Afterlives of the Rich and Famous Read online

  I could go on and on about the joy that awaits us after we leave this world—the same joy we temporarily interrupted to come here for what I like to call “boot camp.” In fact, I have gone on and on about it, in a book called Life on the Other Side, so I’ll leave it at that for this discussion in the hope that these brief “highlights” will help Francine’s descriptions of the current lives of the celebrities in this book make much more sense.

  But there are other available options for our spirits when our earthly bodies die, most of them the result of our own choices during our lifetimes, and since a few of the celebrities we’ll be discussing made those choices, we should briefly explore those options as well.

  THE LEFT DOOR

  Despite what most of us (including me) have been taught since we were children, there is no such thing as hell. The threat of hell implies a God so vindictive and unforgiving that He could turn His back on us and banish us to an eternity away from Him, and not for one minute is that a God I believe in. The God I believe in, worship, and have committed my life to is all-loving, all-knowing, all-compassionate, and all-forgiving; He would never turn His back on a life He created.

  Sadly, we don’t have to spend much time on earth to learn that there are those who choose to turn their backs on God. And “choose,” by the way, excludes anything to do with mental illness or physiological chemical imbalances, which are completely involuntary. I’m talking about people who, given a choice between contributing light to this world or contributing darkness, opt for darkness—the deliberately cruel, amoral, remorseless sociopaths who view the rest of us as props for their amusement, to be used, manipulated, and in some form or other destroyed, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. Darkness can’t exist where there’s light, after all, so the Dark Side, as I call this segment of society, feels perfectly entitled to the destruction it inflicts. Its devotees know right from wrong. They just don’t care. Unlike the misguided or the genuinely lost among us, residents of the Dark Side can’t be rehabilitated—without a conscience to begin with, they have no conscience to be guided back to. They can feign charm, compassion, love, generosity, and often a devout faith in God, not because they mean a word of it, but because they know how seductive those qualities can be, and it’s so much easier to destroy someone whose guard is down.

  There’s no such thing as action without consequence, for better or worse, and that’s as true for the Dark Side as it is for the rest of us. Remember, these dark entities have chosen a path that keeps their backs turned squarely away from God, and that arrogant rejection of Him prevents them from experiencing the perfect bliss and love of the Other Side when they die. Instead, they head straight to a nightmare called the Left Door (which my granddaughter Angelia used to refer to as “mean heaven” when she was a child).

  The Left Door is the entrance to a joyless, godless world of nothingness, an abyss through which dark spirits briefly pass before heading right back in utero for another incarnation that’s likely to be as destructive as the one they’ve just completed. So when you come across those in this book who’ve gone through the Left Door, know that within a few months of their death they were born again on earth with a whole new identity, a whole new incarnation to live out, with no more of a conscious memory of their past lives than you and I have, and another opportunity to finally choose light over darkness.

  And by the way, just as God doesn’t condemn any of His children to an eternity of hell, He also doesn’t condemn any of us to an eternity of recycling through the Left Door and back to earth again and again and again. Sooner or later (which in the context of eternity might mean hundreds of years), the spirits on the Other Side will retrieve a dark soul in that instant before it reaches the Left Door and return it to the healing peace of Home, where God’s unconditional love is always available, even to those who don’t reciprocate.

  THE HOLDING PLACE

  There’s a kind of anteroom to the Left Door, a desolate gray expanse filled with lost souls who’ve been separated from their faith, hope, and joy by oppressive depression. They shuffle silently around in no direction, heads down, eyes empty and lifeless, never acknowledging each other or the hopelessness that’s trapped them there.

  The Holding Place is like the purgatory I learned about in parochial school, and it’s sometimes, but not always, the temporary destination of spirits whose death was caused by suicide. It’s simply not true—in fact, it’s a cruel lie—that all suicides lead to eternal damnation. Again, God would never inflict such vindictive judgment on any of His children. Some suicides are inspired by revenge; others are an ultimate mean-spirited demand for attention or an act of self-centered cowardice (the latter typical of murder-suicides). And those particular suicides can look forward to a quick trip through the Left Door and another immediate incarnation without enjoying a moment of the blissful peace of Home between lifetimes.

  But as we all know, some suicides are the result of mental illness or untreated chemical imbalances that create severe, crippling, mind-altering depression, and in the perfection of God’s universal laws no one is held accountable for actions that aren’t their fault. (Injustice is strictly a human invention.) A great many of these blameless, unplanned, despair-induced suicides, I promise you, make it straight through the tunnel to the Other Side. Others, often confused throughout their lives on earth about their faith in God and their occasional attraction to the Dark Side, find themselves in the Holding Place, where, if they can overcome the desolation around them, they can still choose between the doomed cycle of the Left Door or Home, where God’s embrace will always be waiting for them.

  GHOSTS

  And then there are those who, when their bodies die, refuse to acknowledge the tunnel or see it and reject it. This leaves their spirits stranded here, outside of their bodies, stuck between the lower vibrational level of earth and the much higher vibrational dimension of the Other Side, not one bit aware that they’ve died. And that’s how ghosts are created.

