Ezio De Angelis is an acclaimed teacher and medium, conducting development classes and seminars throughout Australia, and appearing regularly in the media.Michelle De Angelis is an experienced medium, tarot reader and teacher. She has had articles published in several Australian New Age magazines, including Black Rose and Insight, as well as spending two years on drive time radio delivering live readings on air. In addition, she teaches regular classes and workshops assisting others to discover and unlock their gifts, and to embrace their spirituality.

Postcards from the Other Side

By Michelle De Angelis, Ezio De Angelis

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2012 Ezio De Angelis and Michelle De Angelis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74237-996-8

Contents

Introduction,
Part One: Planning the Journey,
1 Dead at sixteen — T.J.’s story begins,
2 The itinerary — Preparing for birth,
3 Earth bound!,
4 Life — Take three deep breaths,
Part Two: Unscheduled Transfers and Stopovers,
5 T.J. makes contact,
6 Checking out early,
7 There’s no place like hell,
8 Lost passports and misplaced souls,
Part Three: Arrival in the Afterlife,
9 T.J. describes his death,
10 Settling into the spirit world,
11 Religion and culture on the other side,
12 Afterlife reunions,
Part Four: Living in the Spirit World,
13 T.J.’s view from above,
14 Astral travel,
15 Caring for kids in spirit,
16 Soul groups — Companions on the trip of a lifetime,
Part Five: End of the Line?,
17 T.J. — The missing heartbeat of his family,
18 The essence of soul growth,
19 Reincarnation — A round-trip ticket,
20 The travel bug bites!,
Part Six: The Journey Never Ends,
21 T.J. remembers,
22 Life review — The journey revisited,
23 Dream connections,
24 Travel tips for life,

CHAPTER 1

Dead at sixteen — T.J.’s story begins

‘The newspapers said it was about graffiti,’ Christine told us in disbelief. ‘It was never about graffiti. It was about loyalty. Toddy was the most loyal person you could ever hope to meet. In the end it got him killed.

‘When that knife went through his heart … well, it killed me too. Killed my whole family. I don’t know how we can ever recover.’

‘I don’t think you can,’ Michelle replied honestly. ‘But somehow, with the love and support of your friends and family, you will eventually find a way to live with it.’

Christine didn’t believe her.

T.J. was almost seventeen years old when he was stabbed through the heart and died on a suburban street last year, just minutes away from his family home. His parents, Christine and Todd Senior, were woken late that night by a police officer asking them to come to the local hospital. Their youngest child, Todd Junior or T.J. as he was known, had been injured during a fight and they needed to get there quickly.

‘I kept on asking them, begging them, to tell me what had happened but they wouldn’t say. All they said was, “You need to be at the hospital.” No one would tell us that he was okay. Deep down we knew it was bad but you just hope …’ she said wistfully, her words and thoughts drifting into a world of what might have been.

‘A mother knows,’ she said, fighting back tears. ‘I could feel he wasn’t with us anymore. What really gets me is that the papers made it out to be a fight over tagging.’

‘Tagging?’

Christine explained that apparently a kid that T.J. knew — she referred to him as Jason but that isn’t his real name — had tagged (written) his street name over another kid’s tag. ‘That’s a big no-no,’ she said. ‘For whatever reason, it’s a big deal to these kids so a bunch of them decided to gang up and bash Jason while he was at a small party at a girl’s house. T.J. wasn’t even there, but Jason rang him and said that he was in trouble. Apparently, he told T.J. that these guys, some of whom T.J. knew, were threatening to kill him and were going to bash the girl too.

‘So T.J. being T.J. ran over there to defend his friend and protect the girl. That’s what he was like. Always ready to step up for someone else — even if they didn’t deserve it … and make no mistake, Jason didn’t deserve it.

‘Well, a fight broke out and my boy was in the thick of it. God, he didn’t even realise that he had been stabbed, he just kept on trying to protect his friend until eventually he lost so much blood that he fell over. There were five of them. The bastards that killed him just ran away and left him dying on the road.’

No longer able to hold back her tears, Christine looked up and said grimly, ‘I will never forgive them … I just can’t.’

As she told us her story, Christine curled herself into a ball on the settee, her knees pulled up to her chest. Outside, it was as if the world hadn’t noticed that T.J. had gone. The sun shone, birds chirped, children laughed and played in neighbouring yards. Life went on as usual. All that stopped at Christine’s front door where she had turned the darkened lounge room of her family home into a candlelit shrine for her only son.

CHAPTER 2

The itinerary — Preparing for birth

‘There is nothing in the physical world that is permanent,’ Shondra, a wise-woman and native elder, once told us. ‘And there is nothing in the spirit world that is impermanent. Everything you see around you will one day return to spirit. The plants and trees, the birds, animals and people — Spirit is where we come from … Spirit is our home.‘

By any account, this is an elegant summary of the intimate relationship between the physical and non-physical worlds. It teaches us that life isn’t only about the things we can see, hear and touch. There’s a vast unseen world of spirit as well. This is the life force that drives the physical world.

