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As we went outdoors into the garden I saw mountains, spectacular valleys, and rivers in the distance. My escorts left me, and I was allowed to proceed alone, perhaps to experience the full beauty of the garden unencumbered by the presence of others. The garden was filled with trees and flowers and plants that somehow made their setting seem inevitable, as if they were meant to be exactly how and where they were. I walked on the grass for a time. It was crisp, cool, and brilliant green, and it felt alive under my feet.

But what filled me with awe in the garden more than anything were the intense colors. We have nothing like them. When light strikes an object here, the light reflects off that object in a certain color. Thousands of shades are possible. Light in the spirit world doesn't necessarily reflect off anything. It comes from within and appears to be a living essence. A million, a billion colors are possible.

The flowers, for example, are so vivid and luminescent with color that they don't seem to be solid. Because of each plant's intense aura of light, it is difficult to define where the plant's surface starts and stops. It is obvious that each part of the plant, each microscopic part, is made up of its own intelligence. This is the best word I can use to define it. Every minute part is filled with its own life and can be reorganized with other elements to create anything in existence. The same element that now resides in a flower may later be part of something else—and just as alive. It doesn't have a spirit as we do, but it has intelligence and organization and can react to the will of God and other universal laws. All of this is evident as you see creation there, and particularly evident in the flowers.

A beautiful river ran through the garden not far from me, and I was immediately drawn to it. I saw that the river was fed by a large cascading waterfall of the purest water, and from there the river fed into a pond. The water dazzled with its clarity and life. Life, it was in the water too. Each drop from the waterfall had its own intelligence and purpose. A melody of majestic beauty carried from the waterfall and filled the garden, eventually merging with other melodies that I was now only faintly aware of. The music came from the water itself, from its intelligence. And each drop produced its own tone and melody which mingled and interacted with every other sound and strain around it. The water was praising God for its life and joy.

The overall effect seemed beyond the ability of any symphony or composer here. In comparison, our best music here would sound like a child playing a tin drum. We simply don't have the capacity to comprehend the vastness and strength of the music there, let alone begin to create it.

As I got closer to the water the thought came to me that these could possibly be the "living waters" mentioned in the scriptures, and I wanted to bathe in them. As I approached the water, I noticed a rose near me that seemed to stand out from the other flowers, and I stopped to examine it. Its beauty was breathtaking. Among all the flowers there, none captured me like this one. It was gently swaying to faint music, and singing praises to the Lord with sweet tones of its own. I realized that I could actually see it growing. As it developed before my eyes, my spirit was moved, and I wanted to experience its life, to step into it and feel its spirit. As this thought came to me, I seemed to be able to see down into it. It was as though my vision had become microscopic and allowed me to penetrate the rose's deepest parts.

But it was much more than a visual experience. I felt the rose's presence around me, as if I were actually inside and part of the flower. I experienced it as if I were the flower. I felt the rose swaying to the music of all the other flowers, and I felt it creating its own music, a melody that perfectly harmonized with the thousands of other roses joining it. I understood that the music in my flower came from its individual parts, that its petals produced their own tones, and that each intelligence within that petal was adding to its perfect notes, each working harmoniously for the overall effect—which was joy.

My joy was absolutely full again! I felt God in the plant, in me, his love pouring into us. We were all one! I will never forget the rose that I was. That one experience, just a glimmer of the grander joy that is available in the spirit world, in being one with everything else, was so great that I will cherish it forever.

After a short while our progress seemed to slacken somewhat, and I could feel that there was something very solid under my feet. I was told to open my eyes. I did so. What I saw was my old home that I had lived in on the earth-plane; my old home—but with a difference. It was improved in a way that I had not been able to do to its earthly counterpart. The house itself was rejuvenated, as it seemed to me from a first glance, rather than restored, but it was the gardens round it that attracted my attention more fully. (…) It was not merely the flowers themselves and their unbelievable range of superb colourings that caught my attention, but the vital atmosphere of eternal life that they threw out, as it were, in every direction. And as one approached any particular group of flowers, or even a single bloom, there seemed to pour out great streams of energizing power which uplifted the soul spiritually and gave it strength, while the heavenly perfumes they exhaled were such as no soul clothed in its mantle of flesh has ever experienced. All these flowers were living and breathing, and they were, so my friend informed me, incorruptible.

(…)

[The protagonist is describing an art gallery in the sprit world and comparing the pictures with those seen on the earth plane] Another great point of dissimilarity—and the most important—was the fact that here all these pictures were alive. It is impossible to convey any idea of this paramount difference. These spirit pictures must be seen here to understand it. I can only just suggest an idea. These pictures, then, whether landscape or portrait, were never flat; that is, they did not seem to have been painted upon a flat canvas. They possessed, on the other hand, all the completeness of relief. The subject stood forth almost as though it were a model— a model whereof one could take hold of all the elements that went to the making up of the subject of the picture. One felt that the shadows were real shadows cast by real objects. The colors glowed with life, even among the very early works before much progress had been made.

(…)

The united thoughts of the inhabitants of the whole realm will sustain all that grows within it, the flowers, and the trees and the grass and the water, too, whether of lake, river, or sea—for water is fully alive in the spirit world. It is when we come into the city and travel through the halls of learning that the organization becomes outwardly mare observable.

DTR1975 wrote: ↑Mon May 20, 2024 1:17 pm Giulia,

That sounds really awesome. If you know of any accounts of the fauna present in the afterlife, I would love to read them. Are dinosaurs still alive in the spirit world? What about other animals that have gone extinct over the eons that human eyes have never witnessed? Do the carnivous animals still subsist on other animals? Or do they eat other things? Do they have to eat at all? Are there still oceans and marine life? Is the weather always sunny? Or do they have occasional storms? I think the spirit world would be boring without storms. Anyway, I don't expect you to have answers to all these questions. They are just things that I frequently think about.

