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Abby has her own blog now, which you can read here.

2/3/12

Occasionally during this past almost-two years that I have been reunited with Abby, my wife from 1836-1841 when I was Matthew Franklin Whittier, I've tried to find evidence of other people taking this road. It's difficult to find the right key words for the search engines. One can find Chinese "spirit marriages"; one can find evidence that the ancient Celtic kings sometimes married goddesses; and one can find people who claim to be having astral sex with astral entities. With luck, you can find accounts of reputable people who actively continued a relationship with their partner for a time after death (a year, in two instances, and 15 years, in another).

But I finally hit on the right combination of key words: "Continuing a relationship after death." Suddenly I realized that I am hardly the forerunner in this paradigm shift. It is, in fact, a trend in conceptualizing grief, beginning with the publication in 1996 of "Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief," ed. by Dennis Klass et al. I quote now from the opening of the book:

"This book was conceived to give voice to an expanded view of the bereavement process. Specifically, this book reexamines the idea that the purpose of grief is to sever the bonds with the deceased in order to free the survivor to make new attachments. We offer an alternative model based on the mourner's continuing bonds with the deceased.

"...Models are intellectual schemata, but as we will note, they're part of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of a particular age. Very often the assumptions in the model we use are unexamined.

"...The authors in this book present data from populations who differ in the origins of their grief. We think that the net effect of all these contributions is to show that the resolution of grief involves a continuing bond that the survivor maintains with the deceased. We hope that this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of what we see as healthy, enduring bonds with the dead."

Now, it's clear that there are two distinct camps addressing this paradigm shift--the people who believe that life continues after death, and the people who don't. I would guess that all these people had one heck of a roundtable discussion deciding on a book title which would satisfy both of them. The "continuing bonds" movement satisfies both camps. It's not a "continuing relationship," it's a "continuing bond."

Well, it's obvious which camp I'm in, so I won't belabor the point. I am simply a widower who has chosen, along with many others, to continue my "bond,"--and since I am convinced of life after death, I am also continuing my relationship.

But I have added yet another element to it, which makes it seem even more fantastical to the old school, and also to the "continuing bonders"--I'm a widower whose wife died in 1841.

Enter now past-life therapy. That's the only other element you need to include in order for this to make sense to you--if you dare, that is. Because past-life therapists tell us that emotional bonds do not weaken from one lifetime to another.

Put these two cutting-edge trends together--continuing bonds, and past-life therapy--and you have what I'm doing.

I don't think I want to develop this any further, today. Sometimes juxtapositions are interesting, and I just wanted to show that there is a basis in cutting-edge thought for what I'm doing. The only difference is that I am not merely studying it--I am living it.

This is, in short, pioneering work. I absolutely hate tooting my own horn. I didn't like it much as Matthew Franklin Whittier, either, apparently, as his famous brother remarked in a recommendation letter, saying that he was not "forth-putting." But for those who can hear me--never mind those with their mind dead-set against it--I have to show that there is a basis for legitimacy here.

Abby's doing the bulk of the writing these days in her journal. She's wearing me out! But then, that's what happens when, in your late 50's, you marry a girl with boundless energy in her early 30's who has the wisdom of a 170-year-old! I enjoy writing her journal entries immensely. I know that I'm filling in the gaps with my own reaching imagination and my own writing ability part of the time, but I definitely feel her mind guiding me as I write those entries, and I try to be as faithful to that guidance as I can. Once I get in character, I let her take over my associations and just go with it. The more I write, the more she can take over. The next step is for us to do the same with piano. She's been teaching me for over a year, now, and I do mean teaching me. She's tough! And I love it. Just now I've developed enough technique that she's starting to teach me to channel. I have to respond quickly enough to play in real time, and it's not easy. Probably it wouldn't be easy even for an accomplished pianist. But I've been getting a crash course, and over the next year I may have something to share here in this blog. (I might as well use the darned word, "blog," but I still don't like it.)

