After investigating the afterlife since 1997, Bob Olson has discovered the most compelling (convincing) evidence of life after death. In this episode, Bob explains the most compelling evidential experiences that anyone can have to develop a knowing that the afterlife is real. He also explains a secret that few people know or understand about two types of evidence that exist–one type that is far more valuable and lasting than the second.
Bob Olson is the founder of Best Psychic Directory, featuring hundreds of psychics, mediums, animal communicators, and energy healers. https://www.bestpsychicdirectory.com
If you’d like to watch this video, The Most Compelling Evidence of an Afterlife, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=3881
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: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
Hey everybody, Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. This is where we talk about life after death, answer the meaningful questions you have around that subject. Today we’re going to be talking about the most compelling evidence of an afterlife.
This is after 28 years of investigating evidence of life after death. My father died, if you don’t know me, he died in 1997. He was age 64. I was 34 and I was a private investigator and because my religious foundation wasn’t enough to sustain my grief, my wife suggested that I use my skills as a private eye to seek evidence of where my father went, if anywhere, right?
I was skeptical. I was open-minded, an open-minded skeptic, but I was skeptical at that time and yet even though I thought the idea of investigating the afterlife was a little silly at first, it got under my skin and I realized that was something that I wanted to do.
It’s now been 28 years since my father passed and I started doing that and I’m going to be teaching you today the, there’s really four things that I find to be the most convincing, right? Compelling evidence of life after death.
Now, before I tell you that though, I have to explain to you something that I learned along the way that is really important and most people don’t know. I want to tell you about the difference between a personal experience, which is, you can also call it an immersive experience. We’ll call it a personal immersive experience and a vicarious experience.
So, we’ve all heard that phrase, you know, I’m living vicariously through you, which basically means someone’s telling you a story about an adventure that they had and we live vicariously through that story, through them and their story because we learn from other people’s experiences.
Well, there’s a problem with vicarious experiences and while they serve their purpose and we wouldn’t be anywhere without them, we need them, the personal immersive experiences are much more important to us when it comes to investigating the afterlife.
Now, one thing I have said since I started Afterlife TV back in 2011 and my book Answers About the Afterlife came out in 2015, throughout I have repeated that I don’t want anyone to take my word for any of this. I want you to become your own investigator of the afterlife.
I want you to seek your own evidence and that’s what this video is all about because I want to give you some ideas of what evidence to look for and in this case, experience. Experience is so important to everything that I’m teaching you.
Now, to go a little further on the difference between personal experience and vicarious experience, I want to explain that personal experience can bring you to a knowing. Now, certainly when we’re going through our personal growth and spiritual growth, we often go through three stages. Some people don’t have the first stage which is the stage of skepticism.
I started as a skeptic and as I said, I was an open-minded skeptic but I still had a lot of skepticism. I moved from there into the stage of belief and this is where other people told me what to believe like religious leaders or authors and experts and I adopted their beliefs. I adopted what they told me was true as part of my own belief system and this is the level that we get to from vicarious experience.
So, if you’re hearing me talk right now, you’re having a vicarious experience. Any of the videos that you watch is a vicarious experience. Any books that you read, that’s a vicarious experience. You’re living vicariously through the author.
If you watch movies, go to a lecture, even take a workshop, that is a vicarious experience unless within the workshop they bring you through a personal immersive experience like say a meditation or perhaps they do a demonstration of some sort.
What personal experiences can do that we can’t get from vicarious experiences and we can get to this third stage which is called knowing, right? We go from skepticism to belief to knowing and what is knowing?
Knowing is that when you have an experience, because you experienced it yourself, you now know at your core what is true. One of the things that happens when you have a personal immersive experience is that you gain information that stays with you and you know it’s true and you don’t even need to argue it with anyone. People can disagree with you. It really doesn’t matter.
In fact, that’s kind of a litmus test. When someone doesn’t believe you when you’re telling them about your experience, it really doesn’t matter. You know what’s true for you. You know that you had that experience.
So knowing is a new level of spiritual consciousness really that allows you to have a sense of understanding, a sense of comfort, a sense of peace. One of the reasons that when people investigate the afterlife and they do it through these personal immersive experiences like the ones I’m just about to tell you about, they no longer fear death and that’s one of the greatest benefits that often comes from it is they’re not afraid of death anymore.
All right. Let me give you a real world example, nothing to do with spirituality, that most everybody has experienced. We’ve all learned to ride a bike, right?
And before we had ever ridden a bicycle, people were telling us about what that’s like and they might even have showed us you know and demonstrated what we need to do when we get on it. And so you have, and this is a vicarious experience.
