The 5 Best Experiences For Afterlife Evidence

In today’s episode, we’ll be discussing the 5 best experiences for afterlife evidence. And I’ll share with you my own experiences with a few of them. I’ll also talk about my experience losing my father 19 years ago versus my experience losing my father-in-law last year — and how different those two experiences were because of my experiential research of the afterlife.

Also in today’s episode, Ellen shares her near-death experience, which I comment on. And I’ll answer a question from my book, Answers About The Afterlife, about how we can best understand the afterlife. We’ll also hear a story from Joe about his incredibly spot-on communication from his wife in spirit. And, at the end, another true story and cautionary tale from my life about how what we believe can truly become our reality.

I want to thank you for listening to the show and sharing it with your friends. We’ve been growing our audience with each new episode, which is wildly fulfilling. I also love hearing your feedback, so continue to tell me what you enjoy so I can do more of it. Enjoy the episode! ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV

 If you’d like to watch this video, The 5 Best Experiences For Afterlife Evidence on Afterlife TV, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=2859

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Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.

Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.

JOIN BOB’S NEWSLETTER: Don’t miss Bob’s latest content about life lessons and life after death on his newsletter called, Bob Olson Connect.

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Announcer: Meet Bob Olson. Bob’s the author of “Answers about the Afterlife” and the host of Afterlife TV. A private investigator who began investigating life after death in 1999, Bob now records his interviews with experts, authors, and people who’ve had extraordinary experiences so he can share it all with you. Enjoy the show.

Bob: Hey, everybody, Bob Olson with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. It’s where we talk about life after death and answer the meaningful questions you have around that subject. I want to thank our sponsor, bestpsychicdirectory.com, this is where you can find over 800 psychics, and mediums, and tarot readers all in one place, again bestpsychicdirectory.com. I want to thank you all so much for all the feedback that you’ve given us, and apparently for sharing the show with other people.

All right, this is the fourth new format episode. With each episode, we’re gaining about 20 or 30% of our listeners. In other words, 20 or 30% more people are listening to the show with each new episode, and I can only account that to the fact that so many of you are sharing it with other people, whether it be through social media, maybe by email, verbally. However you’re doing it, I appreciate it. It’s really nice to be able to grow our audience very organically like this, and it’s exciting for me to know that more and more people are benefiting from the show and they’re enjoying it.

I want to thank you also just for the feedback that you’ve given me. When you tell me what it is that you like about the show, it allows me to be able to do more of that. A lot of people last week really loved Jessica’s story and they also loved the story about Libby. So I’ll be able to tell you more true stories about my life where I learned a significant lesson that helped me in one way or another.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the five best experiences for gaining evidence of the afterlife. Now these are in no particular order. You can really do them in any order that you want, only the last one maybe should come after another one. We’ll talk about that when we get there.

The very first one is just getting a reading with a medium. If you haven’t had a private reading with a medium, you’re really missing out on a spiritual experience that is like no other. It’s one of these deals where especially if the medium is a stranger to you, all of a sudden, this person is telling you things about your life that they couldn’t possibly know.

And you know that they’re getting it from your loved one in spirit, especially when your loved one in spirit is sharing memories that only a few people in the world even know about. Or maybe only you and that person in spirit knows about. That’s pretty extraordinary. It’s a life-changing experience. I highly recommend it for anyone.

Now if you’re a little hesitant to go have a private reading, then a stepping stone to that would be to go to a medium demonstration. A medium demonstration is a public event where anywhere from 20 to 2,000 people attend and they get readings by the medium on stage quite randomly. And the medium just picks up whoever they’re drawn toward and gives them usually 5, 10 minute reading, sometimes 15 minutes. And there’s a couple of things about it.

A lot of people go to these medium demonstrations, they just want to get a reading. And to me, if you get a reading, you will actually maybe miss out on the rest of the events because all you’re thinking about are the messages that you got. So in my mind, it’s really a great experience just to observe, just to watch what’s going on, and learn. You do, you learn an awful lot by going to these medium demonstrations and seeing what is taking place with these little mini-readings. So that’s a great stepping stone to getting a private reading.

Now when you get a private reading, I highly recommend a one hour reading versus a half hour reading. A lot of mediums are offering half hour readings. But if it’s your first experience, then I really think that a one hour reading is the better way to go. For many mediums, not all of them, but for many mediums, it takes them 10 or 15 minutes to really warm up and create the strong connection with your loved one in spirit.

So if you allow that to happen, it allows both our loved ones in spirit to connect with them and create a stronger connection, and the medium to create a stronger connection. And so after about 10 or 15 minutes, bam, things just get better and better. And if you have another 45 minutes after that, anything can happen and it just really is a great experience to have. So that’s number one.

