“It’s not that I’m afraid to die.
I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
—Woody Allen
“SLAM.” I still remember waking up to an unknown, deafening sound, alone in my room at the age of four. I lay quietly in my bed, staring up at the ceiling towards the glow-in-the-dark stickers that had absorbed the daylight and transformed it into an alien green glow that shone down upon me.
I pulled my flashlight out from under my bed and waved it in the air. My dad let me use it so I could play shadow puppets if I got scared or nervous being alone. “That way,” he would tell me, “you won’t come waking me up.” Feeling protected in the bunk-bed fortress that my uncle had built for me, I peeked around the headboard post.
My First Encounter with Puppa
Shining the light toward my closet, I saw an image—an image I will never forget. It was dark and foggy; it looked like a bunch of light had formed into an image or a picture. The man was dressed just the way I had seen him in many of our old photographs.
I immediately recognized him; I didn’t even have to think. I just knew, almost as if I had been waiting for him to appear. I felt like I had prepared for this moment every second of my short four years on this Earth.
“Puppa!” I said out loud.
I wasn’t scared; I wasn’t surprised. I remember just sitting there—in awe.
Then, in a deep voice, I heard, “Jack has my watch, boy. Tell Mom and Dad. I love you.” He vanished just after making this cryptic statement.
Immediately, I heard my parents’ bedroom door opening. Within a second or two, as I stood in the middle of my bedroom, my father flung open the door. “What the hell is going on in here?” he said, standing only in tube socks and boxer shorts.
“Puppa come!” I said out loud, “Puppa come.”
“You saw Puppa?” my father asked in a gruff voice. “Boy, what the hell are you talking about?”
I started crying. My dad approached me and picked me up into his arms. He gave me a kiss on the cheek. That was my father’s way—he’d snap and then apologize. “It’s okay, son. Weird things happen at night.”
Weird Things Happen All the Time
And so began my life as a psychic medium—a seer, a soothsayer, a mystic. But what I learned—almost immediately—is that weird things do not only happen at night: they happen all the time, and they happen to me on an almost continual basis.
I quickly learned—at the age of four—that while the dead may be dead, they still have a lot to say, and it is my job to listen. As kids, we all learn to look both ways and never take candy from a stranger. I also learned to never argue with a dead person—they often know more than the living.
As a psychic medium, I have two particular abilities. First, as a psychic, I have visions about the future, in which I can see where people have come from and where they are going. Second, I connect with the Spirits of those that have departed. Taken together, it’s a combination of hearing a lot of voices and seeing a lot of things. People are amazed by it, obsessed by it, confused by it, and always intrigued by it.
The Dead Can Teach Us A Lot About Life
It’s the best and worst profession to have at a cocktail party—people either want to talk to you all night or run from you like the plague. But I’m not here to make you believe in the reality of psychic mediums. I am not here to convince you of the afterlife. Actually, I’m really not even here to tell you about myself.
People on the Other Side come through for a variety of reasons. First, they deliver a message to validate they are indeed in the Spirit World. They do this by bringing through identifying details like names, dates, and information about their lives that the person sitting with me can relate to.
However, in many ways, while this is the most exciting part of the reading—mainly because it defies our logical minds—it could perhaps be the most useless in terms of resolving important issues that propelled you to seek a reading. The reason is simply that this “confirmation” of information is often stuff that you already know, such as specific memories or significant names and details.
While confirmational messages fortify and confirm the connection, they do not serve to provide spiritual growth or inspire a change in my clients’ life journeys. A whole different, and much more significant, class of information can be brought about when Spirit comes through and connects to living loved ones: to teach them a valuable life lesson. These life lessons can be about unconditional love, gratefulness, serendipity, and forgiveness.
The dead can teach us a lot about life on Earth and can guide us in many ways. For many of us, we constantly obsess about the past: what we should have done, could have done, or would have done. We dated the wrong person, married the wrong person, spent too much money, or took the wrong job.
When something terrible happens, we become guilt-ridden instead of understanding that through this trauma, positive developments can happen—if we allow them. But the dead have a very different version of Earth— they view it as our classroom and playground—where everything is in the name of learning, and every experience we endure (positive or negative) can teach us a very important life lesson.
Seeing Life’s Problems From A New Perspective
When people leave their physical bodies, their Spirit is able to see life and life’s problems from an entirely new perspective. After achieving this clarity, our loved ones’ Spirits are excited and eager to help us with their new knowledge. But they also move on. They move past the relatively common things that we become obsessed with in life. People often ask, “Are they always around us?” and the answer is a bit confusing, because it is both yes and no.
I sometimes like to joke that the dead have lives too, and they can’t be everywhere all the time. The truth is, they are around us a lot, but often, they are doing their own thing. They have many duties and responsibilities on the Other Side (many Spirits have come through in readings to me and told me about their Spirit World jobs, but that is another story).
In the thousands of readings I’ve conducted—whether it be in groups, one-on-one at my Chelsea office, or over the telephone, I have learned that they want to communicate with us. In fact, they actually enjoy the connection. And the reason they connect is that they love us.
Connecting helps us, but it also helps them. It is part of their “job” on the Other Side: teaching the living lessons enables these Spirits to progress to higher dimensions.
The messages that they have for their loved ones are ones that we all can bear witness to, understand, and heal from. This isn’t about the specific message, story, or character that conveys something about our loved ones. Instead, it’s about the lesson in the connection for all of us. For some, seeing is believing, but for me, it is the opposite: believing is seeing.
And if there’s one thing I have learned about dead people, it’s that they have a lot to say, and they’re usually right—so don’t argue with a dead person!
©2015 by Thomas John. All Rights Reserved.
This excerpt was reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Hampton Roads Publishing. www.redwheelweiser.com
Article Source
Never Argue with a Dead Person: True and Unbelievable Stories from the Other Side
by Thomas John.
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About the Author
Thomas John (aka Manhattan Medium) is one of the most popular Psychic Mediums in the US. He has wowed audiences across the world with his impressively accurate messages from ‘the other side,’ hosting sold-out events such as A Night with Spirit and Dinner with the Dead. He has been featured in People, US Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, Vanity Fair, GQ and he has appeared on Dr. Phil, Entertainment Tonight, Dish Nation, as well as, The Real Housewives of New York and Million Dollar Listing (Bravo). Visit his website at http://www.mediumthomas.com/