So like today you could probably watch a video on how to ride a bicycle if you’ve never ridden one. There might be little booklets about it there. You can read about it. You can watch videos about it. Someone can tell you about it. You can even watch a demonstration of it.
But the fact is until you get on a bicycle and try to balance it and then try to balance it while pedaling and steering without falling over, you’re not going to be able to get to a knowing, a knowing about what it really feels like and is like to ride a bicycle.
We’ve, most of us have done it. We fell down who knows how many times and eventually we got it right and once we learned to do it, we just knew how to do it. It became a knowing, you see?
And this is why I think it’s such a great example. You went from believing that you could ride a bicycle because you saw other people do it so you figured you could do it to then knowing you could ride a bicycle. And that knowing was at your core.
You just knew it, it was an experience. You might not even be able to articulate it in words as to how you did it, but you just know that you could jump on a bicycle and be able to ride down the street.
And like so many other personal experiences, you could not ride a bike for 10, 15, maybe 20 years and then get out there and pretty quickly at least be able to ride that bicycle down the street again because that’s what a knowing is.
All right, so now that we understand that because it is extremely important when we’re talking about the most compelling evidence of life after death, I’m going to talk to you about some experiences that you can have with the help of a facilitator, you know, a practitioner who can help you walk through some of these experiences.
And yes, you may have to pay that practitioner, but it’s a great investment. It’s an investment in your personal and spiritual growth.
So the first one that I always recommend to people, and it’s the first one that I had, which is to get a reading with a medium. If you don’t know what a medium is, mediums can communicate with people in spirit.
If you’ve never had one, it can be a mind-blowing experience. And especially if you get a reading with a stranger, someone who does not know you at all, and here this stranger is telling you things about your life with amazing detail that a stranger should not know.
Now, it was one of the pieces of evidence that came from the very first reading that I ever had. And I had a three-hour reading, so there was a lot of evidence. But one of the best pieces of evidence that came from that reading, just to give you an example, was that my father was communicating—my father, deceased—was communicating with the medium and said that one of his proudest moments was watching me play a solo on my saxophone at the middle school band concert.
Now, if we unpack that, we realize there’s a lot of detail there.
One, if she, the medium, had just guessed that I played the saxophone in middle school, that would have been one thing. But it went so far as that I was—not only played the saxophone—but I played in the middle school band. That was two.
Three, that I played the solo in the middle school band. There were only two solos when we did concerts, especially for family members.
And then the fourth one is that my father actually attended one of these. He was a long-haul truck driver, meaning he would go across country delivering products in his 18-wheeler. And so he’d be gone for weeks at a time. So he wasn’t able to attend too many of my school events.
He did attend at least one of those concerts that he remembered and he communicated that it was a proud moment for him to be in that audience that day. Those are four pretty good details to come through in a reading with someone who did not even know me and didn’t know any of these things about me. That’s an example of the kind of evidence that can come through with a medium.
So regardless of what kind of skepticism you might have about it, if you go to a medium—and don’t be looking for the misses. A lot of people like to throw the baby out with the bath water when a medium gets some information wrong. Then they just shut down and they don’t even pay attention anymore.
The fact is, I’ve always found it very valuable to take those and look at that, set it aside, but don’t overlook the evidence that is coming through. You know, you talk about the hits and the misses. Just because there’s some misses doesn’t mean you should overlook the hits—especially when it’s a hit like that saxophone example.
So pretty amazing.
Quite often they can give you names, at least first names, sometimes last names. They can give you what the personality of your deceased loved one was, how they dressed, what their profession was, how they died, a lot of detail about each person.
And then when they get through the evidence, what’s really nice is because now you know that that medium is in contact with your deceased loved one. You now get to get some of the other messages now that you know it’s accurate and it’s true that they’re really in communication with them.
When they say that they love you, that they’re proud of you, and then often they’ll tell you why they’re proud of you—when they tell you these more loving messages that seem vague, if that’s all you got, it wouldn’t be enough. But with the detailed, accurate evidence messages—they call it evidential mediumship—when you have that, then later you’re more open-minded for the more vague messages about “I love you” and “I’m proud of you.” And they actually mean something because you know the communication is real.
All right. A couple of subcategories for this first piece of evidence, which is getting a reading with a medium, is spirit artists.
So spirit artists in the category of what we call spirit artistry is simply that the medium has some artistic abilities. And so they can either draw or paint or maybe with some type of artistic crayon—I know I’m not using the right word—draw a portrait of your loved one.
And you’d see in these portraits—I’ve had them done myself—probably about what you can see of me here. You know, and it’s not usually the whole body, but in some cases it will be if there’s a purpose behind it, but most cases it’s going to be about chest high up.