Number two, as far as the five best experiences for gaining evidence of the afterlife, it does involve a medium again, but it’s a medium who’s a spirit artist. Now, what this means is that the medium has some ability to draw people’s portraits, they’re a good artist, and so they’re able to draw a portrait of the spirits that they’re seeing either in their mind’s eye or they’re actually seeing. These are called spirit drawings. So the second best experience for gaining evidence of the afterlife is getting one of these spirit drawings by a medium who does this. They usually refer to themselves as a spirit artist, and they allow you to take home this tangible evidence of life after death.

Again, if it’s a stranger to you, and they’re drawing your loved one in spirit, well how cool is that. You get to go home with a portrait of your loved one and know that this medium was definitely in connection with them. Otherwise, there’s no way they could have drawn them. Now always keep in mind, just like any portraits that are drawn by artists, usually a few of the features are done very well.

The nose, the chin, the eyes, sometimes the ears or the hairstyle, not everything is going to be perfect. Not everything is going to look exactly like your loved one in spirit. So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, that old metaphor, because if you know that’s who they’ve drawn, that’s what’s most important. It doesn’t have to be an exact replica of what they look like.

All right. The third best experience for gaining evidence of the afterlife is a past life regression. We’ve talked so much about this in past episodes that I don’t think I need to say too much about it. What I will say is don’t always look for the movie. I was looking for the movie. I was expecting that when I walked through that door and I was going into the past life that I was immediately going to see this movie like scene. And that didn’t happen for me. Instead the information came, if I can say this right, claircognizantly, it came as a knowing.

So when the regressionist asked me a question, boom, the answer popped into my head. What are you wearing? This is what I’m wearing. What’s in front of you? This is what’s in front of me. Just keep going with it. Allow it to happen, and if you do, then what happens is, at least this is what happened for me, and I know it’s happened for many other people. All of a sudden, it became this multisensory experience. You’re able to see things and smell things, and even taste what the air tastes like or what have you. Multisensory experience and now you know at the core of your being that this is real. This is a real memory that you’re having and it’s a memory of your soul’s other lifetime.

Obviously, if you know the difference between a spirit and a soul, I’ll put that link in the show notes so if you haven’t seen that yet, you know the different between a spirit and a soul, you recognize it’s not really your other lifetime. It’s your soul’s other lifetime. But we’re at one with our soul, so we’re able to experience these other lifetimes that we have had as a soul. All right. The best experiences for gaining evidence of the afterlife.

The fourth experience, I put two experiences together here. The first one, I just call “spirit contact through hypnosis,” so you have somebody who, let’s just say, they know hypnosis, it could be a hypnotic regressionist. It could be a hypnotherapist. It could be just somebody who really knows how to create guided meditation very well because that’s really all it is. And using guided meditation, they lead you into this scene where basically you’re relaxing your conscious mind and then you’re setting the stage to invite your loved ones in spirit to be with you.

It’s really that simple. It’s an amazing experience because when it happens, all of a sudden when your loved ones show up, you can feel like you’re in their presence. You feel their energy just like when you’re sitting in a room with somebody else. I actually think even stronger. All of a sudden, you feel their energy. You feel their love for you. And in some cases, you can actually feel them touch you, kiss you, hug you. It’s an amazing experience.

Now, the alternative to this is to have an induced after death communication, IADC. This is where someone uses EMDR. It’s basically a rapid eye movement technique to prepare your brain to link with the spirit. Now I did a whole episode on induced after death communication when I interviewed Dr. Al Botkin and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. But again, it’s the same thing.

You’re going through the IADC technique using EMDR, a morphed technique of the EMDR. It prepares your brain in such a way that suddenly you close your eyes and bam, your loved one is right there with you. And again, you can feel their presence. You can feel their love for you. It’s like a reunion and you can feel them hug you. Wow. Just a great experience.

All right, that was number four. Number five, most practitioners won’t allow you to have this before a past life regression. It’s usually you have a past life regression first, and then later, you can have this one which is called a “life between lives regression.” Some people now shorten it to just a “between lives regression.” So here’s what happened. There was this amazing man by the name of Dr. Michael Newton and he’s written a few books that you can find. One of my favorites is “Journey of Souls.” I think that was his first one, still one of my favorites, and the one that I recommend. If you haven’t heard of him, if you haven’t read any of his books, start with Journey of Souls.

He was doing past life regressions. I’m just sort of paraphrasing here. He’s doing past life regressions and all of sudden gets curious about what would happen if we go to the day of their death in that past life and then we just keep going. Usually past life regressions end there, “Oh let’s go to the last day of your life, and we’ll see how you died, and we’ll even learn some lessons about that life that you can take from that life after that,” but that’s the end of the regression. He decides to continue with it, where do we go? Well, turns out we go back to the spirit world. We go to the “life between lives” is what he called it.

And wow, it’s an amazing experience. Now this can be a three and a half hour to five hour experience. Some people even make it longer. It feels like minutes go by. It’s a half day experience, and some of the things that can happen when you go into the spirit world after the death in this past life that you just experience is you can connect with your higher self, your soul. You can meet with your soul family. You can understand why certain significant people from this lifetime now are here and why you’re in each other’s lives.

