Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (6 page)

Soul Mates

The true definition of a soul mate, as opposed to the hyperromanticized definition that’s become such an unfortunate myth, is simply this. Each of us is created with a spirit that has both male and female aspects. At the moment our spirit is created, an identical twin spirit is created right along with us. That identical twin spirit’s male and female aspects are mirror images of our own. And that identical twin spirit is our soul mate.

While we’re living our lives on the Other Side, we’re more emotionally connected to our soul mate than we are to any of the other spirits we know, just as most identical twins are uniquely connected. But we also have separate and complete identities. Our soul mate is not the other half of us, nor are we the other half of our soul mate—none of us is half a person in need of completion. We and our soul mate at Home each have our own friendships, our own interests, and our own pursuits, while loving each other freely and unconditionally. Again, don’t think romance, think identical twins, and you’ll have a much healthier, more accurate idea of what a soul mate is.

Like all spirits on the Other Side, both we and our soul mates choose when, if, and how many times we feel it will benefit our growth to come to earth for another incarnation. Because we’re separate, complete, and on our own unique journeys, we make the decision to incarnate independently and for intensely personal reasons to do intensely personal work on ourselves. Which makes the chances
very
slim that our soul mate would incarnate at exactly the same time we do, let alone that we would choose lifetimes on earth in which we’re going to be together, since we see each other as often as we want on the Other Side. It frustrates me to no end when clients complain to me that they can’t seem to meet their soul mate, when the truth is, it’s highly probable that their soul mate is joyfully busy at Home and, when the time comes, will be the first to greet them when they emerge from the tunnel. So if you find yourself surprised or even disappointed by the scarcity of soul mates among the famous names in this book, now you’ll understand.

Spirit Guides

Since my Spirit Guide, Francine, is the coauthor of this book, it only seems fair that I elaborate a little more on who Spirit Guides are and their role in our lives. As I said earlier, every one of us has a Spirit Guide, someone we literally trusted with the well-being of our soul on the Other Side, who agreed to be our constant, vigilant companion and helpmate when we decided to experience another incarnation on earth.

It’s a requirement that Spirit Guides have experienced at least one lifetime here, so that the problems, mistakes, temptations, fears, and frailties inevitable in humans won’t be completely foreign to them. In fact, most of us either have been or will be someone else’s Spirit Guide during our soul’s journey. But to clarify a point I’m frequently asked about, your relationship with your Spirit Guide was established between the two of you on the Other Side before you were born, so it’s impossible for your Spirit Guide to be someone you’ve known in this lifetime.

Spirit Guides are responsible for encouraging, advising, and supporting us toward the goals we’ve set for ourselves here on earth. And they’re equipped with plenty of information to help them live up to the astonishing challenge they’ve agreed to. They study us closely and objectively on the Other Side, once we’ve mutually signed on to this relationship, and they memorize and then continually refer to our charts every step of the way, while we lose conscious awareness of our charts the moment we’re born.

Even when we think we wish they would, Spirit Guides never interfere with our charts or deprive us of our free will, no matter how far off track we seem to wander. At best, they’ll steer us toward possible alternatives and give us warnings along the way. But our sacred pact with them is based on the fact that we’ve incarnated for the further education and growth of our souls, and those things can’t be accomplished if our Spirit Guides are constantly shielding us from the exact lessons that we designed for ourselves in the first place. They’re Spirit
Guides,
after all, not Spirit Bosses, Spirit Police, or Spirit Superheroes, doing precisely what God and we ask of them for our maximum benefit.

Spirit Guides communicate with us in several ways, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t have the advantages I do of clairaudience and the ability to channel. The vast majority of the time they express themselves telepathically and through infusion, directly from their spirit minds to ours. What you might habitually define as instinct, your conscience, or the ever popular “something told me” is really most likely to be your Spirit Guide sending you messages, and it’s up to you to remain open-minded and alert enough to pay attention.

They’re also the very last to say good-bye to us as we leave the Other Side to come here, and they’re there when we return Home, among the crowd that welcomes us and the sure, steady hand that leads us to the Scanning Machine to start making sense of the lives we’ve just finished—in other words, our relationship with our Spirit Guide is one of the most unique, steadfast, and invaluable alliances we’ll ever experience.

Spirits

Just to clarify something right up front, we’re all spirits. The only difference between us and the celebrities in this book, not to mention our deceased loved ones, is that we’re currently inhabiting a body and they’re not. So in this discussion of spirits who’ve moved on from their bodies, when I use third-person pronouns like “they” and “them,” please remember that not that long ago “they” were “us,” and not long from now we’ll be them again, just as we were before we incarnated.

The spirits we’ll be talking about are those who’ve made it safely to the higher-frequency dimension of the Other Side, three feet above our own ground level. You know those countless descriptions you’ve heard of visiting spirits looking as if they’re floating a few feet above the ground? They’re not really floating at all; they’re simply moving along on their own ground level, exactly three feet above ours.

Once spirits arrive Home and go through any Orientation or cocooning processes they might need, they’re living in a very real place of perfect bliss, where the atmosphere itself is charged with God’s immediate presence, peace, and eternal, unconditional love. Living in that state of bliss, reunited with their memories of all their past lives on earth, and now at Home and back on the “time clock” of eternity again, they’re literally incapable of the strictly human emotions of unhappiness, anger, resentment, pettiness, worry, fear, and negativity. Any emotional and physical burdens a spirit carried through an incarnation are resolved in the white light of the Holy Spirit on the Other Side. So if you ever encounter a being who seems sad, mean, or troubled in any way or who shows even a hint of wounds, disease, or other challenges, I promise you’re dealing with an earthbound ghost, not a spirit. And if you ever find yourself worrying if deceased loved ones at Home are angry with you, if they’ve forgiven you, or if they are as ill or unhappy as they were during their lives, you can ease your mind. Needlepoint it on a pillow if you need to, because you can count on it: if they’re Home, they’re happy.

