by Mark Pitstick MA, DC

Note: If you already know the following information scroll down to the article title in maroon below the seven asterisks.  However, I strongly recommend reading this introduction until you really ‘own’ it.  In addition, post The Great News where you’ll see it every day.  

Over the last 15 years, and especially during 2019 – 2024, data from a series of experiments at the University of Arizona have definitively demonstrated scientifically that life continues after physical death.  This research was conducted by Gary E. Schwartz PhD, former professor at Harvard and Yale, and pioneer in the fields of behavioral medicine and energy healing.  

Dr. Schwartz is assisted in this work by a team of electrical engineers, software developers, research assistants, evidential mediums, and postmaterial luminaries at the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health.  (To learn more about the SoulPhone Project and lab, visit LACH.Arizona.edu.  To learn about postmaterial luminaries, see article #31 at SoulProof.com) 

The Demo SoulSwitch is a binary (Yes / No) SoulSwitch device that postmaterial persons (the so-called ‘deceased’) can use to answer questions, verify their identity, and begin providing information to help many people and our planet.  This device should be ready for beta testing by the summer of 2024.  After sessions with project volunteers and larger donors, we will share data that scientifically demonstrates life continues after bodily death.  However, this ‘reveal’ will initially occur as an ‘incremental trickle’ versus a ‘sudden splash’.   Over time and under optimal conditions, we will gradually amplify how widely this news is shared. 

Likewise, demonstrations of this technology will occur in a stepwise fashion.  We anticipate, but cannot guarantee, that full announcements and demonstrations will occur by spring 2025.  These decisions were made in April 2024 after many strategic planning discussions with core project team members.  The many factors involved are much more complex than you might imagine. 

See articles #1, 60, and 115 for an overview of the scientific, clinical, and experiential evidence that indicates – with 99.9% certainty – that consciousness survives bodily death.  This collective evidence also shows – with very high degrees of certainty – The Great News that you and everyone else:

  1. continue to live after your earthly body dies.
  2. can interact with ‘departed’ loved ones now and after you pass on.
  3. are integral, infinite, eternal, and beloved parts of Source Energy now and always.
  4. receive guidance and support from angels, guides, master teachers, etc.
  5. are sacredly interconnected with all people, animals, and nature.
  6. have special purposes for having this earthly experience now.
  7. may manifest in other simultaneous time / space realities now and after bodily death.
  8. have everything you need to enjoy an optimal earthly experience – no matter what your past or current circumstances.
  9. can find meaning, as well as opportunities for growth and service, amidst your toughest changes and challenges.
  10. co-create how heavenly your life feels – whether living on earth or elsewhere – by your predominant thoughts, words and actions.
  11. can likely use SoulPhone technology in the future to communicate with postmaterial loved ones and access wisdom from luminaries who can help us heal our world.  

Statements #1, 2, and 11 are based on definitive scientific research.  The other statements are based on: (a) clinical research: near-death experiences, past life memories and regressions, perinatal experiences, life between lives sessions, shared crossings, terminal lucidity cases, and deathbed visions; and (b) evidencefrom firsthand experiences: after-death communications, out-of-body experiences, spiritually transformative experiences, electronic voice projection / instrumental transcommunication, and other ways of knowing.

This is, obviously, a new and exciting era for humanity.  When understood and internalized – even just a bit – The Great News can help you make the shift:         

  • FROM thinking, believing, and acting as if your time on earth is unfair, meaningless, cruel, and ends with cessation of consciousness or the possibility of endless suffering.
  • TO thinking, believing, and acting as if this earthly experience is a totally meaningful, safe, and magnificent adventure amidst forever.

Conscious language can help you adopt a greater reality perspective and live based on the second bulleted worldview.  And that, in turn, can help you create the greatest life YOU have envisioned, fulfill your purposes for being on earth, serve others, and enjoy a magnificent journey.  In the pursuit of using more conscious / accurate terms, l:   

