Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [42]
I want you to go on the journey of your life and find your own treasure.
Do I believe in the life beyond?
Perhaps. I am not all-seeing, all-knowing. I don’t make claims to fake authority. I am a seeker after wisdom and truth, as you are. I am living life as anyone would, but with an ability that arrived with me at my birth that might provide some insight for you, I hope.
But by naming this book The Life Beyond, I wanted to suggest the freedom each of us needs to feel from the chains of the past—whether the past is something tragic that occurred recently, or simply a template for all our future actions that needs to be modified so that we can change our future life. I do believe in spiritual awakenings. I believe in souls. I believe that there is something sacred about the threshold that exists between life and death. And I have been at the deathbed of people and have seen what mystics might call miracles, but what I would call natural phenomena when the soul leaves the body.
Where that soul goes is not within my field of understanding. I am not out to prove or disprove your God.
I truly doubt it is any human being’s understanding. To the religious, it may be the peace that passes all understanding. To the non-religious, it may be that the door that shuts us off from this life is enough to know for now.
As you continue reading my book, I hope you will travel with me on the journey of what I know from my psychic readings, from my experiences with remote viewing, and from my understanding of how to move from this life to what I hope will truly be, for you, the life beyond—beyond the petty anxieties, the wasted efforts, the small-mindedness of the everyday problems.
An interviewer once asked me: Do you believe in an afterlife?
I have to say: it’s not a matter of belief. I know there is one. For, centuries ago, men dreamed of flying, but could not. And now, they can fly. So that means that in dreams, we can see all that is possible. Nothing within the limits of the human imagination and mind is impossible. If it were, we could not imagine it or dream it.
But what is the afterlife? I haven’t yet been there— that I know of—but perhaps in exploring the human mind more fully, we can find the questions to ask of ourselves, of each other, as to where our journey continues, in the life beyond.
8
Julie closed the book. She put it back in the bag, and folded the edges over. A woman, across the park, elderly and with a large, mean-looking mastiff, walked slowly, taking deliberate steps, as if she might fall at any moment. A long-haired young man of about twenty or so played guitar near the fountain rim, two or three friends sitting near him, singing along.
Julie then felt inside her bag, for the keys. Finally, she went to find the building on Rosetta Street.
Chapter Eleven
1
She’d narrowed it down to the block in Matt’s videos, Rosetta Street, which was near Chelsea, but toward the water. With the heat turned up full blast, she was drenched by the time she wandered down to the end of the Village, and then just beyond it, made a left onto James Street, and then a right onto Rosetta.
She had that feeling of déjà vu—remembering Matt’s video, the cobblestone of the street—it was not quite as lovely as it had seemed in the video, for most of it was taken up with meat-packing plants, and there was that awful smell in the air of raw beef and something uglier. The sidewalks outside one of the buildings had just been hosed down. A few people walked along the opposite sidewalk, obviously using the street as a shortcut from one business meeting to another, or a lunch, or lives that she could only imagine.
Then she came to the sunken doorway of the building she had been dreading since she had first found the phone number and the keys.
She tried each key on the door of the building, but neither worked.
She sat on the edge of a stone pediment, just at the edge of