The influence of grief on the deceased

- 3 - Earth? – Even some theologians share this view these days. An Evangelical Pastor of my previous community told me during a discussion of this theme: “Death is a terrible occurrence as far as I am concerned. It represents the complete annihilation of the human existence through God.” My answer at that time was: “Death is not a terrible occurrence to me at all. It means the end of one part of life and the beginning of a new one, the passing into another world and the familiarisation with new assignments. Death is comparable to the completion of terrestrial schooling and leaving the parental home and the transfer to a working life. This is also connected with a certain separation from a previous lifestyle, but it is not a catastrophe.” 3. Insights from Parapsychology But what intitles me to make such a statement? It is based on the research results of a relatively new science that we call parapsychology these days. It deals with processes that take place on or inside living human beings or within their environment and they are connected in a yet unknown fashion with the human spirit or with the phenomenon we call “life”. These processes are such that they cannot be classified within conventional psychology, physiology or physics. These processes are therefore called paranormal, based on the Greek word para = adjacent, next to, beyond. This science reaches beyond the existing sciences, it attempts to expand them. Parapsychology, amongst other things, also investigates the question of the origin and the aim of the human existence and it tries to give an answer to whether death is really the end of a human life. Parapsychology furnished a plethora of circumstantial evidence and experiences of the personal survival after death during the last 140 years or so (6; 10: 11). It shows that the often repeated sentence: “Nobody who died has ever returned” is simply false in its strict interpretation. The research results of parapsychology clearly show that an immediate communication link to the deceased is possible under certain circumstances (12), well, that the deceased can actually become visible, palpable and approachable for a short period of time and that they can be photographed (10; 11). Such processes have taken place tens of thousands of times between 1850 and 1950. The Danish materialisation medium Einer Nielsen (1889 – 1951) produced 17’000 materialisations over a period of 50 years. These facts have been vehemently denied and attacked, because of their extraordinariness and their far-reaching mental and spiritual consequences on the present and possibly also on the future lives of a lot of people, this by people who mostly have superficial knowledge of them. Something like this can simply not be true. The popular idea that life comes to and end with death and that neither God nor Christ as his son, as otherworldly spirit beings, actually exist, has only taken root in modern times through the so-called elucidations within the 18 th century. Only from then on have non- professionals, namely philosophers and politicians, come to completely false conclusions from the advancements of science and created the thought structures of materialism and atheism. It had been common knowledge before that something continues to exist after people’s physical death, something called the human soul, something that was and is indeed invisible to us, but something that consists of a different substance on a different level of existence in a similar human form, wherein the personality is able to subsist.