second life of a human !! REALITY.

[dyaoko]

acording to this site, this child has been Reincarnated....

http://neardeath.home.comcast.net/reinc ... es/06.html

[Anthea]

Science of Reincarnation

The nightmares began when Ryan Hammons was 4 years old. He would wake up clutching his chest, telling his mother Cyndi that he couldn’t breathe and that his heart had exploded in Hollywood. But they didn’t live in Los Angeles; Hammons’s family resided in Oklahoma

A few months prior, in early 2009, Ryan had started talking about going home to Hollywood and pleaded with Cyndi to take him to see his other family. He would yell, “Action!” and pretend to direct films when he played with friends; he knew scenes from a cowboy movie he had never watched; and said a cafe reminded him of Paris, where he had never been. He talked about his child, worldly travels, and his job at an agency where people changed their names. Cyndi didn’t think much of it until the nightmares set in and Ryan started describing death.

Hoping to figure out what he was talking about, Cyndi went to the public library and checked out a few books about Hollywood. She was flipping through one of them when Ryan got excited at a photo from the 1932 movie Night After Night. “Hey Mama, that’s George. We did a picture together,” he told her. “And Mama, that guy’s me. I found me.” George, Cyndi discovered, was George Raft, an actor and dancer who specialized in gangster films in the 1930s and 1940s. She couldn’t track down the name of the man Ryan had identified as himself.

Cyndi had never encountered anything like this before. She was a county clerk deputy who’d been raised in the Baptist church. Her husband, Kevin, was a Muskagee police officer and the son of a Church of Christ minister. She considered them to be fairly ordinary people, but she was starting to wonder if Ryan wasn’t so ordinary. Cyndi contemplated the possibility that this could be a case of reincarnation.

Cyndi contemplated the possibility that this could be a case of reincarnation

Though she could have looked to one of the religions that hold a belief in reincarnation, such as Hinduism or Buddhism, instead, Cyndi turned to science. In February 2010, she wrote a letter to the Division of Perceptual Studies in the psychiatry and neurobehavioral department at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Within weeks, they wrote back; Ryan was far from alone in having memories of a past life.

The roots of the Division of Perceptual Studies stretch back to the 1920s, when Dr. Ian Stevenson was growing up in Canada. A sickly child, he contracted bronchitis numerous times and spent hours in bed, devouring his mother’s extensive collection of books on Eastern religions. It was in those pages that he was first exposed to reports of paranormal phenomena.

He claimed to possess an unusually good memory and earned his medical degree at McGill University in 1943, before moving to Arizona. He briefly studied biochemistry before moving to psychosomatic medicine, in search of “something closer to the whole human being” than what he had found in biochemistry. From there, he trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

His academic career flourished in the U.S. and he was named chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1957, while still in his 30s. Around that time, he revived his childhood interest in the paranormal. He dipped his toes into the waters of parapsychology—the study of mental abilities that seem to go against or be outside of the known laws of nature and science—by writing book reviews and articles for non-academic publications like Harper’s magazine.

The most convincing cases, he realized, all involved young children, generally between the ages of 2 and 5, who spoke in great detail of places they had never visited and people they had never met

In 1958, he won the American Society for Psychical Research’s contest for the best essay on paranormal mental phenomena and their relationship to life after death. His essay, “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Incarnations,” looked at 44 cases of individuals around the world who had memories of past lives.

The most convincing cases, he realized, all involved young children, generally between the ages of 2 and 5, who spoke in great detail of places they had never visited and people they had never met, or who had birthmarks corresponding to injuries incurred by other people when they faced violent, untimely deaths. Most of those cases were in Asian countries where belief in reincarnation was already high.

Chester Carlson, a wealthy physicist who invented the photocopying process that led to the Xerox Corporation’s founding, read Stevenson’s winning essay. Having become interested in parapsychology through his wife Dorris, Carlson contacted Stevenson with an offer of funding; Stevenson declined.

But Stevenson fell deeper into his new research, taking his first fieldwork trip to interview children with past-life memories in India and Sri Lanka in 1961 and publishing his first book on the topic, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, in 1966.

