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June 12, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:58
Edition 642 - Fr. Nathan Castle Returns
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
I hope that everything is good with you.
It is a beautiful sunny day in the first week of June here in the United Kingdom.
And actually, it's moving into the second week of June now as I record these words.
But it's rather lovely outside and we've got about 22 degrees Celsius, which is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on which system of measurement you use.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I'm going to be doing a couple of shout-outs here.
And, you know, please note that if you sent me an email, I do get to see all of the emails as they come in.
I know sometimes I don't get to see every message that comes in on a Sunday night.
And I'm trying to improve that.
The TV show is much, much more complicated to do.
And there are a million things going on to keep it all going.
So that's partly an explanation and partly an excuse.
But I do have a feed of all of those things.
But just because the video aspect of it tends to dominate everything now, that's one of the reasons.
And a couple of people have asked me why the music that I used to use, the bumper music, Art Bell style that I used to use on the show, no longer appears.
It's simply because that is the way that the TV station wants to do it.
They've told me that all music is banned effectively, as are all recorded interviews.
So I've got to do everything live, and it's got to be done in precisely the way that their news-based shows are done.
Those things may change in the future, but at the moment, that's how we're working.
So those are the answers to those two questions.
And thank you very much for supporting the TV show.
Please continue to do that.
But of course, the bedrock of everything I do is the podcast that I record sitting here in my own home.
And, you know, I've been doing that now, what, 16 and a half years nearly.
It is a labor of love.
It is something that has driven me for all of that time.
And I'm really pleased that it's kind of clicked with you.
Thank you to my webmaster, Adam, for helping me out always, getting the shows out to you, doing the website, and solving any technical dilemmas that we might have with it, because I don't understand any of these things.
Couple of shout-outs.
Vicky, nice to hear from you again.
Steve in Kidderminster, near Worcester, where I used to work, at Radio Wyvern, as you know, Steve.
Grant in Vancouver, good to hear from you.
Anthony, nice to hear from you.
I sent you an email, Anthony, about your question to do with Kenneth Arnold and the dawning of the age of ufology.
I was interested by an email that I got from Martin.
Martin says, I was interested to hear last week as we are the mainstream media of U.S. forces firing upon UFOs on a regular basis in recent times.
This was what, of course, Jeremy Corbell told me, and that went around the world news-wise at the time, a couple of weeks ago.
It was my understanding that such activity was banned after incidents in Vietnam with enemy helicopters, quotes.
One event had a PBR, patrol boat river or patrol boat brown water, being harassed by enemy helicopters.
So the PBR crew opened fire with a heavy caliber machine gun.
Nothing touched the enemy helicopter, but a shower of their own bullets came back at them from this UFO.
In addition, when phantom jets were sent out from Da Nang and fired upon said enemy helicopters, the missiles ended up in the bow of an allied ship, badly damaging that ship.
Now, I don't know of the veracity of this story at all.
Martin sent it to me, and I'm passing it on to you.
I'm interested to hear it, and I need to look a little bit more into it.
If you know any more about that story from the Vietnam War, I would be interested in hearing it.
Martin asks, why the change of strategy?
Are the U.S. military spoiling for a fight?
Are we being told the truth about these attacks, as he called them?
Martin, I'm not sure.
You've given me a lot of food for thought.
Thank you for that.
If you want to make contact with me, I see all emails as they come in.
The website is theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody who's been on before.
Father Nathan Castle, Catholic priest, and a man who deals very much with matters between this life and the next one.
You may remember some of the stories that he told in our first encounter here online.
I think he's got updates on a lot of that material and some new material this time.
So we'll connect with him, Father Nathan Castle, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Like I said, thank you very much for being there for me through all of the good times and all of the more difficult times.
Supporting me through the first tortuous weeks of the TV show has been great.
It's been nice to know that you are there.
You know, I kind of sometimes feel that when I'm sitting there in front of the bright lights on the camera, which is just so not me.
I just kind of feel like I'm supported at times.
So thank you very much indeed.
All right, let's get to the guest.
The return of Father Nathan Castle.
Nathan, thank you very much for coming on.
How are you?
I've never been better.
How about you?
Well, I think, you know, it's summertime here in the United Kingdom, as it is indeed where you are in the States, Nathan.
I'm always happy in the summer.
I guess that's where I'm at.
All right.
Yeah.
I haven't spent very much time in places that are cloudy and damp, which I think is that's the impression I have about the UK.
I've spent a lot of time around Boston and the northeastern U.S., and I know that people absolutely love the summer there and savor every minute of it because they know it's brief.
Well, no, that's true.
And I've spent a certain amount of time in Boston and across the river in Cambridge, and it's very similar to here, actually.
The winters are cold and crispy, a little crispier there, I think, in Boston, and the summers are pretty nice.
And I think that's what I'm doing.
Well, I live in Tucson, Arizona in the desert, so I get a lot of sunshine.
But right now, I'm on vacation, what you would call holiday, in San Diego, which is just gorgeous this time of the year.
I love San Diego.
It is a place that I want to return to.
And as I think my listeners have been bored with many times, it is my favorite city on earth.
Is it really?
Well, it has plenty to recommend it.
Yes, no, especially the arty little place just north of San Diego, La Jolla.
I'm not very far From there, I'm probably about a 10-minute drive from there.
Home of all the artists and the seals and the dolphins as well.
Now, Nathan, let's get to it then.
For listeners who haven't heard you here before, talk to me about you.
Some of the people hearing that I'm speaking to you and you being what you are, a Catholic priest, they will think that we're going to talk about exorcisms, which we aren't necessarily.
No, I'm not an exorcist, and I don't, you know, that's just not my topic.
No, it's true.
I'm a Catholic priest.
In fact, today is the anniversary of my ordination, 37 years ago today.
Congratulations.
So I was waking up this morning thinking of my parents and that day and all of that, the way that you do down memory lane.
I'm a Dominican, and I've been a Dominican 42 years, almost 43, and a priest for 38 of those, 37 of those.
Most of my career has been as a campus minister.
