Rocky Mountain Whirlwind

Happy holidays! I hope you've all been as merrily busy as I have. The month of December has been a wild ride, that's for sure.

Just a few days before Christmas, I visited Denver, Colorado, to officially launch a Top Secret New Book Project. It was great to see snow again (it's such an unusual sight here in central Virginia) and the good friends who welcomed me were even more a delight. After some long days of interviews and research, I'm sure I wore out my welcome, but the trip was a huge success regardless.

Why the tease? No details? Because this is probably the most extreme, in-depth, and controversial project I've ever been involved with. It is a turning point for me, both personally and professionally. I can tell you this much: the book is about a form of instrumental transcommunication (ITC) that garners verifiable results like nothing else I've ever seen or heard. If you want to learn more, you'll have to keep an eye out over the next couple of months for updates as the manuscript progresses!

Book Review: The Survival of the Soul by Lisa Williams

The Survival of the Soul by Lisa Williams describes the journey of our souls from the energy plane to Earth (and back again) using the information channeled from the author's many Spirit Guides.

As someone who is very skeptical of any claims of communication with the spirit world, I was unsure how much of The Survival of the Soul I would be able to digest before it pushed the boundary between believable and bull. I was pleasantly surprised when the author's grounded explanation of this epic spiritual journey wove together many of the ideas embraced by religions around the world, her personal near-death encounter, and concepts and events familiar to the "well attuned" who have lost loved ones and kept me eagerly reading until the end.

Williams outlines the process by which souls cross over after death, including being welcomed by waiting friends and family and undergoing the often grueling "Life Review" to determine the growth of a soul while in a physical body. Though many aspects of a soul's duties and progress are, according to Williams and her Spirit Guides, intentionally kept secret from the living, the rules and expectations for souls wishing to visit those still on the Earth plane clearly explained in the book.

Have you ever met someone for the first time but felt sure you knew them already? Lisa Williams says the reason for that may be because that person is a member of your "soul family" - a group of like souls who work together in differing roles in both the spirit realm and the physical. Particularly fascinating to me was the section about souls preparing to re-enter a physical body and their selection of parents who would best help to teach (or conversely, to learn) the lessons to better that soul's evolution.

The Survival of the Soul is a spectacular guide for expanding your ideas about how lucid dreams, out of body experiences, spirit communication, and other phenomena are connected to the human personality beyond death. Though you may not agree with every detail, reading this book with an open mind may just bring to light many of the facets of the spirit world your intuition has already nudged you toward.  Perhaps that in itself is a lesson for your soul.

The Survival of the Soul by Lisa Williams is currently available from Hay House Books.

Book Review: A History of Ghosts by Peter Aykroyd

It's seldom I will shell out the cash for a hardcover edition of any book, but I grabbed up A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters by Peter H. Aykroyd and Angela Narth as soon as it was released. Why? Because I'm a hopeless fan of the Ghostbusters movies and couldn't wait to read about the actual events in the Aykroyd family history that inspired the films. Sadly, it was not at all what I had hoped it would be.

I felt a little mislead by the title of this book, for one thing. It is not a historical look at paranormal activity at all - it is instead a summary of the Spiritualist religion in the United States and Canada. If you've ever been curious about the formation of the church and the most famous mediums from its first 100 years, this book provides a decent overview for the casual reader. Peter Aykroyd provides a glimpse at the researchers, like Charles Richet and Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, who were out to expose the frauds in the field, but the author makes only a short reference to one of the staunchest skeptics out to expose the Spiritualist church - Harry Houdini. As so many of the mediums highlighted in A History of Ghosts were exposed as having resorted to tricks and deception, I feel the book could use a little more attention paid to those investigators, like Houdini, who revealed the most convincing trickery.

The most colorful and entertaining parts of the this book were the tales of the Aykroyd circles (seances held in the dining room of the author's grandparents) and the communications between the family's medium, Walter, and his spirit guides. I wish that there had been more of these first-person accounts and less encyclopedic profiles of Spiritualist "celebrities", but alas, what is done is done.

For those new to the ideas of mediumship and channeling, Peter Aykroyd does a wonderful job of explaining the practices of automatic writing, table tipping, early spirit photography, slate writing, materialization, and direct-voice mediumship. While he touches on the study of electronic voice phenomena (EVP), he is quick to discount the findings as natural artifacts of the recordings, while he openly accepts the spirit communications through a human medium as absolute truth. His lack of objectivity on the subject was incredibly frustrating for me as a reader (likely because our opinions differ drastically) but I'm sure such is not the case for all.

I'm not really sure which events from the Aykroyd circles were those that inspired the author's son to write Ghostbusters as they were never clearly identified as such. Maybe the constant talk of spirit contact and the open mind the family has about the afterlife were more influential than any specific encounter? I guess only the Aykroyd men know for sure.

I know it may sound like I've been harsh on A History of Ghosts, but I really felt like there was a bit of "bait and switch" going on with the packaging and marketing of the book. The content itself is a great overview of the activities surrounding the Spiritualist boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is ideal for those seeking a quick and easy read to introduce them to the subject, but a "history of ghosts" it is not.

Overall, I give this book only one thumb up because of its weak cohesion. I encourage you to form your own opinion by picking up a copy and putting it to the test yourself. Peter Aykoyd is 90 years old and currently suffering from rapidly degenerating eyesight. To learn more about him, check out his interview with George Noory on Coast to Coast AM.