Free ebook about channeling ghosts and spirits is a remarkable look into what mediums were finding out about the afterlife 150 years ago

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Mediumship, spirit writings and the séance were becoming all the rage by the late 1860s and perhaps would peak in England and America around end of the 19th Century. After, say, 1910, the fascination with hard science began to gain steam, and before long, science fiction magazines were emerging, displacing that sense of wonder one filled by the spiritualists and occultists.

But in 1869 a klatch of free-thinking transcendentalists gathered somewhere in America -- and apparently they had access to one incredibly talented medium. The result is this remarkable document, "Strange Visitors."

Download the free ebook here: Strange Visitors

It's a collection of "original papers" which are the messages channeled from the dead, but not just any of the dearly departed. This ambitious project goes for the cream of the crop. They seek contact with luminaries from the world of science and literature, philosophy and government, art and poetry, and more.

Such VIP Dead as Lord Byron, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edgar Allen Poe and William Thackeray are contacted and queried for their impressions of what it is like to die and what the `The Other Side' is like.

Also, people who were famous at the time, but more or less forgotten today, are tapped for after-death reports.

For example, there is a session with Lady Blessington, who was born to poverty in late 18th Century Ireland as Margaret Power. She suffered through a bad marriage to a drunken sea captain (which ended with his death in debtor's prison), until she finally married into the aristocracy, landing Charles Gardiner, the 1st Earl of Blessington. Upon her elevation into high society, Lady Blessington became something of a celebrated literary figure across Europe and among elite, over-educated Americans.

But who is Henry J. Horn, the editor of this document?

I've done considerable sleuthing, and the best candidate might be a lawyer who spent most of his life here in my native Minnesota. Today, the "Horn House" at 50 Irvine Park in St. Paul is a prominent landmark listed with the Minnesota Historical Society. Born in Philadelphia in 1821, Henry J. Horn passed the bar in Pennsylvania and moved to the Twin Cities area in 1855. He purchased the Horn House in 1881. The home was built by Dr. Jacob Stewart in 1874 and designed by the German-American architect August Gauger. Henry J. Horn died in 1902.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any connection between Mr. Horn and spiritualist groups, mediums and séances -- but is it likely that a high-profile, respected Minnesota attorney would lend his name to such an arcane publication? It's a mystery.

An even bigger mystery is the identity of the medium himself/herself. Who was this remarkable person who contacted these disincarnate souls, and via "automatic writing," produced reports an array of richly divergent writings (and poetry)from beyond the veil?

What's even more amazing is that these manuscripts are much more than musings about the Afterlife -- for example, an entire Gothic novel is presented, purportedly written by the ghost of Charlotte Brontë herself!

There are also political ravings by Napoleon -- clearly still a megalomaniac-imperialist in the hereafter. A dirge by Edgar Allen Poe reveals that he remains a bleak, dreary, haunted poet despite having cast off the agony of the flesh!

The examples of Napoleon, Brontë and Poe might lead one to believe that these missives are not so much after-death communications, but rather, impressions of a creative medium with a literary bent -- except that the majority of these works read like "authentic" contact with the dead.

Here's what I mean:

In recent decades an interest in mediumship has experienced a resurgence. It all goes hand-in-hand with the rise of all things "New Age," but interest in the idea that "no one truly dies" has also received a boost from medical types, such as Dr. Raymond Moody and his groundbreaking book "Life After Life," and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with "On Death and Dying."

Others have since have gone much further with talking-to-the-dead kinds of books -- consider the likes of psychologist Michael Newton and psychiatrist Brian Weiss who use hypnotic regression to document volumes of intense information from people's past lives, but also from deceased loved ones.

Then there's a whole string of folks from all walks of like who are either channeling the dead or reporting intense experiences in the Afterlife --books I've read recently (some reviewed here) along these lines include those by Natalie Sudman, Erika Hayasaki, Julia Assante., Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Allan Botkin, Bill Guggenheim, Dr. Don Miguel Ruiz -- and many more --

-- and the point is, the descriptions and communications these folks report about the after-death environment are remarkably similar the writings presented in "Strange Visitors" -- which suggests that there is a certain authenticity to these works.