And what’s wonderful about it is you get to see the hairstyle.
Sometimes they’re not entirely accurate. You have to understand that, you know, it’s a medium who’s perceiving a spirit in their mind’s eye and trying to draw that. And sometimes they miss a few things.
Again, this is the importance of don’t overlook the hits just because there’s a few misses. So if the cheeks aren’t perfectly right, but the mouth or the eyes or the nose is extremely accurate and they got the hair right—and even maybe the jewelry that, say, your grandmother often wore, the pearls, right? Or the kinds of clothing that they would typically wear, dressed like that.
Quite often for men, it can be a particular kind of hat that they wore. The medium, they’ll come through that way and the medium will then draw it—glasses, spectacles, that sort of thing. If the man had a mustache or he was known for a mustache—even if he didn’t have it his entire life, obviously as a boy he probably didn’t have a mustache—then the medium will likely draw that mustache because that was a signature characteristic of that person.
So this is what we get from spirit artistry. And what I love about getting a reading with a spirit artist is—now, typically I’m just going to be honest—my own experience on it is when I just go to a medium who is not a spirit artist, I get more detailed verbal messages.
When I go to a spirit artist who’s also giving me verbal messages as they’re drawing, they don’t seem to be as detailed because they’re a little distracted by the drawing.
But what’s amazing about getting a spirit artistry drawing—a portrait of your deceased loved one—is that this stranger who knew nothing about you, so certainly didn’t know anything about your deceased loved one, just drew a pretty accurate drawing of your loved one in spirit.
And you get to take that home. It’s tangible evidence, whereas the verbal evidence is intangible, right? And we get to take this portrait home. We can put it in a frame. We can put it on our wall. We can show it to other people.
It’s amazing. I’ve had a few done and I’ve shown them to many people and most people are really blown away because I have a picture of my deceased loved one who was drawn and then we have the spirit artistry drawing portrait—and they’re really accurate.
And so anyways, that’s a version of mediumship.
And the other version of mediumship that I want to just talk about is animal communication. And basically, this is a medium who prefers to communicate with animals.
Now, animal communicators can communicate with the living animals as well. And we won’t get into that in this video. For the purposes of this, we’re really talking about deceased animals.
And so if you’ve had a pet—a dog, a cat, a horse, gerbil—it doesn’t really matter. If you’ve had a pet that you’ve grieved the loss of after their passing, you can have a reading with an animal communicator who is really just a medium who prefers to communicate with pets.
And just like the reading that you got with a medium, you’re going to be able to have this communication from your deceased loved one—your pet in the spiritual dimension—now coming through to prove to you that they’re there with evidence and then also send you some messages, usually messages of gratitude for how well you treated them while they were alive and took care of them.
That’s the first one: reading with a medium.
The second most compelling evidence of an afterlife—again, these are all personal immersive experiences—is similar to that. I call it spirit contact through hypnosis.
Spirit contact through hypnosis is, I think, takes the mediumship to one step beyond because we’re actually experiencing it ourselves rather than somebody else communicating what our deceased loved ones have to say through them to us. We actually get the communication directly.
This is usually done with a hypnotic facilitator. They might call themselves a hypnotherapist. It might be someone who does past life regressions or something like that.
A lot of people who work with hypnosis tend to do more than one thing. So you can ask anybody if this is something that they offer—preferably somebody who has more experience doing it.
I’ve been trained in hypnosis, past life regression, and spirit contact through hypnosis. And I have facilitated this for other people, mostly people that are close to me so they could experience it.
All hypnosis really is, is to quiet your conscious mind. It’s to quiet the chatter, right? All the voices, all the thoughts that are running through our heads—it quiets that down so that we’re almost in a state of falling asleep, but we’re still awake.
If we can describe it, it’s such a relaxing state of mind. You’re still aware of what’s going on in the room, but your conscious mind is quiet. And so you’re now open to connecting with other realms—and in this case, the spiritual realm.
A lot of times this is done through visualization, and there’s a deepening effect. You might, you know, take down some stairs or down an elevator or an escalator. Every time you go down the step, you’re deepening your relaxation, deepening your, what they might call a trance.
Again, nothing magical about it—it’s just simply a relaxing state of mind. And eventually, usually the way you’ll see it happen, it can take many forms, is you might come to a doorway. And when you walk through the door, your deceased loved one will be on the other side to greet you.
I did this. I walked through the door, my father was there—and this happened, I don’t know, maybe 25 years ago—and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I could feel his presence. I knew it was him.