You can learn what your soul hoped that you would experience in this lifetime and so much more. It’s really a fascinating, extraordinary, and again, it’s a life changing experience. The episode that I did with Nancy Canning, we talked about past life regressions and we also talked about life between lives regressions. So that will be in the show notes so you can watch that if you’re interested.

So to wrap up. The five best experiences for gaining evidence of the afterlife are one, get a reading with a medium; two, get a spirit drawing done by a spirit artist; three, get a past life regression; four, either get spirit contact through hypnosis or an induced after death communication, IADC; and number five, get a life between lives regression sometimes just called the “between lives regression.”

When I talk about the five best experiences for gaining evidence of the afterlife, I’m really trying to inspire you to have all of these experiences. I know many of you have had one or two of these experiences. I know a lot of people who I’ve even interviewed who are experts in their niche subject within this field, and yet they’ve had none of these experiences. Or they’ve only had one of the five different experiences that I’ve talked about here. And I will tell you that just from my own personal journey, I really gained from each and every one of these experiences, as well as others that I’ve had that I didn’t even mention.

But these are the foundation experiences because I learned the most from them. And one of the things I want to really encourage you to do is not just have one of each of these experiences but have as many as you can possibly have. And I’m not saying you need to go out and have them this week or even this year. Just put it on your goal list because really what I recommend is that you have readings with different mediums. I would love to see you have spirit drawings with more than one spirit artist. I would like to see you have past life regressions with a few different regressionists, and the same with all the other experiences.

Just use different practitioners so that you can see what the experience is like with somebody else. Just as our personalities differ, so do the experiences that we have with the different personalities that come with different practitioners. That’s one of the things I wanted to mention. The other thing I wanted to mention is that there’s a great benefit to having these experiences, having any spiritual experiences. But certainly, these are the ones that we can create for ourselves.

They’re not spontaneous. They’re not something that just happens to us out of the blue, not something that we can go out and proactively manage. But I wanted to give you a contrast of how this affected my life over the course of my journey here as an investigator of life after death. And so I have two experiences that I’m going to share with you.

The first is the day of my father’s death which was about 19 years ago. And the second one is about a year ago which is the day of my father in law’s death. I wrote about the scene at my father’s death, I’ll read that to you, and then I’ll just talk to you a little bit after that. It brought me back to that scene where my mother, my sister, Melissa, and I surrounded my father’s hospital bed and held him tightly as the doctor removed the breathing tube. For 10 minutes but more like an eternity, we watched as he took his last few breaths. We listened as the monitors signaled his vital signs within a motionless beeping that slowed in rhythm as his soul escaped the confines of his cancerous flesh.

When my mother twice burst out into a panicked wailing of tears at the realization that her lifelong best friend was leaving her forever, the monitor’s beeping escalated as if to say, “I’m sorry honey. I will try to stay for you a little longer.” Upon realizing how difficult her crying was making it for him, my mother gained control of herself and the beeping slowed once again. And she did this two more times. And my father attempted to hang on with each fit of tears.

After my mother calmed down, my father’s face lost all color and then turned a bluish gray. His chest previously, the only evidence of life and movement, became motionless. And when that hidden source of energy, that which we all call life had obviously left his worn out body, mom hugged dad one last time like she was never going to let him go. At the age of 59, my mother had become a lonely widow. That was the part that I’d written. What happened after that was that when the nurses asked us to leave the room, it was really time for us to leave, and we needed to go to the funeral home to make arrangements.

I remember Melissa and I leaving the hospital and we’re standing outside in the parking lot. And to me, life had stopped for a moment. And yet, when I went out there, there was a lot of traffic. It was in the middle of the city, and there were horns beeping, and there were people yelling, and everything was just moving fast. It just seemed so fast. And it was a shock because I just couldn’t believe that I felt like the world had stopped and yet, it didn’t miss a beat. My father had died and the world didn’t miss a beat. And I recognized that this wasn’t just true for my father, this was true when anyone dies.

Yes, there’s a few people for whom life seems to stop, at least pause, and for the rest of the world, it just keeps on going. I was 35 years old at the time and it was a shock to me. And it taught me a big lesson. Many years later, last year, so probably 18 years after that, my father in law passed. This was just a year ago in January. And now, I had had all these experiences that taught me about the afterlife. And his passing was a little different. We expected it. We saw it coming. We watched his body slowly demise and at the point where he was basically in a coma.

And he died at home, which was really nice, rather than in the hospital. And when I got the phone call that he had passed, my experience was that I got in my car, and on the way to his home where his body was, I talked to him. And it was a relief really because he had been out of it and he had been in this coma for so long. He was still semiconscious just on a lot of morphine and his body was dying. And so, he wasn’t really there the last few months. He wasn’t entirely lucid.