So I've served at university churches most of my life, including 12 years at Arizona State University in Phoenix and seven at Stanford.
I'm currently living at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
But this kind of work that we're talking about today is a large part of my ministry now.
In the 37 years that you've done the job, how do you think it's changed?
The demands upon you.
I know that you've spent a lot of time around students, and that's a formative time for them.
They have changed undoubtedly in 37 years, but how has the work changed?
Well, I can't help but notice the disaffiliation from organized religion, the Catholic Church, and others, at least in the U.S. where I live.
So there are fewer students involved in the ministry.
On the other hand, they have to be much more intentional about it.
There's nothing automatic about going to church.
It's more of a choice than I think it was when I was a child.
When it seemed like everyone went to church on Sunday.
That's one thing.
I'm excited at the confluence of, are you familiar with quantum physics, the basics of the quantum hypothesis?
I am.
In fact, I was talking about the idea of the notion of a quantum internet only a few nights ago on TV.
Yes.
And then there's an emerging field called quantum theology, starting with the basics of what quantum posits matter and reality to be, and then going back into our theological tradition and thinking about things from that different angle.
So I enjoy being involved with scholars and just people who have experiences that are mystical.
And the whole of the quantum world seems a mystery to me, just a marvel.
Now, isn't it interesting that you basically said there, and I think statistics, whichever side of the religious sphere you're in or on, statistics show that fewer people are attending church.
That's certainly a fact in the United Kingdom.
And yet, and I know that exorcism and this kind of thing is not what you do, a piece that I read in Newsweek seven days, 10 days ago was saying that despite the fact that fewer people seem to be going to church these days, and that's going to be telling us something, maybe they continue to have a faith, maybe they haven't got a faith, maybe they're time poor, maybe they're faith poor, I don't know, but whatever, that's the fact.
But more and more people, according to this piece, are contacting priests and asking and contacting people of religion and asking for help with alleged possession.
Why do you think that in this day and age, more people consider themselves to be possessed by something?
Well, I'd only be guessing, but really, even modern psychology is only about 130 or 140 years old as an academic field.
It's still, you might think of it as still in its infancy.
And there's still, and I deal a lot in the States with people that have maladies of a psychological and sometimes spiritual nature that overlap.
But a lot of them don't really have access in the U.S. anyway, maybe it's different in your healthcare system, but here coverage for mental health is really poor.
And anybody middle class or lower has poor access to it.
So oftentimes religious and spiritual leaders get invited into people's psychological and spiritual pain because they have no access to anything else.
And there is a lot of overlap there.
A man who was a regular guest on Art Belzo shows in the United States, Father Malachi Martin, the late Father Malachi Martin, and he was an exorcist and he did deal with what he called Lucifer and the problems that people had.
But he said the first thing that we ever do as a team, if ever we get involved with somebody who believes they're possessed or dealing with something that is dogging them, we have to give them a full psychological analysis first.
So I take your point that these great numbers might indicate that there is more psychological trauma out there, not necessarily more demonic possession.
Yes.
And then the pandemic, now two and a half years of it and the isolation that it's caused has just exacerbated a lot of stress and sorrow and all the death and the inability to have proper funerals and to gather, to share grief.
But there's a great trauma load in the world that gets expressed in lots of different ways.
And there seems to be so little in the way of outlet for a lot of people.
You know, a lot of us, including myself, were incarcerated for the best part of two years during that period.
And even me, I'm pretty robust and I'm pretty self-sufficient.
But by the end of the first year, I was starting to have, you know, I was starting to have a wobble, as we call it here in the United States.
It was starting to be difficult for me.
So I can quite understand that.
But I just wondered what your take may be on this.
You're not an exorcist.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I don't do exorcism.
I'm a priest.
So, just about any priest, we all have to deal with the dark side, you know, generally.
And I have, I've had some exposure to working within that realm.
But the work that I do that's described in my two books is not that.
It's really more helping people that died sudden, violent deaths.
What is the dark side?
Well, that's a great question.
Let me see how I can answer that on the fly.
I believe that God, that the universe is a created thing.
It didn't create itself.
I believe it's created by a vastly intelligent, loving creator.
And I believe that everything that was created was good.
But one of the goodness, one of the things, the goods that's built into the universe, at least for us, is our ability to freely choose.
And we can choose to love and we can choose to be selfish.
We can create joy.
We can create woe.
And some intelligent beings who are created well are behaving badly and making life miserable for themselves and those around them.
I don't want to get into a debate about who and what created the universe and everything in it, because that will divert and distract us.
But, you know, there will be people listening to this who don't believe that take on it.
They believe that we evolved.
We weren't created.
So, you know, I just have to say that because I will be getting emails from those people during this.
Well, I don't believe it needs to be one or the other created.
I've been evolving since I came out of the womb.
I'm still the same guy, but I'm very different from than I was 66 years ago.
Right.
So basically, we're talking about the debate that will rage on forever, I think, about the origins of it.
Like you say, quite rightly, and brilliant answer, if I may say so, that everything is evolving.
We all do.
So this planet and everything on it is an evolving thing.
And I'm more, my father used to say I'm a lover, not a fighter.
I'm not really interested in arguing with people.
You asked what I think and believe, and so I told you.
That's what I do.
No, that's fine.
And, you know, my listener needs to accept everything that is said here on the basis of the conversation that we're having, I think.
Okay.
Well, everybody's free, believe or, you know, think as they please.
It's, you know, we one of the things I've enjoyed about being in this milieu of people that are interested in consciousness studies and near-death experience and the work that I do is that we listen to each other.
And that's respectful.
Yes.
And we're not going to get anywhere if we don't.
You know, not everybody in this world, Nathan, seems to operate that way, but if they did, it would be a whole happier place.
Okay.
Do you consider yourself then, on the basis of our first conversation, which I greatly enjoyed and I found greatly moving, as you might recall, do you consider yourself to be a man who intercedes between this life and what may come next?
Yeah, if I can define it, the word intercede or intercessor, intercessory, that's part of Catholic lingo.
And I grew up in a Catholic home.
And for me, interceding is praying for anybody else, which I woke up doing this morning.