He reconsidered Carlson’s offer; the following year, the funding allowed him to step down as chair of the psychiatry department to focus full-time on his reincarnation research—a move that pleased the dean of UVA’s medical school, who was not thrilled with the direction that Stevenson’s work was taking.

But when Stevenson stepped down, the dean agreed to let him form a small research division in which to do his curious new research within UVA that still exists today.

Carlson died unexpectedly the next year and left UVA $1 million to support Stevenson’s research. Over the following decades, Stevenson traversed the globe tracking down instances of children with past-life memories, logging an average of 55,000 miles a year and identifying over 2,000 cases. Along the way, he authored more than 300 publications, including fourteen books.

The new research division at UVA was called the Division of Parapsychology—a name forced onto Stevenson, according to Dr. Jim. B. Tucker, the division’s current director. Stevenson changed the name to the Division of Personality Studies, concerned that parapsychology was isolating itself from the rest of academia.

The vagueness of “personality studies” suited Stevenson, as he continued working to gain the respect of mainstream science. That mission permeated his studies: He ceaselessly quantified his data—coding 200 variables in his database of cases, calculating the probabilities of one or two birthmarks corresponding to one or two wounds on another person’s body, and painstakingly examining every possible normal, as opposed to paranormal, explanation—in a bid to be taken seriously.

Now, the research unit is called the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, and remains up and running despite Stevenson’s death in 2007. There, Cyndi Hammons’s letter about Ryan’s Hollywood memories found Tucker.

Tucker traveled to Oklahoma to meet the Hammons family in April 2010. With help from a TV crew that was following Ryan’s case, they identified the man in the photo from Night After Night as Marty Martyn, who died in 1964. Tucker showed Ryan photos of people Martyn had known in sets of four, asking if anyone looked familiar.

He later realized this wording was too vague, especially for a 6 year old, but Ryan did pick out Martyn’s wife, saying that she looked familiar, but that he wasn’t sure how he knew her. Together, they flew to Los Angeles and met Martyn’s daughter, who’d been 8 years old when her father had died. Ryan was confused to find she had grown.

Tucker fact-checked some of Ryan’s memories with Martyn’s daughter. A lot of the details proved accurate; a lot of them did not. Some couldn’t be verified. Martyn had acted as an extra in movies before becoming a talent agent. He and his wife had traveled the globe.

Ryan had talked about dancing on Broadway, which Tucker thought unlikely for someone who’d been an extra with no lines, but Martyn’s daughter verified those memories. He had mentioned two sisters and a mother with curly brown hair—also true. He recalled his address having Rock or Mount in its name, and Martyn’s last address was 825 N. Roxbury.

Ryan Hammons recognized the actor George Raft in old Hollywood photographs when he was a child. (John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

But his heart had not exploded. Martyn had leukemia and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1964. Ryan had also said that his father had raised corn and died when he was still a child, which didn’t prove accurate. Still, the case presented “strong evidence for reincarnation,” Tucker wrote in his 2013 book, Return to Life, in which he documented this story, but it was certainly not definitive.

What this offered was an opportunity to look at the big picture, this question of there being more of us than just the physical

When Tucker first heard about Stevenson’s research on reincarnation, he was a child psychiatrist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia, where UVA is located. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, but his wife was open to ideas about reincarnation and psychics, so he gradually opened up to those concepts too. And his wife wasn’t alone:

A 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 33 percent of adults in the United States believe in reincarnation. After reading one of Stevenson’s books, he heard that DOPS was doing a project on near-death experiences—another field of research within parapsychology—and reached out. He began working there part-time in 1999.

“What this offered was an opportunity to look at the big picture, this question of there being more of us than just the physical. That was really quite appealing—and not just the question but also the approach to the question, that these were rational, serious-minded people that were doing this work,” he told VICE News.

