Did you know that Buddhists believe that chanting certain mantras, hundreds of times, for the recently departed can get them to heaven? Or that Catholics also believe that praying for the dead may release them from Purgatory? How about that some people believe that when a person comes to visit you after death - be it in a dream or as a ghostly apparition - they may be there to ask you to pray for them? Latter Day Saints believe that when you are doing your genealogy you can pray to ask the ancestors to help you with your research.
I've had spiritual experiences such as dream contact with the dead. In one case I was not aware the person had actually died until much later but in the dream they were coming by to see me before leaving town. I've had the experience of seeing the face of someone who has died in my mind's eye like a small cameo at a time when I was not at all thinking of them consciously.
I've seen one full-on ghost, years ago. The person had recently passed from a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol, and because I saw this ghost smiling and waving, but also going about his worldly profession, I knew it had been accidental and not a suicide.
I recall what the late psychic medium Sylvia Browne had to say about ghosts. She said that if the apparition you see has its feet on the floor, they are indeed a ghost. If they are up off the floor, floating, then are already on The Other Side, which is what she called the afterlife. (My favorite of the psychic mediums is James Von Prague. He has stopped doing readings and is focusing on education.)
What strikes me about these experiences of mine is that they happened when I was not seeking contact. Some people do, with rituals, seek contact with spirits or other entities. (I think this can be dangerous. I prefer to just let it happen, if its going to happen, as a natural part of living.)
When researching your genealogy, you sometimes find that amazing synchronicities are occurring. I say do everything you can, do it right, but also be open to the gifts of information that you may encounter and keep in touch with your own ability to be psychic.
Here is an example of something that happened to me recently.
I got to the research library I was using for the day a little early with a strong plan of action for using my time. However, it turned out I was going to have to wait my turn to get on the Internet. So I sat in front of a database machine that had the Social Security Death Index on it, as well as other databases. Suddenly the thought came to me "I wonder, is Katherine dead!" So of course in two minutes I had her married name in the SSDI and sure enough she had died a little more than one year prior! I had not thought of Katherine in years. She had died young. When I got on the Internet I not only found her obit but other information that I wished were not true.
Katherine and I were friends in our late teens and early twenties before our lives diverged.
I guess she really wanted me to know that she had died and so I do!
She had changed religions and was Jewish at the time of her death and had a husband who could do the prayers and rituals of that religion for her, which normally go on for a year, and I did not seek him out or involve myself in her spiritual evolution past death. I had a strong sense that this was not my place and also that I wouldn't know what was truly appropriate. But I did note that she had waited that year to get her message to me across somehow.
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