The tragic and violent death of Matthew McKay’s son sent him on a turbulent intellectual and emotional pilgrimage to discover the meaning and truth of our existence. Matt, a professional psychologist and educator committed to the materialist paradigm at the core of the modern social sciences, consulted me because he knew of the death of my eight-year-old son in a bicycle accident forty years ago. The death of a child is such a violent rupture in the normally anticipated cycles of life that most people, including professional psychologists, are stunned into incomprehension. This book is the account of Matt’s mythic journey to reconnect with the immortal soul of his beloved son and reestablish the connection that had been ruptured by Jordan’s early and violent death.
Not only did Matt, in time, make a conscious connection with Jordan’s soul, which has given him great personal solace, but he has gone further and established an ongoing conversation with Jordan. As a committed radical empiricist in the tradition of William James, Matt recorded the visions, dreams, and communications he received from his son. This approach allows the received insights and teachings to be considered, reflected, confirmed, or modified by other observations. This book is a first expression of this project shared between incarnate father and discarnate son. Matt states, “before any of this was written, Jordan outlined the entire book. During a session of channeled writing, he named each chapter and described its contents. It took five minutes.”
Matt adopted my suggestion of setting aside a special time and place in his house to regularly sit to commune and communicate with Jordan, writing down the impressions and communications he received. As with all observations, the ones we make about the nature of life beyond death are subject to confirmation, extension, and modification through repeated questioning and the observations of others. It turned out that Matt, a trained hypnotherapist himself, could very easily enter a conscious trance state from which he could later remember everything that transpired. This book contains a record of some of our sessions, as well as completely independent observations by Matt, channeled communications from psychics and mediums, and the observations of other individuals who have known Matt, Jordan, and their family.
Matthew and Jude McKay and their family were friends of my family. My stepson, Eli Jacobson, Jordan, and their friend Chris formed a trio of adventurous teenagers in their last two years at Berkeley High School. Our families would see each other at social gatherings. The teens and their respective friends would cluster in small circles among the larger groups of adults. Like all teens, they had their own way of telegraphing shared interests and observations. In the writing of this foreword, I wanted to complement Matt’s observations of Jordan’s after-death journey with some memories Eli had of his friend in this life. This is what he wrote:
I met Jordan on the first day of my junior year of high school, introduced by a mutual friend. After a few weeks of school, maybe around the time of the 9/11 event, we really started to gel and hang out. During that year, some of the people from our group went to a rave in Oakland. That was my first time doing Ecstasy. Jordan was there, but he was not interested in doing drugs, except for occasionally smoking pot. He came along and took care of the rest of us.
During our senior year, our most common weekday activity was meeting at a café in Berkeley to do homework together. It was usually an after-dinner meeting from 7 or 8 PM until the café closed at 10 or 11. These study sessions were not all that productive as far as schoolwork goes. Jordan actually seemed to enjoy helping us with our homework more than he liked doing his own. If Chris or I were ever stumped looking for a topic to write a paper about, or if we needed an outline and couldn’t get it started, Jordan would take over and get us going. He was really smart and very capable of succeeding at anything he was interested in.
Jordan was always interested in money. Those nights in the café, he would sometimes bring the Wall Street Journal and read it while we were hanging out. He would keep track of stock quotes even though he didn’t have any money invested. He had a dream of being rich, and he was studying the stock market to get a feel for how it worked so he could take advantage of it someday when he had enough money to really get into it. He and I had a little business in high school: we would buy candy bars at Costco and sell them to other students for a decent profit. We didn’t make a lot of money, but enough for lunch on some days, and we had fun doing it.
Jordan also loved music. He played the guitar and was always interested in getting the highest-quality sound he could for listening to music or watching movies. He had these incredible speakers in his room and had invested quite a bit of money in a special amplifier and high-quality headphones for his iPod.
Jordan had a great sense of humor, and he would keep everyone in any group laughing constantly. That said, his humor was not for those who were easily offended. Nothing was off limits. In every picture I have of Jordan, he is either smiling or making a ridiculous face.
One curious thing about the story of Jordan being shot is that he had a history of being a target. I really don’t know what to make of this, but in high school on several occasions he ran into trouble and would get beaten up. Chris and I never had that problem. Maybe it was because we were bigger, or perhaps it was just chance. Jordan wasn’t particularly small, and he was feisty and would fight back if someone was attacking him. One time, he went into a bathroom and some kids followed him in and tried to beat him up. He was able to shove them out of the way and ran out, but he was a little shaken up by it. Of course, these kinds of things weren’t unheard of at Berkeley High. I just think it’s interesting that he was targeted those times in high school, and then again that terrible night in San Francisco that ended his life.
When he sent me that story, Eli knew nothing of the connections and insights related in this book. But his comment about Jordan being caught in violent confrontations with others is consonant with the account Matt writes about a violence-prone past life Jordan had as a bootlegger in the Prohibition era: “Because of these activities, he lived in fear of the police. . . . Jordan then sought balance in his next incarnation (his life with us). Though he feared anger and had a phobia of the police, he found safety in his life with us. . . . Three times in his life as Jordan, he was a victim of violence — and karmic forces, unknowable to me, were at work on the night he died.”
This book documents the paradigm-expanding journey of a psychotherapist and social scientist led by his own experience to recognize the reality of a multidimensional universe. I see a parallel between this book and Proof of Heaven, in which neurosurgeon Eben Alexander describes a near-death experience. Alexander is a recognized and influential authority in his field of medicine, as Matt is in the social and psychological sciences. Their accounts of the reality of individual lives and consciousness beyond the veils of mortality are important expressions of the expanded worldview that our society needs and is moving toward.
Many of us understand and can verify through our own experience that it is possible to communicate with our relatives who now exist only in the nonmaterial spirit world. But this does not invalidate our observations of ordinary reality. Rather, it expands and enhances them with unsuspected depths of meaning and beauty.
Seeking Jordan intersperses descriptions of Matt’s meetings with individuals who knew Jordan, sharing memories and post-death visions, with his reflections on their meaning and with channeled statements by Jordan. If Jordan’s statements seem to reflect a wisdom far beyond that of someone his age, it is because he is no longer subject to the limitations of Earth-centered knowledge and can access the multidimensional universe in all its depth and scope.
In response to his father’s question about purpose, Jordan’s soul-spirit tells him, “the purpose of matter — whether in the form of circling planets or the human body — is to help consciousness grow. All of physical existence serves this purpose. Consciousness creates matter and the laws of the universe. Then it manipulates and lives in physical worlds in order to learn and evolve. So every event is an opportunity for souls to grow.” This is truly a book to be read and contemplated, offering both solace and wise inspiration.
— Ralph Metzner, PhD
Ralph Metzner, PhD, is a clinical psychologist; professor emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he taught for thirty years; and founder-president of the Green Earth Foundation. His books include The Unfolding Self, The Well of Remembrance, Green Psychology, and The Life Cycle of the Human Soul.