Discernment: An Initiation  by S. M. Berry

Written by Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski and originally published in 1988, WE DON'T DIE is the story of George Anderson, a psychic who communicates with the spirits of those who have died and are "on the other side". This communication occurs when George discerns the spirits who come to him during readings, which is why he refers to it as discernment. The spirits set the agenda, not the psychic, including who will come and how long they will stay. George has the distinction of being the "most tested" psychic today, which convinces the skeptical and opens them to the messages of love and hope he conveys. What kept me turning pages, however, was the experience of discernment that George described, because it validated the experiences I had had myself.

My initial perceptions of spirit presence were common ones, the kind most of us have and brush aside as an overactive imagination or wishful thinking: Dream visitations, the strong scent of roses outdoors on a cold winter day, a song that reminds you of a lost loved one, coupled with the intense feeling of that person's presence, even seeming coincidences that intervene in subtle ways that can have dramatic results. These perceptions were particularly strong where my father was concerned, no surprise since he and I were psychically linked during his life. Dad knew when I needed him. I knew that no matter the hour, when I called he would be waiting next to the phone; he said he could pick up my distress call from anywhere in the world. His unexpected death from a heart attack was devastating. He had been there for me for my entire life, and without him, nothing would ever be the same again. Dad quickly let me know that he would still be there for me, just in a different way, on the way to his funeral. Unable to bear the silence in the car, my brother switched on the radio, and I heard Helen Reddy's song "You and Me Against the World" for the first time.

And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on,

Then remembering will have to do.

Our memories alone will get us through.

Remembering the days of me and you,

You and me against the world.

Dad was there for me a few months later, when it was thought that my third pregnancy was ending in miscarriage. My own doctor was hundreds of miles away at a medical conference, so when I began bleeding I was seen by another physician who was covering for him. "There is tissue," he said when he examined me. "Spontaneous abortion," he concluded, and scheduled a dilation and curettage procedure - to scrape any remnants from my uterus - for the next morning. The doctor assured me that I could simply get pregnant again, but I was inconsolable. This child was special, conceived only days before my father's death, both a link to the past and hope for the future. I turned my back on my roommate and eventually cried myself to sleep.

When I awoke, I could barely breathe. My nose was stuffed, my head congested and pounding. My roommate, a registered nurse, put hot compresses on my head to ease the sinus pain and alerted the staff to my condition, one which precluded general anesthesia. "Upper respiratory infection," said the doctor, and he scratched my name off the surgical schedule. He ordered another HCG test, but said it would be up to my doctor, returning that afternoon, to decide the next step in my treatment. My roommate pointed to the beautiful bouquet of fall flowers that she had received the day before. "I wonder if the flowers are making you so congested," she said, but I assured her that I am not allergic to flowers. The pollen and spores that make so many people miserable have never been a problem for me. She decided to play it safe, however, and removed the flowers from the room. By the time my doctor arrived less than an hour later, all of my symptoms had disappeared. Moreover, the HCG test came back positive, something my doctor told me never happens if a pregnancy is spontaneously aborting. His examination found a cervical polyp to be the source of both the bleeding and the tissue that led the first doctor to believe I was miscarrying. The following spring I gave birth to Shelagh, the second of my three daughters, a young woman with a mission in this life. Her grandfather helped ensure her safe arrival.

I didn't get it right away. I didn't get it until more than a year later, and even then it had to be spelled out for me. The explanation came in a dream that I, my mother and both of my brothers had on the same night. (My mother and one brother confirmed the dream the next day; it took my remaining brother nearly ten years to admit to it.) We were standing in a place similar to the inside of a large teepee whose function was to provide a sense of closeness and privacy. My father stood before me; to my left, eyes closed, stood my mother, and to my right, also with their eyes closed, stood my brothers. It seemed to me that my mother had already had her "turn" to speak with my father, and that my brothers would follow me. Dad explained that it was difficult to bring us all together in this manner, and that he couldn't maintain such a connection for a long time. Then he asked me if I had anything I wanted to ask him. I certainly did. Where were you, I demanded, the night I thought I was going to lose Shelagh? I needed you so much. I called to you and I cried myself dry. Where were you?