Ten years prior to meeting the Hammons family, Tucker gave up his private practice to join DOPS full-time. For nine years, he also served as medical director of UVA’s Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic alongside pursuing his parapsychological research through DOPS. Most of Stevenson’s work focused on reincarnation in Asia, but as Tucker plunged into researching past-life memories, he realized that if he were to get Americans to consider his work seriously, he needed to search for cases among those in the U.S. that didn’t believe in reincarnation.

Tucker has now published two books documenting cases of children with past-life memories—a term he prefers over the flashier “reincarnation.” He writes in a decidedly more approachable voice than Stevenson did, aiming for a mainstream audience instead of an academic one.

“Ian's primary goal was to get the scientific world, the scientific establishment, to seriously consider this possibility [of reincarnation]. And that's a pretty tough audience,” he said. “But beyond that, if you just write for that audience for decades, at some point you have to decide that the rest of the world needs to hear about it too.”

Even in Europe, where parapsychological research is more common in universities like the University of Edinburgh and the University of Northampton, the broader psychology community remains skeptical of this work

In spite of Stevenson’s attempts to turn reincarnation studies into a hard science, parapsychology is still a stigmatized niche within academia, where it is not viewed as a very respectable field. It’s one of the reasons that Tucker, as well as many other parapsychologists, keeps one foot in mainstream psychiatry or psychology while pursuing their parapsychological research.

Even in Europe, where parapsychological research is more common in universities like the University of Edinburgh and the University of Northampton, the broader psychology community remains skeptical of this work.

Tucker and his colleagues at DOPS are not the only academics in this field in the U.S, either. “I think there's an assumption oftentimes that if you're studying parapsychology, that means that you absolutely believe everything you're studying, and I try and work hard to say that you don't have to believe in everything you study.

It's an academic interest and these are experiences that human beings have reported across different times and across cultures, and we really need to try and understand all aspects of human experience,” said Christine Simmonds-Moore, a parapsychologist and associate professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia.

Simmonds-Moore gravitated towards the paranormal as a child in the UK, but it wasn’t until she was far into her psychology degree that she realized she could actually study paranormal phenomena seriously. After getting her PhD in England, she moved to the US to research at the Rhine Center, an independent parapsychology research center in North Carolina that was once affiliated with Duke University. It was while working there that she first encountered the researchers at UVA.

She never met Stevenson, but she distinctly remembers her first visit to DOPS. “It does send shivers down your spine when you go into the room and you see all the filing cabinets containing all of the cases of the past lives that were investigated by Stevenson,” she told me.

“You see all of his work and you see all of the things that he collected from his travels whilst he was doing the investigations. So there are lots of artifacts on the walls there. It's quite a beautiful experience just to see the room with these filing cabinets.”

Not everyone is so moved by Stevenson and Tucker’s work. Christopher French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, considers himself a skeptic when it comes to paranormal phenomena, despite conducting some of his own research on past-life memories.

He began his career studying mainstream neuroscience before embracing anomalistic psychology, the study of human behavior associated with the paranormal but based on the assumption that nothing paranormal is involved. French’s new direction was, he described, “tolerated” by his department, and he had to keep up his more mainstream psychological research in parallel with the anomalistic work that interested him far more.

I think they are false memories that have arisen as a result of a kind of interesting social psychological interaction between the child and those around them

He thinks the most plausible explanation for the majority of cases is that the children are experiencing false memories, though he maintains respect for Stevenson’s meticulous research. “I think they are false memories that have arisen as a result of a kind of interesting social psychological interaction between the child and those around them,” he argued.

“You do wonder to what end the researchers are kind of just finding the things that match what's gone on.” He thinks that young children will often say things that don’t make sense to their parents when they first start to speak and the parents will then inadvertently feed them information as they begin to wonder whose life the child could be describing—perhaps showing them photographs and asking if they remember the people in the picture and “having this interaction that ultimately will produce a situation where they've unintentionally implanted false memories,” as French put it.

Stevenson’s work informed French’s own forays into investigating children with past-life memories. Many years ago, the two men met when seated next to each other at a conference dinner. “He came across as a very intelligent, reasonable person,” French recalled. “I think his work is very good as far as it goes, but I don't think it's the whole story.”

