Spirit Contact Messages from Heaven

The story I tell you now had its occurrence in two parts: 1977 and 1997, a twenty-year interval, in which I dwelt upon its ramifications, and in particular how it would affect two people who I both love and respect. And it was because of my feelings towards these two, both relatives of mine, that the long delay between the two parts tooks place. For you see, they had suffered a calamitous tragedy, and I did not wish to reawaken their grief with a message from beyond the grave.

Now though, another thirteen years have elapsed. We all grow older. I am now seventy-four and the two people I mention older still, so if the story is to be told it need be told now. And I believe its telling is important, for it deals with one of life's greatest mysteries. But I'll say no more here other than to simply relate the story how it occurred...

It was just another working day when my eighteen year-old niece, Karen, boarded a city-bound train at Parramatta. The platform was crowded. The commuter-train from the Blue Mountains was packed. But Karen was able to squeeze into the third carriage. That's where she was when the Bold Street Bridge at Granville collapsed with a shattering roar and crushed the life out of her. The date: the 18th January 1977. Eighty-two people died along with Karen that day. But I wasn't to learn until twenty years later exactly how my niece, Karen was killed. For it wasn't until twenty years later that she told me. Yes, she told me herself. You see, I am a medium- or in modern parlance, a "channeler."

The realisation that I have a rather unusual gift came home to me very gradually. It took years. It began back in 1945. I was nine. That's when I saw my first spiritual entity, a ghost; a lady dressed in Victorian clothing. It was further substantiated when both my sister and I saw a ghost in 1951. Without any prompting or collusion, my elder sister, Ada, said she'd seen my brother, Tippy's, ghost around the house. I, too, had seen him. But I hadn't told anyone. My elder brother, Tippy, committed suicide at age seventeen. He hanged himself.

That was all a long time ago. When I was thirty-two I happened to mention these occurrences to a trusted friend of mine at work. Our conversation went something like this:

"You could be a 'sensitive,' Tom. I know a woman who is clairvoyant."

"A 'sensitive.' What's the hell's a sensitive?

You could be a spiritual medium?"

"A what?"

"You could have a gift. You know, like clairvoyance. Although in your case in might be clairaudience?"

It was my friend, Rex Bunn, who talked me into putting myself to the test. I can tell you that I felt like a complete idiot when I sat down late one night to try out what he suggested.

"Have you got a class-topped table at home?"

"Yes."

"Good. You need something very smooth. When you get home tonight (we were on evening shift and I wouldn't get home until midnight) Try putting a very small glass, upside down on that glass-topped table. Then rest your little finger on it. I want you to keep an open mind on this, Tom. Then, if there are any spirits around, you might just be surprised what happens. You could get a message from beyond the grave."

Naturally, in a thing as important as this, I trusted no one. I didn't want any joke-players. If I was a medium then I wanted to ascertain this for myself. I'd test myself alone. No table-tipping. No outside help. No tricks.

Can imagine my surprise! It worked. Not immediately. There were three or four failures. In these, all I actually felt was a sort of giddiness overcoming me. Nothing happened to that upturned glass. Yet, I felt there was something indescribable going on. But on the first night, the glass, with my little finger resting extremely lightly on it - barely touching and certainly not pushing - began to move.

The glass simply went round in tight little circles and shapes, making no sense. Naturally, I thought that it was my own mind playing tricks. That this was the result of wishful thinking; that it was all being done subconsciously, by muscles which I (my conscious self) could not feel working.

Such is our rationalisation- because of our conditioning that we will not believe our own senses. At least, that is how I felt for a long, long while. However, I continued on with this fascinating practice. But I never fully believed full that it was not just part of myself. I'd read about split personalities, schisms, sub-personalities within the same being. I was very very skeptical.

To cut a long story short, in time, the glass began to move more and more easily. My friend, Rex Bunn, suggested I put an alphabet under the glass-topped table. Then to ask questions with my mind. This I did. And the answers came. I learned that the entity (or spirit) who was contacting me in this way was an elderly woman who had died of a terminal illness in the house in which I live. The house in which I live is at least seventy years old.

