Jon Klimo, a Brown University-trained psychologist specializing in parapsychology, explores channeled accounts of suicide in the afterlife—no Old Testament-style punishment but self-judgment and purgatorial consequences, disrupting soul growth. He cites cases like an Alzheimer’s patient communicating post-death and suicides lingering due to unresolved trauma, with redemption over torment as the core message. Klimo distinguishes between avoidable emotional pain and justified suffering, warning that most suicides stem from preventable turmoil. While he acknowledges telepathic overlaps with extraterrestrial experiences, love—not obsession—remains the key link to spirits. Art Bell transitions to global news, including a San Diego woman’s alleged child murders, Clinton’s Fox News defense, Iraq’s federated push, and bizarre call-in stories like a 45-foot eel and graveyard security gaps, before urging listeners to seek Klimo’s book Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife for deeper insights. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, the Philippine nation, 7,107 pearl-like islands nestled in the Pacific, Manila, good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
This is Art Bell, and of course, this is the largest program of its kind in the world.
It's called Coast to Coast AM.
It is my honor, my privilege to be escorting you through the weekend.
Now, once again, this evening I've yet posted another picture of Aaron and myself in Hong Kong.
That's in Hong Kong.
The photograph yesterday was taken up on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong on a pretty good day, actually.
Somebody said, well, kind of misty.
Yes, but for Victoria Peak, that was actually a pretty good day, day after rain in Hong Kong, and a couple of weeks ago.
So that picture is about two weeks old.
Now, I would like once again, if I could, to call attention to this horrid little letter, this hoax letter that was actually done many years ago by somebody who wrote it at the University of San Diego campus and went to the library there and sent it out in my name, degrading the Filipino people.
And that was many years ago.
Now, of course, that I've moved to the Philippines, somebody's taken it on themselves to recirculate this letter.
Not that it ever really stopped circulating.
I've been answering those for, oh, God, actually years now, to be honest with you, years.
But now they're recirculating it, which is something of a bit of a dangerous situation for me here.
I'm getting death threats and that sort of thing.
And here they actually do dispose of journalists on a somewhat regular basis.
So while actually keeping a very low profile here in the Philippines, I certainly don't need that letter going around.
So we've got a little link on top of the website or near the top of the website that covers the specifics of the letter.
An awful, hateful letter written against the Philippine people.
And I guess that was done because at the time I was married to Ramona, as you know, and she was half Filipino.
And so I guess they decided it would be a good thing to do or it was coincidental.
But I think not.
At any rate, if you would be so kind as to read the specifics if you get an opportunity and pass it along to your friends, that it certainly was not me that wrote that, I would be very appreciative just for the safety of myself and my wife.
Now, let's take a look at the world news.
Never all that pleasant.
A woman accused of killing a pregnant woman and her fetus told police that she drowned the woman's three young children, stuffed them into a washer and dryer at their apartment.
Preliminary autopsies on the dead children Sunday appear to show they were indeed drowned.
Alice Hard, a deputy St. Clair coroner, told the Associated Press God, that's just awful.
Is there no depth to which people will plunge?
No end to it.
Democrats on Sunday seized on an intelligence assessment that said that the Iraq war actually has increased the terrorist threat, saying that it was further evidence that Americans should choose new leadership in the November elections.
The Democrats hoped the report would undermine the GOP's image as the party more capable of handling terrorism as the campaign enters its final six-week stretch.
And then there was quite a Fox incident, I guess.
In a combative interview on Fox News Sunday, former President Clinton actively defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden.
A lot has been said about that.
He said he'd tried to have bin Laden killed and was attacked for his efforts by the very same people who now criticize him for not doing enough.
That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now, Clinton said in the interview.
They ridiculed me for trying.
They had eight months to try.
They did not try.
Iraq's feuding ethnic and sectarian groups agreed on Sunday to consider amending the Constitution and begin debating legislation to create a federated nation.
Wow.
While the Shiite prime minister appealed for an end to violence during Ramadan, despite the plea for peace, violence killed at least 20 Iraqis, wounded 37 a day before the official start of the Muslim holy month.
So that would seem to me to be sort of caving in to the notion of civil war or the possibility of civil war.
When you talk about autonomous regions being governed within what was one country, you're sort of caving into the possibility of the civil war, trying to prevent it, I suppose.
Anybody who believes that Nancy Grace was chastened in some manner by the suicide of a young mother following their tough television encounter doesn't know much about Nancy Grace, I guess.
The primetime prosecutor continues to focus nearly full-time on Melinda Duckett, piling up evidence to point to the Florida woman's guilt in the disappearance of her two-year-old son, Trenton, with all the support of her bosses at CNN Headline News.
Tampa Bay's quarterback Chris Sims has had his spleen removed.
My goodness, spleen.
After taking several hard hits on Sunday's 26-24 loss to the Carolina Panthers, see, I just ruined the game for myself and was resting comfortably in a hospital.
Chris is doing well, and we anticipate a full recovery, said the team physician in a brief statement.
So if you're an NFL quarterback, look out.
It can cost you your spleen.
Oh, by the way, by the way, in a moment, by popular demand, I didn't get an opportunity to play it until the very last hour of the program last night.
And there is this very, very, very funny little diddy called Tequila.
And so I know a lot of you didn't get an opportunity to hear it.
And I got about a million emails asking me to repeat it.
When we get back from break in a moment, I shall do so.
We will indeed be doing open lines here shortly, so anybody who already knows the phone numbers, and I'm sure many of you have them written down and or memorized after all of these years, you're welcome to begin calling and we'll line you up.
A woman called the Emergency Poison Center, very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants.
She was quickly reassured.
Ants are not harmful.
No need to bring her daughter to the hospital.
She calmed down.
And then, sort of, as a little addendum at the very end of the conversation, happened to mention that she had given her daughter some ant poison.
Ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants.
She said, they told her to get her daughter into the hospital right away.
And this true story out of San Francisco, a man wanting to rob a bank, a downtown bank of America, walked into the branch and wrote, this is a stick-up.
All small, no capitals.
This is I-Z, a stick-up, S-T-I-K-K-U-P.
Stick-up.
Put all your money, M-U-N-Y, in this bag.
There he was, standing in line, waiting to give his note to the teller.
He began to worry that somebody might have seen him write the note, might call the police before he could get to the teller's window.
So he walked out of the Bank of America, crossed the street to Wells Fargo, after waiting a few minutes in line, handed the same note to the Wells Fargo teller.
She read it, surmising from the spelling that, well, he just wasn't the brightest bulb in the harbor, told him she couldn't accept a stick-up note because it was written on a Bank of America deposit slip, and that he'd either have to go fill out a Wells Fargo deposit slip or go back to the Bank of America looking somewhat defeated.
The man said, okay, and just simply left.
Now, this is an interesting story.
I really think it is.
It relates to what we've been talking about when we talk about shadow people or shadow beings.
You're walking down an empty street alone.
Suddenly, you have the eerie feeling that someone's following you.
Is it your mind playing tricks on you?
Well, perhaps so.
According to a new study, when a specific region of the brain called the left temporal junction TPJ is stimulated in some way, it can create an illusion of a shadow person.
Given that such experiences are often heightened in psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and paranoia, and even in those who believe that they've been abducted by aliens, the results could lead to a better understanding of these neurological conditions.
The finding emerged totally by accident.
Neurologist Ulf Blank of the Brain Mind Institute in Lucerne, Switzerland and his colleagues were attempting to identify the source of epileptic seizures in a 23-year-old woman.
They applied a mild current through surgically implanted electrodes to various regions of the brain.
Not much happened until the researchers stimulated the woman's left TPJ located roughly above the left ear.
Suddenly, she reported feeling the presence of a mystery person behind her, a motionless, speechless shadow that imitated her body postures and action.
He, that's in quotes, lay beneath her when she lay down, sat beside her when she sat down, and attempted to take a test card from her when she tried to participate in a language exercise.
Such delusions are very similar to those seen in patients with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics often mistake their own bodies to be someone else's, for example, and attribute their own actions to others.
So they also have frequent illusions of being followed or controlled by a stranger, as do those who claim to have been manipulated, of course, by aliens.
Speaking of which, the theory of extraterrestrial origin of life is not a well-defined single theory.
It is more of an adjunct or an extension of the belief that since random unguided biological evolution on Earth is a fact, certainly the same forces would have resulted in life in other places in the universe.
Extraterrestrial life is never associated with the possibility that life perhaps could have been created elsewhere if it could be created here on Earth.
If it could be verified that life existed elsewhere in the universe, it would be presented as proof of biological evolution.
The argument could not be farther from the truth.
Although it is true that if life could evolve on Earth, it certainly could evolve in other places if the conditions were correct.
However, it is equally true that if life could be created on Earth, it could be created elsewhere also.
In fact, if the creative force was powerful enough to produce life, it would be powerful enough to create the proper environment in which to place the created life.
The theory of the origin of extraterrestrial life only moves the evolution creation debate to a remote location.
Now, I think most of you are familiar, aren't you, with cosmic ray bursts?
They've been a fairly recent discovery in the galaxy.
However, there was one so severe back on February 18th that had it occurred anywhere near our galaxy, all life on Earth would have ended last February 18th.
I don't know if you knew that or not.
I recall at the time I did report on that.
But there it is in black and white.
NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory says, Had the star that produced this been anywhere near us, all life on Earth on February 18th would have ended.
But of course, it did not.
That doesn't mean that it could not happen.
The Chinese people, leave it to the Chinese, have decided that it is better to let a computer decide if a criminal should be executed or not.
The new software, patched into a legal database, is being used by judges on 100 different crimes, including robbery, rape, by tapping into details of the crime, and, if there are any, mitigating circumstances, the penalty calculator provides a recommended sentence, including those punishable by death.
The software was designed as a method of dealing with corrupt judges and has been trailed in 1,500 cases now, and it looks like it will be used in courts all across the Chinese landscape.