You know, similar to—much more profoundly—but you know, if you’ve ever been, say, working at your desk or something and you’ve been very focused, maybe you’re reading, and then someone walks in the room behind you—not only can you tell that someone walked in the room behind you, even if you didn’t hear them, but you sense their presence. And in many cases, you’ll be able to say who it was.
You can even feel that. Well, in this state of mind, in this hypnotic trance-like state—again, nothing magical about it—you’re much more susceptible to recognizing. And I could—obviously I knew it was my father. Instant tears, right?
It’s like, oh my God, it’s a reunion of sorts, right? I haven’t seen my father in years and all of a sudden, here I am, I feel like I’m in the same room with him.
Many people have an embrace, you know—they get a hug. I didn’t get that, but I felt him near me. I felt his love for me like in ways that I never could have felt it while he was still here in the physical realm.
And we communicated, and it was like—it was a telepathic communication. So I could hear his voice in my head and I could communicate without having to say the words out loud to him. We could communicate back and forth. It’s a beautiful experience.
The very first one I facilitated almost happened by accident. And it was a good friend of mine. And she met with her father and they did have an embrace.
And he walked her down this hallway and he was showing her different rooms. And those rooms were significant of things that he wanted to teach her. And oh, it was just a beautiful—I was so grateful and blessed to be a part of it, facilitating this and witnessing it.
And then he had some incredible insights to share with her about her own life, about how she could move forward, guidance that he had for her—but also just the communication, the love that they shared. And being with one another again was something that, if you were to talk to her today, I’m sure she remembers it like it was yesterday.
And again, because it’s a personal immersive experience, it becomes a knowing.
All right. The third one is called the past life regression. I’ve done other videos on past life regression.
I won’t get into too much detail other than once again, you do it with someone who’s been trained in hypnosis—people who typically are also trained in past life regression.
I’ll just give you a sense of what that usually is like. You usually start off with visualizations to sort of get you in a calm state of mind, a relaxed state of mind.
You might go into a meadow or a field and then you start to go down some stairways just to deepen your relaxation. And in many cases, they’ll bring you to what they call an age regression, where you go into a childhood memory first. And then you have this childhood memory.
Maybe it’s something that you already remembered. Maybe it’s something that you had completely forgotten, but you know it’s true while you’re going through it and you’re experiencing it during this regression.
And it’s not just showing you something that happened in your childhood. There’s going to be a reason that you’re seeing that—there’s meaning behind it—and it’s going to be meaningful to you at that time in your life.
So you see this childhood scene before you—usually it’s fairly brief but pretty meaningful.
And then you move forward—and I should say really backward. You move backward and most regressionists, most hypnotic regressionists, will bring you then into the womb and you’ll have an experience in the womb.
And I’ve done that as well.
My very first one was profound. I was in the womb. It was the day of my birth. I could tell what was going on with my parents. I could tell what was going on with me.
I felt like I was starving from nutrition. This is back in the sixties when we didn’t know that much about the smoking and the drinking and even how to feed ourselves so that the baby could be nourished as well.
And I could sense that my mother felt a sense of anxiety about having another child. I knew it was related to finances. I knew that my parents were arguing in the hospital room at the time.
And then we just moved on toward the past life regression—but it was profound. Again, like, so meaningful, taught me a lot, explained a lot, and helped me really to understand where my parents were at the time of my birth.
We then go down more stairways and eventually come to a door. I go through the door and I come into a past life.
And I’ve done this many, many times. And I’m going to do my next video—you can check to see if it’s there—on four past lives I experienced very recently.
I had four past lives that I experienced in one week. It was profound. They were all related. They were all meaningful as to things that I have been going through recently. And yet they all came from different angles to teach me something new.
I ended up having a fifth one, and nothing came. It was like, I just knew enough. You’ve learned all that you need to learn right now at this moment.
So anyway, that’ll be my next video that I create—about four past lives.
A past life regression is a phenomenal experience in that the level of knowing that you gain is unlike most experiences. Because one, it usually goes on for an hour and a half or more and there’s a lot that’s happening.
There’s so much that you gain. When you go to that person’s death, you then usually rise up and discover what was the key lesson of that lifetime.
You also, usually within that lifetime, visit more than one day. So you visit a few significant moments within that person’s lifetime.
Again, they’re all going to be meaningful to you in this lifetime.
And then at the day of their passing, you then rise up and you get to really see the big picture of what you gained from that lifetime.
But also, if the facilitator helps you with it, you can then learn how that is supposed to help you in your life now.
And that’s extremely helpful and can be transformative.
The fourth most compelling evidence of an afterlife is related to that. It’s called a life between lives regression.
