Posted on 09/13/2003 6:21:12 AM PDT by foolscap
Sep. 5, 2003. 03:22 PM
They All Want To See Dead People
BARBARA TURNBULL LIFE WRITER
Being in touch with the dead has been coming alive.
Conversations with people in the hereafter is so very now — in movies, on television, in best-selling books and in personal appearances before live audiences across the continent.
The widespread urge to get in touch with the dearly departed is making the afterlife mainstream.
That's no surprise to James Van Praagh. He's the medium whose show Beyond With James Van Praagh is one of two about communicating with the dead that airs on TV multiple times each day. He says he predicted the popularity of tapping into eternity during his first appearance on Larry King Live in the mid-'90s.
"We share two common experiences in this world — the first is birth and we have some idea what that's about," he says in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "The second is death. We don't really know about death, but every one of us has this experience. People want to know more about what's going to happen to them."
Even more so, people want to know what happened and what is happening to those who have already passed into the hereafter.
Van Praagh — whose first of four books spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, selling 600,000 — is one of four mediums scheduled this season at Toronto's Learning Annex (http://www.learning annex.com), each one purportedly sending and receiving messages from beyond the grave.
About 700 people are expected at tomorrow's three-hour seminar, paying anywhere from $50 to $250 for the privilege of possibly making a connection. There are no guarantees. The dead are notoriously elusive and anything but predictable.
But he does try to send everyone home with something. Van Praagh plans to teach the audience about everyday intuition and how to use it.
Then he'll move into the main part of the presentation and bring through messages from the spirit world.
How? Think of him as a live radio, Van Praagh suggests.
He explains that he opens up to another level of awareness, uses the energy, then shuts it off when he's done. After all, he doesn't want to be walking down a street filled with people and ghosts.
"You have to tune in to a frequency," he says. "The spirits will come and will impress me with thoughts, feelings of their personality. Some will use vision, some will use hearing. There's the meaning and personality behind the thoughts — that's what I try to convey to the person in the audience. It's mind-to-mind communication, telepathic."
It comes to him almost like Morse code, he explains, though unlike anything in our three- dimensional world.
This is all fine, as long as people don't remain emotionally attached in an unhealthy way to someone who has died, according to Toronto psychologist Ana Bodnar, who specializes in grief counseling. It's important to acknowledge that someone has passed on and to feel the emotional pain related to the loss, she says.
Some people feel guilt or that they contributed somehow to the death, which can lead to a syndrome called "complicated mourning," Bodnar says. If there are unresolved issues, a person may get stuck in the grieving process and hold back living a full life. Bodnar's job is to help people work through their unfinished business.
Bodnar agrees on the healing potential of helping people express unsaid thoughts and achieve a semblance of peace.
"I can comment on the therapeutic value, I can't comment on the reality" (of mediums), she says.
Van Praagh certainly has his share of celebrities convinced he's the real McCoy — Cheers star Ted Danson played Van Praagh in a television movie last year after getting a reading that, the actor says, blew him away.
In fact, the mediums have become celebrities themselves, with some fans traveling great distances for their appearances. Van Praagh's books have been published in 35 countries and in 25 languages.
Gone are the days when the odd believer quietly — sometimes even sheepishly — went to a local psychic for a reading on his or her past lives and future. These days the subject has even gone to the dogs — The Pet Psychic runs weekly on the Animal Planet channel.
Van Praagh believes his job is to demonstrate that there is life after death, to alleviate the fear of death and to impart the importance of karma.
"It seems our heaven or our hell is based upon how we lived our lives," he says. "When you pass over to the spirit world, one of the first things you go through is a life review and you relive everything you've done and feel everything you've done to each other. I try to impress upon people that you are responsible for all your thoughts, all your words and all your deeds."
It's not just grandiose actions, but small, everyday acts of kindness or selfishness that count, like holding the door for someone versus cutting someone off on the highway. "It has a ripple effect," he says.
So which spirits get priority when he's before an audience?
That largely depends on his personal spirit guides, says Van Praagh.
"It's like a line. They line them up and bring them to me. Most of the time they will bring through spirits whose message is for everyone in the room. Maybe it's about forgiveness or about unconditional love or regret or guilt — something that everyone can relate to."
It can also be partly driven by an audience member who really needs to hear from a lost loved one or a spirit particularly anxious to be heard, he says.
Audiences are usually made up of a cross-section of society.
Toronto flight instructor Barbara Santamaria thinks she may have connected with her deceased mother at a recent Learning Annex seminar with British medium Rosemary Altea. Altea described her mother as fighting to pull out oxygen tubes and handing her daughter roses — two things Santamaria says make sense.
"I have this wish, like a lot of us do, that there is an afterlife," she says, adding that other psychics she has seen have been very vague. "I'm skeptical, but I'm open. She was pretty convincing."
"People need to be enlightened about death," Van Praagh says. "It's a natural occurrence and the fear needs to be taken away. When you take away fear, you really begin to live life."
Van Praagh believes everyone can tap into the spirit world if they get in touch with their psychic selves.
"Whether it's the chemist or the person who works in the office — everybody has these kinds of experiences of intuition. I just had the courage to go out in public and show people that this stuff is real," he says.
--Boris
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