Software designer Quinn Ye has been working on the program since 2003 and helped by Shandong legal officials has loaded it with a huge database of Chinese law and case precedents.
On the plus side, it certainly will ensure standardized decisions on prison terms and avoid abuse of the discretionary power of judges as a result of, well, corruption or perhaps insufficient legal training.
On the downside, the judges will not have to pay so much attention in drawn-out trials.
If the software is ever hacked, then it might, for example, be possible for a murderer to get a very light sentence or a person who wears a loud shirt in a built-up area to be sentenced to death by firing squad.
China has the death penalty for 68 offenses you might like to know, including bigamy, stealing petrol, gasoline, wow, tax evasion, and computer hacking.
A death sentence for all of that.
Can you believe it?
Stealing gas?
Stealing gas?
They really do prize their gas in China, don't they?
All right, let's take a few calls, see what awaits.
It was a wonderful experience, but I've had the opportunity, Chris, to repeat the experience because I've had this beginning of what is an out-of-body experience.
Being paralyzed, feeling the buzzing, this intense feeling, and I've always bailed out, Chris, at the last moment and stopped it from happening.
unidentified
I understand that.
There's nothing wrong with being patient, taking your time with this.
Well, I'll put another way I chickened out, buddy.
unidentified
I'd like to also address some of the concerns that people out there who have kundalini coming up.
As it comes up the spine, it will expand the kidneys and it'll also affect the adrenal glands.
This will hyperstimulate the adrenal glands, and it'll put out a hormone that makes the person become very excited and delusional, kind of like someone who's on methamphetamine.
And I want them to, once again, keep the tongue to the roof of the mouth behind the upper front teeth.
I wanted to tell you about a new potential source of energy, or an energy production source, whatever, that could not only get us away from oil, but also help clear up our radioactive wastes.
And you can Google it, and I think it was originally developed back in the mid-80s, but they're actually starting to use it commercially or develop it commercially for pacemakers and remote electronics, that sort of thing.
We're breaking the hour here, so I've got a scoop, but I definitely will Google it and see what's up.
We will continue with Open Lines following a brief break.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, I am.
John Climo, I guess it's Climo at the top of the hour.
And he's going to be talking about a subject that I'm very, very, very interested in.
It's what happens to you when you commit suicide.
However, he is a channeler.
Now, over the years, those of you who have listened to me for years, know I'm very skeptical of channelers, not because I don't believe that channeling is possible, because certainly as any other, I don't know, unusual thing is possible, channeling is possible.
The problem I've always had with channeling is that it's also something that can be faked.
I mean, I could give you a pretty good example of channeling, you know?
I was Art Bell.
Now, I'm three lifetimes Ago, Art Bell.
My name is Harry, and I want to tell you what's going on with the world.
You know, that kind of deal.
I mean, it could happen, right?
It could be faked.
So I've always had a little problem with channelers, not because I think channeling is not real, just because I think there's a big potential for faking it.
Anyway, we'll discuss that, and then certainly Suicide with John Climo.
It's going to be a very interesting program, no doubt about it.
That'll be coming up next hour.
In a moment, we continue with Open Lines.
Open Lines Were it not for love, what reason would there be to even exist?
Have you ever wondered about that?
Love really is, well, other than ham radio.
I mean, otherwise, what reason would there really be to exist in this world, were it not for love?
Let's go to our first-time caller line, and I think it's Daryl in North Dakota.
This is just sort of a stab in the dark, if you will.
Cute, huh?
Shadow people stab in the dark.
Anyway, it's a stab in the dark.
And just because science is able to recreate the feeling or the sensation of being followed or somebody there with you or somebody moving with you does not mean that it's not real.
It just means they can recreate that feeling.
As, for example, science has been able to duplicate with electrode implants in the brain the emotions and feelings that one has during an NDE as well.
It doesn't mean that NDEs are not real.
It just means that scientists have found a region of the brain where they can seem to activate that sort of thing.
I think that in the next year, as in every successive year now for a long time, you're going to see a worsening of the weather.
And I think that what's happening is that our climate is warming up.
Our planet is warming up.
And heat is the engine that drives storms.
Whether it would be rainstorms or hurricanes or tornadoes or other violent weather, heat is the devil behind all of it.
So what do I think is going to happen?
I think we're going to have an escalating, continuing, violent season after season after season after season, and it's going to be increasing very quickly.
Now, how quickly and whether there's a tipping point and a trigger where it's really going to get bad, I don't have the answer to that.
There are a number of scientists who figure there is a tipping point, a trigger point when all of a sudden it could get much worse as in global superstorm, that sort of thing.
But that's what I think.
I think it's obviously warming up.
No question about that.
And that will contribute to more violence above us.
Let's go to the, let's see, first time color line.
Okay, we was fishing down at the river bottoms one time, and we had parked our truck about 25 or 30 feet away from the water line, and we had set our poles down next to the water line, and we had attached a little bell to the end so that if a fish did on it, it would jingle, and we'd run out there and pull it in.
Well, me and a friend of mine was sitting in the truck, and along about, I'd say probably 10 to 12, there had to be Indians, and these were ghosts, come walking down the riverbank and walked right between us and our fishing poles.
And they was definitely Native Americans, and they had, and they weren't tangible.
I mean, you could tell, you could almost see through them.
But you could see that they had the clothes on them, and a couple of them had, there was no horses, but a couple of them was carrying, looked like children on their back, and one or two of them.
He has an undergraduate and graduate degree, both from Brown University, and a doctorate in psychology.
So it's Dr. Clemo, actually.
He's been continuously teaching in doctoral programs for the past 32 years and is currently starting his seventh year as a core faculty member in the clinical program at San Francisco Bay Area Campus of the American Schools of Professional Psychology, Argus C University.
As a lifelong multidisciplinarian, he has done extensive research, writing, teaching, and presentations in the area of creativity, intuition, imagination, parapsychology, consciousness studies, my favorite, new paradigm thought and new science, ufology, extraterrestrialology.
I'm going to have to be honest with you, though, Doctor, and I'm going to have to say, before we get into the whole question of suicide, and I'm really fascinated by it because I've been close myself, I have always been skeptical, Doctor, of channeling.
And I'm very open-minded, and I'm not suggesting that channeling does not really occur.
It certainly could be every bit as real as any other area of the paranormal that I look into, and I look into almost all of it.
But I am a little skeptical of channeling simply because of the obvious potential for fraud.
And so I'd like to talk to you a little bit about channeling, if we could first.
Because I think a lot of it seems to represent about the best that we human beings have to share with each other about wisdom or guidance or insight or creativity or imagination or a larger view of the world, irrespective of whether we can irrefutably prove it's from the sources it claims to be from or that a channel claims it to be from.
It's like putting a picture frame around content you get from somebody.
I mean, if I just say, I'm going to now tell you art some opinions that I have, some experiences that I've had, it's unordained.
There's no frame around it.
It doesn't say it's channeled.
It doesn't say it's special.
It doesn't say it's from the collective unconscious or from something outside of myself or from my higher self.
And by just being just plain old me, we can identify with each other and say, well, that's just normal communication and normal sources we're getting our information from.
It's when someone says this is channeled or the informational source that's available to the person, supposedly, says I'm not you or I'm from beyond you or I'm a channel source, then we get into another realm.
And the jury stays out, as far as I'm concerned, as far as being able to prove that these sources are transcending the channel or the medium who's related to them.
In other words, I agree with you that it's a kind of a crapshoot.
It's a mixed bag.
I mean, I believe that some cases of channeling are absolutely authentic as far as I've experienced them and been the case of them.
And there are cases where I have my crap detector kind of goes off and something kind of is wary in me that doesn't quite feel right.
I think that's somebody having their 15 minutes of fame or pretending or aspiring to transcend themselves, but it may not be transcending themselves.
It's very, very hard to tell in this sort of interdimensional subjective realm what's really, really going on.
Doctor, is there any way to delineate between the wheat and the chaff here?
In other words, is there, for example, are there any medical studies that show that people or some channelers who claim to be channeling are in some sort of different mental state during the time they're doing this?
There is overlap with altered states of consciousness or consciousness research and the neurophysiology or neuroscience, the correlates that are associated with an altered state of consciousness.
For example, someone who is dissociating, which is the psychological term for splitting off part of yourself into an alterer sub-personality, which is one of the favorite explanations of mainstream psychology for what's happening with channeling, is that it's really a kind of a dissociation, maybe a functional kind of dissociation, meaning that you're not crazy and you're functional, but it's like being an amnesiac ventriloquist.
You have this sort of part of you that splits off and doesn't know it's throwing its own voice through some other entity or being, but it's really just part of you, but you're disconnected from it.
The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
That's kind of a favorite explanation.
And so if you do neurophysiological studies, e.g.
readings and so on, of someone who's clinically or naturally dissociating and it's really part of their own unconscious, there seems to be a different signature, although not enough research has been really done on this, but this research that I've seen does seem to show that you get a different signature, a different brain signature, when the person claims to be sort of surrendering to something that's coming to or through them, telepathically, clairaudiently, or so on.
This particular book, first of all, let me back up one step.
The book I wrote in 1988 called Channeling Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources with a new edition about in 1998 is considered the definitive study of channeling.
And this book that I just did with her this year, in June, Suicide, was co-authored.
And it's really a scholarly study primarily.
In other words, we looked at 120 years of published material, and some of it very small press or rarely published in print, from sources claiming to be people who had committed suicide or people from the spirit realm, spirits in the spirit realm, giving their insights into suicides and people on the other side who they're helping who committed suicide.
So it's all scholarly work, meaning we go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sources, boil it all down to the common themes, and then look and see what the commonalities are.
It's kind of, you could call it inductive research.
Now, we also Supplemented that with a set of seances where neither she nor I were the channels or the mediums, where we used other people.
And we did that because part of the book dealt with the suicide bombers, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
And because the Islamic tradition doesn't believe in the psychic or mediums or channeling, we couldn't find any Muslim channels or people indigenous to that culture who said they were getting information from recent suicides, terrorist suicides, suicide bombers.
