Visit from the afterlife?
By Anjum Niaz
It’s not your imagination if you hear the TV make funny sounds in the thick of the night or the phone whirr without a reason. There is a spirit that wants you to know, and most of them come between 1am to 5am
SYLVIA Browne, the best-selling psychic, says she’s on a mission from God to prove us mortals that the soul survives death. Saucer-eyed with nails like red claws and lips like crimson slivers, she is a progeny of a family of psychics dating back to 300 years.
Care to believe?
Never mind if you don’t, because the burgeoning club of Nosy Parkers that bloat The New York Times bestseller list do. Visits from the Afterlife, Sylvia Browne’s latest offering of ‘hauntings, spirits and reunions with lost love ones’ continues to be a favourite.
And the mystic is no pedantic scholar of theology or its nebulous branches, instead she’s an M.A. in English Literature. But passionate enough to declare: “My faith in God is as essential to me as the air I breathe — it empowers me, comforts me, inspires me, sustains me, brings me joy and diminishes my fears.”
Put on your seat belts then for a ghoulish ride though spookyland with vivid images — some benign others blood-curdling that make many wish they hadn’t opened the book and scoured the pages having unfriendly ghosts and devils spring up to scare the daylights out of us.
Then there are the spirits of the dead ones who constantly appear and narrate their personal stories to Sylvia along with an army of 2,014 ordinary people who have written to Sylvia to share their visitations from the outer world. Some really weird.
For example, a man sitting in a deserted airport lounge in the middle of the night got a visit from the devil itself! He came and sat next to him and began laughing. Who are you? The man asked and why do you look at me? “I am the devil!” He chased the man through the corridors, refusing to get lost.
“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,” says Sylvia.
It’s not a trick of imagination if you hear the TV make funny sounds in the thick of the night or the phone whirr without a reason. There is a spirit that wants you to know and most of them come between 1am to 5am. Some fidget with curtains or blinds, while others make a lot of electrical stuff go off.
Watch out!
What startles me and gets my heart racing each night is the creaky wooden floor that makes the most uncanny noise in conjunction with the heat radiators running throughout the house that crank and cackle when heat passes through them. Believe me, the sound itself can scare the robust hearted among us. All old American homes have this heating.
Then there’s a spirit that sends a lot of birds to her sister: just trying to show her hello.
And ghosts?
“I believe in ghosts,” says Sylvia. What she utters next is really corny, “Not one of them have the slightest idea that they are dead!” In other words, they don’t cross over and continue to roam the earth — “desperately confused and lonely, often angry, sometimes aggressive and petulant.”
Sylvia insists that there are angels with wings that she’s seen, four in tow, hovering around humans to protect them. While I can’t vouch for that invisible claim, what I can safely wager is that a cosmetic surgeon/beautician sure is protecting the 66-year-old from looking like a hag! The TV cameras don’t lie or do they?
So what happens when you die?
“You go through the tunnel and you go to the other side, and it is a beautiful place with actual buildings and art museums and...we just can’t see it, we’re ghosts in their world. We’re not the real world. It’s like Plato said, we’re nothing but the shadows on the wall of a cave. We’re the transparent world. That’s the real world.”
Our physical being is a passing phase, what is permanent about us, according to the spiritual sage, is the divine part that feels joy and sorrow, love and reverence, it 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.”
Sylvia saw how ‘Old blue eyes’ crooner Frank Sinatra’s spirit left his 82-year-old body on May 14, 1998, and went to the Other Side in an instant. “The crossing over for Dean Martin, 78, eight years ago on Christmas day was rough. He actually never stopped grieving the death of his beloved son, Paul, in 1987, and even after he died, Dean’s grief kept him earthbound.”
But Sylvia saw Paul come from the Other Side to bring his father home.
She says she “saw” Lady Diana, 36 and John Kennedy, Jr, 38, reach “Home” with John “in his mother’s arms, before they knew what hit them.” And when will Sylvia Browne cross over to the Other Side? “I will die when I am 88 years old” — another 20 years to go and God knows how many more psychic books in-between!
IN THE MIND’S EYE
Can you catch the wind?
See a breeze?
Its presence is revealed by the leaves of a tree
An image of my faith in the unseen
In a blackened room, the only light is an infrared that glows on a screen imaging a blurry sighting of a man. The whole scene is quite creepy, made more eerie by the sound of waves crashing on the rocks. A group of 40, who have paid $35 to converse with their dear departed, are told to shut their eyes and concentrate on the dead person they want to “meet”. Their faces will glow in the red haze. Wow!
The room creates the kind of kinetic energy — the sheer speed and mass of the human mind that, at the end of a two-hour session, one-third of the hyper-excited crowd is goosed if not totally spooked out. “We saw the faces of the ones we wanted to see — we talked and they talked back to us.” The luckless rest of us look blank, “we didn’t see nothing,” we say stonily.
Does one actually connect with the dead? Or on another level, psyche oneself to become exactly the person one wants to be, by feeding oneself the right thoughts? Can one get to the metaphysical by way of ESP (extra-sensory perception)?
Questions that sear the mundane mind and may never get the correct answer ever.
Mysteries of the unknown inhabit our everyday lives, yet who can say what they be.
Money is made by playing fast and loose on the emotions of the gullible thousands looking for quick fixes and subliminal answers.
Marc Sky, the medium hooking up the assembly of 40 with their dead relatives, claims to have “amazing psychic and hypnotic powers.” He says he “discovered” his powers when, as a child while playing hide-and-seek, he was able to “locate” his hidden friends every time. Conse-quently, “they refused to play” with him. He has used this skill to help locate missing people. A Psychology Graduate from Rutgers University in our state of New Jersey, and a hypno-therapist, Marc specializes in ESP, lectures/demonstrations, psychic readings, past life regressions, and hypnosis for weight loss, smoking, phobias, pain, and much more.
At the end of the session, we are handed out “Marc Sky’s All-Purpose Subliminal Self-Help Cassette” to untap “the incredible power” inside our brains. “Listen to your tape once a day for 30 days to exactly become what you want to.” He also hands us a metal coin engraved with “health, wealth, love forever” with his phone number and web site deeply carved. The flip side reads: “Good luck is yours — from psychic Marc Sky — lucky charm.”
“You must keep this with you all the time” he tells us as we depart.
Thirty days later, the tape plays like a broken record with nothing but a mangled noise and the coin is nothing but a piece of cheap metal — more of a millstone around one’s neck (I toss it away when we move home)!
Welcome to the American dream! This is the land of the much-touted free market economy, where the cold calculated system that sells the American dream is no more than a predator feeding on the desperate, living on the edge, needy for help?
With a soaring six per cent jobless rate and more than four million Americans out of a job, the makeover men are minting money by selling their phony wares.
|