Any of your listeners that have some sort of spiritual practice that involves directing goodness towards someone else is an intercessor.
At least that's the way that I understand the word.
So, yes, I intercede a lot for a lot of things.
Some of it is the afterlife stuff, but when I pray for a loved one who's ill, I'm interceding for them.
We talked about your first book, and I found the stories in it incredibly moving, and they were of a nature that I hadn't heard before and told in a way that I hadn't seen written before.
And there are many stories in that first book that stuck with me.
In particular, the story of the young man, Ray, who had found himself, and I'm doing this mainly from memory, involved in a garage accident and a car caught fire.
He was very young and he died, but he died with unresolved issues here.
And that's where you came in.
Yeah, in fact, I have that on Audible.
We recorded it as an audio book and I was listening to it as I was making my way in the shower and so on this morning.
Yeah, he was the very first one of these about 25 years ago, person who came in a dream with a violent story in a dreamscape.
And I said at the time that most priests have had to keep a pager on the nightstand and take their turn in case there's an emergency call at a local hospital.
And so sometimes you have to, you're wakened by a beeper and suddenly you have to shake yourself into awareness and get details, you know, the room number and the person's name and so on.
It felt like that.
He came in a dream and showed me what you just described, being on a vehicle on fire and dying and screaming.
And man, it just felt like I've just been invited into something.
I don't know what.
So that's how this got started.
And did you, I probably asked you this the first time around, but did you verify that Ray actually existed?
I haven't.
And I'm wondering if as I start the third book, I don't do this on my own.
I believe I'm a follower of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and I wait to be told where to go next.
So it's not just me as an entrepreneur making my way in the world.
I'm waiting to be told.
And that's the question I'm asking now is, do you want me to start doing that?
And I haven't got the answer yet.
But the dreams are continuing.
Always.
Yeah.
I still get about one a week.
So four or five a month.
Wow.
Can you recall?
Can you tell me what the last one was?
Yeah.
I just finished it.
I met with a couple of prayer partners on Zoom over the weekend.
The most recent one was a young man in, I'm going to tell you this one, a young woman who was uncommon.
She died of ALS.
You familiar with that illness?
Sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease?
Yes, I am aware of that.
I think we call it something else here, but yes, I am aware of it.
Ameliotropic lateral sclerosis.
I'm impressed with myself that I can rattle that off.
As one who uses words for a living, I'm here to tell you I'm impressed too.
Well, thank you so much.
It's a horrible disease.
It's degenerative.
And this young woman got it at early onset at 23.
I'm going to be careful because I haven't gotten her permission to tell her story publicly.
And that's a discipline that I try to stick to.
But without disclosing too much, she explained that even though hers was a degenerative disease, the end of it was violent because it involves racking coughs, not being able to be pretty much drowning in one's own spittle.
How awful.
Yeah, it is awful.
And so she said the leaving was much more difficult than she ever would have wished and that it had a trauma attached to it, but she moved through it.
And part of her moving through it was availing herself of myself and my prayer partners and finishing a passage.
Right.
So how did she, and I guess this would go for all of them, but how did she come to find out about you?
I mean, that's the most interesting thing.
I started asking that 25 years ago.
I asked Ray the very first one, how did you find me?
And he said, I don't know.
Somebody brought me here.
I quit asking, frankly, but I remember once hearing your light was on, which I thought was kind of intriguing.
Well, that's rather lovely that you're kind of like one of those motels in America.
You know, our light is on.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, the Motel 6.
Yeah, exactly.
We'll leave the light on for you.
And then others, this one woman who is in, I think in book two, Wilhelmina, she died in the 1950s.
And she at that time, people did a lot of shopping from catalogs.
In the States, JCPenney and Sears had these.
I remember from my childhood, great big, thick things that came in the mail.
And you just paged through them and ordered, wrote down a bunch of numbers and put it in the mail.
Sure.
I mean, we have that kind of thing here in the United States, but here in the United Kingdom, but in the U.S., if you think of the physical distances involved and maybe the business that you're dealing with is in Detroit and you're in Alaska, then the only way to be able to get something from them is to get them to ship it to you.
And the only way to find out about it is through a catalogue.
That's why catalogs were so big.
Sorry, I'm just explaining for my UK listener.
Yeah.
Well, and that was, you know, those were still popular when I was growing up.
Anyway, this woman said when it came time for her to make her passage, they gave her a catalog that she could page through and that she was paging through it to see how she might proceed.
And she came upon me.
And she said, oh, there's a Catholic priest that does this.
I was a Catholic.
I think I'll choose him.
Okay, so they're finding you, whether it's through the CS catalog or whatever it is.
Sometimes their guardian angels will say, if you don't mind, I'd like to just make this decision on your behalf because I think I know what's best.
And sometimes they'll agree to that.
But their angels won't boss them around.
They do have their own freedom and will.
Right.
So the normal, you believe that the normal, and many people believe that the normal way of things is that we pass here and some people, as you rightly say, pass peacefully and other people die in traumatic and violent and difficult ways.
But the way of things would be to transition to whatever comes next.
And we can talk about that too.
But that has to be done with your consent.
And some people, because they have issues, knowingly or unknowingly withhold that consent.
And is that where you come in to help them through?
Yes, except that if you think of a healthcare continuum, like all the way from maybe an emergency room through surgery and intensive care and a private room and through therapies of different kinds until you're really healed and ready to go out the door of the hospital, on that last day in the hospital, there'll be some discharge staff.
There'll be someone who makes sure you understand your medications, when your next therapy appointment is, who's your ride, will you be well fed and clothed, so on.
I believe that's where we fit in.
We're at the end of a therapeutic continuum and people no longer need to be at this level and are ready to advance.
And we help them do that.
Right.
And without the involvement, I won't say intercession because that's a specific term, without the involvement of you or somebody like you, that can't happen?
I don't know.
I just know, you know, what I've been exposed to.
If not me, someone like me, and I've met as I've done more programs like yours and my story gets out there, different people contact me who also have this gift or this role, this responsibility.