And so we had to set up our own seances or our own conditions to use a medium or a channel to try to establish contact with them.
And part of the book does deal with that.
But it's not either Pam or me who were the channels of that.
Yeah, and when you ask that leading question, like, you know, don't want to hurt your feelings or anything, but I'm very dubious about the whole issue of channeling.
You know, I'm just, you know, I throw myself right into it because I've moved in academic and scholarly and scientific and research circles for decades now, representing the paranormal and the otherworldly, which is hard to do, you know.
I sort of identify with people like John Mack and the late John Mack and others in that regard.
You feel kind of martyred about it all, you know.
But in a sense, somebody's got to do it, so to speak.
And you've got to do your homework.
You've got to be careful that you don't estrange people, that you don't automatically turn them off by using buzzwords like, you know, auras or chakras or angels, because you lose your audience.
And I don't want to lose my audience.
When we did that channeling book, Jeremy Tarsher, the publisher, did it with me in 1988, he said, look, I don't want to preach to the choir.
I think they'll follow this.
They're already open to channeling.
What I want to try to reach with you in this book is the people who are on the fence, the intelligentsia, the scientific community, those who say, I don't believe this, I don't think there's anything to this.
I want to help to try to reach them and get a foot in the door of that because we have an emerging new paradigm here of which channeling is only a small part.
And it's like a Rosetta Stone.
If you can get people seriously interested in channeling and not easily dismiss it out of hand without even thinking about it or really looking at it, then you can maybe get them to look at other things as well.
And that's the way I look at channeling.
It's deeply interconnected with everything from UFOs, the crop circles, to the psychic to alternative and complementary medicine.
And so it's all very interknit for me.
And so the fact that we don't understand channeling and the fact that it's very much of a mixed bag and you can't paint it all with one brush, you know, as long as you can find one black swan, you can't say all swans are white.
I think from the research I've done, from the research that I'm aware of that others have done, this is not mainstream research, this is not university-based research because it's kind of kept out of that politically.
So it's kind of a marginal, but it's done as I have done it.
And I would say that very few cases of channeling are pathological or dysfunctional, maladaptive, crazy, mental illness.
Very few.
And at the same time, I would say that not that many are consciously fraudulent or hoaxing or pretending.
That leaves the lion's share of the hypothesis, if it's not genuine channeling, what is it?
Which would be left to people who think they're channeling but aren't, by my definition.
Well, you know, it's the biggest for me, too, and I lie in bed at night like a big kid.
You just look at kind of adolescent mentalities lying there all night sometimes wondering, gee, what really happens?
What really, really happens?
Sometimes I wish that the skeptics and those who are really closed to the paranormal and the larger paradigm and the larger reality would be more self-doubting or more open-minded like I am, admittedly, false humility aside, because I lie there and I wonder, crap, what if I'm wrong?
What if there's nothing after death?
What if it's a big fat void and I'm wrong?
And my beliefs are just wishful thinking and I torture myself with that.
In other words, I keep open to the fact that I could be wrong.
Well, because the qualification I put on my answer is that I spend a great deal of my time looking at talking to people and looking at published things and interviewing people who've had non-ordinary experiences, paranormal, non-ordinary, psychic, otherworldly, inexplicable, anomalous, whatever your term is.
They're all sort of the same general bag.
And after you've heard a certain number of these thousands of stories, including the subset of them most recently in this book about suicide and the repercussions of suicide on the other side, supposedly, when you live with as much of that, it kind of seeps into your blood, so to speak.
And it's very hard for me at this point in my life, after all these decades of doing this, to believe that there's nothingness.
Because it would put a lie to these thousands and thousands of heartfelt stories and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences and other kinds of things like that that seem to be pieces of the puzzle that there is continuation of consciousness beyond the death of the body, and that the brain, that our bodies, our brains, are not all that we are.
I absolutely agree with you, by the way, in my own thinking.
If it's a big fat void, I could deal with it.
But having done this show now for years and years and years and heard so many of the stories that you're talking about right now, the near-death experiences, all these heartfelt stories, I too have come to believe, actually as a result of doing this program, Doctor, that there absolutely is some sort of continuation of consciousness after death.
So you and I, we're on the same page about that, and I'm sure many of your listeners are, and I would, therefore, at the same time, I want to sort of tuck channeling in there.
Say, well, if you're open to that or these other aspects, these are all interrelated on some other level.
There is a larger reality, a larger human potential, a larger experienceability to the universe and being in it, and consciousness's place in it, and the creative aspects of consciousness.
And given all of that, to just dismiss all channeling as fraud or hoaxing or craziness is overly simplistic, although some cases can be explained that way.
So it's toleration of ambiguity.
It's being able to live with the fact that it's a mixed bag is kind of crazy making for some people that want it to be simply all yes or all no.
Even a number of physicians that I've spoken to, emergency room physicians who deal with the death and dying virtually every day, if you get to talk to them privately, they absolutely believe because they've encountered it so many times.
Publicly, however, doctors, scientists tend to be, well, they tend to say no, they don't believe in God, actually.
I guess that's kind of a professional, I'm not sure what it is with scientists, but they can't put their hand on it, they can't prove it, and so they deny it.
At any rate, I think most human beings, Doctor, have contemplated suicide, and those who say they haven't, I think, are probably lying, at the very least, contemplated it or thought about ending their own life as opposed to some other ending.
Why do we stick it out, this kind of existential issue that Sartre and Camus and others brought up?
You're thrown in this ocean with birth, or you're in this existence, and the existence may seem fundamentally meaningless, either unduly psychologically or physically painful, which is basically meaningless.
And why keep swimming?
And yet the argument is keep swimming.
Keep swimming because it's like it's a gift, it's God-given.
It's the presenting problem.
It's what you've got to work with.
And to turn away from it is more dubious than to stick with it, even though you might be unable to find the deeper levels of meaning that would make it easier to keep swimming, so to speak.
Well, if channeling is receiving information coming to or through a person from some source outside of that person that isn't physically based, that is some kind of transcending communication from another being, entity, source, presence, mind, consciousness.
If that's channeling, the nature of mediumship is a subset of channeling.
In other words, mediumship is normally defined as receiving information from deceased human spirits, discarnate human spirits, from the afterlife place.
So that's a subset of channeling, because channeling is more than just communication with deceased spirits.
It could be extraterrestrials, nature, spirits, gods, universal consciousness.
Some people claim they can channel God or Christ or who knows what.
Well, look, my worldview, this may have to be for another time, but that the whole universe at heart, when you go down far enough, it's not just turtles all the way down, as somebody once said.
It's consciousness.
It's spirit, it's consciousness.
In other words, physical reductionism says, which is the main view of physical science today, is that if you go down to the very heart of reality, it is physicality, it is materialism, it is inanimate billiard balls and forces and fields and so on.
And that consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon of brain-body.
In other words, you have a brain, you have a body, you have protoplasm, you have neurophysiological, synaptical, electromagnetic, electrochemical firing patterns, all this physical stuff, physical chemistry stuff and biology stuff.
And that consciousness emerges, what's called an epiphenomenon, emerges from that physical background, and that's all you have.
This is going to be a very, very interesting show.
Dr. John Clemo is my guest.
We're going to be talking about what happens to you should you decide to take your own life.
Good morning.
Good afternoon.
Good evening, whatever the case may be, wherever you are.
We've got a good one on our hands here.
Dr. John Clemo is my guest.
And actually, he has a doctorate, a number of doctoral programs in the past 32 years.
He's quite a guy.
He's compiled a very great deal of material, yes, much of it coming from channeling, about what happens to us if we commit suicide.
And in this, we're also discussing, of course, whether or not we actually have a life that extends beyond the physical one we're leading right now.
And this is a very important topic to me.
And I'm glad that we've come up with a very good guest on the subject because, well, I got pretty close myself.
Pretty close, I guess, doesn't even describe it.
I will talk about some of that here in a moment.
With Dr. John Climo.
I'm Art Bell.
Once again, Dr. John Climo.
Doctor, one of the other things that has led me over the years to believe that there really is some sort of life after death or existence after death is I've done I don't know how many shows now on EVP electronic voice phenomena and I have tried to shoot holes in that unsuccessfully now for years.
This EVP thing, there's something to it, Doctor.
There's really, truly something to it.
There's no question in my mind about it.
There's something to it now.
Now, whether we're hearing the voices of the dead or we're hearing voices from the collective unconscious or conscious or whatever it is we're hearing, we're hearing something and it's real.
I know you've investigated this for years, EVP, that is to say.
Well, before the break, you asked me, what do I think is the best evidence of survival of physical death?
And I wanted to make a distinction that if current science says everything is basically physical reductionism at the heart, and I believe it's the other way around, that physicality emerges from consciousness and that everything is basically a living consciousness field, which is not a very popular view, but it's the way I see the universe and move and have my being in it.
Given that, then mediumship and channeling is sort of somewhat difficult to pin down if we're all in a big kind of universal mind and there's compartmentalizations and some of it looks like it's holding still and being more physical and some of it's more kind of living and conscious and self-aware.
It's a great big multi-dimensional koan, you know, mystery.
And so to put your trust in mediumship or channeling and say that's another entity over there and that's one here because this one's associated with a body and that one doesn't have a body and can you not have a body and still have consciousness?
Well if you believe everything is made out of consciousness essentially, then you can have consciousness without a body talking to consciousness within a body and two consciousnesses talking, one has a body and one doesn't, and so on.
So that's kind of the way my thinking goes.
But you said EVP, electronic voice phenomenon or instrumental transcommunication, yet for four years I received private funding.
I think I was about the only person around getting money to study EVP, IETC.
Well, it came from an individual, a philanthropical, wealthy individual, who was raised in the spiritualist church.
And because he was raised in a spiritualist community, which believes in survival of physical death and where the ministers essentially hold kind of seances as part of religious services and act as mediums and so on, and it's been going on since the late 1800s, the spiritualism is an international movement.