Although her counsel was greatly appreciated, Shondra didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. As mediums we communicate every day with real people in the spirit realms who wish to convey to their loved ones that they have survived the journey, through the illusion that death is the end, and now live in the afterlife.

How do they do this? By giving us information that proves they continue to exist.

Shondra knows that sooner or later all the things we have in our everyday world will fade away, taking with them everything that we have struggled to achieve during our temporary stay on this planet. She also observes that when everything does fade away, it inevitably returns to the place where it came from. That place is the heart of all creation. That place is the spirit world. And each one of us has an inbuilt GPS (global positioning system) that takes us there even if somewhere along the way we appear to have forgotten the address.

The greatest misconception in the world today is that we are not spiritually connected to the rest of creation through the web of life. We are. Life of every species begins as a soul made from pure spiritual energy in the unseen realms before manifesting into the physical world, and our journey here is never random or without purpose. Our stay on earth might be compared to an extended working holiday in a foreign country where we immerse ourselves in the local culture, attractions, religion and food to gain valuable life lessons and broaden our personal world view.

The knowledge, different experiences and insights such a trip gives you will naturally make you a more complete person. It will impact who you are — mind, body and spirit — with positive flow-on effects resonating through other aspects of your life. This is the goal of our earthly sojourn: to learn and, as a result, to make our spirits more complete. Then, in due course, when we return home to the spirit world, we share our life lessons with other members of our soul family so that they too may benefit from everything we’ve learned during our journey and similarly we might benefit from their experiences.

The itinerary for our excursion to earth is set well before each of us is born. Some people choose to incarnate together or in such a way as to ensure that their paths cross at some stage during their individual experiences. We have experienced this personally.

In the years before we met, our paths almost crossed many times. We knew the same people and shared many common interests but never actually met until the time was right for us to be together as husband and wife. When that moment finally arrived, there was no stopping us. We were not falling in love for the first time. Our relationship started long ago in spirit. Through psychic visions — and with a little help from our spirit guides — we know that we have spent many lifetimes together. In our previous lives, no matter which part of the world we found ourselves in, or what era, we always seemed to gravitate towards one another and pick up where we left off. Our meeting and subsequent romance is written in our souls’ itineraries. We are eternal husband and wife. Ezio’s spirit guide, Red Eagle, jokes that we are ‘an unstoppable cosmological force’! He is right.

But while a great deal of planning goes into our journey, not everything about our lives on earth is set in concrete. As with any good itinerary, there is an inbuilt flexibility that allows for new choices, adventures, misadventures, experiences and mistakes during the journey. This is what allows us to learn and grow, so that upon return to the spirit world we arrive as wiser and more compassionate people who are better able to contribute to the soul needs of both the planet and each other. That is what we are here on earth for — to help one another gain greater insight into the spiritually significant beings we truly are. Each one of us is a small but essential part of a bigger plan, much like a jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces fit together to form a picture.

Coming to earth for a lifetime is a heavenly contract between us and God. It’s for our soul growth. The broad details of our life and what we hope to achieve here are lovingly put together to ensure that we personally possess the mental, spiritual and physical tools to benefit from what may sometimes prove to be a difficult and harsh existence on the earth plane.

The detail of this plan is imbued within our soul. The soul plan is carried by spirit from lifetime to lifetime, incarnation to incarnation. This master plan is sometimes referred to as our spiritual blueprint — or our soul’s itinerary, as we have referred to it here — and while we may never know the exact detail of the plan, we intuitively know when what’s happening around us is part of the plan and we feel out of sorts when it is not.

No plan succeeds with only one participant doing all the work, so our personal blueprint is blended with the lives of others we come to earth to reconnect with. Many of the people we interact with at home, at work and in our community were known to us before we were born. That’s because they are part of our soul group or spiritual family. Some soul group members choose to travel to earth together so they can be part of each other’s life experience. This may go some way to explaining the phenomenon of deja vu — the experience of doing something for the first time while having a powerful sense that you’ve done it before, or that curious sensation of meeting someone for the first time yet feeling you have known them forever. They are part of your soul plan, helping you to fulfil what you came here to do or learn by making life easier or harder for you through their participation. Prompted by unfolding current events, your soul recollects tidbits of your blueprint and some details are leaked to your conscious mind as memories lost in time. These experiences feel real because they are real … even when they haven’t happened yet.

Many years ago a woman named Margaret described this very experience: ‘I was working for a travel company and had to visit an interstate office to try and sort out some difficulties they were having with a ticketing system. As soon as I stepped out of the lift and into the office, I was overwhelmed by a sense of having been there before, even though I hadn’t. Without ever having been to that office, I knew that the tea room was located just around the corner and that the state manager’s office was the third door down the hallway. I just knew it!

