Julia Assante is unique in being both a psychic/medium as well as a scholar (PhD) specializing in ancient Near Eastern magic, cult, and religion. Her 2012 book “The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death” is the best I have seen combining afterlife research with her own accounts of dying and what comes next communicated by the deceased themselves.
She points out in the book’s introduction that in examining the ever-flexible nature of the afterlife the dead alone have the authority to answer the fundamental question: What happens after we die? What they have told us is that where they are now is bursting with undreamed of dazzling possibilities and freedoms. Making contact with it expands us in every conceivable direction.
Communication with the deceased is not only possible but in fact normal. To accomplish it doesn’t require us to be a saint, shaman, or medium because the tools to do so are already hardwired in our makeup. We don’t know more about the afterlife and how to make contact because, quite simply, we are scared to death about death. Fear of death involving expectations of what is to come affect our every private moment, influencing what we think, do, hope for, and hold as the meaning of life and reality in general. The common belief that having anything to do with death somehow invites it into our lives, she says, is just plain “poppycock.”
Assante assures us that relationships don’t stop at death. We take our hopes, concerns for the living, and, above all love, with us beyond the grave. While the book was written for anyone interested in the afterlife, especially the bereaved, it was, she says, just as much for those already living on the other side. Some of them have been waiting for decades to tell us of their undying love, inspire, encourage, reassure, sometimes warn, and to assuage our grief and bring comfort, and seek forgiveness or to forgive. In fact, asking for forgiveness is a major reason shared by those on both sides of the veil to seek communication.
Although it’s commonly believed that we should not bother the deceased which would bring them down to our level, Assante emphasizes that most of our loved ones want to make contact and for all the reasons we do. Besides, if they don’t want contact, they won’t engage in it. However, Assante tells us that from what she’s seen, once they realize contact has been achieved they’re overcome by relief. Rather than being bothered, they feel exhilarated and deeply grateful.
Interaction eases our transition. It comes naturally as the final moment becomes nearer with increasing and deep insights, dreams, and deathbed visions. Glimpses of otherworldly superenergized, radiance-filled landscapes have such indescribable splendor that beholders are simply transfixed. Very often deceased family members or friends come to bring comfort to the dying and escort them on their passage. These extraordinary deathbed events are so commonplace they have been given the name nearing-death awareness.
The experience of dying differs for each person despite its biological component. Each death is unique shaped by an individual’s beliefs, culture, and personal wants. The more we know about those differences, Assante says, the more we discover new directions and broaden possibilities.
Sadly, even when it is medically evident that a person is very near the end, any direct mention of death to the dying is typically avoided. We seem to unconsciously believe that talking about it draws the moment nearer. It would be so much easier for us, she says, to know more about where we are going and that it is not a place of judgment, but one with compassion, self-discovery, unbridled creativity, and complete enchantment.
Over the decades Assante tells us she has watched the deceased show up in places as different as quiet telephone conversations at her home to all types of social events including boisterous parties. They show up whether or not anyone is hoping to see them, and it’s almost always to help someone they know.
However, many dead people remain troubled by unsolved problems from their lives. If their deaths were unexpected, they may be frantic to reach the living and make their stories heard. Others come back to confess wrongs they committed in their lives. Strong guilt and regrets can persist even in the afterworld keeping them emotionally imprisoned. Until the two parties achieve reconciliation neither will be able to truly heal and move on. Sometimes the dead have such a constant desire for this they might wait for decades to be heard. Unfortunately, Assante points out, we usually ignore their attempts to get our attention or mistake them as a wish-fulfillment fantasy or an upsurge of grief.
When we do make contact, we don’t have to be satisfied with a fleeting apparition or a one-line message. Instead, she says, all of us, both living and deceased, are capable of sustained two-way communication, and this can recur indefinitely. It can involve actual dialogue in which we discuss things, even disagree or joke with each other. The communication can be loving or angry, joyful or sad. In any case at the end of it, we are likely to feel pure elation.