So this obscure gem published in 1869 is of great significance and interest.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer and AmeriCorps volunteer in which he worked with poor and homeless people. He also taught writing at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: THE MAN IN THE NOTHING CHAMBER

Follow @KenKorczak

Spiritual Lucid Dreaming by Samira Nuriyeva is a well written introduction for the novice dream explorer

Review by KEN KORCZAK

This short manual introducing the concept of lucid dreaming to a new audience is well written in a clear and "lucid" style. It delivers a broad overview on how to lucid dream, while also thoroughly grounding the reader in a framework based on the Hindu tradition of Vedanta.

That's no small accomplishment considering that this is just 60-some pages, but the author handles the task well. As a person who has been exploring lucid dreaming for some 30 years, I can find little fault with the approach taken here.

However, let me say that I don't think lucid dreaming must necessarily be considered from the perspective of Vedanta only -- if you want, you can achieve the lucid dream state, practice it and gain its insights without the baggage of any religious or philosophical system, including Vedanta.

This is not to imply that Vedanta is "baggage" in a negative way; I think anyone who chooses to immerse themselves in this ancient tradition would only benefit from doing so, and find great personal growth.

But take, for example, the purely secular and scientific approaches to lucid dreaming, such as that exemplified by the work of the psychophysiologist STEPHEN LABERGE PH.D. It was LaBerge who reintroduced the concept of lucid dreaming to a modern audience with his books LUCID DREAMING and EXPLORIING THE WORLD OF LUCID DREAMING.

LaBerge made lucid dreaming palatable to a western, rational-materialistic audience by scientifically proving the reality of the lucid dream state with innovative and repeatable experiments using EEG readouts and monitoring the eye movements of REM sleep -- it established beyond a reasonable doubt that the fundamentals of what ancient adepts of Vedanta had been telling us for untold centuries is accurate.

The point is, millions of people learned to lucid dream and gain all of its benefits with LaBerge's purely secular approach -- on the other hand, adopting the methods grounded in Vedanta as explained in this short manual by SAMIRA NURIYEVA will be of equal benefit, and perhaps in many ways, will lead to an even richer understanding of what is implied by lucid dreaming.

So this brief, well-written introduction to lucid dreaming gets my best recommendation.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

All NEW: KEN'S BOOK REVIEW SITE ON FACEBOOK: REMOTE BOOK REVIEWING

Follow @KenKorczak

"Awakening's Treasure" by G.A. Codazik is a disastrous, bungling attempt at transcendent prose-poetry

Review by KEN KORCZAK

There is a common saying within the Zen community: “To speak about Zen is to not know Zen.” To write and read about it is to not know it either. Of course, that hasn’t stopped uncounted monks, teachers, lecturers, poets, sages and authors (of all traditions) from spewing millions of words and publishing tens of thousands of pages about – ironically – “that which cannot be named.”

But that’s the way it is. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a paradox. Talking and reading about transcendence will not help you achieve it or get there, but you have to talk and read about it anyway. That’s what’s endlessly weird about “enlightenment” or “full realization” or whatever you want to call it.

However, that doesn’t mean that every book written on this ultimate topic is of equal quality – and this book, AWAKENING'S TREASURE, is an unqualified disaster.

This is a struggling, stumbling, clumsy and muddy attempt to point the way and inspire, but goes fantastically awry on multiple levels.

It’s riddled with imprecise metaphors, clichés and hackneyed phrases, painfully repetitive imagery, and that imagery is pedestrian, pretentious, dull, pompous and boring – and depressingly so.

Let me prove that what I am saying is accurate with selection examples, starting with:

Hackneyed and cliché phrases

EXAMPLE: “We’re drawn to our inner garden/ignoring all else/Like a moth focused only on the flame”

Not only is a ‘moth to a flame’ a hackneyed metaphor, the way it is used here misses the mark.

When we use ‘moth to a flame’, we are generally talking about a negative event, or an unfortunate happening. The moth gets fooled, and then singed or burned to death – yet the author choses this negative cliché to describe how we are drawn to the transcendent state!

