of afterlife communication, wanting to prevent other grifters from preying on people’s grief.
Yet, he still conceived of this special secret code, as a test that could provide solid evidence of the afterlife, both for his beloved Bess and for the benefit of all. After his death, the fact of the secret code was made public and “Houdini Séances” became a thing. There was a hefty financial reward of $10000 to whomever came to Bess with the correct message. Two years later, over the course of several sittings, medium Arthur Ford received the code.
In his 1958 autobiography, “Nothing So Strange”, Ford writes that he had neither a special interest in, nor a connection to Houdini, yet he was first contacted by Houdini’s mother in spirit, and subsequently, the words and cipher of the coded message started to be revealed to him. This took place over several sittings. Once the code was complete and the message was ready to be delivered, Ford reached out to Bess Houdini, who confirmed, in fact, they had the correct message on their hands.
The story gets murky from there onward. Some claim that Bess secretly provided the code to Ford so they could pull a publicity stunt together. Others claim Ford got the message from Houdini’s biography, published some time prior. Bess made a public statement pointing out how unnecessary it would have been for her to stage Houdini’s message for publicity — she’d had plenty of opportunity to make sensational claims every time a new medium announced they’d received a communication from Houdini. Plus, she had all the money she needed at her disposal. Ford made clear that he never wanted the reward money from the start, and he did not receive it. Skeptics, however, branded Ford a fraud. We’re left to draw our own conclusions.
(The original article I read is no longer online, but you can find it on the Internet Archive here. An even more comprehensive essay covering the saga of Houdini’s afterlife communication, by Thomas Razzetto, can be found here.)
Beliefs, examined and unexamined
I had an unusual upbringing. I’d been conversant in unexplained mysteries since I was quite young, (and perhaps because of such an early immersion), I hadn’t given a ton of thought to deep research into evidence for the afterlife. Growing up, I just took for granted that souls go on to another plane of existence after passing from this world. I was brought up to believe in God and angels, “ascended masters”, reincarnation, karma and subtle energy, and a lot of stuff most rational people call woo-woo in our culture. Spirits continuing on in another realm after death was just one more drop in the bucket.
As an adult, I began to question much of my family’s unusual faith, but I remained spiritual. I had a foot in a more rigorous intellectual world, and the other remained planted in the realm of the esoteric. I didn’t feel like I could abandon either: both were meaningful parts of me. Through my twenties, I spent years in a coercive (AKA high-control) spiritual group, built on what was purported to be a complex systems-ideology, and which in reality was a highly convoluted mish-mash. After leaving, healing from that period depended on me deconstructing the mythos that the group had erected to prop up their control. I needed to examine my beliefs thoroughly, run them through a reality check, and create some clarity; distill core truths that felt fully mine out of that tangled mess. Kinda like clearing an old, cluttered attic, stuffed full of decades of junk.
But there was another reason to make an audit of my metaphysics. My life was coming apart as a result of a big, spiritually transformative experience. In its wake, I didn’t know what was what anymore. Things were definitely not as cut-and-dried as the spiritual group I’d been in would have had me believe (“we have all the answers to everything!”). Existence appeared to me at once far more crazy and mysterious than I’d come to believe, and a lot less complicated, in that state of simultaneous Grace and disintegration.
I knew I was having ongoing experiences with what I would call spirits, elementals, ancestor beings, and energies which were obviously non-material in nature. I could know and perceive things that I shouldn’t have had access to through my physical senses. But I was very shy about coming to conclusions. I didn’t want to assume I knew what the underlying ontological “truth” was anymore. Instead, I leaned into forming relationships with these beings and phenomena without holding onto much of an explanation of any kind. Except for: “the Universe is a wild ecology of beings in all kinds of dimensions and with all kinds of needs, goals and agendas. I’m here to explore and learn and play and be ever more whole together”.
In the process, I became deathly suspicious of any philosophies that elevated the spiritual plane too far above the material, or that peddled “salvation” in any form. The group I’d been in was utterly hierarchical. It was rooted in the idea that the right practices, rituals, purification, and ongoing discipline — of ever-increasing levels of difficulty and commitment— would lead us to attain enlightenment. Oh, and also, we’d gain great power, or better yet, “special powers”: a birthright claimed by only the dedicated, necessary to heal and transform ourselves into the truest form we could embody. Oh, and to help shift the world, of course, into a paradise of liberation, and harmonious living with one another and with nature. A worthy ideal, surely, if only it hadn’t been a breeding ground for abuse of power, or if the means to the end didn’t involve constant control, policing, and the weaponization of perfectly normal human vulnerability.