He doesn't, however, question the necessity of the research itself. “There could only be two possibilities. One is that there is something genuinely paranormal happening, and if that is true, that would be amazing,” he told me. “Or, alternatively—which is more the line that I do favor—it tells us something very interesting about human psychology. So either way, it's worth taking seriously.”

Dr. Anita H. Clayton, chair of UVA’s psychiatry and neurobehavioral department, which houses DOPS, echoed that sentiment: “My question is, Where should DOPS be if it's not in the department of psychiatry? And where should it be if it's not in academics? Because I think what scientists do is dispassionately investigate phenomena that we don't yet understand.”

And yet, mainstream science still largely relegates parapsychology to its own community, with researchers struggling to get their work published in major journals. Instead, they often publish in parapsychology journals, which, all the parapsychologists I spoke with agreed, is a bit ineffective—they are preaching to the choir when they would rather be reaching the skeptics.

On April 30, 2011, the TV show that had followed Ryan Hammon’s case, The UneXplained: A Life in the Movies, aired on the Biography Channel. As a young child, Ryan had always been shy about sharing his Hollywood memories out of fear that people would think he was crazy; his parents, too, had been nervous about what people in their small town would think of them.

But just over a year after Cyndi sent that first letter to DOPS, her family’s story appeared on national television. In the end, the family thought the producers did a great job. Soon after the episode aired, Ryan stopped talking about Marty Martyn. Within six months, Ryan had taken down his Martyn-themed bedroom decorations—an iron Eiffel Tower, pictures of New York—and told his mom it was time to be a regular kid.

After more than two decades of researching children with past-life memories, Tucker is still getting letters about children like Ryan and he is still seeking out new cases. At his last count, there were about 2,200 cases coded in his database. He describes himself as “spiritual but not religious,” and his goal remains unique from Stevenson’s, who was open about his unfulfilled quest for mainstream science to value his life’s work.

“A lot of it, to be perfectly honest, is trying to figure out the answers for myself,” Tucker told me. “Hopefully my work or my writings have had a positive impact on some people, but they're still trying to answer the question of, What is the level of evidence that, in fact, there is this part of us that survives after the body dies?”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqygg/ ... obal-en-GB

[Anthea]

What happens after death?

It’s the age-old question: what happens to us when we die? Near-death survivors share the inexplicable mystery of their experiences with Jo Macfarlane

The doors of the train slammed shut, trapping David Ditchfield’s jacket between them. There was a moment of frustration as he tugged desperately at the material. Then, as the train began to move from the platform at Huntingdon station, forcing him to jog alongside, David realised with deepening horror that, with his jacket caught, he’d shortly be dragged underneath the train.

This, he thought, was how he was going to die.

But what followed was something far more startling and intense. For as he lay in hospital with horrifying injuries– the speed of the train and the pull of gravity had thrown him clear – he lost consciousness and had what’s described as a ‘near-death experience’. ‘All the noise of the room died out and the pain disappeared,’ the 61-year-old recalls today. ‘There was silence, and stillness. I was in another world entirely.’

David’s extraordinary experience echoes those of many others that have flummoxed scientists for decades. Together they pose the most tantalising question: is there life after death? For David, and thousands like him, the answer is almost certainly yes.

What David describes is as real for him today as it was when it happened in 2006. In fact, it’s ‘the most real thing I have ever experienced. I was in this darkened, calm space, with all these beautiful orbs of colour flashing and pulsating around me, like landing lights on a runway. The colours were more intense than anything I’d seen before.’

There was a ‘comforting presence’ beside him, a figure David felt he’d known his whole life, and two others who used their hands to ‘heal’ his physical and emotional wounds.

‘It was like being surrounded by love– it’s the only way I can describe it. Somehow, I knew I was staring at the source of all creation.’