Not only are the deceased a dependable source of encouragement, reassurance, and inspiration, but their eyewitness accounts of the afterlife impart information about their reality that truly bends the mind. If we are open to this communication with the dead, Assante emphasizes, it will charge our lives with greater meaning and redefine our understanding of reality
Assante makes the point that understanding the experience of dying and the afterlife consciousness is key and should replace the traditional terms of soul and spirit. Those terms set up unnecessary divisions within the self and between this world and the next. A person while living is not called a spirit, only after his or her death. A person can have a soul while alive but becomes a soul after dying. Consciousness transcends these divisions and supports the notion of the self that is independent of physical identity. You do not have consciousness, she says, you are consciousness whether alive or dead.
Assante understands consciousness as “sentient energy that tends to form constellations of identity, from simple cells to the most complex discarnates.” When focused in material dimensions, it creates matter.
Although the consciousness of each identity is unique, all seek expansion and fulfillment. Discrete consciousnesses making up individual selves form larger identities outside the physical realm that mystics call oversouls. Our eternal individual personality, along with all discrete consciousnesses, is contained within an oversoul which gave birth to it. The oversoul serves as a kind of command headquarters that generates and orchestrates the past, present, and future lives of all it spawns. It encompasses immeasurable regions of knowledge and potentials from which our individual self constantly draws.
Our individual eternal selves enhanced by the profound and constant connectedness to the oversoul are our own greatest personal teachers that are ever-present and alive within. This aspect of us knows eternity and also serves as a guide to others whether we are aware of it or not. The human soul cannot be bound,but surpasses all limits while containing all limits.
Assante tells us that from what she has seen clairvoyantly all souls possess a spectacular grandeur, ”a kind of cosmic immensity.” The aspect of human consciousness that lies just outside its narrow focus on physical reality is so enormous it contains the full range of human experience. We could view it as “containing the sum total memory of humankind, past, present, and future, good and bad, exalted and tragic.” This memory is what she calls “the spiritual equivalent of our genetic heritage.” We have an innate urge for self-fulfillment and growth that continually moves us to assimilate more and more of that totality which then comes into conscious awareness and is actualized.
Most of us were brought up to believe that after death we go to a fixed place that remains forever the same. Moreover, we were also taught that whatever religion we belong to knows the exact nature of that place. However, Assante points out, an exploration of ancient beliefs about death and the afterlife makes clear that from the beginning of recorded history until the present each society and sect has refashioned the afterlife to fit its own needs, even when the official religion has remained the same.
For each person the cycle of preparing to die, leaving the body, and the first experiences on the other side is unique. It varies according to his or her beliefs. However, to a large degree, the inner experience of this cycle pushes up from a deeper source, like, she says, a “single subterranean river that rises to the surface in different places and times.” No matter how or where a person dies there is “an awareness of something of enormous magnitude happening underneath, an awe-inspiring recognition of being in a partnership with greater powers.” (p. 193).
For those whose bodies simply wear out from age the period from old age to death, counter to what we think, is actually one of accelerated growth. Qualities that have been suppressed often come to the surface. Cellular consciousness that largely organizes our perceptions of time loses focus with aging or illness, resulting in our perceptions loosening so more than one time- line becomes apparent. Short-term memory may fade and long-term memory become more real. Beliefs, events, and relationships are reworked to encourage an overall healing.
The most commonplace symptoms of the last phase of dying are weakness and extreme fatigue where the dying can neither move nor react to their surroundings. Sleep is predominant, often deepening into unconsciousness. At this point, they are more on the other side than here, and there is no more desire to eat or drink. Typically, their eyes take on an unfocused, glassy appearance. The physical senses disappear with hearing the last to go. In the days or hours before death, breathing becomes more irregular until it ceases altogether.
Accidents and diseases from which we die, Assante believes, do not come out of nowhere but represent choices and are largely tailor-made from a person’s inner patterns. Once the decision about dying is made, the psyche, she says, goes about arranging the necessary future circumstances that will facilitate the body’s demise. The psyche has enormous energy for making these preparations with much of it directed toward bringing about closure, resolution, reconciliation, and the conclusion of unfinished business.
This inner preparation may involve summons for visits from deceased relatives and friends that sometimes occur long before a person dies. These visits can be regarded as a very early sign of nearing-death awareness.
