The Last Frontier Quotes

“Dreams in which the dead interact with the living are typically so powerful and lucid that there is no denying contact was real. They also fill us with renewed life and break up grief or depression. In chapter 16, on communicating with the dead, you will learn how to make such dreams come about. Another set of dreams in which the dead appear can be the stuff of horror. If you have had a nightmare concerning someone who has recently passed, know that you are looking into the face of personal inner conflict. You might dream, for instance, that your dead mother is buried alive or comes out of her grave in a corrupted body in search of you. What you are looking at here is the clash of two sets of ideas about death. On the one hand, a person is dead and rotting; on the other hand, that same person is still alive. The inner self uses the appropriate symbols to try to come to terms with the contradiction of being alive and dead at the same time. I am not sure to what extent people on the other side actually participate in these dreams. My private experience has given me the impression that the dreams are triggered by attempts of the departed for contact. The macabre images we use to deal with the contradiction, however, are ours alone and stem from cultural attitudes about death and the body. The conflict could lie in a different direction altogether. As a demonstration of how complex such dreams can be, I offer a simple one I had shortly after the death of my cat Twyla. It was a nightmare constructed out of human guilt. Even though I loved Twyla, for a combination of reasons she was only second best in the hierarchy of house pets. I had never done anything to hurt her, and her death was natural. Still I felt guilt, as though not giving her the full measure of my love was the direct cause of her death. She came to me in a dream skinned alive, a bloody mass of muscle, sinew, veins, and arteries. I looked at her, horror-struck at what I had done. Given her condition, I could not understand why she seemed perfectly healthy and happy and full of affection for me. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me over a week to understand what this nightmare was about. The skinning depicted the ugly fate of many animals in human hands. For Twyla, the picture was particularly apt because we used to joke about selling her for her fur, which was gorgeous, like the coat of a gray seal. My subconscious had also incorporated the callous adage “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” This multivalent graphic, typical of dreams, brought my feelings of guilt to the surface. But the real meaning was more profound and once discovered assuaged my conscience. Twyla’s coat represented her mortal body, her outer shell. What she showed me was more than “skin deep” — the real Twyla underneath,”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“Each person is born with a spiritual and biological faith that is personal, intimate, and optimistic. Real faith springs from innate awareness of our connectedness with all living beings, with nature and All That Is. It requires only that we retrieve that child part in each of us that knows the universe is good. Not good and evil, not even good and bad. Just good.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“Human sin is supposedly inevitable because of our right of free will. This assumption is unmistakably laid out in the greatest origin story ever told — the story of Adam and Eve. The Genesis account of the beginning, foundational to three major world religions, establishes the dichotomies of “light and dark” and “good and evil” as basic to the infrastructure of the universe.1 The greatest transgression is emphatically disobedience. Disobedience drives the action, bringing about the Fall and the permanent loss of paradise. As a result of Adam and Eve ’s eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, all who issue from the seed of Adam are condemned to death. Mortality — dying, regarded as a natural act in most non-Abrahamic-based philosophies — is instead the unnatural outcome of sin. This is yet another demonstration of the Judeo-Christian discomfort with death. Eve and Adam’s disobedience also brought down on us a host of lesser curses — shame, guilt, impurity, suffering, bodily pain, especially while giving birth, physical labor, desire, temptation, greed, crime, sex, and so forth. Why was this tree put there?”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“Dr. Morris Netherton, a pioneer in the field of past-life therapy (and my teacher),7 relates the incident of a patient who returned to her previous life as Rita McCullum. Rita was born in 1903 and lived in rural Pennsylvania with her foster parents until they were killed in a car accident in 1916. In the early 1920s she married a man named McCullum and moved to New York, where they had a garment manufacturing company off Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Life was hard and money short. Her husband died in 1928. In 1929, her son died from polio, and the stock market crashed. Like many others during the Great Depression, Rita succumbed to bankruptcy and depression. On the sunny day of June 11, 1933, she hanged herself from the ceiling fan of her factory. Because this memory featured traceable facts, Netherton and his patient contacted New York City’s Hall of Records. They received a photocopy of a notarized death certificate of a woman named Rita McCullum. Under manner of death, it stated that she died by hanging at an address in the West Thirties, still today the heart of the garment district. The date of death was June 11, 1933.8”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“Typically, proof of survival is held to standards that are rarely met in other areas of research, the hard sciences included. Much of what the hard sciences present as proven is more extrapolation from a set of effects than fact. If this and that are observed to happen, why they happen is deduced. From these deductions, a workable hypothesis is formed and then tested. We don’t know for sure, for instance, if there was ever a Big Bang, that stunning first moment in no-space, no-time, when something infinitely smaller than an atom exploded into what 13.7 billion years later would become the universe; nor do we know whether wormholes or even black holes actually exist. There has been no direct observation of these cosmic identities. The assumptions that they do exist derive from a set of discernible conditions that can best be explained — in the current state of our knowledge — by a bang or hole. The sorts of things astrophysicists and nuclear physicists now consider as probable conditions of reality also include equally fantastic notions such as the God particle (the Higgs boson), the many-worlds interpretation, string theory with its eleven dimensions — some of them “compactified” so we don’t see them — the zero-point field theory, and the hidden-worlds theory, which all read like the wildest science fiction and make any theory of postmortem survival look as dull as dishwater.