It would be easy to dismiss it, as sceptics have, as an extraordinary dream brought on by extreme shock and the brain’s reaction to trauma. Except that David’s description of what he ‘saw’ is not unique. Remarkably similar reports have been recorded for centuries, dating back to Greek and Roman times. And there’s compelling evidence convincing scientists that these near-death experiences are proof that some form of consciousness may continue after the heart and the brain stop functioning.

Studies from around the world suggest one in ten people who survive after their heart stops report a near-death experience. Some are ‘out-of-body’, where patients float above themselves, often in operating theatres. Others, like David, travel to an otherworldly realm and describe details that rarely vary, even across countries, cultures, socio-economic backgrounds and different religious beliefs.

Some mention travelling towards a light, sometimes through a tunnel. Many have spoken to dead relatives or ethereal beings. As in David’s experience, many instinctively sense a higher power– which, they say, can’t be described by language alone. Most also describe a sudden understanding of the world, a sense that everything is interconnected.

But there is always some kind of boundary –a door, bridge or river – which represents a point of no return. Cross through or over it and there is no going back. David had the sensation of being ‘dragged back by an invisible force. I didn’t want to come back, but it happened in an instant, like I’d crashed through some invisible barrier.’

At the time, David had never heard of near-death experiences. He woke in A&E, returning to shock and pain. He doesn’t know whether his heart stopped – to this day, he hasn’t asked medics how hard they had to battle to save his life. But, having been rushed into theatre, surgeons took skin grafts from his legs to rebuild his left arm. It had been sliced open, was badly fractured and the elbow dislocated. One finger had been torn off. He subsequently suffered terrible post-traumatic stress disorder and flashbacks of the accident.

Yet for David, as for many other survivors, what happened next when he returned to his normal life was as startling as the near-death experience itself. Some people report that technology or machinery starts to malfunction when they are around. Their watches stop working; lightbulbs blow when they flick a switch. At one conference on the subject in Texas, new microphones had to be bought when they stopped working on the day people who’d had near-death experiences took to the stage (despite having functioned normally when doctors and scientists gave their presentations over preceding days).

These are anecdotal reports and haven’t been replicated in trials, yet they seem to have no plausible explanation.

Outside these strange phenomena, people are also often changed in a more fundamental way. Many become more altruistic and care less about money. Some give up their jobs to pursue charity work.

For David, a tradesman, who had been dependent on alcohol, it led to sobriety. He began writing orchestral music, despite having never learned to play an instrument, and his compositions have been performed by the Chamber Orchestra of St Ives. ‘I realised, looking back on my life, that it was linear, just living on the surface,’ he says. ‘I’d just skim over adversity. But now I know death isn’t the end, it all feels so much more three-dimensional. I live far more in the moment and appreciate the small things.

‘When I lost my mother 18 months ago, I told her, “You’re going to love where you’re going now”. It was a huge comfort.’

For Zoë Chapman, 36, from North London, a near-death experience also had a galvanising effect on her life. She remembers ‘everything going black’ when there were complications following the birth of her son Mayson, now nine. ‘I just saw this tunnel, with a bright light at the end,’ she says. ‘It was dark and calm and I thought I must be dead. There was no connection to anything physical, as if I was leaving myself behind. I knew I could go towards the light if I wanted to, but I didn’t. Then I heard Mayson cry. It was like a shot of adrenalin, and it brought me back.’

Zoë (who recently invented the Whizzer, a portable toilet for children) had mental-health struggles and had previously attempted suicide. But she says: ‘I was given the option to die and I didn’t take it. It has changed everything. My bond with Mayson is so strong.’

The number of reported near-death experiences has increased as medicine has advanced; quite simply, more people are being brought back from the brink of death. Dr Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioural sciences at the University of West Virginia, has studied them for 50 years.

The experience that first piqued his interest involved a young student who had attempted suicide. She had been unconscious when he visited her, but the next day she not only recognised him, but recounted a conversation he’d had with her friend in a separate room down the hall.

She also asked what he’d spilt down his tie– moments before being called to the ward, he’d dropped spaghetti on it, and covered it up with a white coat. Since that encounter, he has documented hundreds more and has spent his career studying the phenomenon.

