11

Out of Thin Air

THE NIGHT AFTER BRIO'S PASSING, all the lights in the house went out. There was a storm, but no general power outage in the area. The fuses just blew inexplicably. One of my friends who had gathered to give support said it was Brio showing he was still around. Why not believe it? Why not believe that somehow he continued to exist, since it was impossible to think that he had suddenly ceased to exist? Why not consider that the huge energy of his spirit was continuing to affect the material world? I was coming to the resounding realization that being a believer was bringing color into my world—a black-and-white world that had long been drained by disbelief and negativity. At night, as I lay between wakefulness and sleep, I could feel him. I often had lain on his flank, feeling his heartbeat, his breathing. Now it truly seemed that I could still feel his presence, the life of his spirit.

I had recently begun to explore different spiritual paths, going to some group classes in Siddha yoga and reading the teachings of a mystic Catholic priest whom I filmed. Everything felt like very foreign territory to me still, but some of it resonated deeply, like a truth I had always known but had chosen to forget. I began to meditate from time to time. In the beginning, thoughts and fears crowded my mind. Yes, I read that that was normal. But like most new meditators, I was convinced I was doing it wrong. I took periods off, but kept coming back.

I'd gotten enough of a glimpse of what inner stillness meant as I sat with Brio in a flower shop or at the ocean just breathing that salt air that filled me with joy and hope. I continued to try to find that stillness within myself. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but the time I first truly “felt” and even “saw” Brio in meditation, after he had physically died, is forever ingrained in my mind. At first it was more a feeling, a sense of his presence. Then his face arose in my mind's eye, so clearly that I could discern different expressions or movements of his head. It was so clearly him—the way he held his head, the starry gaze. In meditation, there was a knowing, an absolute knowing that I had seen him in spirit, although my rational mind still couldn't explain this experience. I hung on to every millisecond of these feelings and moments of conviction that he was still with me.

Was Brio in fact still with me somehow? Would he come back physically? The mere thought of seeing him again in flesh and blood made me feel that I could come home again, that I could feel again that I belonged.

Perhaps it wouldn't happen quite like that, but Brio and I were everconnected in a way that was just as “real” as physical life. Indeed, I had stepped further into the world of Spirit in the last days of Brio's physical presence. That day before he passed, when the hummingbird and the frog appeared, I felt I was living between two worlds. I was there on the kitchen floor holding Brio, but I somehow knew that these appearances of the frog and the hummingbird were truly from the world of Spirit. People could argue that they were just coincidence, but in my heart, in the part of me that was now awakened to another dimension, I knew they belonged to that other plane of reality. They had invited me in.

In the days after Brio passed, this other dimension of Spirit was more real to me than the ordinary physical world. I sleepwalked through the daily tasks of “normal reality.” I surely was not wholly there. My need to know that Brio still existed in some way was all-consuming. I was driven to seek affirmation of the continuance of life, of the unbroken bond.

In the soft space of the summer nights, when he was no longer visible physically, it was easy to let my imagination travel, to feel him just beyond the reach of touch and sight. He was everywhere: looking at me as I got ready for sleep as he always had, or lying on his bed in the sun, or on the grass under the moonlight. Those were the good moments, when I felt his presence, felt the conviction of it. Yet often I seemed to be reaching in vain past the horizon line. When Brio had gazed so intently out over the ocean, I always felt he could see beyond it. So why couldn't I?

Surely the next step into nonphysical dimensions was not a matter to be explained or discussed. I could not explain it to myself. If I had been in the shallows of psychic phenomenon, I now plunged into the surf. I wanted to hear from Brio, from the world of Spirit. I wanted to see what the communicators would “report” about Brio and if it felt true or not.

I asked Dawn to try to connect with him. There was something about her “down-to-earthness,” her funny, rather blunt manner that I wanted; something I felt might give assurance that I hadn't gone completely crazy in trying to believe in a reality of existence beyond what our physical senses can know. I told Dawn nothing of the last days with Brio, nothing of my experience during those moments of his passing when I'd been on the phone with Alecia.