Ridiculous!

EXAMPLE: “… when our inner Ocean rains its grace/A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Well! How about a tired phrase gleaned from politics and greedy businessmen? The ‘rising tide’ comment was popularized by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in reference to his trickle-down economics favoring tax breaks for the extremely wealthy, and has since worked its way into common usage.

The phrase was actually first coined in a speech by President Kennedy in 1962 – and his speech writer borrowed the phrase from some businessmen selling yachts in New England.

But the bigger offense is that ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ is a dull, overused image that does nothing to inspire – much the opposite, it drags us down by invoking the dull dreariness of life.

I could go on with many more but let’s move on to:

Improper, imprecise language:

EXAMPLE: “Waiting only the turning of our heads to see it, Like (sic) sunflowers tracking the motion of the sun.”

Again, a worn-out metaphor – but also an inaccurate one based on a common misconception – you know – a delusion.

Let’s me tell you as a guy who lives in a rural area next to a large field of sunflowers – they don’t follow the sun. Sunflowers come up facing the sun in the east, and when the sun sets, their faces remain glued to the east.

This from Wikipedia:

This old and chronic misconception was debunked already in 1597 by the English botanist John Gerard, who grew sunflowers in his famous herbal garden: "[some] have reported it to turne with the Sunne, the which I could never observe, although I have endevored to finde out the truth of it.”

One of the primary paths to enlightenment involves what spiritual masters call, “just seeing.” That is, just see your world for the way it really is. Don’t overlay your world with pre-formed ideas or what you have pre-conceptualized based on common knowledge – but just perceive directly. So I find it painfully ironic that the author trots out a metaphor based on a common misconception – and a well-known one at that.

That’s inexcusable.

That this is a short book, and that there are so many examples of clumsy usages and utterly bland imagery borders on the astounding.

My rather severe and strict Ninth Grade English teacher, Mrs. Allen, often withered us with her red-penciled condemnations if we allowed “colloquialisms” to slip into our school essays. A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is employed in conversational or informal language but not in formal speech or formal writing.

Mrs. Allen would roll over in her grave if she knew that books like Awakening’s Treasure were on the shelves and floating around as ebooks in cyberspace – it’s almost as if the author made a concerted effort to break the record for the amount flat colloquial usage that could be fit into a limited space.

Just a few of the "dead wood" and "junk phrases" clogging up this manuscript:

"Asleep at the wheel ..."

“All this stress calls out for a cosmic shock absorber …”

“Just running on autopilot with life in overdrive …” (Yet another automobile metaphor, I guess)

“Prime the pump …”

“Dirty laundry is laid bare …”

“Grasping at straws …"

“Crawl out on a limb …”

“Can’t get a word in edgewise …”

“Collapse like a house of cards …

“Providing a wake-up call …”

“Speaking with a forked tongue …”

“A poster child on automatic pilot …” (the author uses both forms, ‘autopilot’ and ‘automatic pilot’, demonstrating again a painful inattention to word choice)

“Emerge from a cocoon…”

“Like a hall of mirrors …”

“Swept under the carpet …”

And there's lots more.

So the writing is either lazy, sophomoric or amateurish, but is there at least some substance delivered in terms of what the book promises – to help people find their way out of the delusional daydream of unreality to a state of transcendent clarity?

The answer is that is offers absolutely nothing of substance. Rather, this document is like a caged parrot repetitively squawking without understanding threadbare phrases which do nothing to illuminate transcendent concepts that have been been known for centuries.

Ken Korczak is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

Follow @KenKorczak

Free Astral Travel Book: "The Astral Plane" by C.W. Leadbeater Is Boring, Yet Informative -- Dated, But Possibly Useful

Review by KEN KORCZAK

Let me begin with a couple statements made by the author of this book, The Astral Plane:

“… the majority of mankind make but very trifling and perfunctory efforts while on earth to rid themselves of the less elevated impulses of their nature, and consequently doom themselves … to a greatly prolonged sojourn in the astral plane …”

And:

“The ordinary man, however, allows himself to be so pitiably enslaved by all sorts of base desires that a certain portion of his lower Manas becomes very closely interwoven with Kama …”

These quotes from the writing of C.W. LEADBEATER are interesting because Mr. Leadbeater was more than once accused of pederasty. At least one man, who was once an 11-year-old boy under his charge, accused Leadbeater of “misusing him.”