And it gets played out in a lot of different ways.
And they're not all Christian people.
They're just, death is very equalizing.
Everybody dies.
And apparently this kind of work manifests in lots of different ways.
And so I've spoken with mostly people I haven't met around the world who have something analogous to this that they do.
You're very comfortable with it.
I've been doing it for 25 years, so I've gotten increasingly comfortable with it over time.
And I've met such nice people.
And one way to describe the Christian church's mission is called the Easter Proclamation.
Have you ever heard that phrase?
No.
It's simply the sentence, Jesus is risen from the dead.
And properly understood, we're not just happy for this one person in history, but we believe that he's showing us who and what we all are, that we're way more than we appear to be, and that we will survive our death, even when as gruesome as crucifixion was.
And I believe that this work is just an expression of that truth, that it doesn't matter how awful your death was, you are going to survive it and you'll thrive.
But things do need to happen in a certain order.
And as you said, how did you phrase it?
They arrive with some sort of trauma or work to do, or I don't remember what you said.
Yeah, there's an issue to resolve, I think.
That's what it was.
Yeah, and they do.
But they have like a therapeutic team that walks them through what those issues are and clarify for them what needs to be done or what doesn't need.
Sometimes people want to skip ahead.
For example, I've dealt with people who died in automobile collisions, sometimes which they caused, and they know that their driving behavior caused not only their own death, but those of others.
And sometimes in the afterlife, they want to meet the other people and apologize.
So guilt goes with that?
And sometimes the guilt is inappropriate or overdone, and other times it isn't.
But frequently, I've been told by them that they've been told that's noble.
And we'll make them note that that needs to be done.
It's just too early or it's not timely yet.
Right.
And so they come to you for absolution?
Not very often, once in a great while.
Mostly it's just helping them contextualize what they did.
And if they really need to apologize, then it's almost like I'm very methodical in the way that I work.
And sometimes I'll write things in columns and lists.
And you have to sometimes distinguish.
You can feel guilty about something, but it doesn't mean that you did wrong.
I understand.
You know, maybe you made a mistake.
Maybe it was a lapse of concentration.
It's not necessarily something that is deliberate.
Yes.
And, you know, it's part of the training for being a confessor in the Catholic Church, for hearing confessions, because sometimes people will come in and accuse themselves of things that are really more, I don't know, psychological habits more than they are free choices to do wrong.
So anyway, sometimes these people will accuse themselves of something.
Do you remember the young man that drove off the end of the pier, Paul?
Yes.
He accidentally caused his death and the death of three companions by driving off the end of a pier in the dark when he thought he was on a bridge, that the wood underneath his wheels, he thought it was a bridge, but instead it was pier.
Well, in the afterlife, he called himself minus four man.
I remember that.
He was just from high school and he had read the scarlet letter.
Do people in the UK have to read that?
Probably not.
No, but we did discuss it last time we spoke.
I know what you mean.
Anyway, in that story, which all American kids read in high school, this woman had committed adultery and was caught at it and had to wear a scarlet A on her dress the rest of her life.
He had that in his consciousness and he thought that he would be minus four man because he stole four lives from the earth.
He brought that with him.
So that was that.
He was not judged or sentenced or anything like that.
That was just the content of his imagination and his consciousness.
And he just needed to rethink that and find a way to be free of that awful condemnation.
I promise, my listener, we're going to get back to the woman in the 1950s who found you through the Sears catalog metaphorically.
I just want to expand this a little.
Those who cause death or discomfort or problems for others, and then they die themselves, you know, those who deliberately do it, murderers, criminals of various kinds, do they come to you?
Once in a while, I remember, again, I haven't permission to talk of this one story except very generally, but I was once helping a man who had killed his girlfriend's child, done so in an impulsive act.
He said to me, did you ever say to someone or think to yourself, I could just kill her?
I could just kill him.
And he said, I had that thought.
And then I pushed him off a ledge.
He said, I couldn't even believe I did it, but I did.
And the instant I did it, I recognized that I had done something awful and nothing would ever be the same.
But he brought that into the afterlife and it was, you know, partially resolved anyway.
And was he in the afterlife?
You know, whatever definition you have of the afterlife, was he purged?
Was he cleansed of that?
He was, I think it's really a lot about truth, seeing the truth of things and why you did a thing, which is what we hope happens in a courtroom.
That's why, at least in the United States, we have different nomenclature for it, but you can be, you can have caused someone's death, but it can have been accidental.
There's vehicular manslaughter, or there's murder in the first degree with intent, where you planned it well in advance.
There's a gradient of how much responsibility there is for taking the life of another.
And then a jury, a judge listens to that, and then they sentence accordingly.
And the idea of justice is balance, to bring balance to things.
So it's interesting to hear, as I've heard from many people in many disciplines, that balance runs through all things beyond time.
So you think that you're bringing balance back To situations that need to be redressed.
Yes, in the Hebrews, the Jewish tradition, the idea of wisdom is related to that.
That wisdom is a balancing of different competing goods, or it's sort of an ancient idea of multitasking, but figuring out what's most important and letting lesser important things settle out and then acting upon what's most critical.
It's that same idea, coming to the truth of things and then behaving according to truth.
Let's get back to the story of the woman in the 1950s who found you through the Celestial Sears catalog.
I absolutely love her.
Her name is Wilhelmina.
She went by Willie.
She was a retired woman.
They'd had two children.
She and her husband were surprised at how much they were enjoying each other's company as empty nesters late in their life.
They'd had their children young, and most of their marriage had been dominated by child rearing and then grandchildren and careers.
And now they were retired and just puttering around the house.
And she said, our lives would have bored anybody but us.
We just enjoyed doing what we were doing.
She said she was sitting in what she called her front room, listening to the radio.
I think this was in the mid to late 50s.
And she said, Eric walked into the room and he looked odd.
And I called his name and he dropped to the floor.
And she said, he was dead weight.
He was dead before he hit the floor, right in front of her.
It happened that it was her mending day.
Do you ever do any mending?
Do you send that out or do you know how to use a needle and thread?