“I sat under a little tree and ate roast beef,” were the first words out of Dawn's mouth. “He enjoyed the moment,” she went on. “He wants you to feel him there in that spot.” I'd said nothing about how I had in fact sat with Brio in the yard and fed him an entire pound of roast beef.

After the years of uncannily accurate readings when Brio was physically here, I shouldn't have been completely surprised that somehow Dawn was still apparently hearing him so accurately. Still, it took my breath away.

“He wants you to feel him in connection with your heart, to feel his love for you; he feels it.” Dawn's words were, of course, what I wanted to hear, wanted to believe in. But how could she have known? How could I not feel that she was truly somehow hearing Brio's voice?

The devil's advocate in me argued that she could be reading my mind. Even if it was too much to believe that she was just guessing, giving a cold reading, there could be some other explanation. Maybe it was not just a matter of “hearing” Brio. Maybe she was somehow tapping into a dimension where there was no time or space. But such mental excursions into unfathomable territory gave me no comfort. Again, I was insatiable in my quest for confirmation that Brio's presence was still here; that what one animal communicator said could be verified by another.

I asked Alecia, “Where is he?”

But Alecia pushed back. “I don't really like to connect with them for the first three days at least. I want to let them be and go on their way, because we're so caught up in the physical strings. We have to be fair to him so he can complete his turnover.”

“Why three days?” I wondered.

“I don't remember where I read it or heard it,” Alecia explained, “but I felt something about how after passing there's a three-day ascension process.”

Three days later Alecia checked back in with me to give me her report. “After passing he seems well. He's more solidified and oriented, running and playing. He's more like a puppy—the energy around him. That dog was an amazing runner with these super-duper long strides. And he showed me a vision of him just running and playing and having fun. I've had that a number of times with dogs that lose bodily functions. When they transition they say look, ‘Look, I'm out of my physical body. Look at what I can do! I'm free now.'”

Remember that Alecia had only been in Brio's actual physical presence once—she never saw him running, never observed him outside of my home.

I went back to the ocean on Martha's Vineyard—my first visit without Brio, the first in fifteen years. The days there seemed to be out of a dream; a time not of this world. In meditation I felt Brio's presence. I could feel him in the wind, as I lay in the grass where he had rolled with joy, legs kicking the air. The doubting part of me argued that this could be just wishful thinking or a product of my subconscious, even though there was an internal knowing that it was more than that. That knowing part of me was gaining strength, almost enough to shut down the skeptical part.

After I returned home, I again called Dawn, wondering what she might “hear” from Brio, if he had truly been with me on the island when I felt his presence in an especially powerful way. I told Dawn nothing about the visit, yet she said right away, “You went to the ocean with his ashes. Brio was walking with you on the beach.”

I had scattered some of his ashes there on the rocks edging the sand and into the ocean as well. He would want, I knew, to be part of the ocean that he'd loved. It was hard, so hard, to hold that gray dust in my hand and believe that that was Brio. In fact, as much as I yearned for his physical body, I did know that he was not really in those ashes. They did not hold his great energy. So I could believe that he had in some sense been walking with me—in spirit—on the beach. I had seen paw prints in the sand and wondered if somehow they were Brio's. But Dawn didn't confirm that bit of magical thinking. “The paw prints were not his. But he says you sat on a little grassy knoll near the edge of the water. He knows you can feel him in your heart. Brio wants you to know he's still here.” She meant, of course, that his essence, his presence, was with me.

I had, in fact, sat on some rocks elevated above the beach; there were grassy green dunes right behind me.

I found it more convincing that when it came to the paw prints, Dawn drew a clear distinction between my desire to believe and what she felt was actually true about Brio's presence with me that day on the beach. The fact that she didn't just confirm everything I wanted to believe led me to trust her more and to think that perhaps—just perhaps—there is a reality in which Brio exists, in which he sits with me at the edge of the ocean.