One man having a heart bypass reported floating above his body and watching his surgeon ‘flapping like a chicken’. The doctor had trained in a technique that involved placing his sterile hands on his apron and using his elbows to instruct the theatre team. Another man was perplexed to meet his sister and his long-dead parents in the beyond. On waking, he found out she had died, without his knowledge, the previous week.

‘What’s happening is either fundamental to our biology, or fundamental to something else that we can’t yet explain,’ says Dr Greyson. ‘The only differences, across all cultures, lie in how we describe these events. Some talk of tunnels, but in less-developed countries where tunnels are rare, people might describe the mouth of a flower, a well or a cave. The basic idea is the same.’

Dr Greyson is among a group of scientists who have tried to find a biological explanation for near-death experiences.

Some suggest it’s the dying brain releasing a rush of endorphins, which creates a sense of peace and wellbeing. Studies of dying rats have shown their brain activity spikes just before they die, although this hasn’t been reproduced in humans. If damage occurs to the brain’s temporal parietal junction – which assembles data from our senses to create our perception of our body– it could induce an ‘out-of-body’ sensation. Other possibilities include a lack of oxygen causing hallucinations, or too much carbon dioxide affecting vision, creating a tunnel effect. But crucially, Dr Greyson admits, science can’t yet fully explain the phenomenon.

Near-death experiences have been reported in people attached to hospital monitors, which proves they weren’t lacking in oxygen. And out-ofbody experiences also occur when brain data indicates no activity at all. Dr Penny Sartori, a former intensive care nurse who
has researched near-death experiences at the University of Wales, Lampeter, says some people bring back information they could not have known.

‘One patient had a message for a living relative,’ she says. ‘That relative was astounded
as she’d gone to great lengths to keep the information secret.’

American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who had his own near-death experience
when in a medically induced coma with meningitis in 2008, described travelling through spiritual realms with a female guide. He reported this guide as having ‘a beautiful face, with gorgeous clear blue eyes’. He was inspired to research his birth family after being adopted as a baby, and learned a biological sister, Betsy, had died ten years previously. When a surviving sister, Kathy, sent him a photograph of Betsy, Eben was stunned: she was ‘unmistakably’ the blue-eyed woman who had been his spirit guide.

Dr Greyson admits ‘a lot of these questions are not going to be answered by our logic and
our science’. A recent international experiment put image cards on high shelves in hospitals, only visible if patients truly floated out of their bodies. Ten per cent reported a near death experience but none saw the images.

‘I’m fairly well convinced now that there is something non-physical about us that is able to separate from the physical body during a near-death experience,’ Dr Greyson says. ‘I’ve seen enough evidence suggesting that we continue after death.’

Yet neither Dr Greyson nor Dr Sartori is religious. Whether we survive death ‘has nothing to do with whether there’s a god’, says Dr Greyson. It’s something more fundamental about what it means to be human, they explain, and whether consciousness exists separately from our brain – rather than being created by it.

In fact, those who had faith beforehand often tend to abandon it, as their experience doesn’t tally with any organised religion.

There is, however, a darker side. Some struggle to reconcile their experience with the world, or feel disbelieved and unsupported. There are high rates of divorce and depression. Not every experience is uplifting, either: some report a distressing ‘hell-like’ realm. ‘People perceive there’s something “wrong” with them, or it happened because they’re somehow a “bad” person,’ Dr Sartori explains. ‘That’s not true. It could simply be these people are clinging on to life and fighting and resisting the experience.’

Gigi Strehler, who runs a support group, Near Death Experience UK, was one of five per cent to experience ‘the void’ –a realm of almost total darkness. In 2011 she was rushed to hospital with internal bleeding. She received several blood transfusions and went into cardiac arrest. ‘It was total darkness, total silence, total nothingness,’ she said. ‘A doorway between life and death – a sort of purgatory.’

But it yielded some profound revelations. ‘I experienced my life through everyone else’s encounter with me,’ she says. ‘I now know the only judgment comes not from some “higher being” but from how you feel about yourself. Coming back from that is hard. You realise that every interaction has meaning, which is partly why people who have had near-death experiences become nicer people.’