And suddenly, I got this call and I’m driving to Melissa’s parent’s house and I’m able to talk to him. And I know he can hear me with great clarity. He knows what I’m saying. He understands every word. And it was such a relief to finally be able to talk to him. And that was in huge contrast to when I stepped out of the hospital after my father’s passing and felt so separated from him. I felt as though he was gone. I felt as though I would never see him again. And I felt as though my relationship with my father had ended.

And yet a year ago with my father in law, I knew that we were all beginning a new relationship with him, his children, his wife, his friends, his other family members, and myself. We all had a new relationship with him now. One in which he was in spirit and we continued on here in the physical, and that all came as a benefit of the work that I’ve been doing here. And it’s one of the reasons that I teach what I teach. It’s one of the reasons that I do this show and share the things that I share with you because this is the benefit that I have gained and I want you to be able to share in that same benefit.

I want you to recognize that you now have a new relationship with your loved ones who passed, and that they are not gone. And you are not separated from them. And that you can still communicate with them. They can hear you. They are watching you. They are aware of everything that you are doing, and even if you can’t hear them, even if you’re not aware of their presence, you know that they are there. That’s a place that I hope you’re able to get to because it makes grief a different experience.

Now we can’t deny that we have lost their physical presence or that we’ve lost their companionship in the way that we’re used to it. We know that they’ll never hug us in the same way that they used to hug us or you won’t be able to hold their hand in the same way that you had held their hand. But yet, it still is a whole different experience if you know that they are there. You know that they are with you. You know that they can hear and see you and you know that you will be with them again when it’s your turn to go home.

Ellen: Twenty-something years ago, I suffered a traumatic brain injury after a horse kicked me in the temple. I was in a coma for about a week, and it’s my understanding that I was very deeply in the coma, but all I know is my own experience. And here and now, I’ve decided to publicly give my story a voice. While in the coma, I feel I had a glimpse of the other side. The first thing I can tell you is that I feel complete, and loved, and surrounded by warmth, acceptance, and beauty. The colors were vibrant.

There was beautiful music. But most of all, I tell you, I really felt like the edges of my body could feel the love surrounding me. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced, and I believe it’s nothing that can be experienced on this plane. I loved this place. I felt whole. I was at peace and connected. I was no longer myself but a part of something so incredible that I didn’t even need to know what it was.

I felt safe and loved. Again, completely at peace. There were two guides with me in this space that communicated with me through thoughts alone. At some point, I was asked if I wanted to stay with them or go back and live my life. I remember feeling drawn in by the beauty and love surrounding me. And in some sense, I wanted to stay. I knew that either choice would be okay and that I felt loved and okay in this place. But I was a child at the time, not much older than my daughter here, 12 years old.

And even though I was young, I remember in that moment having great clarity and foresight about my life and the life of my loved ones. I knew that if I stayed in this place, the lives of my family members would be changed. I knew that my passing would affect their ability to live out their purpose in life. And I knew also that I had not yet lived my life’s purpose.

My life’s purpose at that moment became very clear to me. I remember knowing then that I wanted to use music to help people. And looking back, I believe that it was in that moment that I actually chose my life’s purpose. And I had the gift to do so which I don’t know if everyone gets to choose to come back. But I knew then that I needed to live and there was still much for me to do. And as soon as I made that decision, I moved back into the darkness of the coma.

But in this darkness, I saw something different. I saw music notes on a staff. I couldn’t hear anything. But there was a different color for every note on the staff, and I remember watching the notes change on the staff. I watched these until they faded into nothing and the sound of the music took its place. And soon, I woke up to the sound of that music allowing it to pull me into consciousness.

I awoke from the coma at that time. I don’t remember much else from my recovery, but I know that I was lucky. I had to relearn how to form sentences and skills, regain balance, deal with incredibly painful headaches, and the emotional mayhem that comes along with recovering from a traumatic brain injury. I also lost all but about 3 to 5 memories from when I was from before the age of 12. And though I have no memories of birthdays, schools, teachers, family members, friends, or events before that age, I still consider myself lucky, lucky to be alive and thankful for the insight that this experience brought to my life.

So what will I do with my one wild and precious life? I know from my experience that sometimes I’m given choices about how I want to live, and I know that I can choose to make the best or the worst of everything that comes to me and into my life. My experience helped me believe that there is an immeasurable sense of love and support available to me and to everyone, a love so vast and incredible that it’s not limited to one religion or spiritual belief.

I know that everything that comes into my life comes in for a reason. I choose to live a life knowing that I can tap into this love whenever I need strength, comfort, or support. And I’ve come to believe there are no accidents. There’s a reason for everything. Everything and everyone who comes into my life comes in for a reason. And I came out of that coma to music for a reason.

