Induced After-Death Communication: A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma is a book that will gently hold you and show you the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how deep your grief. The authors, Allan L. Botkin and R. Graig Hogan, give you the tools of a new therapy that has been helping millions of people who have found themselves faced with the trauma of the death of a loved one.
Grief is a different process for every person. For every person that we lose, depending on their relationship to us, we experience quite a lot of grief. It dose not matter if it's the death of a loved one, or of some family member or relative, a friend, or, in some cases, even at the death of a person that we did not like. With this new, miraculous therapy, the author helps us heal our grief and loss by allowing us to experience it as private communication with our departed loved ones.
First of all, the authors talk about the main questions. They begin with the question, 'What is death?' Death is the natural consequence of a life that ends in a transformation, and in the case of a natural death, the physical organs may be used up from the experience of life. When the natural forces of life have ceased to rhythmically circulate in the living being, or when there is an event so great that it causes some kind of organ failure, the body simply cannot continue to go on in this life path. The soul pulls out and the "machine" that remains, that is, the body, stops. That is what we call physical death.
Human beings are similar to caterpillars in that we go through this stage of life, then we go through the chrysalis stage which seems static in appearance. Inside that chrysalis, there is a lot of work that goes on to, in due course, develop into the beautiful butterflies, which must then liberate themselves from that chrysalis. This labor of liberation is also what we call life. When we die, our material elements fall apart and dissolve. As everyone knows, when we are buried, we decompose rather slowly and eventually become part of the very soil of the Earth. However, there is more. We yield in the form of solid, liquid, and gaseous elements that separate out as we truly become part of the Earth, water, air, and even fire. It's the energetic principles that escape the body, just as the caterpillar gives up material and energetic parts of its substance in its transformation which is also a definite decomposition. The outer layers of the caterpillar dies off and new parts form until there is a tightly wound butterfly formed (trans-formed). So it is with our immortal soul that escapes our body, which decomposes and transforms into all of those elements, and we reform into a new being in a new form.
The authors go on here to give us surprising news: these new forms of being that we take on when we die and transform make us capable of communicating with human beings in one fashion or another. Sometimes humans living in this mortal body are visited by the newly transformed beings, our loved ones.
How does death happen? There are basically three phases. In the beginning phase, when we sense that imminent death is inevitable, most people have at least a little fear that we will certainly die. Then there is a kind of liberation, where all of the multiple lives within us are freed. This phase brings us to a state of surprise for some, and anguish for others. How we experience it will depend on the level to which we have evolved spiritually. During this phase, it's as if we have one foot in the physical plane and one foot in the spiritual. There is a kind of agony at this juncture, and it is the most painful of the three phases. As the author notes, the more spiritually evolved we are, the more there is surprise and the less there is anguish. The third phase is the disengagement of this world and movement toward the next dimension of our existence, and a revelation to our soul that this is our journey.
For us to be able to communicate with people who have died, we must understand this entire process. The authors give us many examples of patients confronted with the trauma of the death of someone dear, and then they describe the startling and extraordinary experiences that they have had surrounding these deaths.
One of my favorite chapters is the one on how forgiveness heals, "Forgiveness in IADC (induced after death communication) Heals - Anger and Guilt." As to how to heal anger and guilt through forgiveness, the authors give us a perfect quotation from the great master Buddha. This quote has been variously translated, and you may have heard it in one form or another before, but it bears repeating here: "Anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. But you are the one who gets burned!"
This chapter offers many good and practical tools to heal ourselves. The authors write, "the experience of guilt is a normal, healthy psychological function. Conscience and consideration for others guide our behavior. So when we do something in conflict with our conscience, we experience the unpleasant feeling of guilt. To avoid the averse guilt feelings, we likely will alter future behavior to appease our conscience."
Then the authors speak about IADC: "every IADC induced thus far has been positive and none negative... Some near-death experiences described in the literature have negative content. [But] in the more than three thousand IADC [experiences] that we have induced thus far, not one has contained negative content."
One of the best examples, and the one that I liked the most on a personal level, is in a section where the authors describe some interesting encounters that their patients experienced. One of the authors writes, "I was very amused by the experience [of] a patient named Dan. When he attempted to have an IADC induction procedure, Dan closed his eyes thinking about his brother, then suddenly opened them with a start. He blurted out, with his eyes wide, 'I felt huge claws clamping around me.' I said, 'Dan, these experiences have so far always been positive. Go back to it and find out what happened.' Trusting me, he agreed to go back to the IADC, focusing on his brother again. I administered another set of eye movements, and he closed his eyes. In a moment, he smiled. After few seconds, he opened his eyes and said, 'I saw my brother this time. It was just like we were together before he died, and I felt I could just talk to him. I asked him if he knew what the claw thing was. He said it wasn't a claw, he was giving me a big hug, and he hugged me again, and I could feel it. My brother's Ok....' "
For me, the experience recounted above contains the essence of this book. Reading about the work of the authors, we can see why it is so important to understand the phenomenon of death before we can truly connect with those who have passed into that other dimension. Death as a symbol represents all that is perishable and destructible in our current existence. Death indicates what disappears from us in the inevitable evolution of things, and death is intimately connected to the symbolism of the Earth.
Death is both revelation and a beginning. When we use the tools of this new therapy that you will find in this book, I think that you will be as impressed as I was to learn how easy it is to understand and be receptive to this other higher dimension of consciousness, so that we can communicate with, and even see, the person who has died. The most positive experiences of all are when we do it all by ourselves without having to go through an intermediary. It is at this moment when the channel is open and we are the most openly receptive to connecting with the deceased. The process is not easy, and we must allow ourselves to take the time to heal. In the grieving process, we must pass through all those familiar stages first and arrive at a kind of healing. The experience of communicating with the dead can happen on an individual level or in a group setting. It's different for each person.
After reading this book, a poem came to my mind that I would like to share with you here:
I say to you that the tomb
That closes over the dead,
Opens up to all of the heavens,
And that what we take as the ending here,
Is really just the beginning...
By
Marie-Claire Wilson, author of the The Spiritual Tarot: The Keys to the Divine Temple, is a bilingual writer and poet.