Leadbeater himself made no bones about the fact that he encouraged his young male student to masturbate – but his rationale was that this would actually help them stay sexually chaste, and avoid the “bad karma” that could result from sexual escapades. It was Leadbeater’s belief that “release through masturbation” was better than harboring pent up sexual frustrations, and thus would lead to a more disciplined and chaste lifestyle overall.

One should also note that this was the environment of Victorian England, when the bulk of “proper society” considered the "self-touching" of masturbation an abomination. Merely encouraging someone else to masturbate could generate tremendous scandal, and so Leadbeater suffered from this kind of thing to some extent. There is some indication that Leadbeater may have acted on his own “impulses” by touching boys inappropriately, but he was never charged with anything, although in one court case, a judge ruled that Leadbeater bore “immoral ideas.”

But, Leadbeater was a maverick in his field. He was a rabble-rouser and nonconformist. His ideas about sexuality might be compared to the free love era of the hippies of the 1960s, which many also thought "perverted" at the time. He began his career in 1879 after being ordained an Anglican priest. But his interests quickly turned to the occult, and so he effectively left his Anglican roots to spend the rest of his life developing the philosophies and structure of the Theosophical Society along with the famous Madam Blavatsky, Annie Besant and others.

He was a prolific writer, and also claimed a number of paranormal abilities, especially clairvoyance and the ability to leave the body via “astral travel.” Here again I should note that some of his clairvoyant vision later proved terribly off-base, such as his psychic detection of a population of humanoid beings living on Mars.

Anyway, those interested in the topic of astral travel, or out-of-body experiences will find much to ponder in this book, THE ASTRAL PLANE: IT'S SCENERY, INHABITANTS AND PHENOMENON.

It was published in 1895, and so it’s my guess that most readers today will find the style stilted, dense and perhaps even boring – also, since the resurgence of the New Age in the 1960s – many of the ideas presented in The Astral Plane will already be familiar to those who have read widely on the topic.

No doubt, many readers will also find some of the ideas presented here quaint, or smelling of the outrageous superstition of a simpler, less scientific time.

For example, Leadbeater says that real life incidents of “vampire” and even “werewolf” appearances can be explained by attributing these humanoid beasts to a kind of astral energy gone astray -- generated by dead people whose sins and failings somehow became corrupted in astral from, and become able to manifest as actual physical creatures on earth.

On the other hand, if portions of any thesis are false, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everything in that thesis is nonsense. Leadbeater’s ideas on astral travel are obviously heavily influenced by ancient Vedic and Hindu thought (he spent much time in India)– in fact, I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of what emerged as the “New Thought” and the Theosophical movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s was a rediscovery and reinterpretation of those precepts imbedded in those other cultures for millennia.

After all, spiritual adepts – swamis, yogis, Buddhist monks, holy men, holy women, shamans, and medicine men of a dazzling array of traditions have been dealing with the subject of astral travel since the beginning of written language, and in oral tradition before that. And let’s not forget the countless cults of the pagan religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and the various Middle Eastern lands – and so on. Such is the nature of religion and philosophy in that what is old tends to become new again -- until it recedes into the background again.

So the bottom line: The Astral Plane is mostly a dismal, stilted and pedantic treatment plodding through the painstaking details of what one can expect to confront from an out-of-body experience, and in the astral world. The serious student of astral travel may learn something never before encountered – at the very least, this is an impressive attempt to describe the astral world in exacting detail.

Sure, a lot of it may be nonsense, but sometimes you find scraps of truth in the last and most obscure places you look for it. As the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick said: "Sometimes the best place to look for the truth is in the trash."

Ken Korczak is the author of: MINNESOTA PARANORMALA

Follow @KenKorczak