The visitors from the other side come to assist the transition, bring comfort, and help resolve life issues. Many may also come to take the dying away which is further evidenced by the frequency with which death ensues shortly after.
Visions also frequently have to do with transcendent realms of the afterworld described by such terms as staggering beauty, extraterrestrial light, brilliantly vibrant foliage, and loving high-charged energy emanating from the grass, the trees, the flowers, and the sky.
As a psychic at the deathbed, Assante tells us, before breathing stops she shifts her focus and concentrates on what is going on in those barely perceptible spaces adjacent to the body where one can best see a person leaving our world. This process of passing and its aftermath, she says, is without a doubt “the most dazzling event of a lifetime outside of its counterpart, birth.”
What she observes is the energy body or ethereal body simply rising out of the physical one, most often from the region of the head. A person usually goes from there into a space filled with a creamy or golden living light. However, sometimes leaving the body is slower and appears more like a gentle floating upward through “layers of emotion-laden atmospheres, each effervescent with a color that loosely represents a psychological tone or state,” like rising through various layers of water, some of which are cooler and darker and others warmer and lighter.
Those who are unconscious or heavily medicated during their last hours may be enveloped by a mist that is experienced as a thick blanket of tender security which invites the more vulnerable to slowly and safely release into it. On rare occasions a dead person takes the place of the mist and simply appears to lift a person’s ethereal body out.
There are thousands of descriptions of the inner experience of leaving the body found in near-death and out-of-body experiences. Assante comments on a few. NDEers typically report emerging from the head region and moving upward, corresponding to what she usually sees. They look down on their own bodies with an unusual degree of emotional detachment. Early on they may try to get the attention of someone in the room although almost always this goes unnoticed.
In their out-of-body state the dead and “near dead” are able to move freely through walls and ceilings and hover over rooftops. In fact, they can travel anywhere simply by putting their attention on a destination. The act of getting out of the body is met with joy, usually relief, and, almost all of the time, awe and wonder.
From her unique position, Assante tells us that those out-of-body people who are at least a tiny bit conscious and have no intention of lingering vanish for a second or two and then reappear again in another scene. They appear to shift to an entirely different psychological environment that corresponds point by point with the exquisite deathbed visions of the afterlife. On the other hand, those who are too sedated or deep in coma and unable to go on by themselves might remain in the secure mist or are looked after by others until they come to, perhaps in hospital-like settings.
No matter what stage we are in during death helpers are standing by right on the other side. Usually they are a departed member from the immediate family, but sometimes who shows up is a surprise. They might be a person we knew from another life. Occasionally they might even be someone who is still alive. Pets frequently are common members of the welcome committee, which truly delights their newly deceased owners.
Many types of helpers can be characterized as nonhuman or superhuman including but not limited to angels. Some appear to be specialized in helping people adjust after death. In order to best do that they occasionally take on the appearance of a figure important to the belief system of the newly deceased. Often these are the prophets, saints, and paraphysical beings of a person’s personal religion.
The helpers by themselves or with others might act out a drama designed to produce a specific cathartic effect. In extreme cases this may even involve re-creation of archetypal hells where a person is able to confront the ugliest self-condemnation in graphic terms. In all cases the objective is to help that person move toward cathartic revelation, inner resolution, and liberation.
For many NDEers a being of light dominates their experience, a personage of incalculable magnitude. Surveys show that from 16 percent to more than half of survivors actually encounter this being. Surprisingly, the permanently dead do not speak of this magnificent entity leading Assante to conclude that it mostly comes to assist people in deciding whether to stay or return to their bodies.
The being emanates such indescribable love and compassion that some people come back with the conviction that they have met God or Jesus. Considering the overwhelming power of the experience this is understandable. It is clear that the being of light represents a distinct personality which possesses an intimate knowledge of human nature and may manifest in different forms in order to meet an individual’s psychological needs and preconceptions. Assante points out that anyone who has been dipping into otherworldly dimensions for any length of time begins to realize that they are populated with a huge number of the most divinely endowed entities.