But were my regular go-to communicators getting it right because they were already well aware of my history with Brio? Would someone new to the scene be able to contact him?

For the first time, I reached out to a different kind of psychic. Silvia Rossi, who calls herself a psychic medium, can apparently communicate with people—with beings—both before and after their physical death. She says she's had that ability since she was a child. Like other psychics, Silvia was initially surprised and mystified. She describes “inexplicable communications from the spirit side,” seeing “shadows” and “people” at the foot of her bed. She resisted these experiences for many years until she came to appreciate and use what she now sees as her “gift.” She's worked with the police to solve cold cases and murder cases. She's counseled families of 9/11 victims. Silvia is a Cuban American born in Miami and now a Jersey girl who loves to sing.

All of the animal communicators I know claim that they can continue to make contact after physical death. They argue that the energy of a being—human or animal—remains reachable in some way, because that energy never dies; it is only transferred from vessel to vessel.

But mediumship? I'd always cringed at anything that smacked of what became known in the 1970s as the New Age culture. It still seemed cultish to me, an outgrowth of the hippie movement, which could not be further from what I considered my natural inclinations.

The history of mediumship of course begins much earlier. Throughout human history there have been efforts to communicate with the dead. During the nineteenth century, mediumship gained popularity in the United States and in the United Kingdom, although along with this were widespread accounts of fraud. Critics pointed out that some mediums (like some psychics) did so-called cold readings, using peoples' dress or body language or response to leading questions to make educated guesses. Mediums especially, it was argued, preyed on grief. Yet interest in contacting the spirit world does not seem to have waned. Roper polls conducted over the years from 1944 to 2014 reported that the number of Americans believing in life after death has remained at about 7 in every 10 people since the 1960s. And the surveys reported that only about half of Americans rule out entirely the possibility that some people can communicate with the dead.¹ A professor who led a 1993 study at the University of California, Santa Barbara said, “People today are on a quest rather than in search of faith. They are walking, exploring, experimenting; they want to know the options. The quest itself has become in a sense a religious style.”²

In short, I was not alone. Just as with the pet psychics many years ago, I was willing to experiment. There was no feeling of “woo-woo” at all in Silvia Rossi's tone, which gave me confidence. One would never think that she “talks to dead people,” as she puts it. Silvia had never met Brio when he was alive, and I told her nothing about him when we first spoke by phone. Yet from the beginning her readings made it impossible not to believe that she was truly connected to Brio.

With no prompting, Silvia too picked up on my time after Brio's passing, when I'd been back at the ocean. “Brio is on the beach. He walked a lot; he walked with you on the sand, giving you signs. He knows that you talked to him a lot. You said, ‘Brio, please give me signs. Brio, I miss you; please come back.' He says you got something to eat at the beach. He was there. You brought something to read.”

Letter perfect! It's all in the details. How could she possibly have known what I said to Brio mentally, and that I'd brought a snack and a book to the beach. The details made me feel that those times when I imagined—actually felt—Brio beside me at the beach or walking with me or in the kitchen eating from his dish that I couldn't bear to remove, that those moments were valid even if invisible.

Silvia continued on to a lunch I'd had with a friend that same day. “There was someone who smoked. The smell of smoke bothered him.” Actually, there had been a smoky fire in a fireplace, which filled the restaurant with smoke. That incident had been the last thing on my mind when I was speaking with Silvia. I'd forgotten all about it. Again, this kind of very particular detail, seemingly pulled out of thin air, made it seem so true that Brio must have been with me at that meal. The more clues like this that I got, the more I gained confidence in my own inner sense that the bond with Brio was still there. I tried to encourage that confidence. I called out to Brio in my mind, and sometimes out loud when I was alone, asking him to give me a sign of his presence.