As I recovered from having inhabited that bizarre space for years, I became practically allergic to any ideals, solutions, methods or wisdom teachings that said we must attain some sort of perfect purity — to elevate ourselves above the world. Any ideology that preached that life is essentially a trap we needed to hack our way out of, that disavowed the perfection of embodied existence warts and all — whether through exalting diet, exercise, productivity, spiritual practice or any other intense system of top-down control — earned a very hard pass from me.
I stopped reading and consuming any material that claimed to operationalize the spiritual: codes, downloads, keys, systems, laws, “quantum” anything, secrets, revelations, et al. . A free-flowing numinous state had become my new normal — and I didn’t feel I needed any more mental frameworks to explain it.
One side effect was that I didn’t purposefully think about what happens after we die at all, for many years. Is our selfhood subsumed into the greater consciousness of the Earth? Do we dissolve, do we go somewhere? It didn’t matter much. I was content in the liminality of my spiritual life. Some years later, that was all about to change.
Research and Empirical Data
Though the Houdini story itself was inconclusive, I was intrigued. It found me at just the right moment to startle my mind into curiosity. If I hadn’t read it, I doubt my life would be what it is now. I was suddenly eager to explore what else there was to know about afterlife communication — especially to learn if there was evidence that couldn’t reasonably be explained away.
Following this inquisitive thread, I came upon the entries for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay contest of 2021. Devoted to the topic of “Survival of Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death”, many of the most accomplished researchers and philosophers in the field of Consciousness Research submitted deeply thought-provoking essays.
The winner of that contest was Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, with his 90-plus page essay, “Beyond the Brain”. Dr. Mishlove is an author and PhD in parapsychology, with a decades-long career of interviewing experts in the fields of spirituality, philosophy, metaphysics and psychical research, first through his TV show, Thinking Allowed, and later through his YouTube channel.
Reading Dr. Mishlove’s essay was a crash course in all of the methods that have yielded robust evidence for our consciousness enduring beyond physical death: from accounts of near-death experiences, in which the experiencer was medically dead for a period of time and later resuscitated; to the bizarre and fascinating world of Instrumental Transcommunication, in which technology is used by spirits of the deceased to communicate with the living, sometimes in the most complex and unbelievable ways. Umm, yeah — spirits can talk to us through phones, radios and computers. Verified reincarnation stories are another branch on this tree of metaphysical inquiry — such as those collected and researched by Dr. Ian Stevenson, of children who remember a life prior to their current existence. Not to mention, of course, the art of mediumship, which started me out on this whole saga.
I embarked on a period of months of intense learning about the science and grounded, solid research backing all of the above and more. I followed threads looking at the validity of many other anomalous phenomena to see what patterns emerged. Applying myself to the data and the philosophical questions they posed, I felt a sharp distinction between this period and the earlier spiritual chapters of my life. As I learned about the rigorous side of Consciousness beyond the body, I was also tapping into new perspectives on spirituality.
Especially in the high-control group — but also socially, in my work with clients, and in other spiritual spaces, I noticed how (and yes, this is a rough generalization) spirituality often tended to carry this focus on metaphor. Rituals, prayers, material symbols, practices, all serving as proxies for some inward, subjective journey or connection with the Greater. People might, or might not, experience these metaphorical instances as “real” , in the same way they would designate their job or their car or their family as real. While I don’t dismiss this way of doing spirituality in the least, it occurred to me that it happens at arm’s length, somehow. There was a distance, a gap between the symbolic act of spiritual engagement and the possibility of direct experience of another reality beyond our consensus “normal”.
Suddenly, I wanted to get up close with the empirical reality of the spiritual: to take it out of soft focus, to turn fudge-able outlines and blurry relativization into solidity and sharpness. Not only to make sense of my own solo tangible experiences, but to center a realm of experiences that could be verified outside of anybody’s head.
Mediumship Is A Thing
Eventually, I felt I’d gained a solid overview of the state of the field of Consciousness Studies and needed hands-on involvement: I went on to train as a medium myself.
