The Structure of Heaven

An encyclopedia of the paranormal, How Spirit is organized and how it affects your daily life

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  • About The Structure of heaven
  • Introduction
  • 1. Skepticism and Classical Physics
    • Skepticism/Humanism
    • Skepticism/Relativity and Quantum Physics
    • Skepticism/CSICOP
    • Skepticism/Why the Skeptics are Wrong
    • Skepticism/The advantages of belief
  • 2. The Human Soul
    • Why do we live in a material Universe?
    • The Human Soul and its Relationship to the Body
  • 3. God and Theodicy
    • Does God cause bad things to happen to good people?
    • Guardian Spirits and the Life Plan
    • What is Theodicy?
      • Zoroastrian Theodicy
      • Jewish Theodicy
      • Christian Theodicy
      • Why is Theodicy important?
      • Can Love conquer all??
  • 4. Psychics and mediums- an overview
    • What are psychics and mediums?
    • Why mediums can’t seem to agree about the afterlife
  • 5. The Structure of Heaven
    • The Universe according to Emanuel Swedenborg and Frederick Myers
    • A Map of the spiritual realm
    • Spirit Portals
  • 6. Heaven, Hell and the planes of illusion
    • Introducing The transitional plane (The Earth Sphere)
      • The functions of the transitional plane.
      • Crossing over
      • Time traps on the transitional plane
    • Evolution within the planes of illusion
      • The Summerlands and above
      • The Winterlands
    • The Hells
      • The Conditions in the Hells
      • Who goes to Hell?
      • Hell and the transitional plane
    • How spirits from different levels perceive each other
    • Vertical Stratification of the Spiritual Realm and How Spirits Progress
    • Horizontal Stratification and Spiritual Social Groups
  • 7. What happens when we die?
    • There is no external Judgment in the Afterlife!
    • Death doesn’t change a soul’s attitude
    • The life review
    • What do spirits look like?
    • Ghosts and their clothes
    • Zombies
    • Time 
    • Time in the planes of illusion
    • Memory in the world of spirit
    • What’s it like to be dead?
  • 8. Spiritual laws/The Law of Divine Love
    • Spiritual Laws/The law of compensation
    • Spiritual Laws/Spiritual Gravity
    • Spiritual Laws/Spiritual Frequencies
    • Spiritual Laws/The Law of Attraction
    • Spiritual Laws/The Law of Free Will and Good vs. Evil
    • The red devil and the white angel
    • The spiritual advantage of Living in a Material World
    • Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?
  • 9. The Human Aura and Theosophy
    • The Aura as a Protective Spiritual Skin
    • The Aura and Spiritual infection (Obsession)
  • 10. Dr. Carl Wickland and Thirty Years Among the Dead
    • Dr. Wickland’s Spirit Dialogs
    • Spirit Related Insanity
  • 11. Spiritual Infection and Modern psychiatry
    • Emanuel Swedenborg’s Spiritual Insight
    • Wilson Van Dusen
    • Wilson Van Dusen’s Heavenly and Hellish Voices
    • Entities that invade the minds of the living
  • 12. Earthbound Spirits
    • Will I end up an earthbound spirit?
      • Three reasons that GOOD souls get stuck on the transitional plane.
    • Where do ghosts get their energy?
    • Human Spirit Obsession
    • Human Spirit Possession
    • Criminal culpability and spiritual infections
    • Enthrallment by the living and Hypnosis
      • Enthrallment and Abusive Relationships
      • Enthrallment: Cults
      • Enthrallment in the afterlife
      • Enthrallment by God and angels
  • 13. Angels and demons
    • The Provenance of Angelic Beings
    • The War in heaven
    • Angels and their function in religion
    • Magic and Wicca
    • Demonology
      • The structure of Hell
      • How demons infect a person or place
      • The five stages of demonic attack
      • Why do demons want to possess people?
      • The characteristics of demons
      • Thought Forms
  • 14 exorcim
    • Major exorcisms (also called imperative exorcisms)
    • False, or fake possessions
    • How Religion Views Demons Vs. Ghosts
    • Avoiding Demonic Repossession
    • Who can Remove Demons?
    • Removing Human ghosts
    • Exorcism and poltergeist activity in disturbed children
    • Haunted Dolls and Other Objects
    • Dealing with Family and Marriage Disturbances Caused by Ghosts
    • Goodness and ghosts
  • 15. Poltergeists, Ghosts and Hauntings
    • Poltergeists versus Ghosts
    • How spiritualists view ghosts
    • How Parapsychologists view ghosts
    • Children and Poltergeist infestations
    • Poltergeists that make the news
    • Ghosts and spiritual imprints
    • Ghosts of famous people
    • Why do ghosts seem bound to the same location?
      • Ghosts and sensory deprivation
    • A Ghost Story
    • Differentiating between Human and Demonic hauntings
      • Hauntings by Human ghosts
        • Ghost hangouts
      • Hauntings by Demonic spirits
  • 16. All about Psychics and others prone to spiritual infections
    • 1. Psychic Sensitives
      • Psi and the human brain
      • The five general categories of psychics
    • 2. Spiritual infection and mental illness
      • Are the spiritually infected mentally ill responsible for their criminal acts?
    • 3. Spiritual infection and Acquired Negative Lifestyles
      • Spiritual infection and drug and alcohol addiction
      • Spiritual infection as a result of negative personality traits
    • 4. Spiritual infection and childhood abuse
  • 17. Criminals and Spirits
    • Why are criminals more prone to spirit obsession than other people?
  • 18. Religion and Government
    • The birth of Morality
    • Religion = Spirit + Politics
    • The paranormal and religion
    • Human Nature-The REAL reason for religion
      • Sex and Religion
      • Religion and War
      • Religion vs. Secular law
    • Religious Dogmas
      • The Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal
    • Spiritualism
    • Why are the dark spheres necessary?
  • 19. Spirit Lies and Tall Tales!
    • Edgar Cayce
    • Edgar Cayce and Atlantis
  • 20. Suicide and its Spiritual Consequences
    • Nondiscretionary Suicides
    • Discretionary Suicide
    • Why you should never choose to commit suicide
    • Suicide Terrorists
  • 21. Reincarnation (An Introduction)
    • Spiritualism and Reincarnation
    • Allan Kardec and the Spirits’ Book
    • Allan Kardec, a warrior for reincarnation
    • Theosophy and Reincarnation
      • Madame Blavatsky
    • A House divided
    • Karma
    • Swedenborg on reincarnation
    • The group soul (the oversoul)
  • 22. Reincarnation: The evidence
    • The evidence for possession as an alternative to reincarnation
    • The early church and the history of reincarnation in the West
    • Past Life Regression
    • Is reincarnation really a part of God’s plan?
      • Why would a soul choose to reincarnate?
      • The Pitfalls of Reincarnation
      • If a soul reincarnates, what happens to the old personality?
      • The ultimate fate of old personalities 
  • 23. The Cross Correspondences
  • 24. The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism Page 1
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 2
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 3
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 4
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 5
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 6
    • The Fox sisters: Original report of the Hydesville Haunting
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Past Life Regression

Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

Another line of evidence regarding reincarnation involves past life recollections by persons during meditation, or similar recollections produced by hypnotherapists on hypnotized subjects.  Seeking past life recollections has become a popular pastime used for entertainment, and a number of psychiatrists also use past life regression to treat their patients, sometimes with spectacular success.  

MOST of the past lives recovered during regressions appear to be fantasies fabricated by the subject in a trance or in a meditative state, as a form of wish fulfillment or as an unconscious wish to please the hypnotist.  While nearly all the cases studied by Ian Stevenson involved the reincarnation of persons who were deceased within less than a decade of the birth of the living subject (15 months is the average) almost all cases of hypnotically regressed past lives involve personalities who supposedly lived a hundred or even thousands of years prior to the hypnotic session that produced them.

However, a minority of both the entertainment and therapeutic cases do produce information which, after painstaking research, are found to be historically accurate.  Some display knowledge of arcane customs, real historical people and accurate descriptions of locations unlikely to be within the knowledge base of the subject.

Critics attribute these true memories to cryptomnesia, (also called “source amnesia”) which is the technical term for forgotten memories.  An example of cryptomnesia might be a woman who read a historical novel when young and then had totally forgotten about it when she got older.  She then “remembers’’ information from the book during meditation or a hypnotic trance, but attributes it to a past life experience rather than to memories of the book itself.  Many historical novels are written by scholars, and the forgotten recollections might contain quite a bit of historical detail, including obscure facts about a historical period that are not common knowledge.  An account such as this would be very impressive, leading anyone listening to wonder how any ordinary modern person could know so much about a historical period without actually having lived during that time.

