Life After Death

Aug 17, 2023

This post will be perhaps the most personal I have ever written, but if I do not tell the story with sufficient detail, it will not provide the depth of understanding I hope to encourage.

Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and I have known each other since our days in Santa Fe. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, he invited me to speak at a conference he was hosting in Seattle. One of his patients had volunteered to help with the audio-visual part of the presentations, and there was a small dinner party at the home of another patient after the conference.

Having moved in various circles for decades, I should start by saying that I know many people who are much more psychic than I am, but that night, I was extremely open. Bob was sitting on the hearth, his back to the fire. I saw him at Waterloo delivering an urgent message to the Duke of Wellington. There were no particular details except perhaps the suggestion that he was entrusted with sensitive information. As fate would have it, Bob was distantly related to Wellington on his father’s side of the family.

The drive home from Seattle took nearly two hours, and I was happy to see my bed after a long day on the other side of Puget Sound. Bob phoned to make sure I had arrived safely, and that night I had one of the most detailed dreams of my life.

A couple of points stood out. The first was that there were two unresolved issues that were related to whether or not Bob would survive. The other was that Bob liked simplicity and was enthralled by the capacity to transform one reality into another, a kind of magic requiring an unusual skill.

I felt that sharing the details would be important, but it became apparent that he was not clear about the two obstacles to recovery. In the dream, he was wearing a white kimono and was floating in the sky, perhaps seventy feet above the ground, maybe higher. He reached under the fold of the kimono with his right hand and pulled out a black raven and released it. Continuing the dream, he saw that I was fascinated so he reached with the other hand and pulled out another raven with the left hand.

Though he had studied psychology with one of the foremost professors in the field, he was unable to make sense of the inferences in the dream.

Some days later, five of us met at the apartment where the dinner party had taken place. Bob was bleeding, but I had gone to Chinatown before joining the others. It happened that I had some Yunnan Baiyao in the car and was able to stop the bleeding.

We all went to a performance at the Seattle Opera. Norma is one of my favorite operas. The lyrics and issues are immortal. Whether staged in a Druid forest or more contemporary setting, the personal and political complexities are as relevant today as hundreds of years ago. Besides, the music is absolutely divine.

It must be obvious that an invisible force was at work, but I did something I came to regret. I told Bob that, as a practitioner, I could not be involved with a patient even if his primary care physician was Dr. Klinghardt. Yes, “the moving finger writes . . .”

To make a long story short, I did accompany Bob on visits to countless psychics and healers, but we never seemed to come close to discovering the significance of the ravens. Then, a patient in Austria had a dream about Bob and phoned me with an urgent message, the gist of which was a careless remark by a family member that was deeply wounding. Finally, a story emerged, obviously very hurtful, but it was something that could be addressed consciously once nudged.

Sad to say, the secret of the other raven was never revealed.

In those days, I was traveling back and forth to Europe where I was consulting in cancer clinics, mainly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Bob would sometimes leave Seattle at 2:00 am to pick me up and take me to the airport. I told him that driving at night on icy roads did not feel safe to me, but he insisted that he enjoyed the long chats to and from the airport.

On one occasion, he was a little flustered and asked, “What is the source of your deep faith?” I asked him questions about his beliefs, but he insisted that nothing he ever heard in church generated the level of confidence I had. In particular, he wanted to know why I was so certain there is life after death.

These questions and the underlying feelings are very deep, and I could not escape the sense that on some level, he knew he was not going to heal. However, he made some rules about what could and could not be discussed. His command of language was incredible. He always had exactly the right word at the right time, and there was never any ambiguity; but if I asked a direct question, the answer was often that he could not remember. He insisted he was trying to remember, but he simply could not find the missing pieces.

He was the guinea pig for a demonstration of a cutting edge healing technique that was previewed at a retreat lasting a week. He returned trashed and very fragile. I nursed him for several days. He did not want to be left alone for even a second. I ended up putting a massage table in the kitchen so he would not feel abandoned while I prepared special foods for him.

When he returned to Seattle, he had some radiologic exams. He knew my beliefs on this. There was a radiology clinic near where I was consulting in Bavaria. I told the doctor that the patients always went into a tailspin after the exposures, and I could not stabilize them in a realistic amount of time. I was spending three weeks in Europe on each trip. I understand the need to know; but the risks, in my mind, outweighed the gains. I can feel cancer in the aura so I never felt the need for x-rays or MRIs, but I realize this is not tangible enough for doctors.

It was shortly after this that I stumbled on Dr. Mary’s Monkey. This explained the observations I had been making, but I was still not able to convince doctors to avoid the risks associated with the technology.

A few days after the diagnostic tests, I got a phone call that Bob was in the hospital. I grabbed some sacred ash and frankincense and jumped in the car. He had chosen to admit himself to a hospital near the apartment where we had frequently gathered. He was in a coma, but I anointed him, especially his feet because he always said “Bob’s feet love Ingrid’s hands.”

Visiting hours were over and we were forced to leave. We went to the nearby apartment and prayed. He had crossed over minutes after we left.

One evening, I was looking at my own blood under the microscope, and I heard Bob’s voice clear as day: “Look a little more to the right.” There, I saw the mold that I had been battling since moving into a new house that flooded a few days after moving in. Bob had accompanied me to the mold analysis laboratory, to the various meetings with lawyers and court hearings, but we had never seen the mold in the blood. There it was, and it was a perfect match to what we had seen in the laboratory.

After this, he appeared often as if to confirm that the convictions I had about the afterlife and our inherent immortality had helped him to navigate the shift in dimensions.

I know how important this information is to many others. I have seen ghosts from time to time, but it is not just our human companions who often remain with us but also our feathered and furry friends.

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