In fact, a lot of people, a lot of famous people, were involved with this, as you may know.
Anyway, because he came up in that climate as a child, he believes in this.
He doesn't need to be convinced of it.
And so now that he has money, he wants to contribute toward research that goes in that direction to prove this stuff.
The problem with proving these things, there's something called James's Law, named after William James, the great philosopher-psychologist.
And James's Law says that, I don't even remember who came up with it, but I like it.
It says there's always going to be just about enough evidence and information and experience to prove to the skeptics that something isn't true and to prove to the believers that it is true.
It's an agnostic kind of nether world where we're left to make our own decisions.
I think that's part of the genius of God, let's say.
It's an open system where our own free will and our own passion and our own awe and wonder and inner guidance and fumbling and trial and error and seeking for meaning comes up with whatever we can come up with, but we're left open to that.
And we hooked electrodes to the leaves of a plant, and then we kind of meditated and said, if there's any spirits there, could you use the plant as a channel or a medium?
And then we set up a software system Where, depending upon whether the direct current coming out of the plant leaf went up or down or changed, that that was correlated with the letters of the alphabet, like a Ouija board.
And so the spirit or whatever it was could spell things out.
And I'll be damned if it didn't spell some things out out of the background, kind of gobbledygook of nonsense letters.
And some of the things did correlate with somebody who had a friend who recently died and communicated something that she needed to know as the executor of his will.
And that came across out of the damn plan.
Now, what you can't control for, if it's a big conscious universe, is did that come from her unconscious?
Did it come from kind of a universal mind or some kind of a holographic data source and there is no survival of death?
I mean, every day, 24 hours a day, we were together.
We were best friends.
We were so in love.
It was the best marriage that ever happened in one day.
Doctor, I lost her.
She was an asthmatic.
And anyway, one day I lost her.
And for about a week or two weeks, I really, really, really got close to suicide, Doctor.
I had a mouthful of pills, and I got that close.
I mean, that close.
And the only things that stopped me were, I remember my wife, Ramona, had told me many times suicide was wrong, and that she knew without a doubt that you were supposed to play out the hand you were dealt.
That's actually her exact words.
That, and I'm not a really religious person, although perhaps now a little more so than I've been for all the rest of my life and since her death.
But, you know, given the possibility that religion is correct and suicide is a sin, and I'm told you might not ever get to see your loved one if you commit suicide, there's all kinds of that stop.
Those two things, I guess, are what stopped me.
But I'm telling you, just barely.
It was so close.
So I'm very curious.
In the information you've received and correlated by channeling, what do you know about the results of suicide for people on the other side?
There's not an Old Testament judgmental God that's going to punish you, even though it may not be a good thing to do to take your own life.
It may be unnatural or taking away something that is God-given or nature-given.
But nonetheless, you're not really punished for it or judged for it other than that you judge yourself.
This seems to be a recurrent story across these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sources over 120 years that we've studied, is that you review your own life and you look at it and you look at the sins of omissions and the sins of commission.
And if one of the big sins in this sense was taking your own life prematurely or you didn't have to or you got impatient or you got angry or frustrated and you did it, and then it's irrevocable and you're over there on the other side, what are the repercussions of it?
Well, first of all, there can be irrevocable and you have to live with that, the repercussions of that.
Plus, we are in a great school system, a great learning, soul growth learning system that's interdimensional and that transcends life and death, as I understand it, from all these endless, endless sources and from some of my own experiences.
And so to take your own life is you didn't give your life, you didn't give yourself the life, and so it's not really yours to take in that sense.
And to do that prematurely is exactly what your wife had said.
We need to play out what we've been given.
It's kind of God-given or nature-given.
It's fate-given.
And if it gets very painful or seems to be intolerable, then in a sense, that's part of the soul growth and part of the lesson learning and the compassion we can bring to others later.
But if you do kill yourself, it doesn't mean you fry in hell forever.
You make your own heaven or hell in a sense.
There is a purgatorial place you can go to, and so can the suicide bombers go there.
Allah doesn't give them the 70 virgins and grin ear to ear when they get over there, right?
They really find out that they were sold kind of a propagandic bill of goods by the terrorist subculture they came up in.
But it doesn't mean that they're tortured worse than they can be tortured on this side.
We torture ourselves.
But we are redeemed.
We can redeem ourselves.
We can forgive ourselves and others.
So there's a positive side to this story.
But the fact that we are dealt these cards, dealt this life, no matter how painful psychologically or psychoemotionally or physically it is, we should be sticking it out seems to be the moral of the story that I hear from the other side, except in cases with terminal illness, extreme pain, and so on.
And to really truly empathically indwell in another person's lived experience, to walk in their shoes, to look out through their eyes, to hold the pain that their heart holds, which is, we're not psychic, unfortunately, as a species yet.
Some of us are, a little bit, but we can't really do that, so we can't get out of ourselves and into another to really know what it was like that they jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, the umpteenth person to do it, because we weren't in their shoes.
It's easy for us to say, oh, you shouldn't have done that.
You should have just held on to your cross or your Jesus medal or whatever and stuck around and let faith see you through.
Well, when you're in the throes of that experiential angst and dark night of the soul, it can be so awful, in your bones so awful, that when you said that you thought you had those pills in your mouth, my question to you was going to be, was it that you were angry at God or life, or you wanted to join her?
I live every day with the thought experiment of losing my wife for 27 years, and I ache in my belly, and I actually can cry real tears, even though she's still here.
But I'm already anticipating that one of us is going to have to go.
We're going to lose each other.
One of us is going to lose the other soon, and we're not getting any younger.
And so I know that feeling already in myself.
And would I want to live without her?
I don't feel like I would, but I will, yes, just like you will.
So if we believe that suicide is murder, as it would be if I took a gun and shot somebody else, then are you also going to tell me that if I took a gun and shot somebody else, there would be nothing on the other side in the way of hell and brimstone for me?
There is punishment, but not the sort of the one-dimensional kind of comic strip notion of the punishment.
In a sense, it could be conceived as even worse.
I mean, if you're going to have to, if you murdered, if you caused pain to someone else until you've had pain caused to you so that you know what it's like to be on the other, to have true empathy, true golden rule, do not do unto others as you would not have done unto yourself.
Do you know what it really feels like in another life, you know, within a life, in another life, reincarnationally, whatever it may be?
It seems like we're given an opportunity to experience enough that we can have true love and compassion for our fellow beings, and that takes a lot of living.
You can't always do it in one lifetime.
But to kill somebody else is to take their life away, the opportunities that they had up until then.
And it's one of the most tremendous no-nos you can do metaphysically, of course, spiritually, of course it is.
But I believe that...
Well, I think they're both essentially the same and that they're God or nature given and that we didn't give it to ourselves and so we shouldn't do it in either case.
It's a tremendous presumption to stop that continuum, that process, whether it's your own or somebody else's.
I do make a qualitative distinction between whether you're taking your own life or someone else's.
For me, it's a worse sin, if you want to put it, to take someone else's life, the presumption on another life force, another being, another evolving soul.
But they're an immortal spirit, and they're just not just their bodies, that you're ending the life of the body.
And so it's not death forever to them, in my frame of reference from the research I've done.
But to take your own life is to, in a sense, to kind of cop out of the process you were involved in, which was a learning and growth process, including as painful as it was, because sometimes the biggest challenges were dealt are the least easy ones.
And if we kept changing the channel, so to speak, or popping the pills every time it got difficult, we would keep avoiding the lesson learning and the soul growth that I believe we're here to do so that eventually we can help other souls and other beings, not kill them or ourselves.
Do you believe that we do come back, that there is reincarnation, that until we attain that perfection or that final graduate moment, we do keep coming back?
And He's an academic, deeply academic, as a matter of fact, and he's done collective studies, much of it coming from channeled material about the subject of death, life after death, and most specifically, suicide.
And we'll get back to Dr. Klimo in just a moment.
Once again, Dr. John Climo, Doctor, a couple of feedback messages from, you know, I get them as I go on here on the computer from the audience.
One, obviously, from Very Much a Christian.
Mike in Tampa, Florida says, morning earth, you people are too much, and I worry about how much either one of you knows about the Bible.
If you murder someone else and you sincerely repent, you can easily be saved.
If you take your own life, your chances of salvation are slim to none.
Well, I mean, the Bible is one source of information and guidance.
So is the Koran and the Talmud and so on.
And I think forgiveness and repentance and restitution are all very, very real and very important.
Things are not necessarily totally irrevocable.
Making a distinction that you can repent and be forgiven for killing someone else, but you can't do that if you killed yourself, I don't think it's quite as lopsided as that.
There's a metaphor that I thought of earlier when you said, you know, when I sensed in one of your responses, Art, that you sort of would like to think that people really do fry in hell very hotly if they kill somebody else, like the suicide bombers or whatever, as well.
And for me, I make the distinction of the relation between the death penalty and life in prison.
You know, like if somebody, if you really just want to get retribution to somebody and you want to just kill them, you know, let's put the drug in the vein and put their lights out.
And that's the worst thing we can do to them.
Well, what about the counter argument?
Well, let them stew in prison for the rest of their natural life and have to live with this for the rest of the world.
You didn't take their life away, but you left them with their life to deal with what they did, to never forget it.
And so, you know, which is the worst one to do?
Just pull the rug out from under them and cease of all consciousness and awareness and thought and reflection and possibility of anything happening from that versus that life in prison notion.
You obviously, having done all this collective work with channeling, must have some details about what happens to people on the other side who commit suicide.
After you die, there are certain experiences that you have, and we outline those categorically in the book.
If you happen to have killed yourself to get over there to the other side, there can be, let's say you were an atheist or didn't expect anything on the other side or expected only certain kinds of Old Testament kind of a thing or Koran thing.
Then there's a kind of a create your own reality for a while.
At least your beliefs will carry over there and you'll kind of tune to that possible scenario for a while.
But sooner or later, the larger reality, the larger transphysical reality will set in and you'll be sort of taught.
