Transcending Suffering

Stories of Serenity in the Face of Tragedy. An afterlife investigator's thoughts following the Maine shooting tragedy.

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com.

Photo by Shadman Sakib on Unsplash

Many of you might have noted that Melissa and I live in Maine. The Pine Tree state rarely becomes national news, but we certainly did this past week. If you missed the news, we had a mass shooting that killed eighteen people and injured thirteen others. It is the worst mass shooting in Maine’s history.

The heartbreaking news took place about an hour away from where we live, which felt closer when we were told that the shooter had escaped and was now on the loose. I doubt anyone within a hundred miles of Lewiston felt safe. It all began at about seven o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, and the shooter was at large until Friday evening when he was discovered to have taken his own life.

Melissa and I were safe since we happened to be in the Berkshires of Massachusetts during all this, although our hearts and minds were concerned for our fellow Mainers, including family and friends. We hadn’t traveled since before the pandemic, so we went there to visit our friend, Paul Selig, who was teaching all week at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. It was an absolute joy to see Paul again, and the foliage in the Berkshires was stunning, but the incident in Maine remained on our minds.

Four essential stories came to mind in light of this senseless tragedy. If you ever wonder what people might have experienced during their death, these four stories may give you an alternate perspective to consider.

Overall, my interpretation of afterlife data leads me to believe that we have a level of free will about how we experience our death. I say “a level of” free will because our soul also has input on what experience will most benefit us long-term (meaning, aid us in our infinite existence as spiritual beings). That said, these four stories suggest our ability to die in tragic settings without experiencing dreadful pain and suffering.

Story #1: Dream of a Murder

In my interview with Pam Coronado, Pam told the story of a dream she had involving a woman who had been murdered. I think it’s interesting to note that this type of dream was new to Pam. Today, she’s a psychic detective, but at the time of this dream, she was a mother of three (ages one to four) studying architecture and design at UCLA.

Let’s read the transcript of Pam’s engaging story. I’ve edited the transcript for readability.

Pam: I dreamed about a woman who went missing locally. In the dream, I had an empathic experience of being her. I was riding in the back seat of a car, and the person in front of me was my husband. It was a person I’d never laid eyes on before in my real life. But in the dream, I knew this was my husband (the husband of the woman in the back seat).

Bob: Oh wow.

Pam: And there was a person in the front seat with him, a female. I knew that she was his girlfriend. I realized that they were going to kill me. I looked out the window, and there was an angel flying outside the car and waving as if to say, “Come with me.” And I went with her because that was preferable to wherever we were going.

Bob: Yeah.

Pam: I then had this experience of going with the angel to what I could only describe as heaven. It was a big castle with huge walls and a feeling of more reverence than I’d ever felt in my entire life. I didn’t know if I belonged here or deserved to be here. It was a really overwhelming feeling.

The dream was so vivid that I wrote everything down that I could remember because it was just incredible. I’ve never had a dream like that before. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what was happening. And I didn’t tell anyone just because, you know, it’s kind of strange.

About three days later, I was reading the paper, and I didn’t know what to think. I mean, it was the most incredible life-changing moment ever because there was a picture of the man in my dream, and his wife was missing, and he was the prime suspect.

Bob: There’s so much in that story that we can talk about. For one, once you read this newspaper article, what do you do with that, right? This is the big question: what do you do with that?

Pam: Oh, I did nothing with that. For one, I was just really embarrassed. How do you tell someone you had a dream and you think that you were getting murdered? I was really hoping it was just one freak incident. And then, one night, I saw the news and started following the case obsessively, honestly.

Bob: As you would.

Pam: Then it got really complicated. There was a news report, and it turns out I went to high school with this woman who was missing. So I knew some of the parties involved, not well, but I had gone to school with them.

I saw the mother and the grandmother on the news, and they were crying, and they were asking if anybody had any insight, any tips, anything, please come forward and tell the police. So, I really started feeling guilty for letting my fear and my pride and everything else get in the way.

So I decided, instead of calling the police unsolicited, I would go down and volunteer for the search. They were having a search every weekend. So I would just go down and volunteer for the search, and if there happened to be anybody there that I could tell, then I would tell them. Otherwise, I would just help with the search.

Bob: Right.

Pam: And it turns out that the person who was leading the search was actually a good friend of mine, somebody else I went to high school with. I felt pretty confident telling him about my dream because I knew he wouldn’t think I was crazy. At least I knew that he would take it well. So, it was a safe little situation for me to take my first wobbly steps into this field. But I kept telling him, “I’m not a psychic. I just had this dream, and I think it will help.”

He and other people leading the search would ask me questions. I ended up talking to the detective. I went to the house where he was investigating and came face-to-face with the suspect. It was the weirdest day of my life, really. I’ve had several after that, but to that point, that was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me.

Bob: Was there anything in the dream that was helpful in locating her?

Pam: Yeah, yeah. That’s what made the dream so significant. In the dream, I was riding along in the car, looking out the window, so I got a sense of where we were driving around. Once I was with the search party, we got out maps and started highlighting all the areas that sort of matched my description from the dream. And, one by one, we eliminated them until they found her that day. I wasn’t with the group who found her, but the area visually matched what I had seen in the dream.