  Ghosts, or earthbounds, are tragic, fascinating beings. As far as they’re concerned, they’re every bit as alive as the rest of us, and everything is exactly and perpetually as it was at the moment of their death, from their surroundings to their age, health (or lack of it), and scars, wounds, or visible signs of injuries that might have killed them. The one thing that’s changed, which often makes them desperately confused, if not downright cranky, is that because they’ve changed vibrational frequencies without knowing it, the people around them suddenly seem to act as if they don’t exist.

  There’s nothing haphazard about some spirits’ determination to remain earthbound. Ghosts stay behind for a variety of misguided reasons—to care for a loved one, to protect a home or land they’re deeply connected to, to seek revenge, or, with sad frequency, to avoid facing God out of fear that He’ll turn them away (which is an impossibility).

  No ghost is ever trapped on earth for eternity. Some of them are sent to the Other Side by people who are compassionate and educated enough, when they find themselves in the presence of an earthbound, to simply say, “You’re dead. Go Home.” (Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s worth a try.) Many more of them are eventually rescued by residents of the Other Side, who are well aware of them and can be counted on to perform persistent interventions for as long as it takes to pull these trapped, confused souls into the tunnel and on to the joyful peace that’s waiting for them in God’s outstretched arms.

  Glossary

  You’ll come across several terms in Francine’s comments that could easily leave you scratching your head and saying, “Huh?” Rather than take the time to interrupt what she has to say by explaining each term as it comes up, I’d much rather give you these reference pages to turn back to and let you read any and all definitions that happen to pique your curiosity.

  Astral Travel

  Astral travel is the means by which loved ones on the Other Side come to visit us and we go to visit them. It’s also our means of trans
porting ourselves from place to place at Home, free of these cumbersome, gravity-challenged bodies we’re currently housed in. Astral travel brought us here from our real lives in paradise when our spirits entered their chosen bodies, and astral travel will take us there again when these incarnations are through.

  Astral travel comes as naturally to us as breathing, whether we’re conscious of it or not. It’s a skill we were given when our souls were born an eternity ago, and that skill is ours no matter what dimension we happen to be living in, including earth. You and I travel astrally while we sleep—an average of two or three times a week, in fact. Astral travel is the truth behind some of our most vivid and memorable “dreams.” And we can thank astral travel for the fact that while victims of comas and severely debilitating illnesses are struggling physiologically, their spirits are joyfully darting from place to place, dimension to dimension, and loved one to loved one.

  You’ll read more about the specifics of the Other Side’s visits to us in the discussion of spirits in this glossary. For now I just want to focus on our own astral travel and how we routinely take trips that, among other comforts, allow us to initiate reunions with an unlimited number of people and places we miss. And since our most frequent trips take place while we’re asleep, it’s natural for us to mistake them for dreams. But there are some simple ways to tell the difference:

  Dreams of flying without benefit of an airplane or other external means aren’t dreams; they’re astral travels, perfectly real, neither dreams nor your imagination. Not all astral travel “dreams” involve flying, though. Like everyone else, including you, I astrally travel to the Other Side several times a month while I sleep, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never had a dream in which I’m flying on my own power.

  Astral trips unfold in a logical sequence of events, just as our waking experiences do, rather than in that haphazard jumble of images, people, and locations that are so common in dreams.

  Any dream you’re not only part of, but actually view yourself in, isn’t a dream; it’s astral travel. We’ve all heard about or experienced the phenomenon of people watching themselves during surgery, deep meditation, unconsciousness, or a coma. The same thing can happen during astral trips for exactly the same reason—during those moments the spirit and the body are two separate entities. And take it from someone who’s been there, there’s a certain curious fascination in finding yourself able to look at yourself from outside your body as an objective observer. I don’t happen to love that feeling, and I much prefer limiting my astral travel to those hours when I’m sound asleep and my cluttered conscious mind isn’t ready to leap in and interfere.

  So next time you have a pretty, peaceful “dream” about a departed loved one that unfolded in logical, sequential order and “seemed so real,” please know that it is real, and go right ahead and enjoy every bit of the comfort it gives you.

  Cell Memory

  You’ll find a reference or two in Francine’s comments about something called cell memory, or when a celebrity reacts during the most recent incarnation to an experience he or she had in a previous life. And since cell memory isn’t reserved exclusively for celebrities, but is common to all of us, it’s even more worthy of a brief discussion.

  Cell memory is the cumulative body of knowledge our spirits have gathered during all our lifetimes on earth and at Home, and it is accessed by every cell in the body the moment we “take up residence” in the fetus. It’s what lies behind countless health problems, phobias, psychoses, chronic pains, and so much other supposedly unexplainable “baggage” we arrive with when we’re born.

  The basics of cell memory go like this:

  Our bodies are made up of billions of interacting cells.

  Each of those cells is a living, breathing, feeling organism, responding literally to whatever information it receives from the subconscious mind.

  It’s in the subconscious that our spirit minds live, eternally intact and with total recall, no matter how healthy or unhealthy our conscious minds might be.