‘I was completely detached from the experience, sort of floating through it but still so very much a part of it … it was strange. Moments before reaching the state manager’s office, a thought entered my head — “You are about to meet your husband.” We were married two years later!’

This sensation occurred because Margaret had temporarily experienced time differently and briefly glimpsed part of her soul’s itinerary as it unfolded before her very eyes. She was able to simultaneously live in the present while stepping purposefully into her own future seconds before it happened. Meeting the state manager who would eventually become her husband was not a random event, it was a scheduled stop on her itinerary. They undoubtedly knew each other in the spirit world. Their meeting was mapped out in the life plan they had mutually devised before being born.

Just why such things are sometimes unexpectedly revealed to people remains a matter of conjecture, but one possible answer might be that the universe doesn’t want them to miss what is a very important milestone in their own grand scheme of things. Our spirit guides call this a ‘marker in the shifting sands of time’. It is a signpost to show you that you are on track, the spiritual equivalent of scanning a directory board in the local shopping mall and seeing a great big red arrow pointing to the exact spot where you are standing and a sign saying, You are here! Knowing where you are on your soul’s itinerary can help you map out where you are headed.

In Margaret’s case, she was on track to meet the man she would marry and create a family with. Who knows, she and her husband may well produce a child worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize or who discovers a cure for a disease. Or maybe they have created a loving, peaceful union between soul mates, inspiring others with their devotion and commitment to one another. The possibilities are endless.

We can only wonder at what our wise friend Shondra would make of it all. Perhaps she would wink and say, ‘It’s lucky she didn’t lose her itinerary!’

CHAPTER 3

Earth bound!

Before we are born we make our plans and draft our itinerary. Then what? Well, it’s pretty simple really. We incarnate, or are born, at a time and place that will enable us to experience the people and events that are part of our soul growth this time around.

Although our spirits connect very intentionally and in a planned and purposeful way with our developing physical bodies during pregnancy, they are by no means bound to them for the duration of our time in utero. While a baby is developing in its mother’s womb, the spirit of that baby is still free to come and go from its original home in the spirit world. Literally, it has a foot in each world until such time as it must fully commit to life in the physical world. So its spirit floats in and out of its mother’s body, making final preparations for a new life on earth.

Being able to communicate with those in the spirit world, we are fortunate enough to have experienced many surprising and delightful examples which prove that our spirits are not tied to our physical bodies. On one occasion during a public reading, a spirit named Mary came through to connect with her granddaughter Grace who was seated at the back of the auditorium. This loving grandmother was able to clearly identify herself and had given several relevant pieces of information which proved without doubt that she was Grace’s grandmother when suddenly she changed the subject. Mary mentioned the name of another granddaughter, Jenny, who though not present that evening was Grace’s sister.

‘Tell Jenny I have the baby here. I’ve been keeping an eye on him,’ she said. An audible sympathetic sigh floated through the room as everyone immediately assumed that Jenny had lost a baby who was now in spirit with her grandmother Mary. But the best was yet to come. Mary continued, ‘He is absolutely beautiful and she will be thrilled with him when he arrives!’ There was a collective gasp from the audience but no one was more surprised than Grace. She excitedly confirmed that her sister was indeed pregnant and due to have a baby within the next week or two and that she was expecting a boy. You can imagine our delight when six weeks later Jenny arrived at another of our public readings to proudly show us her new little boy, the very one Mary had spoken of!

This wonderful story teaches us that people who have died and left the physical world are able to know and interact with new members of their own family even before they are born, just like Mary did with her granddaughter’s baby. There appears to be no fracture in the timelines of life preventing people of different eras from connecting in the spirit realms — a strong indicator that the afterlife and the Earthbound pre-life are in fact the same place. That place is, of course, the spirit world!

Another instance occurred during a private reading when the spirit of an unborn child made himself known in no uncertain terms. His future aunt, Renee, was astonished when her spirit nephew showed up. This tenacious little one saw an opportunity to influence his own future and was not about to let it pass him by.

‘Tell her Callum is yuck!’ he said emphatically.

Renee was stunned. ‘My sister is pregnant,’ she said. ‘She knows she is having a boy and is tossing up between two names, Callum and Cameron.’

Both of these babies were able to communicate from the spirit world even though their tiny bodies were already here in the physical world — growing inside their mothers. This illustrates perfectly that spirit is not tied to the physical body but exists independently of it. Not only that, it is also further evidence that on our way to earth we have a sense of what’s going on and what lies ahead. In both cases the spirits of the babies made appearances during readings with people who would soon become part of their family. These babies knew about their future family connections before they got here. How wonderfully clever of them! While their physical bodies were busy growing, their spirits were equally busy laying the groundwork for their earthly arrival.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Postcards from the Other Side by Michelle De Angelis, Ezio De Angelis. Copyright © 2012 Ezio De Angelis and Michelle De Angelis. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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