Updates

9/23/11

I've written three Updates in as many days. Yesterday Abby, my girl in the astral, wrote a wonderful Update via our version of channeling, so you might want to check that out in the Updates Archive (link at the bottom of this page). It's not verbatim communication, since what I get are "thought bursts," which I then have to translate as I feel she'd want it written--but when the dust settles and I go back and read it over, her personality comes through quite clearly. If I really loosen up and get "stream of consciousness," sometimes an idiom from the 1800's will even sneak through.

Somebody out there must have a model train set-up, because she used that analogy and it came out of the blue. That one wouldn't have occurred to me.

Now, what prompted me to write another Update this morning was the comments made by a friend who is reading my new book, "Matthew Franklin Whittier in his own words" (and, yes, I do want to leave the subtitle in lower case--if I ever get it published, the printer will probably set it in initial caps at the last minute, thinking he's done me a favor!)

My friend is skeptical but tries to be open-minded. He's also very intelligent. Craig (not his real name) can run rings around me in terms of facts and figures. He's worked as a technical writer and editor. But he's having a hard time with my book. He's ploughing through it out of sheer loyalty, and his biggest complaint is that I didn't set forth a complete biographical synopsis of Matthew Franklin Whittier at the outset of the book.

Except, I did.

He also says it's written in an academic style and I'd do better to tell the story in a more folksy manner.

Another skeptical person, a publisher's representative, also said it was hard to read, and felt it was better-suited to academic publishers. She rejected it so quickly, however, there's no way she could have read it. She also felt I should have presented the story in a more familiar way, as the case unfolded.

I already had.*

Then, an author who heard me on the radio took the time to read the book more-or-less completely. She had none of these complaints. Her reaction was, "Wow!", and she enthusiastically called it a "GEM."

Now, my friend Craig cited what he felt would be the skeptical objections (and, no-doubt, his own objections). First, that I am just going on feelings, and feelings can't prove anything. Second, that out of the billions of people in the world, there are bound to be people like myself, so that doesn't prove anything.

Again, I want to stress that Craig is a highly intelligent person. But these are not highly intelligent objections. In fact, they drive me nuts because anyone stating these objections has entirely missed what I'm doing with the book.

Let's start with the first one.

I am not psychic, and in my waking state, I do not have clear, precise past-life memories of being Matthew Franklin Whittier. This is normal. I do, however, have reason to believe I've made an accurate match. So, how to proceed? Can a normal person who doesn't have clear memories such as you see in Dr. Ian Stevenson's cases, prove a past life once he's identified it?

What I do have is all of Matthew's emotions. This is also normal--we just don't realize where our emotions are coming from half the time. I also have somewhat stronger than normal past-life recognition memory; and, to be precise, a few impressions have tagged along with the emotions like shreds of upholstery still clinging to an old chair.

So I used these two types of memory as my data, and filled it in a bit with two hypnotic past-life regressions, and two psychic readings. This comprised my data on the paranormal side.

What you do, if you want to prove a past-life match, is to come up with paranormal data about the past life first, and document it. You want to be able to show the date that you obtained this data; ideally, you want it to have been published. I did both; I published some of it on my website, which has been in existence since 1998; and the rest I have as dated correspondence. I can prove, for example, that I felt annoyed when historical accounts spelled Matthew's first wife, Abby's, name as "Abbie," and my letters to my volunteer researcher, expressing that reaction on more than one occasion, are dated.

Then, you study the written history. Ideally, you have a historical person who is just barely known, but whose record is scanty. This eliminates the "crytomnesia" objection, because it's impossible you could have run across the information before and forgotten it. In the best possible scenario, the historical record is not only scanty, but faulty. That way your emotional reactions and memories should disagree with the history at times--and further research should reveal that your emotions were correct and the written history was wrong.

For example, after documenting my emotional reaction to the spelling "Abbie" in the history, I found a letter in her hand, in which she signed her name "Abby." I can provide both dates.

All of this is quite scientific. I am not "going on feelings." I am using emotional reactions as data, and I am supplementing it with image recognition, hypnotic regression and psychic readings. I am cross-referencing all these sources of data.

So this off-the-cuff objection is off-target. Let's look at the second objection, which was that out of the billions of people on the planet, it's not surprising to find someone who is similar to me.

This one boils my blood. As Abby (who has not had a physical brain for 170 years and is way smarter than I am) would say, this is a "no-brainer."

First I'll have to briefly recount the story of how I found Matthew Franklin Whittier and became convinced, instantly, that I had been he. Based on a psychic reading many years ago, that I had been a female writer of serials living on the West Coast (probably about 1920-1930), I would occasionally scour the internet looking at the names of female writers. None of them seemed strongly familiar, until I chanced upon the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project website. I felt strong recognition for that name, though I had never heard of her before.