  The instant our spirit minds enter our physical bodies for a new incarnation, the familiarity of being in a body again triggers all the memories and sensations our spirits have retained from every past life we’ve ever lived. It’s not unlike an experience you’ve probably had when you returned to a place that holds powerful memories for you—your childhood home, maybe, or the site of your first school dance—and been stirred both physically and emotionally by the impact of the present colliding with the past. On a larger, more significant level, that’s exactly what our spirits feel when they find themselves in a body again. Like all the other information our subconscious minds transmit, our billions of cells are instantaneously infused with an eternity of memories and sensations and physiologically react to them as part of their reality.

  Through regressive hypnosis, I’ve helped thousands of clients access those cell memories and learn to recognize them as part of lives and deaths that have long since come and gone. But make no mistake about it, we, and the celebrities you’ll read about, are unavoidably impacted by cell memories from other lifetimes, for better or worse, some of us more strongly than others.

  And just to clarify an important point that some people find confusing: please remember that living several lifetimes doesn’t mean that in the course of eternity we become several different people. We’re always the same spirit, always ourselves, on one infinite journey, growing and learning along the way, no matter how many different bodies we might inhabit. For an effective analogy, think of your journey in this lifetime alone, every step of which led to who and where you are at this moment. From birth, through infancy, through potty training, through kindergarten, through high school, through whatever stage of adulthood you’ve reached now, you’ve gone through countless changes, physically, mentally, and emotionally, but you’ve always been you, the sum total of everything you’ve experienced so far. The eternal journey of our souls works exactly the same way. Through all our incarnations that temporarily take us away from Home, all our physical, mental, and emotional variations during our time on earth, and our exquisitely busy lives on the Other Side, we always have been and always will be no one but us, utterly unique as God created each of us, constantly learning and growing and becoming wiser through experience, whether we’re at Home or here, in this rough school away from Home that we’ve elected to attend.

  The Chart

  It’s worth repeating as often as it takes: earth is not our Home. The Other Side is our Home. We had joyful, busy lives there before we came here, and we’ll return to those lives after we leave here. We make these brief trips to earth to learn, the hard way, through hands-on experience, for the growth and progress of our spirits along the path of their eternal journey. It’s a completely different kind of education than we have access to at Home, because on the Other Side everything is infused with God’s perfection. And as Francine has rhetorically asked me a million times, “What have you learned when times were good?”

  We choose to come here, as rarely or as often as we decide we need to, and we choose what we’re interested in learning and working on this time around. There’s nothing haphazard about our incarnations. Just as we would never head off to college without having decided which school would serve us best, what courses we’ll need, where we’ll live and with whom, and countless other details to maximize our odds of accomplishing our goals, we wouldn’t dream of coming to earth unprepared.

  And so, before we come to earth for a new lifetime, we go to a vast room in the Hall of Justice and write an exhaustively detailed chart of our upcoming incarnation. From the broad strokes to the most trivial moments, we leave nothing to chance in pursuit of our goals.

  I don’t know any individuals, including myself, who can imagine having deliberately chosen some of the unpleasantness, ugliness, and tragedy in their lives. But again, our sole reason for incarnating is to learn to overcome challenges, negativity, and despair, none of which even exist on the Other Side, for
the advancement of our souls. And then there’s the fact that we write our charts in the blissful euphoria that is our constant state of mind on the Other Side. We’re fearless there, we’re utterly confident, we’re our most loving selves, and we’re surrounded by nothing but unconditional love from each other and from God. There’s nothing we feel we can’t handle, nothing we’re reluctant to take on in our pursuit of spiritual growth. I guarantee you, no matter how challenging your life is, you were in the process of planning something even more astonishing for yourself until your Spirit Guide and the Council convinced you to tone your chart down to something a little more realistic.

  And so, hard as it may be to believe, before you came here, among countless other details you chose your parents, your siblings, and every other family member; every aspect of your physical appearance; the exact place, date, and time of your birth; your friends, your lovers, your spouses, your children, your bosses, your co-workers, your casual acquaintances, and even your enemies; the cities, neighborhoods, and houses you’ll live in; your preferences, weaknesses, flaws, sense of humor (or lack of one), skills, talents, and areas of incompetence; every minor and major injury and illness you’ll experience; and even your hobbies, interests, passions, and private little quirks that no one else might know about but you.

  Not that our charts deprive us of free will once we’re here. We actually arrive on earth with countless choices surrounding every detail we’ve designed. If, let’s say, one of those enemies you charted, maybe even someone you knew in a past life, shows up as you planned for, it’s your choice whether to avoid that person like the plague, be polite but keep your distance and watch your back, or engage him or her and suffer the inevitable consequences. Or if you charted yourself to catch a cold when you’re twenty-two, it’s your decision whether to take care of yourself and get over it or to keep pushing your luck and run the risk of letting it develop into pneumonia. A charted life is absolutely a life filled with options, and beyond that it’s proof that the success of our souls isn’t measured by the obstacles we face, but by how we handle them when they come along.