  1. Will use the term ‘YOU’ to describe the totality of your energy / being. Your real self may manifest in different spacetime ways simultaneously since only approximately 50% of your consciousness is needed to have an earthly experience. The term ‘YOU’ recognizes both of these possibilities.
  2. Won’t use the terms ‘die, departed, deceased, or dead’ without single quotation marks since those have strongly entrenched and erroneous meanings indicating an end of life.
  3. Will use the terms ‘bodily death’ and ‘death of the earthly form’ to remind you that only the earth-suit dies. The rest – all the intelligence, love, personality, memories, preferences, sense of humor, and much more – continues living in other parts of the field of all possibilities.
  4. Will use the terms changed worlds, passed on, transitioned and others that aptly describe a continuation of consciousness after bodily death.
  5. Will primarily refer to those who have passed on as postmaterial persons. That term recognizes the points in #3. I also will use soul, consciousness, essence, and awareness.
  6. Will primarily refer to ‘physical humans living on earth’ as material persons. Why? Because those terms within single quotation marks may apply to postmaterial persons.  That is, they can have physicality, visit earth, and are still human in meaningful ways.
  7. Will use the terms lower versus higher energies, emotions, and ways of being. These descriptors are not critical, judgmental, or subjective; rather, they are based on objective measures by, for example, David Hawkins PhD, MD author of Power Versus Force. He and other researchers found that higher-energy emotions of peace, joy, and love calibrate at 600, 540, and 500 respectively.  Conversely, lower-energy emotions of anger, fear, and guilt calibrate at 150, 100, and 30.  To be clear, energy / consciousness is who and what you really are, not just how you are feeling.  Your predominant energies create the quality of your life and the nature of your earthly or other time-space experience.
  8. Will use single quotations marks with words such as ‘lose and fail’.  The Great News and collective afterlife evidence can expand your worldview about what seem to be losses and failures.  We can’t accurately judge the big picture of life – what is lost or how we failed – with our limited human senses.   

Note: To recognize and respect different genders and sexual identifications, I will alternate using ‘he’ or ‘she’ and related pronouns.  Depending on a person’s orientation, one, both, or neither of those may apply.

The free articles and radio shows mentioned are available at SoulProof.com.  To learn more about the collective afterlife evidence and The Great News, read Soul Proof, The Afterlife Evidence, Greater Reality Living (co-authored with Dr. Schwartz) and The Big Picture of Life (for ages 10 – 16 written with Schwartz and Katta Mapes MA, MEd).  To experience expanded states of consciousness to optimally heal and transform your life, use audio sessions under Shop at SoulProof.com. 

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When Reaching a Fork in Your Life’s Road

Perhaps you are an important fork in the road of your life right now.  Or maybe you have looked back, realized how important taking the optimal path is, and want to do better in the future.  If so, read on . . .

Here’s a personal example of a fork I took many years ago; I now realize I could have done better.

At the age of 21, my first love of four years was clearly starting to break up with me.  She was my best friend, the epicenter of my life, and had a dazzling personality and looks.  We were pre-engaged and I thought she would be my wife and life partner.  It was Memorial Day weekend with just a week until final exams then summer break.  I had planned to visit her, but she didn’t want me to.  I could see, feel, and hear the handwriting on the wall.  I was devastated because I thought she was my one true love and the only one for me.

Bill, who lived next door on my dorm floor, sold pot on a small scale.  By the end of my junior year of college in the ‘do your thing’ 1970’s, I had tried marijuana a few times but wasn’t that impressed.  I had big goals to reach – including marrying my first love and being a doctor – and didn’t want to be sidetracked.  However, with a long weekend at school, most people going home, and facing major heartbreak, I decided to buy some pot.  I told Bill that I wanted ‘a nickel bag’.  ($5 bought a quarter ounce back then.)

I had counseled Bill during the previous year and helped him when he lightly cut his wrists during a traumatic break-up with his boyfriend.  Bill respected me and told me how impressed he was at my focus and drive.  So when I asked to buy some marijuana, Bill said: ‘No, Mark, not you!  Come on, man, what are you thinking?’

How could Universe signal any more clearly that I was about to make a poor choice — the lower energy fork in the road?  It’s a HUGE sign when a drug dealer tells you to not buy drugs.

However, I persisted and prepared to ‘get high.’  I pulled the small baggie of weed from inside a sock where I had hidden it.  (Simple possession was a serious offense back then and no one would ever think to search there, right?)  As I held the bag, a super strong voice / feeling / knowing said, ‘Mark, don’t do this!’  But I didn’t listen.  I wanted to stop the pain and sadness.  I wanted to be someone else and escape what was happening.

But I went about it a suboptimal way.  Looking back, I clearly didn’t make the best possible choice.

I smoked some pot and, suddenly, everything seemed wonderful.  The music, movies, pizza, and – well, everything – were so amazing.  I didn’t even think about my lost love . . . until the next day when I had to face reality again.  I continued to smoke pot twice a week to cope with the changes and feel better.  It was a lower energy response by self-medicating to handle the relationship breakup.  I didn’t do very well in my final exams that quarter.

(I’m not saying that smoking pot was immoral, evil, or horrible.  Used occasionally and optimally, it may be better than getting stupid drunk.  But it wasn’t the highest possible choice for me at that time.  I might have later chosen to use it occasionally for the buzz and mind-altering benefits.  But using because I needed it wasn’t, in my opinion, the best reason or use of the plant’s gifts.)