I was there all along, Dad told me. Remember the flowers that made you so sick? Flowers never made you sick before, they don't make you sick now and they will never make you sick again. I did that. Whenever you need me, I'll be there.

My awareness was heightened after that. When I was feeling down, stressed or lonely and "You and Me Against the World" would suddenly play on the radio, I would smile inside and thank Dad for being there for me. Crossing the hospital parking lot one cold November day to visit my paternal grandmother shortly before her death, I smelled roses and thanked Dad for being there for her, too. The awareness went beyond recognizing my father's presence. I noticed the little girl who stayed close to my youngest daughter, Jean, from early infancy through her preschool years. Sometimes I saw her fleetingly from the corner of my eye, or felt her as a hovering protective presence, particularly during Jean's frequent bouts of bronchitis. Once, however, when I came upon her leaning over Jean's crib, patting and comforting my baby, she was so real that I mistook her for Shelagh, until I realized that Shelagh was still sleeping in her bed across the room. When I looked back at the crib, the little girl was no longer visible, but I knew that she was still there.

My heightened awareness and acceptance of the continuing interaction between the dimensions we call "living" and "dead" undoubtedly opened me psychically, yet discerning a spirit I did not know in life was, as they say, a horse of a different color. It occurred early on a Saturday morning, just as I was waking up. In retrospect, I believe I was in what is called a "theta" state, halfway between awake and asleep, said to be the most receptive state for psychic experiences. I saw before me the silhouette of a man, a silhouette composed of golden energy, without specific features but with glasses superimposed where eyes would be. In fact, the glasses looked a bit silly, but I knew that they were projected as an identifying feature. I knew as well that this was the spirit of someone who had passed to the other side, and that I didn't know him. The interaction between us was simple: He "talked" and I "listened". He did not, however, use words. The best way to describe our communication was that he conveyed feelings which I then translated into mental images, around which I later tried to wrap descriptive words.

Somewhere during his discourse I got the name "Chris" and took it to be my visitor's name. He told me that he had had cancer once before and thought he had beaten it. I was given the impression of "whole body cancer", a cancer that by nature spreads throughout the body, like leukemia, rather than being identified with a specific part of the body, such as lung cancer. When the cancer came back, he said, it was devastating. When he told me that the support of "the guys" was so important, I had the impression of military, the color navy blue and police all at the same time, interwoven and inseparable. He said he was concerned about his wife, that she needed to know that he's okay and that he is with her always. And then he was gone. I woke my daughters and told them what had happened. We agreed that I'd been given a message that needed to be conveyed, but kept coming back to square one because we didn't know who "Chris" was in life. Without that vital bit of information, there was no way to locate his wife and give her his message. We finally had to set the matter aside and hope that the answers would come of their own accord.

Come they did, the following Monday. I was still new to my job, having begun only three months earlier, and enjoyed having lunch with co-workers as a way to get to know them better. As soon as we were seated that day, one of the women announced, "Chris is back." Someone said, "I thought she went to live with her parents after Roger died" and someone else replied, "Well, she's come back and she's working for the court commissioner again." Chris. I began asking questions. Chris was a court reporter whose husband, Roger, had died almost a year earlier. His death had so devastated her that when she moved in with her parents in another part of the state, no one expected her to return. Hesitantly at first, I told them about my discernment of Roger, except that I described it as a dream. I didn't want them to think they had a total nut case working with them. When I finished there was a clear consensus: "You have to tell Chris."

It took two more days for me to work up the courage to contact her. When I finally called I got her voice mail and left a message that probably bordered on nonsense. Nonetheless, Chris came to my office less than an hour later and heard me out, warily at first. She confirmed that Roger wore glasses, the same horn rimmed type I had seen. He died of Hodgkins Disease, cancer of the lymph system, an "all body" cancer, and when I told her what Roger had conveyed about having beat it once before, Chris began to cry. Early in their marriage Roger had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, had been through the full course of treatment and had been free of cancer for eight years. They truly believed he had beaten it. When the cancer returned, it did so with a vengeance, but Chris refused to believe that it couldn't be beaten again. She explained what Roger meant about support "from the guys", along with the interwoven impressions of military, navy blue and police. Roger was a police officer and a member of the Navy Reserves. His final weeks were spent in a university hospital one hundred miles from home, but his fellow police officers and Navy reservists took turns staying with him so that he was never alone. Chris had refused to accept Roger's death. She said that as he was dying she repeatedly begged him not to leave her. What Roger needed for her to know was that he never did leave her. Ironically, his message through me helped Chris to acknowledge the many times she had felt Roger's presence.