I personally believe music has the ability to help us tap into something greater, and I choose to live a life as a music therapist where I help people do just that. And at the same time, I want to remember that my experience taught me what’s important in life because so much is not as important as we think, as I think. But the important thing in my life is relationships that I have with friends and family members, so I choose to live a life nurturing the relationships that I have. And finally, I choose to live a life of gratitude. After my accident, I realized that every experience in life be it positive or negative is a gift because I never know and we never know how long we have to make a difference in this lifetime, in this moment, in this wild and precious life.

Bob: That was Ellen Whealton who presented a talk in front of an audience as you could hear was outdoors, you could even hear the airplane go by. She got a videotape of that and she had put it up on YouTube. And I came across it and asked Ellen if it would be okay if we could play the audio here on the show. She was kind enough to agree, just so much to this experience. I’m just going to mention a few things because really, how can you cover it all?

One of the things I thought was really interesting about it was that she talked about when she went back into the darkness of the coma, she was able to see music. She actually saw notes on a staff. She couldn’t hear it anymore but she could see it. And she also mentioned that there was a different color for each note on the staff. This reminded me of a condition maybe you might call it, called synesthesia. Now I’m not sure I’m saying that correctly, but synesthesia is actually where some people’s brains are wired so that numbers and notes are associated with colors or smells and this sort of thing.

It’s very fascinating, interesting, brain…I wouldn’t call it a disorder. To me, it seems more advanced, and that’s what I found was really interesting that Ellen mentioned this in her talk because it was part of her experience that during her near death experience, a very spiritual experience, the notes that she saw, she couldn’t hear, but that she saw, each had a different color. So people with synesthesia might be very advanced beings, right?

Anyways, if you’re interested in that, it’s certainly something you can look up online. There’s some videos of people talking about what it’s like for them. And I think it’s different for different people, very, very fascinating. And I became interested in synesthesia even though nobody told me how to say it properly because it reminded me of the near death experience. And what a lot of people were describing to me as what their experience in that spiritual realm was like.

And yet, these people live it day to day. Now I also want to mention really interesting, she said the colors were vibrant. She heard music. She felt whole, and connected, and at peace, just beautiful. Anybody who has lost a loved one or who fears death, these are wonderful messages to hear from somebody who’s had an experience like this. I also thought it was really interesting. She had two guides that she was aware of. And they gave her the choice to live or stay. Now a lot of people want to stay and she even explained how she knew that either choice would be okay. But she chose to come back because she recognized how some of her loved ones who were still here, it might affect their life purpose if she were to die at the age of 12.

I also thought it was really fascinating that she lost her memory from before that. So the first 12 years of her life, she lost all those memories, and yet, she doesn’t come across as a victim at all, does she? In fact, she really talks about how she has gratitude for this experience and for her life. She talks about how she can choose to make the best of the worst of everything that comes into her life. Beautiful, just oh my goodness. I love it.

The last thing that I find really interesting is she recognized her life purpose had something to do with music and you can learn more about Ellen Whealton at wellnessmusictherapy.com. This, too, will be in the show notes if you’re interested in learning how her near death experience sort of panned out in her adult life and what she’s doing now. Wonderful story, thanks, Ellen.

So now I just want to answer a question from my book that is very related to everything that we’ve been talking about, so on page 23 of “Answers about the Afterlife,” the question is what’s the best way to understand the afterlife? And my answer is this. This is such an important question that has become the foundation of everything I teach. To state it in a sentence, the best way to understand the afterlife is through personal experience.

What this means is that you will come to understand the afterlife much better by having personal experiences rather than listening to a lecture, watching a documentary, or reading a book about other people’s experiences. Personal experience is where we proactively go out and have an experience that involves all or most of our senses. This might be getting a reading of spirit communication with a medium, having a past life regression with a hypnotic regressionist or having an out of body experience at the Monroe Institute.

This might also involve having an experience that does not involve a practitioner, such as doing daily meditation, visiting a spiritual place like Machu Picchu, or practicing inspired writing. The key is that we are actively involved in these personal experiences as opposed to hearing, watching, or reading about someone else’s experience vicariously. Vicarious experience is where most of us begin our spiritual journeys by learning about the experiences of others. We learn vicariously through other people’s stories, books, lectures, workshops, sermons, online videos, websites, TV shows, documentaries, feature films and the like.

Listening to someone talk about her near death experience is a vicarious experience. When someone tells us about their experience, we can’t touch it, taste it, smell it, or see it with our eyes. We can only imagine that experience in our minds. It’s more advantageous to personally experience a past life during the hypnotic regression, which is a personal experience, than having a psychic tell you about one of your past lives in a reading which is a vicarious experience.

One is a direct multisensory experience. The other is something you must imagine. And direct personal experiences are the only path from believing where we accept what someone else tells us is true to knowing where we know from personal experience that something is true. You might be wondering how a reading with a medium is a personal experience rather than a vicarious one, especially if you’ve never had one. This is actually one of those experiences that could fall either way. What makes mediumship a personal experience is that it is a conversation with your loved ones in spirit. So even though a medium is conveying the messages and you can’t hear or see your loved one yourself, you are having a personal experience because the messages coming through cause you to have an emotional, visceral experience.