There was a man named Michael Newton. He had done, I suspect, thousands of past life regressions with people. And he got curious—what would happen if we just kept going?
Normally, like I said, you go to the day of your passing in that lifetime, and then you rise up, you learn what you can learn, and then that’s it. Everybody goes home.
Michael Newton decides he’s going to continue the experience and see if you can go anywhere. And sure enough, where do you go?
Well, you go into the spiritual dimension, which is where we all go. This is where the people who have near-death experiences go, right? You go back into the spiritual dimension.
And because the experience—this life between lives regression—is continuing, you get to learn a great deal.
Now, where a typical past life regression experience might be about an hour and a half to two hours, the life between lives regression—sometimes called a spiritual regression—is anywhere from three to five hours.
And one of the reasons for that is you have to have the past life to get there. That’s the doorway into the spiritual dimension.
And so you go through one lifetime, which is also going to be meaningful to you, and then you go to the day of the death, and then you just keep going. You go into the spiritual dimension.
So many things can happen here, and it seems to be different for a lot of people.
You can see who’s part of your soul group. You can see, in other words, people who you’ve shared other lifetimes with—maybe many lifetimes with. You can learn why certain people are in your life.
Maybe you have someone who’s just constantly tormenting you, and you can find out what are they there to teach you? Because all our relationships are there to help us grow in one way or another.
Maybe even the people who are just very loving to you—you can learn what are they there to help you learn, and how are they going to help you grow?
One of the things I experienced was I went through this lifetime, and I was really beating myself up about things that I had done. It wasn’t even my fault, but that was part of the lesson—that I wasn’t able to control something that I had thought that I should be able to control, and I was being hard on myself.
Now, one of the things that happens when we go into the spirit world is there’s nobody there to judge us. We’re judging ourselves.
In fact, the only thing that’s going on is that there are spiritual beings there to help us not be so hard on ourselves, because that tends to be something that happens once we’ve completed the lifetime.
And I went in front of this group of spiritual beings, and they—to me—they called themselves the Council of Elders. And I only saw them as beings of light. I didn’t see any faces or anything.
But the love that I felt from these spiritual beings, the Council of Elders, was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime.
And as many of you know, I’ve been with my wife Melissa—we started kind of dating when she was 11 and I was 14. And then we started going steady when she was 12 and I was 15. We’ve been together ever since.
Obviously, the love that I feel from her is unlike any other love that I’ve known. But the love that I was getting from the Council of Elders was almost a hundred times that.
And I was feeling that in this experience while they were trying to help me not judge myself so much—not be so hard on myself—and become a little bit more detached from what had happened, so that I could learn the lessons from what happened. That’s what it’s all about.
And so there were many other experiences while in the spiritual dimension. I won’t go over all of them, but it’s certainly worth having this three to five hour experience.
And I will tell you that it goes by very quickly. If you’ve ever had anesthesia—you know, you wake up after surgery or something and you’re like, “Wait, no time has gone by. What happened? Why’d you stop?”
“No, we’re all done. We removed your wisdom teeth.”
You’re like, “What?”
It’s not quite like that. That really feels like no time has gone by. With this, it feels like only minutes or 15 minutes or maybe a half an hour has gone by—even if it’s been five hours. So kind of cool in that way.
If you ever think there’s no way I could go through a three to five hour experience, trust me when I say time goes by very quickly.
Those are the four experiences:
Getting a reading with a medium (which can include a spirit artist experience, animal communicator experience),
Spirit contact through hypnosis,
Past life regression,
And life between lives regression.
If you want to have a reading with a medium—because I tested so many mediums for my research—I learned the difference between an extraordinary reading versus a good reading versus a mediocre reading versus a not-so-good reading.
In fact, in 2010, I had over 120 psychics and mediums from around the country and parts of Canada come, and I taught them about how to give a better reading based on all the research that I had learned.
Well, because I had all this knowledge, obviously people were asking me, “Can you recommend somebody?”
So I created this directory called Best Psychic Directory, and a lot of the people that I had done research with—and since then I continue to vet—the most credible and reputable psychics and mediums and tarot readers and energy healers, lots of different practitioners who fall under the intuitive category.
Check out bestpsychicdirectory.com, and you’ll find hundreds of psychics and mediums there who I personally recommend and vetted. And I think it would be a great way for you to start off with one of these experiences.
Again, my name is Bob Olson. This is Afterlife TV. I hope you’ve enjoyed this, and I hope you’ll like this video so that YouTube will show you more of my videos as they come up.
My next one is going to be about the four past lives that I experienced within one week, and in the meantime, I hope you have a great day, great week, and we’ll see you next time.
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: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