I have to say that I can just about put a button on and I'm not very good about that.
Well, she didn't like doing it, but she, you know, that needs doing.
And so she had a basket that she tossed things in.
And she said about twice a year, she would just declare that this is going to be mending day, whether I like it or not.
And since it was going to be, she was doing a task she didn't want to do to begin with, she'd put on the radio on and she said, I would talk to the mending.
She would say, you've mr. Tornsock, this is your lucky day.
You wait and see.
Any minute now, you're going to be good as new.
So she said it was a silly thing to do, but it was something she did to trick herself into enjoying a task that she really didn't like.
So she was trying to do her mending when Eric walked into the room and died.
And she said, suddenly, my life was, she ran next door to the neighbors to get help, but there wasn't any aid to render.
But she said, within minutes, my house was full of strangers, you know, coroners and police and people from down the street.
And she said, my life wasn't mine anymore.
Other people were taking over things.
And she said, it was just too overwhelming.
And she hit upon this idea, which is really dissociation.
You familiar with dissociation in personality?
In psychology, yes.
Yes.
She decided that it was too painful to be where she was.
And so she moved one step out of her middle of her consciousness and started saying to herself things like, what should a woman do when her husband just died?
She probably ought to go to his closet and pick out the clothes he's going to be laid out in.
That woman probably ought to call his former employer and let them know of his death.
She probably ought to write an obituary for the newspaper.
So she, instead of her being in the middle of her consciousness, she slid it to one side where it wasn't as painful.
Right.
And she said, she said, I just came in afterwards.
She said, I took on the role of whatever I thought people wanted me to be.
Okay.
So, and she lived the rest of her life that way.
Was that was that was why she came to you in a dream?
She was Catholic and she hoped, she knew that this was not a healthy way to live, but it was all that she could figure out how to do.
But she lived for some years and she got lonelier and crankier and weirder.
She said her grandchildren hardly got to know a healthy, well, they just got to know this shell of a weird old lady.
And she eventually died in a nursing home and made it clear that she didn't like company.
And so they get, she said, they gave me, as roommates, they gave me the oldest, sickest, like comatose women.
And then she died.
And she said, I'd hope that it would all just go away and I'd get to restart.
Oh, and she had an idea of heaven and she just hoped that she'd go to heaven.
And where did she find herself?
She found herself in limbo by the sounds of it.
Well, she found herself in an afterlife place of her own design.
She was surrounded by companions, but she was in something of a clinic.
And she said, you would have thought after dying in a sick bed that I might have wanted to leap up and bound around the room, but I'd gotten so used to being relatively immobile that I sort of stayed that way for a time.
And then she said, gradually they got me up and about.
And I've seen this again and again, where people just, they need to be, they need to be tended to according to what they'll receive.
And they made her know, well, you are going rather slowly, but you're progressing.
If you'd like to go faster, you can, but we will work with whatever you give us.
So they're never shamed or made to feel stupid or slow.
Anyway, she moved at her own pace.
But when she was ready to make a move to a happier level, that's when they gave her the catalog and said, start thinking about how you would like to make this passage.
And how did you help?
We just listened to her.
We always go into prayer, and we always protect ourselves first.
I pray to St. Michael the Archangel, Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus, a lot of the saints and angels, and make sure that we're surrounded by light, happiness, and peace.
Most people that I deal with in conventions and crowds of people that work in the spiritual realm, if they're not Catholic or Christian, they have some similar practice about not moving into these areas without first protecting themselves.
But I use the guardian angels and Mary and the saints and Saint Benedict and different ones, St. Dominic, my father.
Anyway, we first create a sacred space.
And then during the pandemic, we've done most of this work on Zoom calls because it was unsafe for us to travel or be together.
But once we're in prayer, I read the dream as they showed it to me because they bring it in a dream and I write it down.
I read the dream story after protected prayer.
With Wilhelmina, I read her story to my companions.
And then after we've read it, we usually read it twice, sort of once for the mind and once for the heart.
Once for the mind is just reading it straight through just as points of data.
Then we sit still and we ask the Holy Spirit to help us allow this story to seep into us.
I think of it sort of like when you put a tea bag in the hot water, you know, you let it steep, you know, and allow the story to be to move through your consciousness and your body and so on and be still.
And then we ask the help of the Holy Spirit and of the guardians that we ask to be around us.
And then I just say, I want to make myself available to this person.
And then I allow my voice to be borrowed by the guardian angel or the person themselves.
I avoid using the word channeling because in the Catholic Church, it's kind of a radioactive word.
People immediately associate it with the occult.
And I think of it as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit or an aspect of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are described in the letters of St. Paul.
So you're connecting, not channeling.
Yes.
Well, all I'm really doing is allowing my voice to be used, which is really what I believe I'm doing when I'm preaching at a mass.
I'm not giving speech as much as I'm letting Jesus talk to his people.
And yes, I'm going to be in the middle of it, but I'm trying to, I'm not just speaking from my own ego.
I'm trying to allow the universal Holy Spirit to speak to the people.
So anyway, I allow them to borrow my voice.
And that's where it can get dicey for some people, where they just feel like that that's just dangerous and awful.
And people will think as they please, but I believe it's something I've been called to do.
So anyway, I allow the, I usually ask for the Holy Spirit to send their guardian or their guardian is with them anyway.
And ask, may we hear, could a guardian give us some clarity?
Dreams, by their nature, are symbolic.
And so sometimes you get the symbolism right and other times you might miss something.
So sometimes there's just a level of clarity that you want to come to right at the beginning.
And then the guardians are so sweet.
They'll come on and they'll say hello.
They're doing something like a mic test, like you and I had to do to do this call.
It's the first thing you do, isn't it at the beginning?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
You want to make sure that there's clarity.
And then after that, they stay on the line for a few minutes just chatting and maybe supplying some little bit of information that might help us.
And then they'll say, now it's time for her to tell her own story.
I'll slide to the side.
I'll be right with you praying, but it's time for her to tell her story.
And her story is coming through you.
Yes.
Yes.
We're co-conscious.
I'm not entranced.
I'm fully alert.
