Reunions - Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones
abracad, · Categories: books, reviews, survival
Dr Raymond Moody is the scientist who not only brought knowledge of the near-death experience to the masses, he also made a respectable discipline of research into the topic. In Reunions - Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones, Moody brings the scientific method to the ancient, but much derided, practice of mirror gazing.
Reunions begins with the long history of mirror gazing, describing how many cultures have used looking into reflective surfaces to invoke altered states of consciousness. In its time it has gone from widespread acceptance, through condemnation as evil sorcery, to the rationalist ridicule.
Moody goes on to describe how he built a modern-day psychomanteum (apparition chamber) in his old gristmill in Alabama and how he prepared participants for their sittings. It seems that proximity to nature, stimulation through decor and art, and being somehow disconnected from the contemporary world (eg hiding all timepieces) are all positive factors in promoting apparitions. Relaxation and an attitude of not really trying also help facilitate visions.
Moody found that a surprisingly high proportion (more than 50%) of participants have some kind of experience at their first sitting and gives some remarkable accounts of what they reported. Rather than just seeing visions within the speculum (mirror), some participants reported apparitions leaving the mirror to be physically with them, others reported actually entering the mirror themselves. Particularly amazing is that some participants, including Moody himself, reported being visited by life-like apparitions some time after leaving the chamber.
Are the "apparitions" genuinely the spirits of departed loved ones, or are they merely creations of the subconscious minds of the percipients. The book does not pass judgment on this, but the observers' strength of certainty they were real suggests the former. The author has confirmed that participants have reported being given information by the apparitions that they did not previously know and that was later verified to be correct. The couple of accounts of shared visions are particularly interesting as these indicate that the observers were seeing something independent of their own individual minds.
The Spiritual view is that we are all essentially Spirit, temporarily encased in flesh. By altering our level of consciousness, disengaging with physical reality and going deeper within ourselves we draw closer to our Spiritual essence and hence to its connection to the Spiritual realm.
For my own part I must admit to being slightly, inexplicably, afraid to try the techniques described. Though I do admit that shortly after my father's passing I was just gazing aimlessly at my reflection in a glass-fronted piece of furniture when my appearance seemed to take on that of my father's. Of course the family resemblance may offer an explanation...
Also by Raymond Moody:
Life After Life
The Light Beyond
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Filed in: books, reviews, survival
[...] surface. Notable practitioners have included Elizabethan mystic John Dee, and more recently Dr Raymond Moody, who uses the technique to facilitate contact with deceased loved ones. In How to Read the Crystal [...]