In the past, I had had a couple of rare moments when I spontaneously felt such a strong connection to someone—someone still alive but nowhere near me in physical space—that I had no doubt there was some other reality in which we were together. Space was not a boundary blocking our connection. I thought of that moment as Brio was leaving this world, when I moved toward believing that there can be communication past death, past time as well as space.

Now that I'd stepped into this strange world I kept playing devil's advocate, asking myself if what I was hearing could be explained in some way that fit with the rational, material world of our five senses and that can be empirically tested by science. But oh, the details I was hearing!

Quite frequently, Silvia would report that Brio was in various places in my house that she had neither seen in person nor in photographs, nor had I described them to her. In one conversation, she reported: “He spends time in the bedroom. There's a light headboard with a pretty pattern.” Yes, there was. I thought of the many times Brio had physically lain in his bed beside mine, or on my bed itself, right next to that headboard. That brought me comfort, thinking that perhaps he was remembering that too, and that perhaps he was even somehow looking at that headboard as Silvia spoke to me.

Another time, I called Silvia from my office at my house in the country. “There's a chair where you are now. It has wheels,” she said. “I see Brio with you now. There's a door to the right. He's looking in the door. There's pretty trim at the bottom of the wall and a wood floor. There's a window opposite up against the corner. He's standing there in the doorway, saying, ‘I'm here.'” As she was speaking, I looked at the door to my right, almost convinced that I would see Brio standing on the wood floor.

She went on to describe the dining room with equal accuracy. “There's a yellow color, or butter cream.” Brio used to lie quite often in the dining room, which was painted a pale yellow cream color. There were chairs with a floral pattern. By now, I was incredulous. Sure, I wanted to believe. And the accuracy practically forced me to believe that Silvia was somehow seeing through Brio's eyes, right in my dining room.

“You've never seen my house. I've never described it to you,” I told Silvia. “How can you possibly know these details? How can Brio somehow be ‘telling' you this? Is he in this room; in the office with me right now?” I was clenching the phone, trying to hold on to material reality.

“Brio is not in a physical body,” Sylvia answered, “but he'll come in free form to say ‘hello.' He can be in constant communication and you may not feel him or sense him, even though you're thinking about him a lot and saying, ‘Oh Brio, I miss you,' when in fact he's right there with you.”

It was like explaining advanced physics to a two-year-old. The psychics had no way to give me an intellectually convincing argument. But I didn't feel that they were trying to defraud me and just take my money.

Sometimes Silvia and the animal psychics seemed to be exercising a kind of remote viewing. The term refers to the ability of some people to actually put themselves in a distant place and describe it. Scientific studies have not validated these claims, although the U.S. federal government actually invested in research into it during the 1990s. Stephan Schwartz, a former assistant to the chief of naval operations, is a leading expert on distant or remote viewing. He's conducted various experiments testing the ability of people with apparent remote-viewing ability to locate lost archaeological sites, sunken ships, or other distant objects whose whereabouts were unknown. Schwartz says that these individuals were able to accomplish these tasks, providing solid proof of distant viewing. The experiments were filmed and shown on national television.³ Schwartz believes that remote viewing is evidence of what he calls non-local consciousness, which extends beyond our five physical senses and is not limited by time and space.

Mainstream science has not accepted remote viewing as a proven fact. However, it is a fact that the U.S. government invested research funds to investigate its possibilities. Ingo Swann was a renowned remote viewer in the twentieth century. He helped develop a process for experiments at the Stanford Research Institute in which viewers would try to “see” a location with no information except its geographical coordinates.⁴ The process was tested with CIA funding during the 1970s.⁵

What about some of the “farther-out” theories regarding the possibility of continued existence or consciousness after physical death? I wondered, if matter and energy are interchangeable as physics tells us, does that mean that Brio's energy didn't die but continues to exist in some other form? Albert Einstein himself did not believe in the afterlife, although he was a mystic. He did state that “people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” So if individual consciousness, or awareness, of a being exists now in this moment, might it not exist in what we perceive as the future too?⁶

“Everything lives,” Alecia Evans responded to my speculation. “Everything has essence to them that physical death doesn't conquer. Physical death just releases that energy to the universe. We struggle with loss as human beings. It's a hard thing to try to bridge the gap.”