I'm sharing my vocabulary and my vocal cords and my being.
I think of it as communion.
When I go to communion at Mass, commune is related to communicate.
It just means to be one with.
And I'm just trying to allow my body, mind, spirit to be one with this person so that we can help her through this little passage.
So she comes on the line and then we read the story and said, is this, you know, for companions, this is all in the book.
So anybody that wants to know more about it can read it because we record these sessions and have them transcribed.
So the books are largely people speaking in their own words.
Right.
So it's exactly as it happened.
Yes, with a little minor edit just to get rid of redundancies and all the ums and ahs that we don't pay much attention to in normal speech, but it's annoying to read.
Incomplete sentences.
I've surprised myself with how many sentences I don't complete when I hear my own conversations transcribed.
But anyway, she came on and she described what happened.
And that she, you know, she continued after his death, she just stayed in this way of living that was always one step removed from her heart of hearts.
And she died that way, hoping that it would all just, I don't know, she had a kind of magical thought that dying must take care of this.
And when I die, it'll all be different.
That was her hope.
And why didn't it fix it?
Because she had quit participating.
You still have a life to lead.
She kind of opted out of it, at least to a degree, and chose to adopt this other way of being.
And they said, you know, it's understandable.
She had a care team.
They all do.
And they said, it's understandable that you did this, but we need you to be aware that you did it and that you're continuing to do it.
And we need just to get you back on the horse.
Right.
So after dying, curious though this may sound, after dying, she had to learn to live again.
Yes, exactly.
That's well put.
And they reminded her, you did this for years and years.
We're not trying to teach you to do something unprecedented.
All we're trying to do is help you recall that you once did this without effort and you can do it again.
We just need to get you back in the center of your consciousness and making choices again.
Right.
Free choices, not ones that were always trying to avoid pain or always trying to conform to what she thought others wanted of her.
She just needed to learn to be a free agent again about her life.
So she is expressing through you The issues that she's been dealing with, and she's doing this, yes, it was essentially one issue, and it was this business of dissociating because of pain.
So, she had to come back into herself in order that she could transition, yes.
And, you know, how old are you now, anyway?
I am a little younger than you, but older than I should be.
I'm 66.
Well, I'm assuming you had some share of suffering, have you not?
Have you had pain, emotional pain in your life?
I would say, although I've known people who've suffered terribly, illness and all that sort of stuff.
But having, let's just put it this way, Nathan, having chosen the path career-wise that I chose, I certainly know suffering.
We all do.
And of course, it varies, and we don't need to compare ourselves, you know, our load of suffering to someone else's and so on.
But we all have to learn how to manage some suffering and sorrow.
And she was no exception.
She just needed to acknowledge that, you know, she had suffered the death of her husband right in front of her.
But the fact that he continued to live and so did she, and she needed just to be kind of coaxed.
Would you like to re-enter your life?
And the minute you say you are willing to, we'll help you do it.
And so she described that they started, she had died in a bed.
And then she said they sort of did something on the order of physical therapy, the way they might do in hospitals and nursing homes, get you up to walk you around the room or down the hall, gradually, little by little, getting to re-engage and show her that she could do something more than lay about.
And then she said, I was healthy enough to the point that they started bringing me visitors, children that she'd known in childhood, and people who would stay for only a brief time, but give her a little tantalizing view.
And they'd say at the end of their visit, next time we come, maybe you'll go with us and we'll go shopping, you know, or we'll do something, something fun.
And then they've led her to the point where eventually she was interested in the possibility of reunion with her husband.
I mean, that to me seems to be the answer.
The answer is the reconciliation, is that the word?
The reconnection to the husband.
Surely that is where relief would lie for her.
And in her case, that was only a joy.
You know, not everyone, not everyone dies on good terms with a spouse or other family members, but she had no problem.
She loved him and he loved her back.
So why didn't the powers that be on the other side immediately facilitate that reunion?
Because it would have been overreach.
She needed to be the agent of the pace at which she moved.
Right.
So she had to be walked back, just as anybody who suffers some kind of mental issue and they manage to start to get through it, or those who suffer things like alcoholism or whatever, they have to be walked back to the right side of things to get better.
It's not a one-step process.
No, and in any kind of healthcare, I think the better healthcare providers are the one who presume that you're in charge of your health and not they.
Right.
So that's the cosmic way of things.
It's not tough love, but it's a little like tough love.
I get where you're coming from.
So how did her situation resolve?
They kept encouraging her that she was stronger than she thought.
And any minute now or any day now, she's going to be able to leave here and so on.
And she finally allowed that thought to begin to kind of bloom in her.
And she said, well, if that's the case, I wonder if I could see Eric.
And they thought, well, all we need to do is get you ready.
And then you'd need to invite him.
So at the end of it, it's really sweet.
She did decide, okay, I think I'm ready.
I think I would like to see Eric.
And I said, well, okay, well, let's say a little prayer and just say, God, well, Amina would like to see Eric.
And is that possible?
And then I don't see these things most of the time.
It depends on how the person employs the tools I make available.
She didn't show me much, but she described it.
So I have the visual, not because I saw it in an inner vision, but because she described it.
She said, oh, look at him.
He looks so sweet.
He looks like he did the first, like we went on our first date.
He was a teenager, and he is holding roses from his mother's garden.
They're not the kind you buy at the store that are all perfect and uniform.
They're all different colors and they look like they came out of someone's garden, but he's holding them and he's inviting me to come to him.
Okay, and that was the resolution?
She decided that she was ready to go to be with Eric, and they were going to So he had kind of created this scene where he wanted to see, he wanted her to have a chance to start over.
And so he created this kind of origin story of how they met and she slid into it.
So he was aware of her dilemma on the other side.
Was, yes.
And he didn't speak.
He just showed up smiling and holding his little flowers.
And she walked toward him.
And that was the end of it.
It's a beautiful story, Nathan.
Were you not, have you not been tempted to try and research whether this person really existed?
I wouldn't use the word tempted, but yeah, I've wondered about it.