Several weeks later – sure enough – she broke up with me and I felt like I wanted to die.  For the first several nights, I awoke in the middle of the night and found my pillow wet from crying during my sleep.

Soon after, while driving by myself at night on a highway, I briefly thought: ‘I could end all this sadness and pain right now by driving my car into a big tree.  Then I wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.’  Very quickly, a voice inside me shouted: ‘No! You should not do that!  Look at all the good things in your life.  Think what your suicide would do to your family.  You can get through this and be stronger and better because you survived it.’

I listened to my inner voice / G.O.D. that time.  I literally took the better of the two forks in the road at that moment. 

Over time, I realized that using even a little bit of pot actually delayed my grieving.  Several years later, while receiving individual and group psychotherapy as part of my clinical psychology training, I was surprised to discover that my pain was still there.  I hadn’t processed it, just covered it up.

Soon after that, I quit using pot and discovered I could feel much more peace and joy via meditation, prayer, yoga, loving relationships, optimal diet, time in nature, exercise, and fulfilling my highest reasons for being on earth at this time.  But there were some negative consequences of taking a suboptimal path for seven years.  I wish I had listened to Bill – and my inner voice / spiritual support team – and responded to my suffering in better ways.

Looking back, there are many better choices I could have made:

  1. visit dear family and friends
  2. study more for finals
  3. take advantage of the many cultural events and activities on campus
  4. seek counseling
  5. pray more for assistance and clarity about how to best handle this
  6. meditate more to hear wise answers from within and all around
  7. double down on my goals and resolve to not get side-tracked
  8. spend quiet time in nature
  9. serve others suffering in much worse ways
  10. enjoy pizza, movies, and music – but without the drugs

Many valuable lessons have arisen over the last 47 years from all that.  I can appreciate and honor the experience now.  One lesson is to take the high road in life whenever possible.  It’s usually not the easy one, but it’s the wisest and – in the long run – best path.

My friends Jeff and Lynn Hollahan are bereaved parents I met while working with Helping Parents Heal.  They have taken many high roads since their son Devon passed on.  As a result, they have become exemplary people who love, care, and help others.  While having lunch, we discussed the ever-present option to make good choices no matter is happening to us or around us.  Jeff said, ‘I’ve learned that, when you come to a fork in the road, go up.’

We all looked stunned for a moment at the simplicity and wisdom of his statement.  He said, ‘I don’t know where that came from, but it sounds really wise.’  A Google search revealed no references to that phrasing.  My wife Andy who is a medium thought it could be a message from Devon since messages from ‘spirit’ are often shockingly short but profound.

In my twenties, a great song by the band Marshall Tucker was Take the High Way.  At the time, I thought that smoking weed was taking the best route.  I immaturely and judgmentally thought that people who smoked pot were better / cooler / more hip than ‘straights’.  Later, I learned that what’s within is what counts – not age, hair style, drug use, etc.

I asked people who didn’t use drugs why they chose to abstain.  They usually said it was because they liked to be as clear as possible.  They wanted to be in touch with themselves and their senses.  I get that now and applaud them for deflecting peer pressure and not doing what so many young people were in the 1970’s.

At the time, there was a ‘we can save the world’ mentality and ‘getting high’ was a key to it.  Nearly fifty years later, how has that worked out?  Yes, there have been some improvements but there are many problems.  Legalizing pot concerns me.  As I experienced, it’s so easy to lapse into euphoria instead of working through challenges and finding the silver linings.

Part of choosing the fork that goes up is realizing there are greater meanings to life’s toughest changes and challenges.  But you have to look for and apply them.  Here’s a recent example of a young women who faces tremendous challenges but is choosing to find the blessings and use them to help herself and others.

At a height of just over seven feet, 24-year-old Rumeysa Gelgi of Turkey is the tallest woman in the world.  But she will never play basketball; her height is a result of Weaver Syndrome, a rare condition that causes rapid growth.  She can walk slowly with a walker and attendant but usually needs a wheelchair.  But Gelgi uses her Guinness Book notoriety to help educate people.  Search for the video about her (October 2021).  Notice her little smile and deep eye contact when she was a kid and now.  She is quite likely an evolved soul who purposely chose to endure physical pain and more to grow and help others.

Very impressive.  That is taking the high-energy fork in the road.  You and I can resolve to do this whenever we face two or more paths.  It’s never too late to shift your focus and direction.  Lyrics to the song Stairway to Heaven are so enigmatic that even Jimmy Page said he doesn’t know what they mean.  But my favorite lines that are apropos for this topic are: ‘Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.’

That’s my take-away from this song and life in general: no matter has happened in the past, there’s still time to upgrade the road you’re on.