A true example of cryptomnesia involved an illiterate maid in Germany who was said to have recited proper Greek and Hebrew for hours during a fever.  At first, this was thought to be the result of true paranormal xenoglossia (the ability to speak a language previously unknown to the subject), but it later was revealed that she had worked as a child for a Hebrew scholar who was in the habit of reading aloud.  She had no education in these languages, and as an adult, barely remembered the scholar and consciously remembered nothing of what he said.  

There is, one caveat to the arguments against reincarnation regarding hypnotically produced cryptomnesia.  It turns out that it’s fairly easy to find the source of the falsely remembered material simply by asking the hypnotized subject where the hypnotist can locate confirmation of the subject matter, or as in the case above, where the subject first heard the foreign language spoken.  In most cases, the subject will simply reel off the name of the author or the title of the book, or the incident in their life where they came into contact with it.

However, a number of well researched hypnotic regression cases have produced evidence about real past life personalities who are not famous historical persons but just ordinary commoners who have been dead so long that no one living remembers him or her and whose only record of existence is hidden in birth and death records, regimental rosters, historical broadsheets and arcane academic books.  All the information conveyed during these regressions would be extremely difficult to attain except by paranormal means, unless the subject had been getting the information from the same historical documents the researchers used to verify it.  These cases support the reincarnation hypothesis.

In addition, cryptomnesia cannot account for the success that past life regression therapy has in curing some patients of their psychiatric problems.  The uncovering of arcane and evidential information, and the therapeutic success of past life hypnotherapy, are often cited as evidence for reincarnation.  

Once again, however, both sorts of evidence may also be explained by spirit obsession.  Hypnotic trances and meditative states lower a person’s psychic defenses, facilitating contact with discarnate personalities.  It is possible that a “drop-in” spiritual entity is conveying the circumstances of his or her past life through the mouth of the hypnotized subject.  

In addition, hypnosis of persons with damaged auric defenses produces a mental state which can call forth an alien spirit with which the patient is already infected and allow it to speak independently.  In the minds of both a hypnotized subject and a confused alien spirit, neither one would know just whose thoughts belonged to whom.  The patient would assume (as would the therapist) that the alien thoughts belonged to a past life personality instead of to an infecting spirit.  

Finally, the success of therapists using past life regression in curing their patients is not really very different from the technique that Dr. Wickland used in his practice to remove obsessing spirits from his mentally ill patients.  The presence of obsessing spirits could very well have been the reason for the symptoms that drove the patient to see the therapist in the first place.  Dr. Wickland found multiple instances in which a spirit who had been crippled in its past lifetime afflicted a living patient with its deformities and pain.  Removal of the offending spirit from the patient also removed the relevant symptoms, both mental and physical.

Accounts by psychiatrists using past life regression relate the need for exposure of multiple past lives in order to bring about relief for their patients.  This parallels the need for the Wicklands to remove multiple spirits from their patients in order to cure them.  Therefore, this line of evidence for reincarnation is not as strong as it first appears.  It could well be just another line of evidence for spirit obsession.

To reiterate, none of this is proof that personal reincarnation does not happen.  The point of this chapter isn’t so much to debunk the concept of reincarnation as it is to point out that there are multiple explanations for the reputed evidence which is taken to be proof of reincarnation in modern spiritual literature.  I leave it to the reader to decide for themselves.  

Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

Is reincarnation really a part of God’s Plan?>>>>

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Science, Math and God

Science, Math and God is the companion book, originally written as a preface to The Structure of Heaven. It's a book that explains why the skeptics are wrong, and why modern science no longer rules out the paranormal. Learn why God now has a place to live. (Also available as an eBook and paperback at Amazon.com)

The Lower Reaches of Heaven

The Lower Reaches of Heaven is a modern rendition of an of an old book; Thirty Years Among The Dead by Dr. Carl Wickland. It is essential reading if you want to understand Earthbound Spirits and the dynamics of their environment. It also contains lots of editorial comment and historical facts, as well insight into how ghosts think.

The Structure of Heaven is a 350 page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

If you have a question for me, you can email me at: author@thestructureofheaven.com. Be aware, however, that the answer to almost all your questions concerning this subject are best found by downloading the e-book or purchasing the paperback direct from Amazon.com

You can contact me directly by email: author@thestructureofheaven.com