Gigi also developed photosensitivity and had to wear sunglasses to drive at night. ‘The grass was the greenest green you could imagine. Others report sensitivity to sound,’ she says, ‘or that they can sense “auras” around people – these are lawyers, doctors, bus drivers, who haven’t exactly spent their lives aligning their chakras.’

Gigi’s support group now has around 700 members worldwide. ‘People think we sit around going, “Oh, I went down this tunnel of light and saw Grandma.” But we’re actually asking, “What is this reality. What is consciousness? How could I have had this awareness when I was technically dead?”’

In some cases, people are physically different afterwards. Dr Sartori recalls a man who was suffering from sepsis following cancer surgery. Unconscious, he later described floating above his body and ‘speaking’ to his father. He also accurately recounted what Dr Sartori did in the room. On waking, his right hand, frozen into a claw-like position since birth, was now normal. ‘It defies explanation,’ Dr Sartori says.

People have reported being healed of illnesses, including cancer. They are largely dismissed as coincidences. But Dr Sartori suggests: ‘Perhaps a near-death experience is such a powerful thing in the mind that it overwrites other programmes we have running. If we could learn more, we could come up with a way to harness it – it could revolutionise how we treat other problems.’

For now, there are no easy answers. ‘Am I 100 per cent sure near-death experiences are real? No,’ Dr Greyson says. ‘Maybe there’s some data we haven’t seen yet that will change our minds. But when I started out I thought death was the end. Now, I believe the likely scenario is that it is not.’

https://www.you.co.uk/what-happens-afte ... obal-en-GB

Shine On by David Ditchfield is published by O-Books, £13.99*. After by Dr Bruce Greyson is published by Transworld, £16.99*

[Anthea]

Proof there's life after death?

In February this year, clinical psychologist Vanessa Moore wrote in YOU about the signs she receives from her late husband, in the form of white feathers. We were overwhelmed with emails and letters about similar experiences. Here, four readers share their stories…

‘I PRESSED THE DOORBELL AND FELT MUM WITH ME ’

Gillian Walker, 75, lives in Wivenhoe, Essex, with her husband Peter, 75. She has two children and four grandchildren.

A couple of months after my mother Anne passed away in late December 2008, my brother phoned me and told me that out of the blue, his doorbell – which he’d bought soon after Mum died– had started playing a piece of music by the clarinettist Acker Bilk.

It was a fancy doorbell, with a choice of ten tunes, that he’d had set to Westminster chimes since he’d bought it. He told me that not only was it playing this new tune – one of the ten options – but it was happening when there was nobody at the door. And, despite having reset it back to the chimes, it kept happening.

I knew immediately it was a sign from Mum. She had loved Acker Bilk’s music so much we even had it played at her funeral. I decided I needed to see and hear it happening for myself. As I pressed the doorbell and heard the familiar melody, I said, ‘Hello, Mum’.

I knew she was there with me and I felt incredibly comforted. Several months later, my brother moved house, leaving the doorbell behind, which marked the end of the signals from Mum. Yet more than a decade on I still smile when I think about it.

I don’t believe someone’s energy simply ends when they die. That was her way of letting me know that wherever she has gone on to, she is content.

‘I DON’ T BUY BISCUITS, BUT I STILL FIND CRUMBS’

Hazel Douglas is 70. She is divorced and lives in Norwich.

I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my dad Harry before his death. He died in hospital – where he was awaiting heart surgery after suffering a stroke– and I didn’t make it in time.

Dad was 95 but that doesn’t make it any easier to lose someone, nor accept that you didn’t have a final moment with them.

I believe that the multiple signs Dad has sent me since his death in 2018, three years after my mum died, are to let me know he is still with me in some way.

The first one came just three days after he died. I would visit him several times a week and I’d read the Daily Mail while he read the Daily Mirror. He particularly loved the sports and puzzles pages. That day, still reeling from his death, I picked up my copy of the Mail and in the middle of it were the sports and puzzles pages from the Mirror. I froze – I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I immediately walked to the newsagent to see if all the papers had been mixed up by accident. But no, it was just mine.