The beings of light, she believes, are human oversouls which contain all possible human experience within them. “They personify the magnificent potential of the human soul — in other words, what you already are in the future (p. 229)”
The life review, which occupies another major place in the experience of many NDEers, Assante points out can occur at any time, especially when one’s life is perceived to be at risk or is in great transition. Because the dying often have life reviews, they should be considered as part of nearing-death awareness. Given their importance it may be surprising that Assante has not so far heard a word about them from the dead themselves. Here again, there is a discrepancy between permanent death and near-death experiences.
For near-death survivors, the impossibly concentrated life review, including its futuristic aspects, seems to help in deciding what kind of spiritual aims and ethics they will follow on their return. It’s reasonable to assume that some people who start out in an NDE and go through a life review may decide not to return. For them, a compressed review is not necessary since most will end up devoting a big piece of their afterlives to examining their pasts anyway, and at a more leisurely pace.
Trying to describe what people do in the afterlife, Assante emphasizes, is about as easy as trying to describe what they do on earth. However, she does offer a few observations about what she and other researchers have so far uncovered with regard to the dead in the modern West.
Most people seem to take about three days before they are well enough oriented to move on. Usually sometime during this period they “get it” in one flash of insight and eagerly start trying out their unbounded capabilities. A majority go to some idyllic place, whereas a minority go to a kind of temporary holding place. Still others remain close to this plane usually to pay reassuring visits to loved ones. People who die from a long-standing medical condition or a traumatic event or who were heavily medicated usually require a time out or vacation for recovery. However, full recuperation is usually rapid, in a place where they experience a deep feeling of safety and a benign, enveloping warmth where weighty cares of physical life dissolve.
They give Assante and other mediums exuberant reports about their return to youthful health and the discovery of newfound freedoms. Typically, unlimited mobility is at the top of the list.
Typically, by the time of their funerals the deceased are already functioning from a place of greater vision. Yet, Assante says, she has learned not to expect even slight enlightenment from everyone. Lifelong patterns strongly persist.
Very often people find themselves in idyllic environments for full recuperation. But no matter where they go, it will seem like home sweet home. Others may instead remove to a thought construction of a place that was significant in the past.
Those whose deaths were traumatizing or too sudden to resolve life issues gravitate to what Assante calls custom-made adjustment or holding zones where they assimilate the past, typically through playful creativity and interaction. These holding zones are not really a place but a projection of a suspended mental state where a person is no longer focused in physical reality and not yet in the reality of the afterlife.
.There are a number of reasons why someone might stay in a holding zone before moving on. Perhaps he or she is motivated by concerns for people left behind and might pause there to stay within range of their emotional and physical circumstances. This is common for parents of a young child. Usually, however, people hang back because they haven’t been able to clear up major unfinished business.
Some remain in holding zones because they’re unable to accept their deaths. Those material realists who were strongly opposed to the idea of an afterlife may wind up there from sheer denial of survival and may even insist that they are still flesh and blood. Still others stay put because they need to tell their stories. This is particularly important if the living are unaware of the person’s death as in instances of disappearance or murder.
In nearly all holding-zone situations confusion plays a big role. Occasionally the newly deceased close themselves off and resist help from the outside. They then remain in a kind of isolated suspension in which they are unable to alleviate their confusion and accept their deaths. Some, Assante notes, may simply “take the next train back” and reincarnate without any reflection on the life they just left.
Typically, they later describe holding zone place as a blank period or a sleep time. Because they haven’t separated from their previous existences when they return, their former identities remain dominant in their new lives, at least during the years of their youth.
Those of us who have just experienced the death of someone close are usually drained physically, psychically, and emotionally. Whatever energy we do have is taken up with such things as getting in touch with family and friends, dealing with funeral arrangements, and handling legal necessities.
Day-to-day living feels surreal and the strange and unusual can happen. There is a psychic bruising similar to that caused by an operation since just as an organ is cut out of our body, a person is cut out of our life. It is a time of maximum stress but also a time of maximum psychic activity, since stress heightens psychic abilities.