Unobstructed by our earthly limitations, spirits have any number of advantages over us on earth that we all have to look forward to:

• The natural ability to communicate with each other, and with us when they visit us, through the use of telepathy—that is, the instant transference of information from one entity to another without the use of the five physical senses. One of the most common observations you’ll hear from people who’ve experienced spirit visits is that an entire conversation took place between them without either of them saying a word.
  
• The natural ability to bilocate—that is, literally be in two places at once. For example, deceased loved ones can easily visit two family members simultaneously who live hundreds of miles from each other, and each visit is unique and absolutely real.
  
• The ability to manipulate animate and inanimate objects on earth to get our attention. Spirits can easily communicate with our animals and cause them to respond to telepathic commands, so that, let’s say, a conspicuous number of birds, butterflies, squirrels, or whatever will be impossible for the recipient of the visit to ignore, or a family pet will suddenly perform tricks it only used to perform for the visiting spirit. The variations in the use of inanimate objects as spirits’ way of waving at us are literally countless. They’ll move photographs or keepsakes, they’ll rock their favorite rocking chair, they’ll play a “broken” music box and make dormant toys spring to life, they’ll hide keys and eyeglasses, they’ll leave little clusters of coins in places that make no sense, they’ll superimpose their own image on a painting or snapshot just long enough to be seen—anything it takes, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, for a spirit to try to express, “I’m here!” and be noticed.
  
• The ability to dramatically affect electrical devices. Spirits, after all, have to cross from the dimension of the Other Side into ours in order to visit us, and they often find it helpful to attach their energy to such readily available conductors as electricity and water (which is why the old movie cliché is true—the spirit world really does love a good thunderstorm). They can create utterly bizarre behavior in TVs (a popular favorite is changing the channels over and over and over again, as if someone’s sitting on the remote control), appliances (particularly instances of doors of microwaves, refrigerators, and ovens swinging open and closed over and over again “on their own”), telephones (they don’t call it “phantom ringing” for nothing, and if you’ve ever answered a ringing phone to nothing but blaring static, it’s safe to assume you’ve been visited), and countless other electrical and electronic devices.
  

In almost all of Francine’s comments you’ll see that she mentions specific people on earth whom celebrities come to visit. It’s my hope that those receiving visits—and all of you as well—pay attention and know what to watch and listen for. They’re so eager to assure you that they really are alive, well, and with you, and I’d hate for you to miss them.

Visages

Through casual, completely unscientific polls among countless clients over the years, I’ve become familiar with the popularity of the myth that when we leave our bodies and rejoin the spirit world, we assume the form of wispy, shapeless blobs of fog. I guess a case can be made that with the gift of eternal life to be grateful for, it’s petty to worry about what we look like at Home, but living eternally among an endless sea of floating fog blobs doesn’t sound like a lot to look forward to either.

The truth is, we all have very distinctive individual identities on the Other Side that we return to when our lifetimes here are through. We have bodies of various shapes and sizes. We have faces with unique features, just as we have on earth, as well as a variety of hair colors, eye colors, and skin colors. We have eyes that blink, and mouths that smile. In fact, we even have hearts and other “human” organs, but their placement is a mirror image of our earthly bodies, so that everything is reversed from left to right. I once asked my Spirit Guide, Francine, why we have organs at Home when we no longer have to bother with annoying functions like digestion and waste elimination. She replied, “Because that’s the way God made us.” For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a good follow-up question.

We get to choose our own visages on the Other Side, and we can change them whenever we like through simple thought projection, especially when we visit a loved one on earth and want to be sure they recognize us. The one exception to that choice is that we’re actually bestowed with increasing physical beauty as our spiritual advancement increases—another of the major differences between here and Home, come to think of it. Sadly, we on earth usually come to learn sooner or later, whether we want to or not, that there’s no reliable connection whatsoever between physical appearance and spiritual advancement.

The Waiting Room

It never fails—just when I think Francine and I have covered all there is to learn about the Other Side, I find out there’s more, not because Francine’s holding out on me, but because, as she tirelessly puts it, “If you don’t ask the question, I can’t give you the answer.”

I knew that when we’re about to descend into a new lifetime on earth, there’s a long, beautifully designed process involved to guarantee that we haven’t made the decision lightly, there’s nothing haphazard about it, and we’ve taken every possible step to ensure that our brief trip away from Home will accomplish every goal we’ve set for ourselves. We’ve chosen our Spirit Guide. We’ve exhaustively designed our chart. The body we’ll inhabit is taking form in the womb of the woman we’ve selected to be our biological mother. We lie down on a table in a sacred, soothing room in the Towers, with the sunset pastels of the sky filtering in through the blue glass façade. We’re surrounded by comfort and support from those special, loving souls who are trained to keep us confident and unafraid.

I thought that was all there was, that the next step was our spirit entering the fetus in the blink of an eye, at the exact moment we choose. I was wrong.

One morning when she was six years old, my granddaughter Angelia told me about an astral trip she’d taken the night before. She routinely traveled to the Other Side while she slept, and she especially loved visiting the peaceful hush of the Towers. On that particular night she’d come across a room she hadn’t noticed before, with a vast window covered by a veil. Like every other child confronted with something hidden, she was curious and wanted to know what was behind that veil, and she took a step toward the room. But Francine, who’d been watching her, stopped her and said, “I’m sorry, Angelia. You can’t go in there.” Angelia couldn’t remember exactly what else Francine had told her, but by the end of the conversation she understood that behind the veil, inside that room, spirits about to leave Home to inhabit an infant body were actually diminishing in size, being transformed from their thirty-year-old physiques into babies themselves.