And one of the things that I think I would like to do, I'm on a lot of shows about the paranormal and near-death experience and so on for people that like that kind of thing.
But I'd also like to move into the direction of people that do academic research on consciousness.
And the afterlife doesn't just belong to religious people.
I mean, there are plenty of academic researchers now doing work on the afterlife.
There are plenty.
I mean, I know some here and I've spoken with quite a number of famous ones there.
I would have thought all you'd have to do is pick up the phone.
Well, I think for me to go very far in that cohort, I'm going to have to do what you're suggesting.
I'm going to have to prove it.
I'm going to have to show death certificates or, you know.
Well, I just think, I mean, look, I don't know how you would derive this amount of detail if there wasn't some substance behind this.
But then, you know, I have listeners who will say, well, maybe it's just a very active imagination at work here.
But you would only have to document one case for you to have proved something pretty seismic.
Yes, and it might be that I'm on the cusp of that.
I'm trying to discern that now.
And one of the stories that are told in these two books, there's 13 in each, so a total of 26.
We went back to each of these people and asked if they would allow us to tell their story publicly.
Interesting.
At first, we didn't know whether that would work.
But one of my companions said, I'm so tired of hearing you talk about this problem.
They came to you once.
You're not disturbing their afterlife.
You're only asking a simple question, a yes or no question.
And we could at least try, couldn't we?
And we did.
And it worked just beautifully.
And they came, each one came and gave.
And we thought we were asking a yes or no question.
But most of them wanted to do a little follow-up story.
Just to get reacquainted and tell us a little bit about what they'd done afterwards.
And Wilhelmina did that.
She explained that she regretted having kind of wasted some of her later years.
And that she regretted that her children and grandchildren had to put up with the kind of cranky, weird version of her that she presented.
So, you know, she looked back at some things.
And then she, I don't remember what she was interested in doing in her future.
But usually they give us some little glimpse.
There's so much to know and learn that a lot of them want to study something.
Not necessarily in a rigorous academy, but they want to, you know, how you might, you know, if you wanted to learn gardening, there must be a gardening club near you where nice people would show you how to plant something.
It wouldn't mean you have to sit up straight at a desk and take exams.
They usually go on to learn something new.
So you don't believe that Wilhelmina, the essence of hers, reincarnated?
A lot of people believe in reincarnation.
That didn't come up.
She just went on to be with Eric.
And this is only a glimpse.
We don't follow these people down the road.
So you don't know whether any of them reincarnate?
No.
I use the word stuck in the subtitle of the first book, After Life Interrupted, including Stuck Souls Crossover.
I got rid of the word stuck in the title of the second book because I saw that many of them are not stuck.
They just died in circumstances that caused them to need more care.
Okay.
It's called Unfinished Business.
And, you know, unless you've lived the life of, I don't know if you've lived the life of some kind of monk somewhere.
Everybody's lives are full, replete with unfinished business.
Remember, you're talking to some kind of monk somewhere.
I'm semi-contemplative.
I'm supposed to have the spirit of a monk.
Our order is semi-monastic.
But, yeah, everybody's got their business to work through.
So it's nice to think that, you know, if the continuum is from here to somewhere else, that on the way you can maybe sort out some of those issues.
Yes.
And do it without being judged.
Yes.
That you should have known this before or you should have made more progress by now or you're not keeping up with the class.
Anything like that.
That's one of the things that they universally say that they're enjoying about this space is that it's such a relief not to have people around you looking at you with disdain.
Well, I think the two greatest words I think that have ever been said in my life, actually three if you expand them, but contracted, the two greatest words are it's okay.
It seems to me that you're partly in the business of telling people it's okay and assisting them.
Now, the second book is out and we'll give my listener details of what that is and where that is at the end of this.
Without giving away more than you want to, to conclude this, have you got a great story from the second book that I can leave my listener with?
Sure.
In fact, it comes a chapter before Wilhelmina.
This one is called Nadi, N-A-D-I, a massacre and a parade of floats.
Nadi came to me and it was an active shooter situation in Iraq.
So quite recent.
Well, maybe five years ago, something like that.
He was a Muslim man who said, I was the wrong kind of Muslim to the people that killed me.
All that sectarian violence that's part of life in that part of the world.
His mosque had been bombed and destroyed and they didn't have a proper imam anymore, just the degeneration of infrastructure.
So it was sort of lay elders, leaders that took up the role of leading the community through this difficult time.
And that included finding an alternative place to gather to pray.
Well, the men and the women don't pray in the same room.
And so they needed to find adjacent places where they would be separate but close to one another.
They were at a prayer when they heard a bunch of them.
He was a man, so he was with the men.
He heard gunfire.
right outside the door it would they they rented a uh warehouse because they wanted something that had few windows and only you know secure doors because they'd already been targeted and thought it could happen again and it did they were there was gunfire outside and they knew that their women were nearby and they the men had to decide: do we go try to see about the safety of our wives and daughters, or do we stay behind the locked door?
Well, he opted to go out to see about the women.
And in the street, he said he saw people all over the place bleeding and didn't know where the gunfire was coming from.
And then he turned and saw a little girl of 10 with men standing over her pointing machine guns at her head and at her mother and her sister.
And they were marching her toward the men, and they shouted at him, shouted at the little girl to kill him or they would kill her and her sister and her mother.
The little girl shot and killed him.
Yeah, just an awful violent death.
So what was his, apart from dying like that, what was his issue for you to resolve?
I mean, it seems strange that somebody of his persuasion would come to a Catholic priest, but then he said the same thing.
He said, I can hardly believe that I'm talking with, how did he put it, an American, a Christian, and a priest.
And he said, by the way, I never learned English and I'm speaking it right now.
I'm forming my thoughts as I always did, and they're coming out of you in English.
An awful death, but what did he want you to do for him?
Well, apparently he had reached his own, because of the manner of his death, it was so awful.
He did need some afterlife care, some tending, but not an awful lot.
And he was brought along and he spoke.
Your readers might really enjoy his story, especially any who love kind of interfaith or larger consciousness.
He was speaking about from the point of view of being the Muslim man that he was.