When a stranger tells you accurate information from your loved one in spirit that they could not possibly know, you are affected mentally, emotionally, and physically because you know these messages are coming from your deceased loved one. If you’re not affected in this way, the reading might fall more on the side of a vicarious experience. Now vicarious experiences have precious benefits, too. I’ve learned a great deal from interviewing people who have had near death experiences. In fact, these interviews have helped me fill in the details whenever my personal experiences only gave me the big picture.

The insights gained from those who have had near death experiences and after death communications are priceless. So I’m not suggesting that they don’t have their place when investigating the afterlife. They most certainly do. But interviews, lectures, books, and documentaries are unable to get one to a knowing which is why I recommend personal experience so highly if you want to learn about the afterlife.

I recognized early on in my investigations of the afterlife that I was being taken down a path through three stages. The first stage is where I began which I called the path of the skeptic. In this stage, I was skeptical because I lacked evidence, so I chose to believe in nothing until I found evidence to believe otherwise. Then I progressed to the path of the believer. Here in the believing stage, we accept as truth the beliefs of other people.

This is where religion resides because people believe what their religious leaders teach them as true. And this is the stage that comes from vicarious experience. It’s a valuable stage in itself and is the only stage that some people ever realize. But it’s also a stepping stone toward personal experience because it teaches us the possibilities for personal experience.

If we don’t know what to look for, we might never see it when it crosses our path. At some point along my journey, I’d stretched into the path of the knower. I knew at a deeper level the answers to my spiritual questions in relation to that particular experience. And this knowing was true for me even when my knowing was in conflict with what other people claim to be true. And what I realized once I attained my first knowing is that knowing can only come from personal experience. So skepticism comes from a refusal to believe.

Belief comes from vicarious experience and knowing comes from personal experience. When I experienced knowing for the first time, it felt more like a remembering than a learning of something new. I guess some people might say that this was the beginning of my spiritual awakening. I relate this transition from believer to knower as similar to the transition from believing you can ride a bicycle while your mom or dad holds on to it to suddenly realizing they are no longer holding on to the bike, and you are actually doing it on your own.

In its own way, riding a bike is a knowing. You can’t fake it. And once you truly know how to ride a bicycle, you never forget it. The knowing stays with you forever. What’s most interesting about knowing is that one doesn’t go from skeptic, to believer, to knower about all the secrets of the universe at once. Just because we learned to ride a bicycle doesn’t mean we now know how to drive a car or fly a plane. We become knowers in fragments, one personal experience at a time.

We can be a knower about one subject while being a skeptic or believer about another. In fact, almost everyone is a skeptic about some ideas, a believer about others, and a knower about still other ideas. My journey into knowing regarding certain subjects is nothing special. That is it doesn’t make me exceptional or extraordinary. To brag about knowing would be the equivalent of bragging about eating.

We can all do it. Just because someone hasn’t ever thought about it, had the desire to reach knowing, or discovered how to arrive at knowing for some particular subject doesn’t make that person who is the knower better than them. Anyone can do it if it’s his or her desire. There’s also no one path to knowing. My personal journey of investigating life after death is just one way to do it out of infinite possibilities. You get to have whatever personal experience you choose in order to gain a knowing about whatever spiritual subject interests you.

The human challenge is to find our way through life without being born with all the answers. But we have the capacity to learn them, at least many of them. With enough personal experiences, we can eventually gain a knowing that gives us a pretty good picture of what those answers are. And our vicarious experiences can at least fill in the empty spaces with beliefs that satisfy us. What happens with personal experience is actually quite astounding. You begin to have answers about life, death, and spirituality that you didn’t learn through vicarious means.

And what you realize is that you gained a knowing during the past life regression, or out of body experience, or life between lives regression that came between the spaces of what you consciously experienced. In other words, you learned more than you were even consciously aware of learning while having that experience. Suddenly, your questions about life’s purpose or why bad things happen to good people or the reason for divine coincidences are just there. You suddenly know the answers. And with this knowing comes a deep sense of inner peace. And this is what spiritual growth is all about.

Joe: Hi, Bob. My name is Joe. This incident occurred three years after my wife had passed. Before I go to sleep each night, I write a short note to my wife, and this particular night, it was the night before my birthday. So I asked her for a sign or a message, something that might make me feel better, and then I went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up and I was sitting on a bench in our garden facing a rose arbor that had a string of LED lighting on it. The lights were off because the sun was up and they’re controlled by a solar switch, and the batteries usually die before morning anyhow.