Making more evolved choices when confronted by challenges may not be the most comfortable route.  But it’s easier now that we know – without a doubt – that life continues after bodily death.  If this brief time on earth was all we have, it may be tempting to succumb to self-pity, bitterness, anger, and other lower-energy emotions / ways of being.  But we now have convincing scientific and clinical evidence that this earthly experience is but a blink of an eye in the span of eternity.

What’s more, there’s the long list of benefits – listed at the beginning of this article – that help you take the high road.  As Robert Frost put it: ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled.  And that has made all the difference.’  Or, as Carlos Casteneda encouraged, take the path with heart.

Perhaps I needed to experience how it feels to take a lower-energy path before I could appreciate the upsides of better choices.  Whatever the case, I resolve to take the forks that go up as much as I can.  I hope you will do the same.  Just imagine the cumulative ripples of that for all people and our world. 

We just watched the lovely movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that highlighted this message: “Everything will be alright in the end.  So if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.”

That saying in India applies to your time on earth and beyond.  Life doesn’t end but it does change.  And everything is actually alright right now if we could only see from a sufficiently evolved perspective.

I hope this article comforts, inspires, and informs you – especially during your toughest changes and challenges.  See you on the high road, my dear fellow travelers!

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Your life, and that of others around you, will be more enriched when you:  

  1. read this article again within a few days so you really own it.
  2. discuss it with trusted family members and friends.
  3. take recommended action steps that seem right for you.
  4. share it with others who can use it.

Let it shine,
Mark

Mark Pitstick MA, DC is an author, master’s level clinical psychologist, holistic chiropractic physician, frequent media guest, and webinar / workshop facilitator.  He has also helped others in pastoral counseling and suicide prevention / education settings.  Mark directs The Soul Phone Foundation, founded Greater Reality Living Groups, and assists research on the SoulPhone Project.  To learn more about how Dr. Pitstick might help you, visit SoulProof.com/About.

Dr. Pitstick’s goal is to help you know and show– no matter what is happening to or around you – that this earthly experience is a totally safe, meaningful, and magnificent adventure amidst eternity.  Visit SoulProof.com for free articles, newsletters, and radio interviews with top consciousness experts.  Other resources include his very reasonably priced books, audio-products, and documentary film.

Note: Because of his many outreaches, Dr. Pitstick can no longer answer complex and/or multiple questions.  However, he has created many resources to answer your biggest questions and provide holistic solutions for your toughest challenges . . .  

FREE ARTICLES, RADIO SHOW, AND E-NEWSLETTERS

– Articles for Transformation and Healing (top tab Articles at SoulProof.com) address the most common questions, concerns, and challenges about life, death, and afterlife.

– Radio Shows (top tab Radio Shows at SoulProof.com) share his and top experts’ answers to life’s biggest questions: “Who am I? Why am I here?  What happens after I die?  Is there a God?  Why is there so much suffering?  Why do children die?” and others.

– E-Newsletters (sign up on any page at SoulProof.com)

AUDIO-PRODUCTS, BOOKS, AND DOCUMENTARY FILM

– Transformational Audio Products  (see Shop at SoulProof.com) provide quality sessions at home for a fraction of the cost of an office visit.  These CDs and digital audios use deep relaxation, visualization, breathwork, and/or other techniques to: access your inner wisdom, visit with “departed” loved ones, release old wounds and lower energy emotions, evaluate your pre-birth planning, have past life regressions, and other goals.

– Books and Documentary (Shop at SoulProof.com) provide information and strategies to help you more deeply realize and demonstrate:

  • you are a forever being of energy / consciousness
  • the many wonderful benefits of realizing this
  • how to reflect this great news in every aspect of your life — even when confronted with big challenges and changes

Webinars and Workshops: to learn about these, subscribe to newsletters at SoulProof.com and SoulPhone.org (Classes & Interviews at SoulProof.com)

Greater Reality Living Groups: these local and online groups share information from Dr. Pitstick, Dr. Gary Schwartz, and other experts on consciousness and holistic wellness topics.  (Visit Greater Reality Living at SoulProof.com)

Coaching / Counseling Session: meet with Dr. Pitstick by Zoom to gain answers to your toughest questions and holistic solutions to your biggest challenges.  (Shop at SoulProof.com)

Disclaimer: This information is not designed to replace medical or psychological care.  Dr. Pitstick’s remarks are based on his personal and professional training and experience during forty-eight years of helping many thousands of people.  Collective clinical, scientific, and experiential evidence supports some, but not all, of what he shares.  Mark’s views may change over time, and he does not claim to have all the answers or the only answers.

Dr. Pitstick encourages you to consider this information and decide for yourself what makes the most sense.  Note: the articles and other resources at his SoulProof.com site are NOT purely based on scientific research as is the SoulPhone Project.