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“And then there is God, the ultimate ineffable. For me the word God is not enough, for it implies a distinct being who is located somewhere else, up far away in rarefied celestial spheres. My God is too immense to be a being and too indwelling to be somewhere else. For me, It is a consciousness of such massiveness that It dwarfs the cosmos. It is forever giving birth, spawning whole universes and reality systems, such as the physical one we are presently in. All thoughts, actions, and things, bodied and disembodied, human and nonhuman, alive and inanimate, visible and invisible, are made from Its tissue. As such, It permeates everything that ever is, ever was, and ever will be, while containing everything tenderly within Itself. Yet It also stands apart. Because It manifests all that is and is manifested in all that is, I use the name All That Is. But then I am trying to force All That Is into a nutshell.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“In the past few decades, we have witnessed an explosion of information about death and the afterlife, generated by an ever-growing number of psychologists and psychiatrists, physicians, hospice nurses and bereavement counselors, near-death experiencers, researchers in parapsychology, and, of course, mediums, who are working toward a better understanding of the world to come. This is one of many signs that the human race is poised to enter a new era, an era I would call a revolution in consciousness. Another sign is that belief in survival after death is on the rise, up to 89 percent according to some surveys.7 In Western countries, more and more people believe in a kinder hereafter. Instead of hell they expect joy, reunion with loved ones, and the complete absence of pain and worry. As concepts of the afterlife are inextricable from concepts of the Divine, when one changes, so does the other. Predictably, the fear-inspiring God of old is giving way to a more abstract Supreme Being whose laws are written in the spirit of love, compassion, and forgiveness rather than judgment.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“Just as versions of the hereafter are endlessly diverse, the multifaceted experience of dying differs for each person as well, despite its biological component. Each death is unique. Overall children die differently from adults, animals from humans, the long-ill from the accident victim. In the same way, afterlife experiences are highly divergent, shaped by an individual’s beliefs, culture, and personal wants. The more we know about those differences, the more we discover new directions and broaden possibilities. My goal is for you to become an independent thinker when it comes to the dead and the sphere they inhabit, basing your conclusions on your own intuitions and experiences while keeping them open to evaluation and change. Therefore, much of what is contained in these pages is hard at work challenging beliefs that impede independent awareness. This book is meant not only to stimulate your critical thinking but also to expand the range of questions you ask about the nature of the afterlife and, hence, of reality itself. Additional motives are at work here too. In chapter 12, you will learn that independent thinkers have more encounters with the deceased than others have. A third motive comes from my own work as a medium and from studies of positive and not-so-positive near-death experiences. Both show that if a person dies, clinically or permanently, with a fistful of unexamined, dogmatic assumptions, it can cause an array of complications in the immediate afterlife, whereas just a jot of open-mindedness leads to experiences that are full, deep, and transcendent.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“The percentage of people reporting contact with the dead in surveys ranges anywhere from 42 to 72 percent. Widows having contact with their deceased husbands can go as high as 92 percent.1 If the surveys had included children and deathbed encounters, which are extremely common, the percentages would have been even heftier. A whopping 75 percent of parents who lost a child had an encounter within a year of the child’s death.2 But a sad 75 percent of all those who had encounters reported not mentioning them to anyone for fear of ridicule.3 It’s hard to believe that a society can deny the validity of an experience shared by so large a proportion of its population. But we do. Many organized and not-so-organized religions go so far as to condemn communication with the dead, a position that at least admits contact is possible. Until recently, near-death experiencers have suffered great distress from disbelief and derision, silenced by those they were expected to trust most, their families and physicians. The same holds for people on the verge of death, since the phenomena they typically experience, such as visits from the dead and visions of the other side, are treated as symptoms of dementia. All these people are between a rock and a hard place.”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death

“The percentage of people reporting contact with the dead in surveys ranges anywhere from 42 to 72 percent. Widows having contact with their deceased husbands can go as high as 92 percent.1 If the surveys had included children and deathbed encounters, which are extremely common, the percentages would have been even heftier. A whopping 75 percent of parents who lost a child had an encounter within a year of the child’s death.2 But a sad 75 percent of all those who had encounters reported not mentioning them to anyone for fear of ridicule.3 It’s hard to believe that a society can deny the validity of an experience shared by so large a proportion of its population. But we do. Many organized and not-so-organized religions go so far as to condemn communication with the dead, a position that at least admits contact is possible. Until recently, near-death experiencers have suffered great distress from disbelief and derision, silenced by those”
― Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death