There are teachers there, there are spirit guides there as there are here, according to all this material.
But you tend to have a life review.
You tend to look back on your life.
You're given choices.
Do you want to maybe come back and try some of this again, again with kind of a veiling, an amnesic veiling, so you're not going to know it all when you come back in, but you're going to be faced with some of the same things again.
And maybe the next choice point, you won't take your own life.
You won't kill somebody else that time around.
What we haven't mentioned here is karma.
I mean, karma, I deal quite a bit in karma.
My co-author Pamela Heath and I deal with karma quite a bit because karma is another way of looking at the repercussions of your acts and how you're judged or do you judge yourself or does the universe do it or God or whatever.
And, you know, I believe in karma.
I believe there's evidence for karma.
And there's certainly a threat in the suicide aspect that you're given an opportunity to reflect on what you did and to make restitution in a way.
I worked with a dissertation with a student once on the area of reparative or restorative justice, which is a fairly new movement.
Rather than just punishing someone, throwing them into prison, whatever, you make them face their victim.
They have to face their victim and they have to make restitution of some kind.
They actually have to pay back in some kind of way, live with the results of what they did.
This is a good analogy for suicide and for the suicide bombers as well, I think.
And that seems to be a theme we're getting.
But the karma of it is you must deal with the repercussions of that act.
You don't get off easy, just get snuffed.
You don't have to not deal with it.
And in a sense, the empathy, the golden rule of it on down the line is part of how the universe seems to work in a spiritual manner, that you will set to Right the wrongs that you had done, and you have an opportunity to do that.
So, the caller in from the biblical frame of reference, I believe, was right.
But I believe that goes for the suicide, too.
Suicides can be very sad situations.
Often they come back, communicate back through a medium or channel to try to tell the story of why they killed themselves.
They didn't really want to hurt you or punish you by taking themselves of your life.
It was just too painful, or it was a mistake, perhaps.
They didn't mean to kill themselves.
And so they want to get the story back to you.
Please, can I have one opportunity to make one call back, not from prison, but from the afterlife, back to the earth side, because suicide is so unsettling once you've done it that you want to do something about what you've done, in a sense.
More times than not, a ghost, what we call a ghost, seems to be coming from a violent death or perhaps a suicide or an unexpected death or, I don't know, something like that.
And I'm sure your research has probably shown the same thing, yes?
It's value-laden, emotionally loaded, and it seems to make negative ripples in the force, so to speak.
And it sort of anchors you into the location of the trauma.
It's like a post-traumatic stress syndrome where you stick around the earth-level density in a way you otherwise wouldn't if it was more of a clean break, a clean death, and move on to the next thing.
There's much argument among those who study ghosts and the paranormal in general about, and this even extends to EVP, about whether what we're detecting, what we're seeing or hearing when we hear these unusual, inexplicable things are actually the spirit of a departed person or whether there's this tape-loop theory that life here on Earth does some sort of imprint that seems to last after you're gone,
and that it's not really the spirit of the departed person, but rather some sort of image of what was, just sort of endlessly repeating.
This is with regard to ghosts and poltergeists and apparitions, and also with regard to, I believe, mediumship and channeling, which is called the super ESP theory, that there is no survival of physical death, and that when somebody seems to be getting communication from the afterlife or from some other source, it's really coming from some giant holographic data pool.
And that we just tune into these things, and we tune into our own needs, our own meanings.
It's not random, totally, but there's another explanation, and that's just that we're capable of getting that information, although not from the purported source we would like to think it's coming from.
And that's an hypothesis.
That's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
And in the case of mediumship particularly, it's very hard to not hold that one open as a viable alternative to explain where these sources are coming from, except in some rare cases where the evidence seems to have had to have come from the source that it claims to be.
And like with cross-correspondences or evidence that nobody on Earth could know about, so you couldn't unconsciously have your own super ESP telepathy be picking it up from somebody on Earth or seeing it in a remote viewing from some place that's physically on earthly information.
And so you rule those out, and you really are left with the source that it claims to be.
So there are some like that, but not as many as I'd like to see, actually.
With respect to reincarnation, is there any way in your research to discern what percentage of people seem to reincarnate versus those who don't, whose soul never comes back again and goes to wherever the souls go?
Well, you know, if parapsychology and psychical research and consciousness studies and so on was given a bigger, was given any kind of presence and funding and teaching and turning out students and researchers in higher education, I could answer that a hell of a lot better.
But it's so marginalized and kept out of mainstream science and academia that you kind of screwed there.
And so people say, show me the evidence, God, show me the evidence, give me the proof, give me your data, give me the stats.
And I say, I'm sorry, but you keep us out in the garage like martyred disenfranchised people.
And it's very hard to do that avocationally.
But to answer your question, I would say that the research that we did with the suicide, for example, reincarnation didn't come up that much.
In other words, when people are talking about being on the other side as a result of their suicide, and in the larger literature where they're talking about being spirits who have survived physical death and they're no longer bodies and what's it like in the afterlife, which I've studied for decades before this book, that often you do not hear very much about reincarnation.
They talk more about what you go on to do on the other side further on down the line and you've had your shot at the physicality.
But from my experience, and I guess it's a choice on my part, I choose to believe that reincarnation makes more sense because to come back here and have a chance to take the course again, so to speak, and make different choices this time around, even though you're not going to be consciously remembering the earlier ones, you may be unconsciously or being able to make connection with that earlier information from a previous life.
No, if you're going to talk about a product of my research, it's that I'm surprised that there isn't more evidence in channeled and mediumship material, more evidence, more references to reincarnation.
If there's so much research on reincarnation, like Ian Stevenson's work at the University of Virginia.
There's very fine research done about reincarnation to make you really believe it, you know.
And I do, I do.
So, why isn't there more references to it, more talking about it from people in the afterlife where you'd think you'd hear more about it?
Like, I'm about to go back for another lifetime or whatever.
Well, most of the spirits that we seem to have connected to in these sciences done purposely for the purposes of the book that Dr. Heath set up at a better home, mostly, it was so soon,
it's been so soon since the experience, since the death, that there's still a certain bewilderment, a certain unsettledness, a certain lack of match between what they expected and what they're finding there.
And so there's a lot of unfinished business, kind of a muddled story, confusion.
One of the sources we did seem to get in touch with was two of the Chechen women who got on the planes with bombs.
And they were quite specific about a certain kind of an anger that they had about how the male leaders in the patriarchy of that there in Iraq had sort of propagandized them to do it, and it's their duty, and there's their duty, and so on.
And then they did take their own lives, and then after they did, they had really, shall we say, mixed feelings about the fact that it cost them their life to go along with the party line, so to speak.
Well, the suicide bomber thing is a current event thing.
If we could affect that deep fabric of why so many Islamic fundamentalists are willing to take their own lives in the name of a holy jihad, a holy war, where it does supposedly give you a loophole as a Muslim to take your own life and to take others' lives, all the Muslim scholars we studied and interviewed said, no, that's not true.
If you really look at the sources, Islam does not say that.
You never have a loophole to kill yourself or to kill someone else.
It's a big, big no-no.
But they still, in the name of jihad, do that.
And so we wanted to kind of do what we could to counter or to put some food for thought out there to the world and to the Middle Eastern world in light of that.
So that's the reason that part is in there.
But the suicide part in general, the reason for the book, and this is very quickly, was that I had a psychologist come referred to me who was going to kill herself.
She said, I'm complaining suicide.
I'm a Jewish atheist.
I'm a psychologist like you are, about my same age.
And she said, before I kill myself, though, I want to talk to you about what's going to happen after you die, especially given that I'm killing myself.
I'm not necessarily going to believe you or anything, but I'd like to talk to you about it.
We ended up talking for six months every week.
And the first thing I did before the first and second visit of hers, I went to my own library and pulled out a bunch of things and just made some photocopies of sources that claim to be suicides communicating from the other side, talking about the repercussions of their act and why you don't really escape anything.
There's no easy out.
There is something like karma.
Do try to stick with it on the earth plane if you at all can.
There is a larger spiritual reality, but there are negative repercussions to your acts.
If you do kill yourself or kill someone else and so on.
And I've got some of these together and gave it to her next week.
It's called bibliotherapy, where you have somebody read something and then you discuss it, you know, kind of focus them.
And I mentioned that to Pam Heath, who was a doctoral student of mine at the time.
And she kind of parked that in her thought.
And about a couple of years later, she came to me and she said, you know, remember that story you told me in class about that client that came to you?
And she said, well, you know, I've already been gathering some information on that.
And that became the beginning of the book.
In other words, the book is sort of like a book-length bibliotherapy of readings from the other side.
Like I did the little mini, you know, Seat of the Pants one for that psychologist.
By the way, I don't know whether what I did helped her or not or whether she killed herself or not because after six months, her mother had serious cancer and she had to go take care of her mother, which is kind of a cosmic joke or something.
She had to turn her attention from her own doing herself in to take care of her mother.
But I just wanted to throw in there for your listeners and for you that my whole background, my whole fabric of my being is as a creative person, as a poet and a painter.
That's the way I began this life.
And the reason that I got involved with channeling was I didn't know where the creative process came from, where the inspiration came from.
Morning, afternoon, or evening, whatever it is, wherever you are.
I am Art Bell.
My guest is Dr. John Climo, and we're talking about people who commit suicide.
And I wonder, the doctor said that specifically in those suicide cases that he's studied, the people on the other side appear confused or are in a state of confusion.
And I wonder if that differs from those who have died, for example, a very Natural death.
Once again, Dr. John Climo, Doctor, you did mention that suicides frequently seem to express confusion from the other side about the whole thing or even are upset that they were talked into doing something in the case of the suicide bombers.
I wonder how that compares to other spirits that perhaps have gone in a natural way.
Well, in general, those of us who are facing death, who haven't gone through the experience yet, the one-way valve of it, so to speak, we have our expectations.
A fundamentalist Christian has her expectations and so on and so on.
An atheist has his or her expectations.