I am waiting for copyrights and permissions to be cleared for the first book, "Matthew Franklin Whittier in his own words;" and I am waiting to negotiate for illustrations for the second book, tentatively titled "Loving Abby in Truth and Spirit." The first is scholarly and attempts to prove my past-life match historically. The second is simply sharing the story of our relationship, today. Head and heart. Both have plenty of proof. The first has historical proof, and the second has Abby's proofs. But proof is not really the primary focus.

Up until now, the materialistic "camp" has always taken any attempt to show that the spirit triumphs, and reworked it into a disbeliever's caricature of itself. I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy. Well, how about birds singing. When you were young, did you thrill to the singing of birds? Was it obvious to you that they sang for the fun of it, out of sheer exuberance? But then, how did you feel when you learned, in school, that this bird sings to attract a mate, or to establish and defend his territory; and that this behavior developed through millions of years of evolution, driven by the principle of survival of the fittest, and it is simply an adaptation of nature? That it is, in fact, a mechanical, soulless survival mechanism?

Well, if you are like me, you felt let-down, cheated somehow. As though you had just been told that Santa Claus was a myth. You had received the "Santa Claus initiation" into the materialistic paradigm.

But if everything is a manifestation of God, Who is the Intelligence from which every living being has sprung; and if the qualities of God include love and mirth and exuberance and every human quality--then His reflections in the world of form actually do express something of His exuberance! The limitations you see are a function of the degree of manifestation, not limitations on the qualities, themselves.

Therefore, the bird is, however unwittingly, expressing some part of God's exuberance; and that exuberance touches your soul, because your soul is also of God.

This knowledge was much more a part of 19th-century consciousness than it is, today. This does not mean that people in the 19th century were primitive, and we are enlightened. Far from it. Do you know that when Charles Darwin was publishing, there was another man, named Alfred Russel Wallace, who was also putting forth his theories about evolution, and that he was not a materialist? Do you know that the publishers and the public chose to go with Darwin instead? And that is why we have a materialistic conception of the theory of evolution, instead of a spiritually-based one--because we, i.e., society, chose it. This little piece of history was first brought to my attention by a monk of the Ramakrishna Order. It has been lost to the popular understanding.

That means that the materialistic position was something that society chose--and chose for the wrong reasons! The publishers knew that Darwin would sell. It was an economic decision, at least, as the swami explained it to me. People who wanted to make the most money possible chose the materialistic position to present to the public. It was not a scientific decision based on what was the best model, at all. Because who decides on what is the best model is a function of scientific politics. The scientists in power decide what's real for the rest of us, in other words.

So the politically powerful scientists got together with greedy publishers, and chose Darwin over Wallace. The same thing happened with Christianity, by the way. So what we know of evolution, and what we know of Christ, was decided by politics and money.

Now, of these two "camps"--the materialist camp, and the survival-after-death camp--who are now debating this issue of "continuing bonds"--which one do you think has the most money and the most political power? Probably the materialists, don't you think? A no-brainer.

This is why my own work seems so far-out, if not downright crazy, to you. Because good information has been withheld from you by the powerful status quo. Victor Zammit, who is a veritable bulldog, will not let the matter rest. He's an old revolutionary--look up his background--and he's sunk his teeth into this cause. This bulldog has his jaws clamped firmly on the trousers of the materialistic status quo, and he won't be letting go anytime soon. I don't always agree with him but I have a deep respect for his tenacity!

My approach is a little different. I am living it. To heck with merely studying it. Abby and I will tell it like it is. Laugh or listen, do whatever you want to. Visit and read, watch my documentary, read our blogs, read our books if we are able to publish them--be offended, forget about us, come back in five months or five years, because you've seen something which suggests that maybe I'm not just looney-tunes after all. We will still be here, or, after I pass, if I can manage it, our work will be here. Take as long as you want.

Best regards,

Stephen Sakellarios, Producer

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