Not long after that, my brother and I were in Dad’s house, summoning the emotional strength to begin sorting out his belongings. I looked up and staring at me through the window was a robin. For several minutes it sat perfectly still on the windowsill, its gaze never wavering. I knew it was Dad, encouraging me to crack on and do what had to be done.

But by far the most unusual sign I’ve received was when I put my dressing gown on one morning and reached into the pocket to find a handful of digestive biscuit crumbs in it. I’m not a biscuit eater– I don’t even keep them in the house– but I know somebody who loved them… Dad.

‘THEIR SPIRITS RETURNED IN THE FORM OF BIRDS’

Sally Treganowan, 73, lives in Tunbridge Wells with her husband Mike, 70.

It’s not just people who send messages after their death – I’ve been lucky enough to receive signs from two of our deceased dogs that their spirits are still with me.

In 2000, my husband and I adopted Chrissie and Hollie, a pair of eight-week-old mongrel pups who’d been found abandoned at a council dump in Sheffield. We don’t have children – our pets are our babies– and Chrissie and Hollie had the best life, living between our homes in Sussex and the Dordogne in France.

In 2014, Chrissie was put to sleep by our French vet after developing a liver condition, and as she slipped away, a little robin looked in the window of the vet’s surgery at me. I knew it was her.

After she died, we drove to Northern Spain in our motorhome with Hollie, too bereft to go home where we would feel Chrissie’s absence so keenly. After a walk on the beach, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a little robin fast asleep on the steps of our motorhome. Knowing she was still around helped soothe my grief.

In 2016, it was time to say goodbye to Hollie, who also died peacefully in France after suffering a heart attack.

Once again, she came to us in bird form, just hours after her death, as a red kite, screeching and swooping over our swimming pool– she had always been the noisier, crazy one of the pair.

Since then, we’ve seen a robin and a red kite on several occasions: a kite once flew ahead of our car for several miles as we prepared to leave France when we sold our house there, and we’ve also found a robin sleeping in our motorhome.

When it happens, it makes me tearful but in a happy way. I still miss Chrissie and Hollie terribly, so to feel I still have a connection to them is wonderful.

We now have a new dog– another rescue called Sophie, who was abandoned at the side of a motorway – but we will never forget Chrissie and Hollie. I believe the signals they have sent are their way of saying they’ll never forget us either.

‘A BUTTERFLY LET ME KNOW MY SON WAS OK’

Jane, 55, lives in London with her husband Michael*, 55.

As any parent who has lost a child will tell you, the pain and feeling that there is a part of me missing never goes away. Yet the signs my son has sent me have given me so much comfort and only served to confirm my belief in an afterlife.

Charles was 19 when he died unexpectedly after suffering a reaction to a drug he’d taken. He had been on the cusp of starting university, his whole life ahead of him, and his death devastated our family.

Two days after Charles died in 2019, I went for a walk in a park with my best friend, who was his godmother. Sitting on a bench, both of us shell-shocked, the most beautiful red admiral butterfly landed on my knee.

Instead of it fluttering away after a second or two, it sat for several minutes before moving to my friend’s knee then up her chest, beside her heart. When it returned to my knee, I was even able to take a photo of it, so unperturbed was it by us.

I’ve always been a spiritual person and, already familiar with the symbolism of butterflies that represent rebirth and new life, I knew without doubt that vibrantly coloured butterfly was Charles’s way of letting me know he was OK.

A day later the same type of butterfly appeared in our garden, and not long after that, on the first Father’s Day since Charles’s death, Michael and I spotted it fluttering around us as we took a walk.

Close friends and family all share my belief that it’s a sign from Charles. Along with talking about him, and keeping photos of him around the house, looking out for red admirals is another way of keeping him alive in our hearts.

No parent should outlive their child but knowing his spirit lives on in some way, and that he wanted me to know that, has brought me a great sense of peace.

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