This time immediately after death is also a time when we as well as the departed are most in need of contact. Pathways between the dimensions are the most open and typically stay wide open for the next three months. It may seem unfair that just at the time when contact is easiest, those closest to the deceased experienceare themselves too overwhelmed to act on it. However, Assante tells us, the driving need for contact on both sides and the close proximity between this world and the next, along with strong emotion, all work to our advantage for communication of maximum clarity. Strong emotion propels contact, and for us it’s just a matter of learning how to use it.
However, Assante points out, there are powerful factors that interfere with this contact. Fear of the dead and of the paranormal is a major one. We have traditional words for the appearing deceased — ghosts, specters, apparitions, phantoms, shades, spooks. Yet we wouldn’t use any of them to describe Uncle Joe smiling at us from the corner of a room? We wouldn’t want to witness a “visit from the grave.” Although we may claim to be free of the superstitions of the past, there’s a part of us that still fears the dead coming back to haunt us or presaging the imminent death of the witness.
Some of us may avoid contact with the deceased because we don’t want him or her to know what’s going on in our hearts and minds. Some might want to bury the guilt of not having done enough, whether true or not. Parents who have lost a child may be so plagued by “what ifs” and “if onlys” that they are may both long for an encounter and dread stirring up more anguish and self-reproach. Many think of contact with the dead, or in fact any dabbling in the supernatural, as perilous and forbidden.
When contact actually occurs, Assante notes, people are likely to pass it off as the product of an overactive imagination. What most reassures them that this contact is real is its unpredictability. The way the dead appear and the messages they convey nearly always is surprising and not what the recipients might have expected or wanted. This unpredictability strongly suggests that the deceased who contact us are independent of our imaginations
The other major reason contact is denied is the view that an appearance is just wishful thinking. Yet at least one study of people who had spontaneous encounters with the departed found the big majority were neither longing for one nor expecting one and that many who yearned for contact never had it.
If we are geared toward contact with one specific person, we are not likely to run into discarnates outside our immediate concern. About 89 percent of the time, people have reported encounters with dead relatives and friends and 10 percent with pets.
There is absolutely nothing, Assante notes, like a direct encounter with the departed for alleviating grief. The intimacy and emotional depth and the clear detail of what is seen, felt, or heard are strongly convincing that real and meaningful contact occurred. This kind of personal, unmediated contact has an impact that never diminish.
Grief therapists, encouraged by Botkin’s work with induced after-death contacts, are beginning to recognize that maintaining bonds with the deceased helps survivors adjust better to their loss than traditional counseling that sought to sever those same bonds.
Studies show that the stronger the support for bereavement, the better a mourner moves through it. Assante points out that the dead can be key facilitators in a bereavement support group if we allow them. In fact, she says, they are by far the best bereavement counselors in existence.
Contact, she emphasizes, is not just good for us but is one of the best things that can ever happen to us. Several researchers have found that the experience of contact affects people in ways very much like those of near-death experiences.
The changes in both cases are huge and are always positive and last a lifetime. Contact works to eliminate the fear of death as well, and when that fear is out of the way a person dramatically transforms for the better.
In addition to alleviating grief, one of the greatest benefits of after-death communication is that it grants us the relief of knowing our loved ones live on and are doing very well. This relief can be overwhelming, particularly when it comes to loss of a child or loss by traumatic death.
After-death communications can involve warnings that save lives and prevent accidents, crimes, and suicides. They provide encouragement, reassurance, and valuable advice from a extremely wide perspective that even includes the future. Communication also helps the dead who want to tell us of their gratitude, to help us find lost important things, and to conclude unfinished business.
Studies of spontaneous encounters with the deceased show that from 39.4 to 53 percent occur in the first year after death. In one study involving 350 cases, 10.5,percent occurred within the first twenty-four hours and decreased in frequency over time to 16.1 percent between one and five years and to 6.8 percent from six to ten years.
We tend to equate ghosts with the deceased who may contact us; however, Assante tells us that there is a very big difference between dear dead Auntie Jean and a ghost. Ghosts, Assante explains, are literally not all there. They are highly developed thought forms made and shed by the living at critical turning points, and their growth continues whether their creator is alive or dead.
She has worked with a lot of them and emphasizes that her objective is not to destroy the ghost, as the term ghost busting suggests, but to liberate it. Because they are fixated, self-involved, resistant to human intervention, and almost never seek help, this can be very difficult. They need to be approached with respect and compassion.