So all of a sudden, these lights started flashing real brightly like eight times right in front of me as I was looking at them. And I sat there thinking, “This is interesting,” but being kind of a skeptical person, I thought, “Well that could be something else. It could be a short or something electrical that I didn’t understand,” and I didn’t get really excited about it as far as being a sign. So I went into the house. I passed under this arbor, went into the house, and I was feeding the cats, and one of the cats didn’t want to eat and it ran back into the garden.

And for some reason, I was curious why it went back in the garden when it was out all night and it was time to eat, and I decided to follow it back in the garden. I don’t know why. It’s not something I usually do. So I went back into the garden, it led me back up to…I walked right up to the rose arbor again, and since I was there, I decided to look at the lights again to see if I could get them to turn on by holding my hand over the switch or something. And nothing happened.

So I decided to go back in the house, and as I kind of stood up, I was leaning down near the switch of the lighting device, I stood up, and I noticed a balloon right next to the rose arbor that was sitting in a pot. And I apparently had walked past this balloon the first time a few minutes earlier, and the cat led me back to it. And I looked at this balloon and I said, “If that says happy birthday on it, then I think this is my sign,” and sure enough, I turned it over and it said happy birthday.

It was a happy birthday balloon. So the lights apparently were trying to get my attention because it was right next to the balloon. I didn’t even see it the first time and the cat led me back to it the second time and I found it. So that incident convinced me that there’s more to this than meets the eye. That was not a coincidence. It was too much of a long shot. So anyhow, I hope you enjoyed the story. Thanks.

Bob: Hi, Joe. Thank you so much for leaving that story. What I love about it first of all, it’s simple. I also love that it’s coming from a guy. We’ve had a couple of guys’ stories here and I really appreciate that. And you sound like such a regular guy, just the guy next door, Joe, the guy next door. Anyhow, I loved your story for so many reasons. All reasons that you already understand. I just want to sort of emphasize them for the rest of the audience because this is such a common scenario where we get messages and then we miss out on them because we’re just not paying attention.

Now what I love especially is how the story begins which is you say that you write a note to your wife every night and it’s been three years. Wow, that’s extra special right there. But I also love that you asked for a sign the day before your birthday. You asked for some kind of sign or message from your wife, little birthday message, why not ask for that? I think too many of us don’t ask for messages like this. And so then we wonder why we don’t get them.

Obviously, we don’t always have to ask for the messages in order to get them, but if we do ask for them, that’s our way of also telling our loved ones in spirit, “Look, I’m going to pay attention.” And then of course, we need to follow up by paying attention. And here you are, you got some lights flashing. You can’t figure out why. I just see myself in the same scenario. You said it might have flashed eight times. Eight is the number of infinity which reminds me of spirit.

Aside from that, so you can’t figure out why the lights are flashing and of course, this first time you missed the balloon, and then therefore, your wife says, “Okay. Let’s try this.” And so we’ll get the cat to see if it can bring you back out there so you can see the balloon that I left for your birthday. And of course, that’s exactly what happens. So I love the story. Thank you so much for leaving it. Luckily, you saw that wonderful message on your birthday.

A lot of people liked the Libby story in the last episode so I thought I’d share another true story from my life. In this case, it was maybe not a lesson necessarily that I learned, but a lesson that I was reminded of, this happened a few seasons ago in the winter, and we had another nice winter, easy winter I should say this season. And so it reminded me of this story here that I titled “The Law of Distraction.” If people in my home state of Maine weren’t paying attention last year, they might have thought we went from fall to spring by skipping right over winter.

Call it global warming or just plain luck since I don’t really enjoy the cold, but I only used my snow blower once the entire winter season. So I hope this winter would be much of the same. Looking at my 10 year old snow blower this past December, I noticed it was looking sad and rusty. I wasn’t sure it was going to start this year considering I had to pull the start-up pulley dozens of times last winter before I could get it going. Nevertheless, this year, I kept procrastinating, bringing it in for a tune-up until it was too late. The weather person predicted a nor’easter.

I commented to Melissa, “I’ll use a shovel like the old days. I’ll enjoy the exercise.” So I shoveled after the first two inches had fallen hoping to remove the flakes two or three inches at a time. Yet somehow, the storm turned up the volume, and before I knew it, another 10 inches had fallen. “No problem,” I said to Melissa as I pulled up my belt doing my best Don Knotts impression.

“I’ll have the driveway shoveled in a jiffy.” As I began to shovel this time, however, the snow was made of lead honestly. Someone had mixed ball bearings in with the snowflakes outside. After exactly three minutes of shoveling, I told Melissa, “I’m going to see if I can get the snow blower going.” She quickly handed me the key to the snow blower like she had known this would happen all along.

Melissa and I walked down to the barn and I checked the snow blower for gas. Yep, the tank was filled with year old gas. Melissa looked at me, “Is that bad?” It was bad. But it didn’t really matter because I didn’t have any fresh gas to use. “This is going to take about a hundred pulls before this darn thing starts,” I predicted to Melissa. “That’s a bad affirmation to give yourself,” she responded. “You of all people should know better.”