And those expectations really are going to influence, often for a while, what you do experience on the other side or create confusion because you're not getting what you expected.
Or maybe they ease the transition that you start off sort of creating your own reality over there based upon your beliefs and expectations and so on.
And so if you're the confusion really was more the suicide bombers part of it, I mean, people can be confused who just take their own lives rather than die a natural death.
But if there's confusion, it's because the moment of death is such an irrational moment, often unless it's euthanasia or assisted suicide, where it's just it makes a certain amount of sense because of the physical pain and the quality of the life is pretty much over anyway.
And so a reasonable jury of your peers would sort of condone it more.
But in other situations where you're just a bad romance or you just life is too meaningless or you didn't get your way or something, and then you kill yourself, there's regret, there's the attempt to want to communicate back that, look, this is what happens.
Suicide is not a good idea.
Try to stick with it.
There's adjustment problems that occur.
Some people don't believe that they're dead.
It depends upon what you expect when you die.
When my father died, he came back a day or two later to me, surprised the hell out of me.
I wasn't really looking for evidence.
And he was an atheist.
He was a secular humanist.
Didn't believe there's anything after he died.
And he kind of came and stood by my bed and was kind of bewilderedly, because he was lost.
He was like in a lucid dream or quasi-lucid dream.
He said, where am I?
What's going on?
Because he didn't expect anything.
So there's kind of an adjustment period there.
And if you kill yourself, there's such an emotional turmoil, it's so loaded compared to regular death that if you believe there's something after you die and you kill yourself, there's still going to be extra dimension to that negative dimension of that experience than if you just believe there's something after you die and then you had a natural death.
Is there a kind of a window of opportunity very close to the death of a person, for example, who is close to you?
Is there a specific time window of opportunity?
It almost seems like there is.
When very close to the death, the person can momentarily come back, make contact, make it known they're close, or in the case of your father, actually appear.
And does that window of opportunity kind of disappear?
Many of the sources for this particular book were sort of one-shot books.
In other words, somebody killed themselves, communicated back to their mother, let's say, or to a loved one, and the surviving person self-published it, privately published it, made a one-shot book out of it, or did find a publisher for it.
But it's the story of that person's suicide and trying to come back and tell the story.
But as far as not having killed yourself yet and having that twilight area of being near death and having sort of maybe the paranormal around that atmosphere of opportunities, I forget the guy's Simon, no, not Simonton, the guy who's considered the godfather of biofeedback, a well-known scientist.
I'm slipping his name right now.
But he wrote a three-volume book called Alzheimer's Isn't What You Think It Is.
And his wife was dying of Alzheimer's.
And as she was slowly really deteriorating into death, she moved in and out of consciousness and lucidity.
She wasn't just dementia, totally.
And she would come back from the other side, so to speak, these excursions, these sort of near-death excursions, moving in and out of that, telling what was on the other side, communicating back from the other side in her own body like a channel unto herself from these excursions.
And he wrote the book about it, about his experiences with her, which was that twilight area of near the death, but not death yet, where she was privy to opportunities to kind of step back and forth across that line, which is quite relevant to the near-death experience literature,
which I think is some of the strongest literature itself, that we can have experiences of conscious experiences and sensate experiences, even though our body and our brain were brain dead or we're bodily dead or our heart stopped.
That's what I love about near-death experiences.
It puts the lie to the fact that consciousness is totally a function of brain-body.
A lot of different cultures have sometimes different, but often somewhat similar stories.
It's a matter of days, really, maybe a week, three days.
How many suicides or people who naturally died visit their own funeral, kind of hover out a body and watch the people there and have that opportunity to do it.
But then, how long do you stick around like an unsettled ghost before you move on, go toward the light, as the saying goes, you know?
And so, yeah, you have a there's a grace period when you can sort of stay or have permission to sort of be earthbound, to hang around a bit, some unfinished business, to see how people are handling your death.
And if there's the unsettledness of a suicide, then you may have, again, that kind of dispensation to communicate back or to appear in a loved one's dreams and to not quite let go yet because you have such remorse that you did rip yourself out of their life as well as out of your own life.
And so there's kind of a grace period.
But usually people don't hang around after they die, whether they kill themselves or not, for very long because it's a much bigger canvas we're operating on here, this multidimensional experiential domain.
And unless you're really stuck in a sense, you don't want to limit your palette of experience to hanging around.
I mean, when the Challenger astronauts died, I dealt with this in the channeling, the original channeling book, all the astronauts came back, who died on the Challenger crash, they all came back and communicated through three different mediums we were using.
It was really unsettlingly detailed, believe me.
And they had a period of time that they could communicate back, and then it sort of faded off, and there's been no more hearing from them.
Like they took care of that business.
They had that window of opportunity.
So how long is it?
It's anywhere from a couple of days to maybe a week or two, unless you have a special deal where you need to hang around longer, you need to become a spirit guide for someone else, you hang out for the rest of your loved one's lifetime, and you stay in touch with them in dreams or altered states or meditation or whatever.
Well, you know, I did my high school English paper for English course in high school in 1959 on Project Blue Book.
That's how far back my UFO research goes.
I've been with the Space Brothers and the UFOs and the who knows what for a long, long time.
It's in my blood.
It's following my bliss.
It's what I have piled by the bed, those kinds of books.
Well, you know, a certain percentage of the extraterrestrials, self-described or described by contactees or abductees or whatever, are physically based and physically embodied, and some are not.
And some who seem to be physically embodied can move in and out of physicality, kind of transubstantiation or materialization, dematerialization, moving through solid objects, all that kind of stuff.
A whole bunch of psi or paranormal phenomena associated with extraterrestrials.
And so the part of it that interests me is the interrelationship between where people go when they die and continue on in a trans or non-physical or subtle energy or higher frequency domain, experiential domain of embodiment, on the one hand, and those percentage of extraterrestrials as species or civilizations who have evolved to the point that they have that kind of embodiment or they dwell that kind of way.
So maybe the physical afterlife of human beings, I mean the physical, the transphysical afterlife of human beings, is not the same domain, paraphysical domain, as some extraterrestrials have their habitat in or their embodiment in.
But there seems to be a certain amount of overlap there.
And there's a little sub-literature that fascinates me where you'll see Jesus and it's always Malpha Centauri and your dead great grandmother all together looking out the porthole of some UFO.
You can't prove diddly squat about any of this, except it's interesting stories and food for thought.
And if any of the UFO stuff is trans-physical or has evolved technology to alchemically be able to move in and out of physicality and the zero-point energy vacuum and go beyond the speed of light and et cetera, et cetera, and we all are immersed in the glorified test tube of that we have physicality and we're consciousness immersed in a physical body and then we lose our physical body or when we dream we go into an altered state
or when we have an out-of-body experience or a new death experience and so on.
And then when we physically die, we enter another realm.
We don't become extraterrestrials, but we become terrestrial with regard to this terrestrial earth and people who are terrestrial bodies.
We become extraterrestrial.
And so there's a relationship between extraterrestrials who are deceased human spirits in an afterlife and extraterrestrials who are not of the Homo sapien lineage associated with this planet who may or may not have physicality to them.
So it's a fascinating larger canvas to look at and experience in.
Well, since you've done so much research on channeling, I wonder how many channelers have identified the spirit that they're channeling as at once physical human versus extraterrestrial.
Well, there's a whole in general, if someone is receiving communication from a deceased human spirit, a human spirit is not in physical form, that's usually called, that's the subset of channeling that's usually called mediumship.
So they're mediumistically experiencing or having communication with a human spirit.
Now, if you are having a channeling or mediumistic seeming experience with someone who's not human, who describes itself as not human, not of the human lineage, no matter what level of embodiment, then you're talking about a subset of channeling,
which is where the source, the identified self, a source, identified by the channel or identified by the source itself, is non-human, is extraterrestrial, is ultra-dimensional, is otherworldly, in another kind of a way than just being a surviving human spirit.
Well, today, I would say that it seems that the majority of the published channeled material is of extraterrestrial, purported extraterrestrial origin.
There's not the old-fashioned mediumship stuff of surviving spirits that you read about and hear of.
Oh, there is.
There is.
I'm sorry.
There's a lot of popular channels, popular mediums that have written books, and that keeps the story going of human beings communicating back from the other side.
But there's, I mean, I personally have a library of probably 200 books, different books, all of which are purportedly channeled from extraterrestrials.
Well, normally things like channeling are associated with delusional systems or audio hallucinations or hearing a voice in your head or automatic writing or dissociation, some kind of dissociation.
This part of you that's the source of it, but it's dissociated from your normal conscious waking self.
Bipolar, I think a relationship there is that when somebody, most creative people, by the way, have some degree of bipolar condition about them, I think.
I can speak for myself, too.
We have our high highs and our low lows.
When we get really high, we get very close to the sun.
We get, so to speak, you know, like Icarus.
We want to find the source.
We want to find the truth.
We're consumed with the excitation of being alive and having a consciousness trying to get in touch with a larger reality.
And we don't want to take our medication, thank you very much.
It's a high.
And yet then we crash down and then we don't even hardly want to be alive.
And a lot of suicides come out of bipolar disorder in the low part of it because it cycles so extremely.
And yet a happy medium, so to speak, a golden mean, is not always the vivacious living that you get in the mania part of the unipolar high.
And so when you get up high like that, you have delusions of grandeur.
You think you can do things that you've got a Superman complex or whatever.
You can fly, whatever the hell.
You think you can go beyond the normal constraints of a human being is limited to, that you would think you're limited to also when you're not in that high point.
And so a lot of some bipolar people, when they're in the mania part of it, maybe think they're channeling or may actually be channeling or kind of get to an extraordinary human potential state of self-actualization that they can do some of these things that they don't hide under a bushel or constrain themselves to before.
And in the depressed side, the low side, then a bipolar person might contemplate suicide.
And you have to stabilize with the medication or try to talk therapy to have them see hope in this stuff, suicide prevention activity.
