Life after physical death

- 3 - of the hereafter raised the interest of inquisitive people, showing that beings from a different sphere of existence could sometimes provide practical help for one’s daily life and this not just through more or less practical advice, but also through impressive interventions in the life of individual people or provide very valuable information. Two examples should back this up: During the middle of the 19th century, a Dr. med. Bernhard Cyriax who was born in Germany, lived in Cleveland, Ohio USA. He was a professor at a medical college at that time. Initiated by a haunting experienced (1848) by the family Cox in the village of Hydesville in the State of New York, USA, modern Spiritism started to spread to a relatively high degree. Meaning that attempts were made at many locations in America, and a little later also in Europe, to make contact with the world of the hereafter via psychically gifted people. This produced the most peculiar paraphysical apparitions the like I described in the book “Aus der jenseitigen Welt” (18). The question of the genuineness of these apparitions started a bitter struggle between opponents and supporters already in those days. Dr. Cyriax initially belonged to the former. He maintained that Spiritism was a deception (3, P. 64) and he thought that the time had come to look into these processes and to expose the deception in order to prevent its dissemination. This is why he started to visit spiritistic meetings from 1853 onwards. He started with the circle of a married couple, the Morrill (3, P. 67) whereby Mrs. Morrill was a good medium for physical phenomena and trance-transmissions. Dr. Cyriax was allowed to thoroughly search the whole house and the meeting room, but he found nothing that could serve the fraudulent production of apparitions. In spite of his marked scepticism and caution, he experienced quite astonishing telekinetic processes during his first participation at their meetings and they elicited great astonishment. Besides, his deceased half-sister Amanda Cyriax announced her presence in writing through the medium. She was able to answer very specific questions by giving accurate details about family relationships (3, P. 71). She wrote in German, something the American medium was unable to read. This and other proclamations convinced Dr. Cyriax after only a few meetings that the spiritistic processes he experienced could not be trickery or deception and that no stage magic was involved. Besides, some of his own psychic abilities soon became apparent. These had a favourable effect during his numerous participations at materialisation meetings later and they eventually led to an experience that saved his life. During a moment of extreme danger outside of a meeting, two phantoms materialised to help him. Cyriax reports (3, P. 135): “It was, if I remember correctly, shortly after New Year in 1869 when I returned home in a terrible storm between 11pm and 12pm and went to bed. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping when I suddenly felt my little dog licking my face, it whined anxiously and it tried to scratch the blanket off of me, well it tried to wake me up. I felt quite unwell, this felt like a heavy weight on my chest. I felt that something extraordinary, something damaging to me had entered. My head alone was so heavy that I was unable to get up and I lost consciousness. I was suddenly lifted up and wrenched from my bed by two strong men who hauled me down the long corridor to an open window, they constantly jogged and shook me and finally led me to a water main where they held my head under a tap and allowed to cold water to wash over me. I was completely without will and subjected myself to all these manipulations without resistance, even though I couldn’t comprehend the meaning of all of this. I was then advised to drink some water and once I had done so, I had to vomit violently. The stupor I had been in finally lifted. I knew that the house was filled with smoke and gas and that I had been close to being asphyxiated. I now looked at both men more closely and to my astonishment recognised that my protective spirits, Hans Alexander from Alvensleben and Guillemot Mazarin had abled-bodily aided me in a fully materialised state. I now received information from them about what had taken place: As it was the norm with the Steward Stove utilised in those days, I had placed a number of large bituminous pieces of coal in the stove before going to bed and once they had started to burn relatively well, I poured a box full of little pieces of coal, sieved from the ash and wetted, into the stove until it was full and as I always did, I left the door open. The storm broke the iron cap in the

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