I ignored her comment and began pulling the start-up pulley. I pulled and pulled but the snow blower didn’t even twitch. I pulled with my right hand, I pulled with my left hand. I fiddled with the choke. I pushed on the primer switch. I moved the gas lever up and down, nothing worked, not even a sputter. I caught my breath and pulled some more until little beads of sweat began to form on my forehead.

After literally pulling on this thing about a hundred times, I admitted defeat. “I surrender,” I told Melissa. As I put my cold hands into my pockets, she looked at me kind of sadly knowing that I’d just worn myself out for shoveling. My eyes opened wide, “Oh my God.” I said. “What’s the matter?” “I pulled my hand out of my pocket holding the key to the snow blower. I forgot to put the key in.”

I put the key in the snow blower, pulled the start-up pulley three times, and it fired up and ran like a brand new machine. I looked at Melissa with a smirk and raised my shoulders. She made sure I learned my lesson by saying, “Well, you said it was going to take a hundred pull before it gets started. You got what you asked form.” I was too tired to respond, but in my head, I saw the evening news headline, “Man chases wife through Kennebunkport with snow blower.”

No, I would never chase Melissa through town with a snow blower, through the yard maybe, no, kidding again. Great lesson there though. Be mindful of what we say and believe. We might just create what we expect. And another point I’m going to leave you with today is something that I learned in my first year investigating life after death. And it’s this phrase just remember this, “Knowing is a process and not an event.” In other words, it doesn’t happen from just one experience. Now it can, but it’s rare. Give you an example, when I had my first reading, 1999, I had my first reading with a medium.

And when I went home, I might have thought, “Oh, I was a knower at that point.” But I wasn’t. What would happen is I would start to talk with other people. I would tell them all about my reading, and over time, it’s this combination between time and listening to other people’s skepticism, I started to question myself, “Did I give too much away? Oh, was that in my imagination? Really, what did she give me for evidence?”

And so maybe a few weeks or a month or more or later, I needed to have another reading. So then that reinforced things, but then over time, I needed another one. At some point within the first year, I would say, I really think it was just about a few months, I recognized that I made this transition from skeptic, to believer, to knower. And once I was in the knowing stage, now it was more for me about I wanted to see the variety of having readings with different mediums, what was that experience like? And then I did that with all the experiences that we talked about at the beginning of the show. But just keep in mind so that you’re easy on yourself and you know what to expect, that knowing is a process and not an event. In other words, it may come from many experiences even if it’s the same type of experience.

I just want to remind you that you can leave your question…now can you believe it? Nobody left a question so that was why we didn’t have an extra question this time. I know you have questions. I know that you’re asking them on all the social media sites, but you’re not asking them so that I can answer them more fully here on the show. So if you want to leave a question, you can just go to the show notes on afterlifetv.com or even youtube.com, we have them in the show notes there. Otherwise, you go to afterlifetv.com/question. Now if you want to leave your story, we’re starting to get more and more of those which is pretty exciting and I love that, I know you do. You go to afterlifetv.com/story or again, the link is in the show notes.

Finally, I’m looking forward to your comments on afterlifetv.com, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and iTunes. Don’t forget you can leave reviews on iTunes and that actually helps us get a better ranking in their filing system when they show other people on iTunes our podcast. If you leave a review, it’s actually helpful to us and helpful to those people so that they find us. And I want to thank Joe for leaving his story.

I want to thank Ellen for allowing us to use her near death experience story. I want to thank Melissa for the photographs that she always lets us use. So beautiful. And we do get your comments and we read them. And I want you to know that whenever you leave Melissa a comment about how beautiful her photographs are and how much you enjoy them, I read those to her. So do know that I’m passing those messages along.

And finally, I should mention that Jerad from New York won the giveaway from the last episode which is a copy, a signed copy of Brian Weiss’ “Many Lives, Many Masters.” Jerad, I’m going to send you a copy of my book, “Answers about the Afterlife,” and I’ll sign that to you as well. Congratulations to you. Can’t believe that the show has gone by so quickly already. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you have a great week and I thank you for listening.

I want to thank our sponsor today, bestpsychicdirectory.com, it’s the only place on the Internet where you can find over 800 psychics, and mediums, and tarot readers all located in one place, bestpsychicdirectory.com. You can also read public reviews about the psychics and mediums. Each person listed there has been screened and approved by a private investigator, and you can either schedule a reading privately or my personal favorite, you can get an instant reading. You go to bestpsychicdirectory.com, you can see who’s available for an instant reading right now.

Male: That’s all for another fantastic Afterlife TV episode. Bob couldn’t be happier. If you enjoyed this episode as much as Bob, please leave a comment on afterlifetv.com, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, and don’t forget to check out Bob’s book, “Answers about the Afterlife.” Thanks for watching Afterlife TV.

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Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.

Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.

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