In the sense that when you get to be a 64-year-old man or even 10 years ago, and I'm at a conference or something, and I get carried away, man, I'm not speaking in tongues or anything, but I get excited about what I'm talking about.
And I do kind of channel or give myself over to what Adolf Huxley called mind-at-large, the kind of the universal mind that comes through the reducing valve that each of us is or has.
And if you dilate that reducing valve, that aperture, if you could open it up more, you can kind of get more mind-at-large coming through you, kind of superconductingly flowing through you.
And it's a form of channeling, in a sense.
It's not an entity channeling.
It's channeling the universal or channeling God or your own higher self, your own greatest potential.
The angels of your better selves can come through yourself.
And if you do that in public and the camera's running or something, it can look socially or professionally inappropriate.
Well, I pray to be a vehicle and to be used and to be worthy of the opportunities to essentially model in human form what we human beings are capable of doing.
I have great hope for the human potential.
And that's in the face of some kind of takeover, abduction, kind of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories, you know, that we're just cattle or something.
I think we're really connected, potentially connected to the source.
We can get in touch with a guiding, transcendental presence and kind of omniscience and potential omnipotence, I think, down the line species-wise.
And that's why some of us need to kind of stand forth from the normal, dowdy, professorial, self-limiting role and kind of energy and kind of information processing to do something extraordinary, not braggadocio or anything, not delusional, but just to show that we can move the pace along faster without being labeled bipolar or manic or delusional.
I'd probably, it's a cheap shop, but I'd probably suggest that they read this book that Dr. Heath and I wrote because we're trying to really address exactly that.
It has a suicide prevention aspect to it.
Now, there's part of it where we quote physicians who say, you know, too many people who deal with euthanasian-assisted suicide from the medical end of it are not sufficiently informed about more recent pain sufficient that can fight pain.
In other words, the stick is other than morphine.
So if you're in ignorance or counseling someone to die because the physical pain is so awful or their useful life is just about over anyway, like Lou Gehrig's disease or something like that, which is a terrible, terrible thought, why not bid them off, break a champagne glass over their head, a bottle over their head and say, launch them into the next level, get them out of that painful body.
But some of the physicians are saying, no, no, don't do that.
That's too facile.
They can stick around and deal with this if we can deal with the pain in a way better than we have in the past.
But I don't know that that's been really proven that we have better pain medication.
Certainly, we're undermedicated in the United States when it comes to severe pain, when it comes to the final stages of life.
Most physicians would admit that.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
Your call is coming up next.
That would be me.
Dr. John Climo is my guest.
We're talking about suicide.
His book, actually, is suicide.
What really happens in the afterlife?
We'll get back to him in a moment.
Listen, I'd like to get email from you, all of you.
Would love to get email from you if you have a story that you think I ought to get out on Coast to Coast A.M. Hey, I'm all ears electronically, that is.
You can reach me in one of two ways.
I'm ArtBell at A-O-L.com, or better yet, really, because it's a little bit bigger, Artbell at MindSpring.com.
That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, Art Bell at Mindspring, M-I-N-D-E-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
Artbell at mindspring.com.
Write it down when you get a moment.
Jot me off a quick note.
We'll get back to Dr. John Klimo and your questions for him in a moment.
Just one very quick item before we go to the phones, and there are a lot of people waiting to ask you questions, Doctor.
Rob in Little Rock, Arkansas wants to know, hey, Art, what that other guy wanted to know, the other Fast Blast, was, when a mentally ill person dies, do they get better on the other side?
Well, I could think of no more rich place to get therapy, get healing, get alternative and complementary medicine for the soul, chicken soup for the complex spirits that we are, than over there.
Because there's such limitation and constraint and density and three stooges poking each other's eyes out over here on this earth plane that when you get over there, there's beings that have been around quite a while and don't even need physical bodies anymore necessarily.
And there's a lot of people ready to help and to heal and to point out meanings and to help one make one's own meanings in ways that it's hard to find people here.
You don't just turn on the bar stool in the bar and start up a conversation with someone and hope to get a lot of help.
And if you are physiologically imbalanced, brain chemistry or organic limitation to your information processing and your capacity to function psychologically and neurologically, you get over to the other side and you really don't carry all that over with you.
You had that in this lifetime.
That was what you were saddled with to experience and learn from.
You get over there, you can look back on, you do that life review again and look back on it and say, okay, I was bipolar there.
Oh, yeah, those little kind of surreal, super-real taste of evidence that, boy, this really has a convincing quality to it.
What you're describing is a classic textbook case of what happens to probably millions of people, although we hear from each other about it, but certainly hundreds of thousands, that we are visited in the discrete, altered state, naturally occurring, discrete, altered state of consciousness called sleep, called dream sleep, that that's a perfect window to be contacted, even if we're not naturally psychic or naturally channeled.
In this altered state of consciousness, we come out on another floor of the elevator.
We're tuned to another frequency domain where experiences can happen and where communication can happen and meetings can happen.
And so I think that you are describing having why he came to you.
If you didn't know him, you might have been just, it might have been opportune.
The light might have been on in your house, so to speak, figuratively speaking, and he came there.
I don't know the fine-tuning on that, but I believe you, from the sound of it, you did experience him.
And you might not write a book about it or get out of the house and get out of the agoraphobia, but maybe something, or you'll at least contact the thing about the brother-in-law or whatever.
You might be moved to do something that that dream starts a domino effect with because there's something that you know in your bones is exceptionally real and convincing that you know from your own lived experience.
And that's how most people who experience the paranormal and the non-ordinary, they don't need data.
I listened to George's show on July 7th with guest Pamela Ray Heath with great interest.
And the question I'm about to ask is one I fastblasted to you earlier, but I don't know if you had time to read it, and I'm sort of dying to know.
What would your guest advise to a person who, and actually what happens to a person who commits suicide as a way of seeking revenge on a person who wrongs them?
So for example, the person says, oh, I'll show this person regret and bang.
Doctor, would you think that people who do the kind of thing you just described are probably believers that it's a big blank, that there's nothing further at all?
Well, in that book that Pam and I did, I asked the question, the thought experiment, what if we knew on planet Earth, like tomorrow morning, somehow it happened, that there was irrefutable proof that we survived physical death and that there is something like karma, or at least the survival of physical death.
How would it change life on Earth for those of us still here?
And in the case of being so angered, so vengeful, that you kill yourself to get back at somebody, to do the ultimate withholding, so to speak, of love and presence, then does that mean that you didn't think there was anything after or that you don't give a hoot what's after, that you were so consumed by the pain of that moment that it blows past any concern about repercussions or what's going to happen after that?
I think it's a mixed bag.
Some people do that punishment thing, taking their own life, knowing there's something after that, but what trumps it is the immediate emotional moment.
And in other cases, I don't think they think there's anything else.
First, Art, I'd like to say congratulations to you and your wife and new family, and all the best to you.
You're in my thoughts and prayers all the time because I've been where you are.
But that's not why I called.
I'd like the doctor's opinion about something that I had gone through, which was I had witnessed a presence, an entity, a ghost, and it actually talked to me without talking to me.
Well, I mean, this sounds kind of clear that he was being engaged in a communication.
He tuned into somebody who was waiting for someone to join him, sounded like.
And why he was the recipient of it, if he might not know the spirit or the still-living person, I don't know.
Just like the earlier one, the agoraphobic woman with the astronaut dream.
But there's not really anything to explain there, particularly, I don't think, except again, in a somewhat altered state of consciousness, we open ourselves to tuning to other channels, other frequencies, other wavelengths of the multidimensional universe's possibilities and communicative interactionism and presences of other consciousnesses and seats of consciousness.
And once you've experienced it, it's very hard to have somebody disabuse you of the fact that, goddamn, that happened.
And it's realer than real very often.
And it does seem to attest to the fact that some of us are on this side and some of us are on the other side.
And he seemed to be privy to one person communicating to him about another person.
And then there seemed to be verified afterwards that there was a smooth death into it to join.
By the way, it just made me think that with the extraterrestrial connection and the channeling and so on, that as you know, Art, and many of your listeners know, that the communicative modality of choice for most extraterrestrials in abduction and contactee cases is telepathy.
And even though we're not normally psychic, abductees and contactees, we seem to, in that sphere of influence, we seem to be able to automatically be telepathic.
And so we all potentially have this capacity.
So whether it's a telepathic connection across dimensionality or between life and death or between different kinds of beings or densities or modes of consciousness, like with extraterrestrials, I think it's just part of a larger picture of reality that enough of us are experiencing and more and more of us are experiencing that sooner or later it's going to contribute to a paradigm shift that eventually it'll back into slowly and reluctantly our sciences and our academic and intelligentsia community who will have to admit that there's something to
all these anomalies, these inexplicable things, because too many people are experiencing them at a level that is so, so meaningful and so undeniable.
Well, I think it's very important that you have people to talk with and me, too.
I mean, I'll be in your life any way I can if you want to continue to talk about these things.
You know, it's lonely to have neither parent in your life.
I still have my mother, but she's pretty far gone, and my father's dead.
And sometimes we're given experiences, especially in the dream state or in the unusual experiences that we don't know what to do with because science, the church of religion doesn't tell us.
The church of science doesn't tell us what to think.
This is Coast to Coast AM with 24 time zones worldwide.
It's always coming up on 2 a.m. somewhere, isn't it?
Morning, everybody.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Dr. John Klimo, and his book...
And something that caller said called a question to mind, and that is, I wonder if people, under some circumstances, decide to die.
I think it's true.
I think they do.
And I think I have evidence, and we'll be right back.
As with that caller we had a little while ago, you so frequently hear, I mean, we hear all the time that a husband or a wife will pass away, and then in very short order, the partner also passes away.
It happens very quickly, and it happens very frequently.
And when my wife passed away, I went into kind of a shock state, and I had already lost some weight, which I had wanted to lose for my back, but I'm telling you, I went from 240 pounds down to around 200, and then remote passed, and I quickly slid to 185.