Rex told me that I should explain to the woman, this entity, by my thought, that the house is now mine. She has no need to hang around. She should leave and go to where she is supposed to be. Wherever that was. I did so. This entity seemed awfully pleased to hear this news. I had a vague feeling that she was quite moved. Wishing me well, she departed, never to contact me again.

By late 1968, I had become so proficient with the upturned glass that my friend, Rex, (always at our place of work, Sydney Airport) suggested that I try Automatic Writing. Rex knew that I did Creative Writing as a hobby. The thought occurred to him that if I had a gift for mediumship it could quite likely show up through my writing.

Now, I sat at my desk with biro in hand. As with the upturned glass, nothing much happened at first. I just took on that heightened sense of awareness, plus a little dizziness, which so often accompanied these earlier attempts.

The pen then began to rotate at its upper end, i.e. the end away from the paper. It moved around as if propelled by a power outside of itself. Then, the first mark on the paper. A tiny little circle.

The circle became bigger. It felt as if another arm had been slipped through the inside of my own physical arm, but was having difficulty adjusting to my musculature. It was a little frightening. It was as if I were being partially taken over. But I determined to remain calm.

The circles went around and around and around. Then there was a attempt to form letters. There came an E then a L, and other E and another L. From memory, no words were actually written.

It was around this time that Rex suggested that I keep records of everything I did. So in early December 1968 I commenced my first notebook on Automatic Writing. From then on, for the most part, anyway, I kept notes of every scrap of Automatic Writing then, later, Automatic Typing, I have ever undertaken.

If is not possible for me to tell you in one short speech all about all of my experiences with Automatic Writing. Let us just say that I filled up many thick exercise books. I might add, that my Automatic Writing was distinctly different to my own handwriting.

Later, I turned to Automatic Typing. I used up several reams of typing paper over the past quarter of a century. An awful lot of stuff came off that automatic pen and automatic typing. I wrote a book on the subject in 1974.

But back in 1968 and 1969, when I first began, what I really needed most was moral and mental support. For about a month I thought I was going completely off my head. I had to be mad. Quite obviously. I was bonkers! Only my friend, Rex Bunn, knew what I was doing. I did not even confide with my wife. And when she did find out she was very upset.

I remember phoning Sydney University and asking to be put through to one of their professors of psychology. I cannot recall the man's name now. Then I asked him if Sydney University had a faculty of Parapsychology. I was aware of studies in Parapsychology taking place in U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. Professor Rhine was a world-wide authority on the paranormal and had been running experiments at Duke University since 1929. Guess what the Sydney Professor said? And this was forty years after Rhine had started his work. "We don't go in for all that sort of nonsense here in Australia."

So I knew I'd get no support there. Who could I tell about this? To talk to any one in the medical profession or in psychology would get me a one-way ticket to Callan Park Mental Asylum. I had no illusions about that.

Of course, there were various Psychic Phenomena organisations and associations around. But they had very little credibility in the scientific world. So, for the most part, I shied clear of them. I wanted no undue influence. I wanted to test the waters for myself. To remain autonomous, untainted by other people's ideas, was the name of the game.

My skepticism was such that it took me well over a year to accept that what was taking place was genuine. I would question my so-called spiritual entities in order to catch them out. The internal arguments I had with myself went on interminably. Such was my conditioning. that I did not want to believe. All of this had to be me. All of this had to be sub-personalities of yours truly. No matter how learned, no matter how different some of these opinions were from my own, I did not fully believe. Until something unexpected happened.

Earlier, in January 1968 I began work on my first novel. I called it, Searchtime Expired. It was a book based around my own activities in civil aviation. The setting was Madang, in Papua New Guinea. Though I had changed the name to a fictional one. I called my fictional town, Nambis.

Now, I had been working on this book and had completed its first draft some months before my introduction to Automatic Writing. But from time to time I would work on the second draft. In those days we had no word-processors, and a second draft meant retyping the whole story on a typewriter from beginning to end. Now, I knew that story back to front. I'd been over it again and again.

You can imagine my absolute surprise then when, during a period of automatic typing, a woman claiming to be my maternal grandmother asked me where Nambis was!

Nambis. It was Madang. It had been clear in my mind for a long long time. I knew consciously where it was. And I'm sure that by this time so would have every part of my own personal subconscious. But my Grandmother White (that is my maternal grandmother) did not. This was truly amazing. For to me, it was evidence that my automatic typing was not my own subconscious thoughts. This bit, at least, was external to me. This was genuine spirit talk. This was the real McCoy. And if this was, it was very likely the rest of it was.