Many investigators of the paranormal and intuitives, Assante notes, don’t share her view that ghosts and the dead are different sorts of entities altogether. Instead they view ghosts as a special category of the human dead known as earthbound spirits, which are spirits of dead people who cling to the earth plane.
The claim is that because these souls cannot or will not move on to the afterlife, they are imprisoned in a hell-like “astral realm,” which is very near to earth but “lower.” The view that the inner dimensions are like a layer cake, with our world between a lower plane at the bottom and a heavenly kingdom at the top, she says, is only an assumption
Assante emphasizes that the earthbound-spirit hypothesis is not at all consistent with the findings of a great many others who are either researching after-death communication or practicing it. In the thousands upon thousands of incidents so far collected, not one mention is made of encountering an earthbound spirit. No mediums/psychics have seen harm done to any living individual by the dead. Furthermore, most people involved in after-death research have encountered dead people who had excessively indulged in alcohol, drugs, and unwholesome sex while in the body, but after death they did not become one, nor were they entrapped by one.
She acknowledges that some people have trapped themselves in a delusion after death, but a delusion of their own making not a prefabricated “lower region,” or low astral plane. If there are entities akin to earthbound spirits, they are really fragment personalities, perhaps sometimes nothing more than stray thoughts picked up telepathically. Unlike the human dead they have no identity or history. Assante and other mediums don’t hear their individual voices nor their personal stories. If they are fragment personalities or thought forms, they could have been created at any time by anyone experiencing some violent or turbulent event.
Furthermore, Assante tells us, many things that “cross the spaces of the human psyche” cannot be explained as the by-products of human thoughts and emotions. There are an infinite number of entities that are not and have never been part of this world. She has seen some of them, and she knows others who have.
Making contact with the deceased, Assante tells us, is a normal process involving normal skills we already have. Telepathy is our main tool for after-death communication, and the capacity for using it is something that we’re born with. We already use telepathy every single day whether we’re aware of it or not. What we need to do is boost its efficiency.
She understands telepathy to be the use of any extrasensory perception for the transmission and reception of thoughts, feelings, and images. It encompasses much more than a mental communication following the logic of a verbal thought process.
However, success with after-death communication does not depend entirely on us and our abilities. Success also depends on the ability of the dead to communicate from their end. Desire is the crucial factor. Certain psychological conditions between us and the dead, along with what she calls preconditions such as meteorological, seasonal, and circadian atmospheric conditions and many others will promote contact or deter it.
Once we’re ready to make contact, Assante recommends that we look at spontaneous encounters and ways to work with those subtle signs the dead give us to announce their presence. We can then use these signs to launch full communication. When we perceive a sign, we should go on “inward alert,” send the deceased energy, start talking to the deceased out loud and asking questions, look for mental images and listen for messages, and, record what we see and hear.
At the beginning of every session we need to set our intentions. Assante offers a model for doing so.
“I ask All That Is that whatever transpires be for the best and fullest good for me, for the departed, and for all things in the universe. I am here at this moment to make contact with _____. I ask all my guides and helpers to come to my assistance now. I call on you, _____, to be present with me now. I call on you, _____, to reveal yourself to me. May all that transpires between us be for the best and fullest good for you, for me, and for the universe.”
A time-honored effective way of initiating communication is to talk to a picture of the deceased. Another successful technique for some is automatic writing.
If nothing seems to be happening, we can engage in an imaginary encounter in which we act as though we’re already in communication. We might ask out loud, “Jim, if you were here, what would you say?” Then we should look inside for a mental picture of the deceased and imagine him speaking. We can verbally pose questions as well as give the answers, until we get the impression that our thoughts are not ours alone.
If these techniques for establishing contact still don’t work, it may be that the dead cannot or will not connect with us at the time of our choice. If we sense this to be true, Assante suggests that we clearly restate our wish for contact and tell the departed that we have done all that we know how to do to meet him or her. Then we simply leave it to the departed to initiate contact. If this doesn’t happen, we might also consider going to a professional medium.