If you’re unfamiliar with mediumship, it’s a psychic practice in which a person (or sometimes a group) opens themselves to communicate with spirits, typically of human beings who have crossed over (though animal mediumship is also a thing). This can be done in a trance, where the medium loses consciousness and channels the messages of the deceased, or even where the deceased will “take over” the medium’s body for a time. But other times, mediums retain their own awareness and act like a go-between, connecting the spirit(s) present and the living participants, traditionally called “sitters”. It’s true that in mediumship, we can never separate the messages delivered from the subjectivity of the messenger, and so distortions can enter the communication, much like in the game of broken telephone. Still, exceptionally clear and gifted mediums have accomplished incredible feats throughout recorded history: channeling deceased doctors to effectively heal sick living people, even with “incurable” conditions; or collaborating with teams in spirit to manifest physical objects and phenomena across time and space.
For instance, did you know that organizations such as the Windbridge Research Center have tested the validity of mediumship readings via a stringent scoring system using a quintuple blinded protocol? This was done to absolutely rule out any possibility of cold reading, fraud, or bias on the part of any participant, be it the researcher, sitter or medium themselves. They scored as relevant only those messages from the deceased that were evidential — if the medium relayed a generic message like “they love you very much”, it was not scored as relevant, but they were given points for specific information about the person that accurately described their personality, special nicknames, hobbies, occupation, or verifiable events from their lives. Through their experiments, Windbridge has certified dozens of mediums as capable of providing evidential information in their sessions with a high percentage of accuracy.
Why does this all matter? Zooming Way Out
I’ve come to think that the so-called anomalous phenomena surrounding death and the afterlife are offering us powerful clues about the nature of reality — and what they reveal is deeply at odds with the Western, materialist-reductionist narrative we’re steeped in.
If you yourself believe in an afterlife — and there’s a good chance you do, as my community of readers leans heavily in the direction of belief — what I’ve shared above might feel like preaching to the choir. Or, if you happen to be someone who scoffs at the notion of consciousness as distinct from the brain, or of a unique spiritual reality beyond this third dimension, it might take a lot of evidence to convince you otherwise; perhaps no amount of evidence would sway you at all.
No matter where you personally stand on this question, what we share is that we’ve formed these individual views in relationship with a dominant culture that asserts that the notion of an afterlife — with all its implications — is a dumb fantasy. A culture that tells us that believing in spirits is for those who can’t stand the hard, rational truth that life ends when the brain dies. At its extreme, a culture that often behaves like there’s not much to each of us: we’re just a biochemical accident, short-lived, intrinsically meaningless but for whatever individual meaning we can eke out for ourselves.
Bernardo Kastrup, in his book, “Why Materialism is Baloney”, explains our culture’s core narrative this way:
“(W)hile acknowledging that there are many superficial worldviews operating simultaneously in society, there is a powerful core worldview that subtly pervades the deepest, often ‘subconscious’ levels of our minds, ultimately determining how we truly feel about ourselves and reality. This core worldview is materialism. Many of us absorb materialist beliefs from the culture without even being aware of it, all the while trusting that we hold other beliefs. Materialism suffuses the core of our being by a kind of involuntary osmosis (…).
The most basic assertion of materialism is that reality is, well, exclusively material. Materialism asserts that reality exists outside your mind in the form of assemblies of material particles occupying the framework of space-time. Even force fields are imagined, in current physics, to be force-carrying material particles. The existence of this material reality is supposed to be completely independent of your, or anyone else’s, subjective perception of it. Thus, even if there were no conscious beings observing reality, it would supposedly still go merrily on: the planets would still orbit the sun, the continents would still drift, volcanoes would still erupt, crystals would still form in the bowels of the Earth and so on. That there is such a thing as consciousness is, according to materialism, a product of chance configurations of matter, driven mechanically by the pressures of natural selection. We are supposedly an accident of probabilities, there being nothing more to a human being than an arrangement of material particles – maintained rather precariously out of thermodynamic equilibrium through metabolism – which will eventually lose its integrity and dissipate into a gooey entropic soup. When you die, materialism states that your consciousness and everything it means to be you – your memories, your personality, your experiences, everything – will be lost. There is little, if any, room for meaning or purpose under a materialist worldview.
Indeed, materialism holds that consciousness is itself a phenomenon produced, and entirely explainable, by the assembly of material particles that we call a brain. There is supposedly nothing to consciousness but the movements and interactions of material particles inside a brain, so that consciousness is material brain processes at work. How the mechanical movements of particles are accompanied by inner life is a question left unanswered by materialism. After all, just like in the case of computers, all the ‘calculations’ taking place inside our brains could, in principle, just happen ‘in the dark,’ completely unaccompanied by inner experience.”
