Visits from the Afterlife - Softcover

Browne, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074992683X ISBN 13: 9780749926830

Publisher: PIATKUS BOOKS, 2006

Synopsis

Visits From The Afterlife: The truth about ghosts, spirits, hauntings and reunions with lost loved ones

About this title

About the Author:

Sylvia Browne is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Other Side and Back; Life on The Other Side; Past Lives, Future Healing; Sylvia Browne's Book of Dreams; and Blessings from The Other Side. She has been working as a psychic for nearly half a century. She is a regular guest on The Montel Williams Show and has appeared on Larry King Live, Good Morning America, CNN, and Entertainment Tonight.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Thousands of people, many of them currently on earth, contributed to this book. There are the spirits and ghosts around the world who’ve been kind enough to show up and tell me their stories for the last half a century or so. There are the 2,014 visitors to my Web site who had the courage and generosity to e-mail their experiences to me, some of which you’ll find in the pages that follow—and let me make it clear right now, I read every single one of those e-mails. Those 2,014 brave people were on the receiving end of some fascinating appearances by spirits and ghosts, some of them deeply comforting and some of them terrifying. There’s a victim of an unsolved murder who told me the name of her killer, and there’s a Spirit Guide who left her voice on an audiotape, repeating a single word that gave a woman the key to her husband’s criminal life. There’s a woman who was given strength by a visit with an ex-boyfriend on The Other Side who she didn’t know had passed away, and a man who would never have found out he had a stillborn baby sister if her spirit hadn’t come to introduce herself when he was four years old.

To the thousands of us collaborators on this particular book, and the many millions who don’t question any more than we do that of course there’s an afterlife, there are those who will always be ready with a list of handy explanations for what we “think” we’re seeing, hearing, and feeling. “Grief hysteria,” “oxygen deprivation,” and variations on terms for both “mental illness” and “scam” are among the most popular. What these skeptics and “experts” are usually insisting on, though, is the same cynical demand, over and over and over again, which boils down to:

“Prove that there’s life after death.”

I’m sixty-six years old, and I’ve never spent one instant doubting that there’s life after death. The thousands of us who contributed to this book, on earth and beyond it, don’t doubt it. The millions we represent don’t doubt it. God certainly doesn’t doubt it, since He’s the One who told us it’s true in the first place, and we take His word for everything. We’re not the ones who are having a problem with this. You are. So why do we keep knocking ourselves out trying to prove something we already know with absolute certainty?

Here’s my suggestion to the skeptics and “experts,” for a refreshing change of pace. We’re done proving that there’s life after death. We’ve proven it well past our own satisfaction. From now on, let’s do it this way: You prove that there’s not.

Chapter One

THE TRUTH ABOUT GHOSTS AND SPIRITS

I believe in ghosts, and in the real and magnificent presence of spirits among us from The Other Side.

I believe because, like so many of you, I’ve seen them, heard them, been startled by them, even smelled the faint familiar fragrance of a lost loved one, urging me to notice, to embrace their assurance that they’re not gone at all, they’re right here, not some trick of my imagination or wishful thinking, if I’ll just open my eyes, ears, mind, and heart and pay attention.

I believe because, surrounded by so much overwhelming evidence of their existence during my sixty-six years on this earth, I’d be insane not to believe.

Most of all, I believe because I know to the core of my being that the majority of the world’s great religions are right—we are all eternal, every one of us, as our birthright from God who created us. Our spirits always were and always will be. Our physical bodies are only temporary housing for the essence of who we are, that divine part of us that feels joy and sorrow and love and reverence and holds our truth and our timeless memories and our wisdom intact. Death will take our bodies sooner or later, but it can never, ever destroy us. God promised us everlasting lives, and He doesn’t break His promises.

And it’s precisely because I take God at His word that I can’t imagine not believing in the existence of ghosts and spirits among us. If our spirits really do transcend death, if they’re immortal as we know they are, that means they never cease to exist. So why on earth would we disbelieve the existence of something we agree never ceases to exist? In fact, why not recognize that the presence of ghosts, and of spirits from Home, is actually comforting, even worthy of celebration, proving as it does that eternal life is a beautiful, sacred, God-given certainty?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the unexpected appearance of a ghost or a spirit can’t be scary. You’ll read stories throughout the book in which many of you have been frightened, and I’ll openly admit to moments of fear during my own stories as well. Some combination of surprise, a cultural insistence that anyone who sees ghosts and spirits is either crazy or lying, and a lack of understanding of what’s happening can add up to very real jolts of panic in even the most rational among us.