I learned that she was on the wrong coast, and of the wrong era. She was, in fact, one of the Romantic writers in New England in the 1800's. Clearly, I had not been her. I was sure of that. But I also felt that, for the first time, I was very close. I couldn't understand it.

So I sent the link to a friend, Jeff Keene, who has his own reincarnation case and who I featured in my documentary, "In Another Life." Jeff has a knack for synchronicity (meaningful coincidence), and I thought if anybody could make sense of it, he might.

Jeff shot back a link from the page of Sarah Orne Jewett's social circle, which I hadn't found. At the very bottom of that page, for the last person listed in her social circle, there is a link to Matthew Franklin Whittier, with an image of him, an etching taken from a photograph made when he was in his late 40's.

Instantly, looking at the eyes, I knew it was me.

Now, let's look at this "billions of people on the planet" concept.

The "billions of people" objection assumes, without directly saying so, that I have rifled through billions of profiles until I found a person who was similar to myself. But I didn't do that.

I went through some fifty names of female writers from the early 20th century and found nothing, until I recognized the name, "Sarah Orne Jewett."

Then, someone else found an image that physically looked like me. I had no idea who he was, or what kind of person he was. For all I knew he could have been a conservative banker, or any of a thousand other types. For all I knew he could have been humorless; for all I knew he could have had no writing talent whatsoever. But without knowing anything at all about him, I knew he was me.

What I actually did was to take one shot out of the entire world, and out of billions of people, on that one and only shot, I picked someone almost exactly like me, with the same attitudes, the same style of humor, and the same writing ability.

It doesn't stop there--it goes much deeper than mere similarity. But let's just take similarity.

Do you see the point I'm trying to get across, or am I pissing into the wind here?

A highly intelligent person threw out two nonsensical objections. I am not "going on feelings" in this book--I am using emotions as data. I documented my emotional reactions to new information and then compared them with the history as it later became available to me, and matched them up.

I did not search through large numbers of historical persons until I found one who had similar traits. I stumbled by chance upon one person I recognized, and out of billions of people on the planet, I have an incredible amount in common with that one person. The odds of randomly picking one person out of billions, who turns out to be almost a perfect personality and talent match for you, are astronomical. I don't know what percentage of the population would match as closely. One in thousands, certainly. The odds are probably much higher. I'm an odd bird, and just to be objective about this, and not to boast, I'm unusually talented in certain areas. I've met people who are in the same general ballpark, but nobody who matches me in temperament, deep psychological patterns, interests and talents like Matthew Franklin Whittier.

I will resist the temptation to philosophize about the irrationality of skeptical reactions.** I've done that until I'm blue in the face, and other people are taking up the theme as well these days. I was one of the first, but I don't need credit for that. I'm just glad to see the mesmerizing spell of materialism starting to weaken, and the glazed eyes of materialistic scientists clearing one by one as they snap out of it.

What I've done with this book, "Matthew Franklin Whittier in his own words," is to identify a real past-life match, then prove it using the resources that are available to everyone (rather than relying on specialized cases in which a child has specific past-life recall). At the same time, I've returned to, and completed, the work that I started in the 1800's. I've set my own rather aggressively distorted legacy straight, and I've resurrected my work from the 1800's and presented it, afresh, to the modern public.

Given the stuff that's cluttering the bookshelves these days, it seems to me it's a book worth publishing.

It's a fun read if you have even an ounce of the detective in you. The one person who has read it through so far, who said it's a "GEM," is a professional detective. Lots of people like detective stories, and lots of people who are not necessarily in academia enjoy a little intellectual challenge. If you don't fight the basic premise too hard, you might enjoy it, too!

Best regards,

Stephen Sakellarios, Producer

*Had I been able to afford to travel to the places associated with Matthew's life in Massachusetts and Maine, I might have been able to tell the story of my research chronologically, in narrative form. Since my research was all online, however, and my discoveries jumped back and forth across Matthew's timeline, it wouldn't have made sense to take that approach. In fact, had I done that, my friend's objection would have been valid. Instead, I opted to structure the book roughly around a chronology of Matthew's life, weaving the research in and through it. Lack of financial resources affected my documentary, "In Another Life," similarly--I couldn't get funding, and then it was rejected precisely for the problems that funding would have solved.

**On my way to the grocery, I just saw a woman who was clearly anorexic, jogging, intent on reducing her weight still further. I won't be surprised if I never see her again, she was that emaciated, but presumably she thinks she's fat. Most of these skeptical objections strike me as being just as irrational.

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