Throughout human history, many cultures have honored all creatures as equal to humans and even as having special power to help us from the spirit world—a perspective that often seems forgotten in the modern world. Native Americans have long believed that we all have animal spirits that help us through life. They honor them in ritual practices intended to help connect people to these animal totems, which are seen as supernatural guides who offer their power to human beings.⁷

The ancient practice of shamanism dates back at least 40,000 years ago, according to archaeological evidence, and perhaps to 100,000 years.⁸ It's been practiced in many parts of the world, including Siberia, Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America. Shamanism teaches that everything is alive and holds power—human beings, other creatures, plants, trees, rocks, the elements. Shamans believe—like Native Americans—that we all have power or spirit animals who act like guardian angels.⁹

Sandra Ingerman has been practicing and writing about shamanism since 1980. She explains that “a shaman is a man or woman who uses the ability to see ‘with the strong eye'. . . . A shaman interacts directly with the spirits.” She says that shamanism is a “system of direct revelation”—that is, the shaman communicates directly with the spirits, be they human spirits or power animals.¹⁰

Diana Leslie is a spiritual teacher in Connecticut who trained in shamanism ten years ago. She does not practice as a shaman today but incorporates it into her teaching. “It's not a religion in the sense that it doesn't have a specific set of beliefs or tenets,” she told me. “It has generalized form. What it says is that you can communicate with anything. I like to believe that thousands of years ago humans were in much closer contact with the consciousness of everything else on the earth and maybe in the stars. As humans developed to be more materially oriented . . . I think that meant we lost some of that capacity. We lost our knowledge of how to really see all the other creatures as allies, rather than something that evolved into something we could dominate.”

Leslie has had several power animals—a bear, a raven, a hummingbird among others. She's also had very close connections with animals she's shared her life with. So for her, there are connections to animals in two senses—to the totem or power animals who are guides, and also to those with whom she bonded in the physical world. “I've had conversations with ministers,” she recalls, “who say of course animals don't have souls. I just can't believe that.”

Leslie remarks: “It's not surprising to me that there is now interest in this whole notion of consciousness and being in connection with the animals and other spirit helpers. When I say consciousness I would say that's the equivalent of having a soul, that everything is connected and part of the Divine. You could call it ‘Spirit '. . . or higher consciousness. But we're all connected.”

Leslie sees signs now that there's a desire to receive knowledge of our ancestors that was lost along the way. “I'd like to think that doorways are opening.” She herself has found it has been a long process to step away from the world of reason and empirical evidence and learn to trust a deeper knowledge within. There it was again—an echo of what the communicators had told me about their self-doubt when they first began to “hear” animals.

Brio, of course, was not a totem or emblem, not a spirit animal in that sense, for he was alive in a physical form. But, regardless, his soul was deeply entwined with mine, and in that regard I certainly considered him my spirit animal. This was reinforced when Leslie said to me, “I could posit that your soul is using the dog to communicate. I consider that to be a channel of information.”

The psychics had gone a long way in making the endurance of Spirit authentic to me, not to mention consoling me in a time of great need. They'd given a lot of details that seemed to be accurate communication from Brio about his experiences just before and after his physical death.

And yet my rational mind continued to seek answers to how exactly the psychics could still be getting messages from Brio. If we grant that an individual spirit does endure, how could it communicate with those still physically alive? A dog had led me to ask these biggest questions of all. I was coming to a point at which I no longer expected an answer in human, material terms. I was out there now in the world of metaphysics—beyond the physical. And this strange territory continued to surprise me and pull me further into the quest to know more.