But he said, you know, I was a man of prayer.
And in the afterlife, he progressed really quickly because he already had an attitude that was not narrowly sectarian.
He knew that he belonged to the universe in some way.
Catholic, my persuasion, means universal.
And uni means one.
He knew that he belonged to the oneness.
And even though he had been raised in a particular religion that sometimes separated, he said, but I also believed in the oneness and now I'm seeing it.
So anyway, at the end of it, it turned out that he was not only, it wasn't his own passing, he was also in a field of other people that might be ready to pass.
This happens sometimes.
We were not dealing only with his story.
We were dealing with him and another group of people that might or might not come with him.
So imagine a field of people who died similarly in the afterlife, sort of clustered.
And he said, I don't know whether they're all going to want to go with me or not, but I believe I'm supposed to lead.
And when he was ready, we said a prayer to Allah, to God, to the one, the maker of all.
And he said, the field around me is beginning to fill with shallow water.
I'm not endangered.
I'm just waiting.
And then he talked about the Tigris and the Euphrates that run through Iraq.
And he said that it's because of those two large rivers that this land is habitable at all.
It gets little rain, but it's fertile because of these two rivers.
And our life is all about these rivers.
And most everybody who lived there has pleasant association with the rivers, swimming in them or having parties near them or parades on them.
He said, we had festivals several different times a year that involved floats that were decorated and lit and parades were done on the rivers.
And he said, there's beginning to be a parade of floats and everyone is seeing the thing that would be most appealing to them.
He said, I can see a float that has my father on it and he's beckoning me to get aboard.
And everybody else seeing whatever.
Your role here then was to solve the trauma of his passing and possibly those other people's passing.
Yeah, and I've seen this a number of times where there'll be some sort of conveyance.
In this case, it was floats on rivers.
And people, all they needed to do was indicate some little bit of willingness.
And if they did so, they had people reaching for them, pulling them aboard and so on.
Even if they didn't feel like they had very much energy, as long as they could raise their hand, that was all that was needed.
And then the energy would be supplied.
So anyway, he got on a float with his dad and others got on their floats and others decided that they weren't ready to leave just yet.
But anyway, he floated away.
And then we talked to him later to get his permission to use the story.
And he went in into some detail about he wanted to learn more about world religions and interfaith ideas and how they unite.
Interesting story.
And this is all in the second book, along with other stories.
As you say, there are 13 stories in each of the books.
And you've got a third book on the way.
Are you planning to, are you expecting, that's a better word, are you expecting to go to bed tonight?
I know there's a time difference between us.
So I've got 5 p.m. just after in the UK.
I think you've got 9 o'clock in the morning where you are thereabouts, whatever.
Are you anticipating going to bed tonight and dreaming another person's situation?
Well, I keep a journal on the nightstand so that in case one happens, I don't have to stumble around looking for it.
So it happens about once a week.
And when I'm on a holiday like I am now, they happen more frequently.
The Holy Spirit just knows my calendar, my schedule.
It gives me more of these when my life is not as busy.
What about you, Nathan?
When we all have to pass, we've said that during this, but it's self-evident.
You know, we all, our time, all of us will come eventually, and we just have to understand that it's hard to reconcile, but that's just the fact.
Are you going to go back, do you think, to somebody and sort out any issues, any untied, you know, loose ends in your own life?
Do you think you'll be doing what those people are doing with you?
I do, but I do believe, too, that the more that we resolve our issues here, the less there is to do hereafter.
Right.
That's a very, very good byword, very good principle.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I try to live simply and kind of cleanly, if you will, without a lot of emotional baggage that's unresolved.
But yes, whatever I bring, I know that I'll be well tended to.
I don't know anybody that takes, I mean, you know how children will sometimes want to be older than they are and they'll tell you they're not four, they're four and a half.
I pretty much do that to myself.
I'm 66.23.
I constantly wish that I was 20 again, but I'm afraid life is not going to afford me that.
So, you know, what there is, what there is.
I sometimes wonder how much longer must I stay here.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the life I have, and I know the importance of living in the present moment, but sometimes I allow myself that little indulgence of, geez, I hope I don't have to be here too much longer.
All I hope is that what comes next is better.
And that's it.
And I have so many friends on the other side and all these people that I've helped that I haven't really seen face to face exactly that I just, they're all kind of joys awaiting me, I believe.
And then it's just a matter of talking to myself and saying, just calm down, mister.
You just stay in the present moment and do your job.
Well, I hope you're here and happy for many, many more years.
It sounds to me like when you go over to wherever you're going to, you're going to have to take a good, big appointments diary with you, Nathan.
Except they also tell, I've seen plenty of people that live busy lives being told, no, you need to go on a holiday first.
We're going to take you to the beach.
We're going to take you to the amusement park.
Sometimes I've met people that really wanted to be busy about the next part of their afterlife, but were told, no, not yet.
You need a holiday.
Let's hope they do that with me because I certainly do need one.
Nathan, thank you very much.
What's the title of the new book?
I know it's very similar to the title of the first book.
It's Afterlife Interrupted, Book Two, Helping Souls Cross Over.
And when's three coming up?
Well, as soon as I get it written, I'm working on it right now.
And then I have another book that I'm trying to write on the Gospel of John as a play, as theater.
I'm working on both of those.
And I'm starting a podcast of my own in September.
But those topics are all.
You're going to be busy here.
Nathan, it's good to talk with you again.
Do you have a location online?
Yes, I do.
Thank you for asking.
It's my name, Nathan, N-A-T-H-A-N-Castle, C-A-S-T-L-E dot com, Nathan-Castle.com.
And once on there, I like to recommend to people that go to the upper right and there's the little social media icons.
If you like, click on YouTube and it'll take you to my YouTube channel.
And eventually, I hope this interview will be recorded there or placed there.
I do a lot of other teaching besides just this afterlife work.
And if people like what they hear, there might be material there that they'd enjoy.
Good to talk with you again.
I know we will talk some more when edition three of volume three is out.
Nathan, thank you very much indeed.
Okay, God bless you.
Father Nathan Castle, more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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