But please take my word for a few important truths about ghosts and spirits:

For one thing, knowledge really is power. The more I’ve learned and the more I continue to learn about the spirit world, the more my fear has been replaced by curiosity and fascination, and you’ll find the same is true for you; I guarantee it.

For another thing, as so many of you are already aware, it’s not just us psychics and other “weirdos” who routinely have perfectly valid encounters with ghosts and spirits. “Normal” people in every corner of every country on earth have come face to face with visitors from the afterlife. These people know what they’ve experienced, they know they’re not crazy, they know the experience was real, and they don’t need me or anyone else to validate it for them. And they’d agree with me on this, I’m sure. Just as any scientist would be a fool to get the same result from the same experiment over and over again and refuse to believe it, all of us who have seen, heard, and felt the presence of the spirit world would be just as foolish to refuse to believe what our five physical senses, our minds, and our hearts would swear to.

Finally, as momentarily frightened as I’ve been by some of my encounters with residents of the afterlife, I can assure you, I’ve never met a ghost or spirit who could do a fraction of the physical and emotional damage human beings can do. Give me a choice between a confrontation with the world’s orneriest ghost or the world’s most cunning human sociopath and I’ll choose to take on the ghost every time. So while this journey into the spirit world we’re about to take together will lead us into territory we might occasionally find scary and unnerving, don’t spend one instant wondering whether or not you have enough courage to take the trip. You were brave enough to choose another lifetime as a human being on this rough, confusing, beautiful earth, which makes you brave enough to meet ghosts and spirits, especially since we’ve all been those ghosts and spirits before and will be again when this lifetime ends.

THE SPIRIT’S JOURNEY
AFTER DEATH

In order to understand what spirits and ghosts really are and where they come from, it’s essential to understand what happens to our spirits when our physical bodies die. I’ve written about this in great detail in previous books, particularly Life on The Other Side, so rather than repeat myself at length, I’ll limit this discussion to a few relevant specifics.

When the spirit leaves the body that’s provided it with temporary housing for another visit to earth, there are basically three different places it might go. And make no mistake about it, which of those three places the spirit travels to is our decision, not God’s. He never stops loving us, never turns away from us, and would never condemn any of us to an eternity of banishment from His presence. It’s only when we stop loving Him and turn away from Him that we take such foolish chances with the health and well-being of our souls.

The vast majority of us, who love God by whatever name we call Him and try our best to honor His love while we’re here, immediately transcend to The Other Side, that sacred, exquisite, perfect world we came from, where we live joyfully among the Angels, the messiahs, our Spirit Guides, our soul mates and loved ones from an eternity of lifetimes both on earth and at Home. Residents of The Other Side are called spirits, and their appearances in our midst on earth are called visitations.

A much smaller percentage of humankind, those dark, remorseless souls who choose evil over God, travel to an unspeakable unholy void called the Left Door, from which they horseshoe right back into an earthly womb, to be reborn into another Godless incarnation. The Dark Side, as we call those travelers through the Left Door, don’t communicate with us or appear among us while they’re in vitro.

And then there are those poor trapped souls who, for their own often confused reasons, refuse to acknowledge the very real tunnel leading to The Other Side, illuminated by God’s brilliant white light, and remain earthbound. Earthbound souls are called ghosts, and their appearances in our midst are called hauntings.

Understanding the differences between spirits and ghosts, between visitations and hauntings, can help turn an unexpected encounter with the afterlife from frightening to comforting. It can help us tell an earthbound intruder from a beloved visitor from Home. It can answer questions about where a departed loved one went after leaving their body, how they are, and whether or not they’re happy. And it can certainly give us fascinating glimpses into the possibilities that lie ahead for us when our current incarnations are complete.

But before I go into any further detail about the brilliant, complex spirit world we’re about to explore, I want to address an issue that came up in several of the hundreds upon hundreds of letters my clients and readers were kind enough to send. Antonio, for example, wrote, in the midst of a description of coming face to face with a ghost in his hou...

About this edition

• Publisher: PIATKUS BOOKS
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 074992683X
• ISBN 13: 9780749926830
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288