In 1971, my family and I moved to New Zealand and I gave away Automatic Typing for well over a year. I think it was sixteen months, in fact, before I returned to it again. In 1974, after another long break in which I determined to gain more objectivity on the subject, I wrote my book: Ghost Guidance and Automatic Writing.

I sent it to half-a-dozen publishers. No one would publish it.

But it was in 1977 - the year the Granville Train Accident killed eighty-two people including my niece, Karen, that I received the second piece of -to me- evidence, of the authenticity of my automatic typing.

I was sitting in the radio-room at MacQuarie Island watching the incoming messages on the teleprinter when I saw a message coming in addressed to me.

It read. " Dear Tom. Sorry to inform you that Karen was killed in train accident at Granville 18th January. Ray and Marie very upset. Love Rita."

Three week later, whilst undertaking some late-night automatic typing (I was on night shift in the radio room) my spirit guide, U.R., said that a young lady wished to communicate with me. You can imagine my surprise when the young lady claimed to be my niece, Karen. For after reading that telegram, and being mildly upset - for we were not close- I'd forgotten all about the incident. I'd seen Karen only half-a-dozen or so times in my life. Mostly as a little girl, and only once as a young woman.

You can imagine my surprise when Karen asked- via my automatic typing- that I call round to see her mother, Marie. How could I call around and see anyone? I was marooned on a windswept sub-Antarctic island and could not get off. I knew it. I'd been there for two months. In every part of my being I knew I was on MacQuarie Island. My subconscious mind certainly knew where I was. Karen did not. It had to be Karen. Or at least it had to be an entity separate from myself.

My doubts were gone. It had taken me nearly ten years. But now I truly believed that I could take messages from discarnate entities in this way. There was no other acceptable explanation for it.

It had taken me twenty years to tell my sister-in-law, Marie, that her daughter, Karen still lives. That she is now in heaven and enjoying her life immensely. But I did it. And I am forever glad. For now Marie knows what I know. That we are all immortal. We are not our bodies. We are our spirits. She knows the answer to the question which the warrior, Arjuna, asked of Lord Krishna in the Hindu Holy book, the Bhagavad Gita thousands of years ago. Here is what the Hindu God answered:

"Know thou, Arjuna, that there never was a time when

I nor thee, nor any of these princes of earth

was not; nor shall there ever come a time hereafter

when any of us shall cease to be."

For we are immortal. We are not bodies which have a spirit. We are spirits undergoing a physical- body experience. We are souls. We are part of what the Indian tribes of North America call The Great Spirit. We are immortal beings.

But in a way I failed Karen. She asked me to call round to see her mother and I could not. She asked me to phone and I would not. Can you imagine me making a radio telephone call to a woman, distraught from the death of her only daughter, telling her that I was a medium and that her dead daughter had asked me to call! They would think I was mad.

When I got back to Australia I thought about telling Marie - my sister in law- from time to time. I was advised by another sister-in-law, Margaret, who knew of my mediumship, not to do so. "She's not ready for it, Tom." So for twenty years I did nothing.

Then, last month, just prior to the Twentieth Anniversary of the Granville Train Disaster, I read an article in the Sunday Herald. I decided there and then I would do some automatic typing and ask my guide, U.R. if Karen was willing to talk with me. She was. Moreover, Karen still wanted me to contact her mother. I decided that I would. Twenty years was long enough. I am sixty. Marie is sixty-five. I just had to tell her, or maybe she would never know until she, too, died.

That was when I decided to write rather than call round. I figured a letter could say it so much better. It was as I was writing this letter that the phone rang. It was Marie herself. This in itself was rather strange, for she only rang ever couple of months or so. But even more strange was that Marie wanted to come over to our house to drop off some old clothing for a charity. She was coming over right now.

Moreover, I had the house to myself so I could give Marie the letter when she arrived and then talk with her. And I did give her the letter. It worked out perfectly. As if planned by God.

I hope you got something worthwhile out of Spirit Contact Messages from Heaven. It's about time I got back to some more automatic typing...

Tom.