Meg's call about and my subsequent reading of WE DON'T DIE occurred almost a year after Roger's visit. According to the book, George Anderson began to exhibit his extraordinary abilities following a serious illness when he was six years old. These abilities include clairvoyance ("seeing" the spirits), clairaudience ("hearing" the spirits), clairsentience ("feeling" information, close kin to empathy but hard to articulate), sympathetic pain and sensation (feeling physical pain and other sensations) and psychometry (gaining information about an ojbect's owner by holding the object). Of these, only clairvoyance and clairsentience were involved in Roger's visit and in other similar visits that have occurred since then. I have often thought that clairaudience would be helpful because clairsentience follows such a circuitous track and is open along the way to misinterpretation. I feel these feelings in my chest, then route them to my head to make mental images and send them to my mouth for verbal expression, like reading in one language, translating mentally into a second tongue and then speaking aloud in a third. It may be that my "receivers" are better developed for clairsentience than for clairaudience thanks to eight years working with victims and witnesses of crime. A psychic friend pointed out during that time that what I could offer victims and witnesses was an ability to "absorb" what they felt and then express it coherently and effectively in a victim impact statement.

George Anderson compares himself to a radio that can be tuned to various frequencies to broadcast messages and other information from point A to point B. That's an apt comparison considering the wide ranging, public nature of his work. For myself, a telephone seems a better analogy, since it represents a one-on-one form of communication. These other dimension contacts are a daily experience for George, but not for me. I'm like a public phone tucked into a far corner of a train station, used only when a passerby spots me and realizes I have a connection to the party he or she wants to reach.

The wheel came full circle in November of 1995 at a conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia sponsored by the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), which in turn was founded by Edgar Cayce, perhaps the best known American psychic. George Anderson was a featured speaker, offering a group discernment before 300 people. Much to my surprise, my father came through -- with my brother. I pointed out that my two brothers are very much alive, to which George responded, "Your mother had a miscarriage." His information was correct; when I was eight years old, my mother had what she called a "late miscarriage," at about five months gestation. I had never thought of that sibling as a person. In fact, I had actively denied him. That was how I dealt with the loss, an approach that I took again in October of 1994 when my twin grandsons were born and died, also at about five months gestation. I denied that they were "real" persons.

One purpose of the visit through George from my father and brother became quickly clear. During group meditation the next day, I suddenly felt my grandsons' presence -- a lively, bubbling presence. They stayed with me through the end of the conference, and I kept "hearing" them say, "We have to get our mom a birthday gift." After the conference concluded, my husband and I stopped at the ARE Visitor Center and went into the book store. I said nothing to my husband, but let the twins guide me in finding a gift for their mother, my daughter-in-law. Angel wind chimes? No. A poster? No, not quite right. A tape or CD? No. Then my husband approached, holding out a book he had found: "Our Children Forever," messages to parents from their children, discerned by George Anderson. Yes! And they were clear about the inscription, too: "To our Mom, from your boys. Happy birthday. We love you."

Another purpose of my father's visit was to open lines of communication between my mother and me in preparation for her transition. Initially, Mom was almost hostile when I recounted my experiences at the conference. She was having similar experiences, but feared that her family would think she had lost her mind, and that she would be "put away" in a mental hospital. Reassured, Mom began to share these experiences, which included past life and between life recall as well as interaction with those who had passed into the next dimension. It brought us closer together than we had ever been. When she died suddenly in April 1996, I knew that she had stayed in a place she had already been visiting frequently.

Mom has been back to visit several times, but her first visit after passing was the most memorable. I was again in that theta state, somewhere between waking and sleeping, when she popped in, wearing a royal blue turtle neck sweater and looking otherwise as she did when she passed ten days earlier. Assessing her new surroundings, she told me, "They have classes here, but you don't have to go if you don't want to. It's not like they send you to detention. They don't even have detention." Then she added with approval, "You can do whatever the hell you want here."

Now that's a discerning woman!
 
 

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