Witnesses To The Unsolved: Prominent Psychic Detectives Mediums Explore Our Most Haunting Mysteries

by Edward Olshaker Forward by Colin Wilson

Remiel Press • P.O. Box 970 • Owings Mills, MD 21117

295 pages, 2005, $22.95 hardcover • ISBN: 0-9755601-5-8

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

A team of prominent psychic detectives and mediums, working with longtime freelance journalist Edward Olshaker, examine some of the best-known “cold cases” in criminal history. In his foreward, Colin Wilson calls it a “remarkable piece of investigative journalism,” while the Fortean Times describes it as “well-written” and says that it “tackles the critics of mediumship head-on.” Some of the prominent murder cases explored are those of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vincent Foster (longtime associate of the Clinton’s), rock idol Kurt Cobain, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, and others

If you’re a fan of real-life murder mysteries then this book will likely fulfill your intellectual needs for hard facts and plenty of background data on each case presented. If you’re a conspiracy buff as well there’s plenty here also to appeal to your psychological needs too for real life suspense and intrigue. There’s the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, environmentalists Judi Bari and Leroy Jackson, not to mention the tangled webs of deaths and deceptions described in the chapter entitled, “The Markle Massacre and Other Arkansas Nightmares.” All of this will undoubtedly supply much intrigue indeed and much for the reader to chew over too. And, all of this plus coupled with the thought-provoking and possible new insights provided by the psychic readings and you have another potentially important and very useful dimension to add in ones exploration of these prominent unsolved “cold cases.” It makes for interesting reading.

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Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife?

by Pamela Rae Heath and Jon Klimo

North Atlantic Books • P.O. Box 12327 • Berkeley, CA 94712

450 pages, 2006, $21.95 • ISBN-13: 978-1556-43621-5

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

This time mediumship, or “channeled” communications from the spirit world, are used to address vexing age-old questions about what happens to human souls that have departed this world as a result of committing suicide. In addition, since we are a post 9/11 society a good deal of the channeled material in this book also concerns terrorists, so-called “suicide bombers,” those who take their own lives, as well as what happens to their victims on the other side. For Klimo, a noted psychologist deeply into parapsychology, and already the author of a book that many consider the definitive work on channeling, published back in 1987, the question of how studying data dealing with our survival beyond death, of an alleged afterlife, became a real issue about fifteen years before co-authoring the current book, Suicide. At that time, he was approached by a licensed clinical psychologist in her late forties, also a self-described atheist, who was suffering a great deal of “psycho-emotional” difficulty in her life and was seriously contemplating suicide. However, before she did that, she wanted to talk with Klimo, as a resource person, just to cover the afterlife issue once and for all. Klimo used an approach known as bibliotherapy, which is described as the selection of reading material for one to focus on for study, discussion, and counseling. He quickly pulled together, from his own library, about a hundred different books dealing with afterlife survival, along with about seven or eight channeled messages allegedly from “spirits” who had committed suicide. Klimo wrote: “The content of this anomalously received material usually related to variations on karma, lesson learning, soul growth, and learning that, by killing oneself, one does not escape what led up to one’s death, nor does one escape one’s own ongoing experiencing of existence.”

Klimo and this psychologist continued getting together almost weekly for four or five months to discuss the material, and then she learned that her mother had contracted cancer, and so she set aside her suicide plans to help her mom. He lost touch with her, and so doesn’t know if she ever did carry out her plans, but a few years later Klimo shared this story with Dr. Pamela Heath, and as a result she became inspired and intrigued and embarked upon her own serious and determined efforts and came to gather together a far more extensive compilation of mediumistic/channeled material on suicide from an afterlife point of view than Dr. Klimo had done in his initial bibliotherapy aimed at helping the suicidal psychologist.

They point out that this book is hopefully going to reach and dissuade some readers who are, or may in the future, contemplate suicide, and will hopefully discourage them. Or, perhaps this book may be a tool for someone who knows someone who is thinking about suicide, and that person may be able to use this book to help change that person’s mind. The contents of this book are based upon some 120 years of published materials that are primarily based upon channeled communications from departed humans on the other side.

While the authors are realists and know that it may be too much to hope that they can dissuade people for committing potential future suicides, or even stop a suicide bomber from carrying out his/her act, perhaps at least in a broader sense the contents of this book may make us more conscious of a little thing long known as karma and how “as ye sow, so shall ye reap,” and that our choices and acts in life have repercussions and consequences for us and others in this life, other lives, or even beyond this life.