Some of us might develop our views against the grain of the culture, and others in accordance with the consensus. But, at the risk of stating the obvious: a culture that adheres to a metaphysics of materialism makes decisions according to materialist principles. Suddenly we’re no longer so much in the realm of personal belief, and more in the realm of “what’s our collective behavior, our impact, when we’re acting out this particular story?”
In this context, death becomes materialism’s executioner. The threat of death looms, like a shadow ever hanging over us, heralding the eventual destruction of the self, of everything and everyone we love. It can be wielded to will people into submission, into complacency, and into following authority in ways that sacrifice the welfare of human and non-human alike.
Even further, when immersed in the certainty of the complete annihilation of our beingness at the end of life, we exist within the full-spectrum madness that arises from fear (all the way to terror) as the backdrop to simply existing. Yet culture also would also have us fragment off from this ominous reality and ignore death at the same time: fear death, but don’t think of death.
We’ll do a lot to prevent and forestall death, when it looks so bleak: whole industries are mobilized in service of that goal. Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe life is precious and we shouldn’t waste it nor accelerate its end. That’s not the same as a systemic view of death as the implicit enemy.
Also: what is the point of living if you know you’ll be destroyed at the end? It’s no wonder we dread making mistakes, we’re depressed, we settle for living half-lives, we’re increasingly more lonely and disconnected.
Yes — I’m acknowledging that it’s not so simple, that there are a million other factors: trauma, precarious financial conditions, injustice, ways of living and working that prioritize profit over the care and wellbeing of our humanness, the destruction of the more-than-human web of life. But it seems to me almost as though our nihilistic relationship to death anchors all of that, is the substrate on which all of that grows.
Paul Levy writes about the Wetiko virus, a cultural-spiritual disease plaguing the Western world, characterized by relational disconnection, uncontrolled consumption and exploitation. The prospect of obliteration at the end of life sets an existential stage in which life might mean nothing more than “get yours while you can”. It can lead some to sublimate that death terror into tyranny and supreme destructiveness, to build titanic empires on the backs of the oppressed, to enact the horror upon the Other, so one doesn’t ever need to feel it.
The materialist version of death isolates us. Even if you yourself behave like a good and decent human being, the story becomes one of scarcity both relationally and materially: choose whatever path your means allow, to make it while you can, as best you can.
Diving into the carefully collected, verifiable body of data we’ve accumulated on the all-important question of whether our souls continue to exist after death, over decades of robust research, is important because it shows us there’s real ground to contradict the blighted version of consensus we’ve inherited. Evidence that doesn’t rely on faith alone.
Not that personal beliefs are lesser in this matter, or to be dismissed at all. But to heal the rifts of hyperindividualism and the pervasive myth of the mechanical Universe, we also need shared spaces of new cultural stories and values to build from. The basis for such culture needs some objective anchor: we need to be able to agree both individually and together that there’s a “there, there”.
But there’s more. From my now-vantage-point — as I’ve deepened and sharpened my own ability to communicate as a medium, filtering out the noise as best I can, I think I can safely say Spirit would really like to be a part of our Western life. Just as much as it’s been a part of the lives of our ancestors, and the lives of traditional and indigenous cultures for all of human history. This re-connection, emphatically, doesn’t have to look like oppressive religion at all.
We deserve to know and connect with the vast network of love and support (not to mention, wisdom, knowledge and even creative and technological advancement) that’s trying to reach us from the Spirit-side of the divide between Life and Afterlife. We deserve, too, to know ourselves and one another as far greater, more cherished, and more multidimensional than the limited reductionist view of the world allows. Who knows what the story of humanity might begin to look like if we did?
Throwing the stubborn myths, taboos and the relentless stigma of insanity that’s been cast on afterlife phenomena (and on their experiencers) out the window, and letting in the light of a Consciousness-first Universe, might be a start.
Have you explored the metaphysics of the afterlife? Or had any contacts or events involving the world beyond the Veil? I’d love to read what reading sparked for you in the comments.
Also, just a reminder that I’m running this holiday season’s Love Your Destiny specials until the end of January, and there are just a few spots left. Check them out if you could use a boost in clarity, integration and direction to begin the New Year.