And even after I got here to the Philippines, I still kept going down, and I got down below 180, and I began to scare myself, and things got better for me.
Life took on reason to be, and I'm back up now to around 190.
But I wonder, Doctor, if you think it's true that people actually make perhaps a subconscious decision to die and then do it?
As a psychologist, I've been involved with doctoral students who've done research, and I've done my own research about what's called the higher self, a part of us that's in us that's more than just our ego or our normal personality or our bodies.
And that higher self part of us is maybe connected to a larger wisdom and a larger understanding and a larger connectedness to the larger reality of things.
And it's that part of us that might act in a kind of bittersweet way sometimes.
Like the higher self says, okay, the normal, embodied, day-to-day me, there's really no much more point to be here this time.
I think I'm going to come back next time as an Indian, or I'm going to go over to the other side for a while and cool my heels or whatever.
But you're not just the part of you that's sitting here listening to me on the radio.
And so that might be the frame of reference or the locus of decision-making for some people.
We say the unconscious.
Well, the Freudian unconscious or even cognitive psychology's notion of the unconscious is kind of diffuse and limited and not very well understood.
But for me, the higher self is more like the angels of our better selves, the kind of the God within or the transpersonal part of us that may make those decisions.
And it may have an omniscient or a larger understanding of things.
It may be up in the kind of outer body, so to speak, almost like your spirit guide under yourself that's looking at what's going on in this life and can see up ahead, can precognitively see when it's going to happen, how many more breaths you have, how much more work you have to do, like a near-death experience person in the near-death experience being told by a spirit, you're not ready.
It's not your time yet.
You've got more to do.
You've got to go back to the office or the schoolroom.
By the way, Art, your woman screener is very helpful and very courteous.
Very helpful.
I'm a third-generation medium, and I also have a background in medical writing, so I'm kind of left-brained, too.
But I've had a lot of experience in working with my clients communicating with suicides who talk, well, they don't exactly talk about reincarnation, but they give me information about their future plans for coming back.
Not all of them are able to do that, but it's not unusual.
What I've found is they don't consciously, or let's say there's a feeling to me that they are not allowed to actually talk about this.
Maybe they just don't want to, I'm not sure, but I get more of an empathic or let's say a psychic sense.
It's like what they're not saying that's important.
And there's one particular instance where they seem to be mildly obsessive or very intensely focused on a particular child relative usually.
That's my clue that this is the one that they're going to be coming back through, that this child will be either a parent or a grandparent to them.
And so they, in a way, act as a spirit guide to that child and kind of guiding them into the through their lifetime to the point where that child can be in the right place to produce a body or maybe the next generation that will produce the body for this individual.
And in one case, this gentleman had committed suicide at 24.
He left a four-year-old daughter behind.
And I was talking, doing the reading for his sister and his mother.
I knew nothing about any of this.
It's just that, you know, he came through.
And I thought it was interesting after the fact that it was mentioned to me that he had a four-year-old daughter left behind because he kept talking about the two nieces that he left.
One in particular he was very focused on.
And in this case, I got the sense that, like I said, another thing about the confused people, when they cross over and they're confused, Alzheimer's or dementia, I kind of disagree with you on that one because it's not unusual in my experience that those who've had a little bit of dementia or even severe Alzheimer's, when they cross over, they're still confused for some time.
And I've had contact with, if you want to call it other souls who work with these people To help them remember, they actually almost do therapy on the other side, talking with them, guiding them around to help them to remember about where they came from on that other side, because we all originate over there anyway.
To help them to remember, they that's that kind of thing.
The Alzheimer's case I referred to was a particular case study, a three-volume study of a husband and wife, where she had already had tastes of the other side and was prepared to go over there.
That's unusual.
I agree with you that often in cases of murder as well as suicide, there's a rest period.
You're kind of hospitalized.
You're kind of wakened with warm milk and cookies and gently brought back like, hey, there is survival.
You are still here.
And often the etheric double, the higher organizational fields that are responsible for the physical, when the physical is so blown apart or is so traumatically murdered or otherwise taken or ravaged by disease, it does take some reparative time on the other side.
I absolutely agree with that.
But I do want to point out at the same time, I'm saying all this, that if you're still on the line, that's invaluable what you have to offer.
And I wish we had Dr. Heath and I had you as a resource also, because you're that wonderful combination of thoughtful and clear-headed and also have the capacity to mediate communication and have insights of a psychic and mediumistic nature.
This program of yours is the best I've ever heard, so God bless you and thank you all.
I just have a comment and a sort of question.
My comment is that I have a brother who is schizophrenic, and years ago I came to realize through him that the voices that he and I assume a lot of other schizophrenics hear certainly are real voices that come from the other side, whereas a lot of medical doctors think it's just quote-unquote voices in their head.
The question I have, and it's something that may not be definitively answered, is that a dear woman that I know who was a wonderful artist, and I just adored her, committed suicide over a year ago.
And I happen to have met since then a woman who is psychic.
And I'm wondering whether I should try to contact her or not.
I almost feel like it's selfish of me to do that, and I'm wondering, should I maybe just pray on her behalf?
The reason I'm a little concerned about trying to contact her is that I might get involved in something and she needs to go grow on her own and I need to grow on my own.
And incidentally, my schizophrenic brother had told me probably 25 years ago that when you leave to the next life, you're going to be back in class again.
I've worked with clinicians, other clinicians who began as experts on multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, sub-altered personalities, supposedly self-generated, who have reached the point that they are convinced that at least some of the sub or altered personalities of some of their clients are separate autonomous beings who usually identify themselves that way.
And Ralph Allison is one who's a leading researcher in this area who eventually got out of the clinical area and pathologizing people, psychopathologizing people, in order to use mediums to communicate to what he used to think were part of his clients, but are really separate.
Wilson von Dusen is another mental health professional who saw that a lot of the state mental hospital lifetime clients, incarcerated people, their stories of entities and of voices that they took to be separate from themselves was very similar to Swedenborg's own experiences of being taken out of body toward the end of his life and shown heaven and hell and purgatory,
fascinating material.
And that really many of those sub-personalities supposedly were really communications from the spirit realm.
And that some schizophrenic and other hallucinated or Claire audiently heard voices or psychic beings that don't have embodiment, physical embodiment, are really it's not pathology.
And schizophrenia can be can look like a negative thing to be saddled with, and it is in many ways, but in a sense they're more porous.
There's more of a permeable membrane.
They don't have selective capacity to damp down the incoming booming, buzzing confusion from their own unconscious and also sometimes from an external realm beyond their own psychic material.
I was listening to Art earlier talking to me, and this has been a burning question.
My grandma died about 14 years ago.
And Art brought this up earlier about his wife dying and him almost committing suicide.
It's a whole long story of what happened.
After my grandma died, I was closer to her than I were to my parents.
They lived across the street from me.
And anyway, like I say, that's a whole nother long story.
But I was really close to my grandma, and after she died, I contemplated the thought of killing myself.
But the fear wa in me was that in the reincarnation thing, that I might miss getting to see her once I died.
Okay, you get what I'm trying to ask there?
If I killed myself, then and I even have that fear right now that, say, I'm 47, and I've got friends that have died already that are my age and whatnot.
And my fear is that, you know, 14 years later, has she been reborn somewhere, possibly?
Or what's my chances of being able to see my grandma in the afterlife?
She might have moved on and wherever she is and no longer in contact back with the earth plane or with you.
But love really conquers all.
It is the key link, I think, in the larger reality.
We are going to reunite with loved ones.
It may not be immediate in the next lifetime.
But I do believe that.
That's my great wish, and from a lot of the evidence I get from this kind of research, that it's not forever irrevocably severed and kept apart.
So I think you can probably plan on that, but exactly when it is, but if we're supposedly immortal spirits or something like that, then we can have the patience for it.
By the way, the previous caller, when he said about should I be contacting this person on the other side, I think it's important.
I think the prayer, having good positive thoughts, meditating, sending love would be about the limit of it, because you can't get caught up in that kind of this life, next life project, and it can pull you away from this life's work.
If it's possible to opt out of this earthly plane, then it should also be possible to opt out of the whole shebang, you know, to escape the cycle of births and deaths completely and gain just pure oblivion, which you're calling the big fat void, if that's what you want.
I question whether you could totally opt out of everything, as you say.
I think you can get out of the karmic or the reincarnational wheel cycle by reaching what's called enlightenment or actually no longer needing to incarnate or go through this trial and error, soul, slow growth learning, because you sort of arrived.
But that's not going into oblivion.
That's going into maybe connection to the kind of God consciousness or having arrived and then really being a bodhisattva or a helper to others in the flesh or out of the flesh.
And I think that's what we're all bound for eventually, evolutionarily.
But to opt out of everything and just say, I don't want reincarnation, I don't want anything.
I want to choose that.
That's a form of maybe metta or ultimate suicide.
That I don't want any more chances.
I want to opt out of everything, everything, everything.
And I don't think you can do that if you're kind of part of God in human form, in the flesh or out of the flesh, whether you have that option because God isn't going to kill itself or part of itself or allow that to happen to its own offspring, so to speak.
I wanted to ask the doctor, he said back in the beginning of the interview, there were some, he experienced some channeling instances that he believed to be authentic.
And I guess the rest of his experiences of channeling instances, he couldn't really put them in the file as authentic.
But I wanted to ask, doctor, what specifically led you to your belief that these instances were authentic?
Messages that seem to be evidence that they're from the sources that they claim to be from, which is normally mediumistic, because how do you know whether it's a Pleiadeum that's really talking or not?
How are you ever going to know that, really, at least at present?
But with a discarded human spirit, if it identifies itself and you knew it when it was alive or it gives you detailed information that only it could know and nobody else could know, maybe you didn't even know, that seems to be rather evidential that it's a mediumistic form of channeling that has proof of survival of physical death.
But a great deal of channeling, I think the jury just stays out, as I put it.
I stay agnostic about it.
I'm not going to say it isn't or it is, and we don't have the ultimate litmus test to prove it one way or the other.