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Edgar Cayce: “The Beautiful Dreamer” —The Man Who Cured People in His Sleep

White Light Productions • P.O. Box 680441 • Franklin, TN 37068-0441

62 min. DVD, 2004, $29.95

Website: http://www.edgarcaycebooks.org

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

This video documentary of the life of the late Edgar Cayce, regarded by many as “the Sleeping prophet” and “the Father of Holistic medicine,” is a widely acclaimed film. Robert Wise, director of The Sound of Music, called it, “A sincere, intelligent, passionate documentary.” It features interviews with Edgar Cayce’s son, Edgar Evans Cayce, and other family members and friends, along with respected authors and historians. Many important details and key scenes from Cayce’s remarkable life are re-enacted, with music from that era, along with the use of archived photographs and home movies. In addition, much footage was shot on actual locations in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The documentary reviews the many extraordinary and accurate psychic trance readings that Edgar Cayce gave on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from medical treatments wherein there were over 9000 cases of documented cures and healings (many of them still incurable and terminal in our present time), to historical facts that have proven amazingly accurate. Then too there are the more esoteric and harder to prove but nonetheless very fascinating and thought- provoking readings that Edgar Cayce provided on things like Atlantis, God, reincarnation, and karma. Very unexpected “readings” and revelations from a humble Christian family man from Kentucky with only an 8th grade education.

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The Living Energy Universe: A Fundamental Discovery That Transforms Science and Medicine

by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., and Linda G. Russek, Ph.D.

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

1125 Stoney Ridge Road • Charlottesville,VA 22902

1999, 303 pages, $16.95 • ISBN: 1-57174-455-X

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Though not a new book, which I didn’t at first realize as I began to read it, the publisher recently sent it to me and they must have been operating on some sort of keen level of intuition because what these two Ph.D. scientists from the University of Arizona write is an absolutely mind-boggling, highly thought-provoking glimpse into a serious, scientific effort to attempt the validation that not only does consciousness survive death, but in fact everything around us, even things that we consider inanimate and dead, may be part of a “universal living memory”—postulating that even every thought and idea may somehow be retained in some form of memory that is part of the entire universe, and which is one big and significant secret behind evolutionary processes, and may also take us a quantum leap toward proving and understanding the reality of God—the Creator’s hand in the midst of it all.

The authors also describe experiments that have been conducted that they feel strongly suggests the existence of this “universal living memory,” or what they came to call “systemic memories.” (with sufficient details that the readers can follow-up and do their own, if they like) One is done with a camcorder whose output is connected directly to a TV, and another requires some water, salt, albumin, wires, a 1.5 volt battery, and two glass beakers.

At any rate, these esteemed authors give us a scientific basis for belief in psychic and spiritual forces, and in things that people from cultures with long-held animist beliefs have always held to be true.

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Psychic Dreaming: Explorations at the edge of self

By Michelle Belanger

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC • 500 Third Street, Suite 230 • San Francisco, CA 94107

2006, 208 pages, $14.95 • ISBN: 1-57863-386-9; paperback

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

The author points out that “dreamwalking,” which she first encountered back in the fourth grade, is a psychic ability that can be found in occult and paranormal literature, but only to a very limited extent. Employing the lucid dreaming process, the techniques that Michelle Belanger shares with her readers is drawn from her own many personal psychic experiences over the years. Born with a life-threatening heart defect she recalls having had two out of body experiences and two near death experiences by the age of five. All of this pretty much foreshadowed her later obsession with occult studies. With a very psychic grandmother and an aunt who was a social worker the author learned much about psychology at an early age. On the one hand she realized that extraordinary experiences were possible, but that also the human brain was capable of playing tricks on us too. All of this early conditioning helped to provide Michelle with a working and balanced approach to these matters.

Carefully drawing from mythology, historical accounts, and modern reports, Michelle shares her findings with a profound tone of insight and clarity. She also brings her readers up to speed on relevant insights about the dream process and how it relates to the deeper paranormal implications as studied by such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, Hugh Calloway (better known by the pen name of Oliver Fox), and others. Her book reads in a very smooth, autobiographical and entertaining style, and interweaves her many experiences and paranormal lessons to be shared with us in the form of stories and evolved techniques that we can use to also perform our own “dreamwalking” exercises--and how to open ourselves to the possible paranormal experiences and dreamscape dimensions that may result from those very exercises.