Survival after death terminology
In the last article we discussed terminology that described psi phenomenon and how it applied to practical psychic development. Now we will delve in the world of survival after death or after-life consciousness.
To recap, parapsychology studies three kinds of unusual events: ESP, mind-matter interaction and survival after death. For the purpose of developing psychic abilities it is essential to understand ESP and mind-matter interaction because it is the bulk of most psychic abilities.
Extra sensory perception (also called AIR – anomalous information reception) describes telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition and presentiment. Psychokinesis or telekinesis falls under the category of mind-matter interaction.
In parapsychology the term clairvoyance seems to be an umbrella term for all sense-based psychic abilities, but for the general public they are classified by each sense they represent. They are clairvoyance (sight), clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (touch), clairguzance (taste) and clairalience (smell.) When psychics or readers convey their abilities they seem to use these terms more often than the others.
Survival after death includes all aspects of after-life consciousness even those terms that are generally thought to describe paranormal activity. The paranormal field has borrowed heavily from parapsychology though most field investigators don’t understand the correlation. It is essential to understand survival after death terminology for any type of spirit communication including paranormal investigation. Often, it seems to be forgotten that paranormal activity is a form of spirit communication. Or that it deals with topics of after-life consciousness and how it applies to the larger questions including why we are living in the first place and where we go when we die.
The first set of survival after death terminology deals with the living. Or those who have had a brush with death and who have lived to tell their tale. A near death experience or NDE refers to a core experience from a person who has been revived from nearly dying. A near death experience is usually described as a feeling of peace, a visual of bright lights or a tunnel with bright at the end, and sometime it involves looking down at your own body.
The experience of objectively staring down at your own body is called an out-of-body experience or OBE. It usually accompanies a feeling of being detached or separated from your physical body. This occurrence has been described in sleep or meditation through astral projection, but parapsychology only deals with incidents that pertain to near death experiences.
Another aspect of after-life consciousness is reincarnation. It is the belief that we have successive lives both in the past and the future. A theory suggests that our souls are constant but as we evolve our higher self develops a new personality which manifests into the physical world as a person. Although in this life we are a different person, parts of our higher consciousness still "remember" the other "personalities" in the other successive lives. These memories are often referred to as past lives. Read more
Heather Woodward