Story #2: Spirit Communication of an Auto Accident

The second story involves a medium named Glenn Klausner. Glenn and I go way back. I met him early in my research of mediums when I would spend hours on the phone with mediums, asking them questions about their abilities and experimenting during readings to learn what was possible.

One day, on the phone, Glenn connected with a friend (Rick) who had died in an auto accident. I hadn’t mentioned the friend or the accident to Glenn, but Rick showed up during our conversation. He wanted to pass along a message to his wife.

Rick was safety conscious to the point where he used to pull over to the side of the road to make a phone call. One day, while traveling on the highway, Rick pulled into the breakdown lane to answer the phone. He didn’t know that behind him on the highway, an eighteen-wheeler hit another eighteen-wheeler’s mirror as he passed, yet he kept on going. The driver of the truck that had been hit was attempting to write down the license plate of the truck that hit him when he veered across the road, smashing into Rick’s parked car.

Rick interrupted my phone conversation with Glenn because he wanted his wife to know that he had left his body and was swimming toward the light before the point of impact. Much like the woman in Pam’s dream who had left her body long before the murder, Rick left his body before the impact ever occurred.

Story #3: Regression of an Accidental Fall

Recently, I shared the transcript of Melissa’s Life-Between-Lives Regression, where she experienced a past life as Jesse, a man who lost his parents at the age of fifteen. He lived in the mountains with his dogs, delighted to live among the beauty of nature. At age fifty-one, Jesse fell from a distance while climbing mountainous rocks.

You might have read or heard me talk about the nature of regressions. Quite often, the transcripts of these sessions only tell a fraction of the story because the person having the experience only verbalizes the bare necessities.

For this reason, what’s not in Melissa’s transcript is what she knew about Jessie’s dying experience when he fell to his death on the rocks. She explained to me that he had already left his body at the time of the fall and witnessed his body lying on the rocks from above. He had a bird’s-eye view of his death, escaping the pain and trauma of the fall itself.

Story #4: Near-Death Experience After a Roadside Bomb Explosion

In my interview with near-death experiencer Natalie Sudman, she uses the phrase “blink environment” to describe where she went when a roadside bomb hit the vehicle she was riding in. In a nutshell, she blinked and was in a new environment. Hence, her name for the transition. Here’s a transcript from that interview with minimal edits for readability.

Bob: So you’re riding along in the vehicle, and when the bomb goes off, what’s that experience like?

Natalie: When it goes off?

Bob: Yeah, do you even know what’s happened?

Natalie: Well, I was tired, and I was bored, so I had my arm up on the windowsill and had just closed my eyes. When it detonated, I don’t know what it was like because I went immediately out of my body.

Bob: Wow, so just like that?

Natalie: Mm-hmm.

Bob: I love some of the terminology you use. You talk about the blink environment, basically, because you blinked and you’re in this new environment. Is that the short of it?

Natalie: Right, yeah.

Bob: So here you are. You’re riding along. You’re bored. Blink, now what’s happening?

Natalie: Now I find myself standing on a stage, maybe fifteen or twenty feet wide, and all around me are thousands of beings, personalities, whatever you want to call them, spirits, like thousands of them.

Like the woman in Pam’s dream, Rick’s auto accident, and Jesse’s fall in Melissa’s past life, Natalie’s experience following the explosion allowed her to avoid what was happening in real time. Natalie lived through her experience, so she experienced the suffering of her injuries in that incident once her consciousness returned to her body. Still, if she hadn’t survived the explosion, she would have transitioned in the blink of an eye, avoiding the physical suffering due to the bomb.

Final Thoughts

Except for stories like these that we gain from dreams, mediums, regressions, and unique spiritual experiences, we might assume that every living being experiences the physical, mental, and emotional impact of their death. After all, witnesses have heard screams or cries for help, suggesting great suffering. But stories like the four I’ve shared suggest another possibility. Maybe screams and cries for help occur naturally as an expression of the physical realm, even if the spirit (the personality/consciousness) has left the body.

There might be a purpose, spiritually speaking, for experiencing some types of death, yet I don’t have any stories to share in this regard. The stories I’ve accumulated in my life’s work are like the four stories I’ve shared with you here. They suggest that the suffering related to inevitable deaths serves no purpose to us as spiritual beings having a human experience.

The deaths that occurred in Maine this week are senseless and unfathomable. There’s nothing that can be said to ease the heartache and pain that accompany such tragedy and loss of life. This being true, my heart and mind ache for the victims and their families and friends. I think to myself, I wish they knew what I know about the afterlife. I wish they knew what I know about Pam’s dream, Rick’s message, Melissa’s regression, and Natalie’s near-death experience. If they did, it might ease their burden and suffering, if even just a little.

Although this knowledge cannot remove the real and raw pain of losing a loved one, perhaps knowing that they did not suffer in the way that we might imagine could ease some worries and fears related to how they died. That, by itself, offers immense benefit and allows us to focus on healing from the loss itself.

Thanks for reading. You have my heartfelt wishes for a week filled with peace, joy, and love.

♥️, Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the reputable directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His newest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.

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