The Fenwicks found that drug- and fever-induced hallucinations are quite different from true end-of-life visions and that they have quite a different effect on patients. Drug or fever-induced hallucinations, including such things as seeing animals walking around on the floor, children running in and out of the room, devils or dragons dancing in the light, or insects moving in wall-paper or on the carpet, are rarely, if ever, comforting. “True deathbed hallucinations are quite different,” they state. “They are not confusional. Most occur in full consciousness; often, moreover, an unconscious patient will regain consciousness and see the vision in a brief lucid interval before they die.”

(...)

When Moses was allowed to communicate with a friend recently passed, he asked him about the spheres. The friend told him that they are very similar, that they have flowers and fruits and pleasant landscapes, animals and birds. He said that he no longer craves food and that the only sustenance required is that drawn from the air he breathes. However, he added that explaining conditions to him is like (Moses) trying to explain earthly conditions to a deaf, dumb, and blind person.

Leslie Stringfellow died in his hometown of Galveston, Texas, in 1886 after a brief illness. He was 20 years old. [Leslie communicated with his parents through a planchette for 15 years and described his new world]. 

As for the weather, Leslie tells us the temperature is always pleasant, as it is on a mild summer day. It never rains, but there are gentle mists about every two weeks. Spiritualists sometimes use the word ‘Summerland’ to describe the region where spirits neither habitually good or bad, as well as children, find themselves after death. From now on we’ll use this word for Leslie’s world.

In keeping with this designation, Summerland is enchantingly beautiful. Gorgeous trees and flowers, shady glades and rushing streams, towering mountains and sparkling lakes, striking land features and charming little villages, vast oceans with islands, and large cities – all of these are here. And there are animals, plenty of them. Leslie speaks of a vast forest set apart for wild animals where one may visit without fear of harm.

He visited this place and saw great monsters that lived thousands of years before man came.

Another part of Summerland was a kind of bird sanctuary:

"This is a part of the world for all wild water fowls that lived on earth. You cannot conceive the countless millions of ducks, geese and that class of fowls. Some flew away but many times they just swam off and seemed to watch us with great curiosity. There were low trees and on one side a vast rocky cliff on which were curious looking birds that lived on earth before men."

Of special interest is his claim that our earth is a gestation ground for all the species of flora and fauna that he finds in his world, and that men and women have been developing Summerland for thousands of years just as they’ve been developing earth. In other words, Summerland is not ready-made by God, but has been developed into an ever more splendid world system over the centuries by our ancestors. This claim is borne out by references to Summerland’s cities and technology, which are ‘engineered’ by spirits out of astral matter.

(...)

The primary communicator here was the notable Lutheran minister, theologian, and professor Alvin D. (AD) Mattson, who died in October 1970. An author in this life, he became one in the next as well. His postings from the Other Side were collected by his daughter, Ruth Mattson Taylor, and published in two books – the first, Witness from Beyond, in 1975. We’ll be working mainly out of that book, though the second, Evidence from Beyond, published 24 years later, provides an important corrective to the earlier work.

The medium through whom AD spoke was Margaret Flavell, a devout Methodist and graduate of the London School of Paranormal Psychology and Sanctuary of Healing. A born clairvoyant, she was commissioned during World War II to trace missing Air Force pilots, and was often successful. She was a rare ‘positive medium,’ meaning she was fully conscious when spirits spoke through her: She had the ability to block out her own thoughts while the spirit communicator used her mind. She died only recently, at the age of 94. Both Mattson and Flavell were persons of the highest integrity. Neither had ever met each other.

In life AD developed an interest in psychic phenomena while a graduate student at Yale, and he was convinced enough that we all survive death to promise that ‘when he died he was surely going to try to communicate back to earth.’ Would he follow through with his promise? Taylor and Flavell would give him the chance. In Taylor’s words,

"Not quite five months after AD died, Margaret Flavell, a close friend from London, was visiting us. She is one of the most respected clairvoyants in England and has a remarkable record of accomplishments in the field of psychic communication. We had expected to make contact with him and to get evidence that he does survive, but little did we expect the quantity and quality of very significant communication and information that we received. From March 1971 through October 1973 we received fifty-five communications amounting to over five hundred legal-sized pages of typed manuscripts. For this book we have extracted the material we felt would be of interest to the general reader. Communications of a very personal nature, relating to our immediate family, have been deleted."

(...)

The messages from AD were full of evidential material, leaving no doubt in Taylor’s mind that this was indeed her father.

(...)

But it’s not only the greats of the world that AD encounters in the afterlife. At the other end of the spectrum, he finds house pets:

"… all the dogs that we’ve had in our family I can find here – all of them. They are still individualized.

(...)

House pets retain their individuality as long as they are remembered and loved. From animals to outer space – AD has something to say on almost every subject!

DTR1975 wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 9:18 am That is so cool Giulia! I found the book on Amazon and bought it immediately. Thank you.

Giulia wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 9:42 am

DTR1975 wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 9:18 am That is so cool Giulia! I found the book on Amazon and bought it immediately. Thank you.

Which one did you find, Derek? The Afterlife Revealed or The Afterlife Unveiled?

I have both in Kindle format, which is why I was able to quote from them.

I also have Life in the World Unseen and More about Life in the World Unseen by Anthony Borgia. His description of the Afterlife is very detailed.