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Mark Ireland – The Persistence of the Soul · Destination Unlimited with Victor Fuhrman

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My name is Victor Furman. Some call me the Voice. I've always been
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fascinated with human nature, spirituality, science and the crossroads at which they meet.
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Join me now and we will explore these topics and so much more with
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fascinating guests, authors and experts who will guide us to Destination Unlimited. Is
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their evidence of the continuity of consciousness after physical death? How might that evidence
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bring comfort to the bereaved, especially parents who have lost children. My guest
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this week on Destination Unlimited, Mark Ireland, sought this evidence after the passing
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of his youngest son. He was able to connect with his son's essence and
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observed a variety of phenomenon supporting the survival hypothesis. This led him on a
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profound personal journey and deep dive into psychic medium phenomena, spirit visitations, afterlife
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communication, reincarnation and near death experiences pointing to the post mortem survival of consciousness.
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Mark is also co founder of Helping Parents Heal, an organization with twenty
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four thousand members that assist berief parents worldwide. His website is markirelandauthor dot com,
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and he joins me this week to share his path and latest book,
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Persistence of the soul, mediums, spirit visitations, and afterlife communication. Please
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join me in welcoming to Destination Unlimited, Mark, Ireland. Welcome Mark.
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Hey, it's great to be here, Vickor. Thanks for having me,
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and thank you so much for joining us today and sharing a message that I
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think is so important for so many. So let's start by asking you what
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motivated you to investigate and write about mediumship and afterlife evidence. Well, actually,
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unlike a lot of folks in my position, I grew up with a
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father who was a pretty prominent psychic and medium. His prominence was from the
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fifties through the eighties primarily, and so I saw this phenomenon in daily life
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where you know, the psychic part of it, you couldn't get away with
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anything at home, and then you know, in his own church where he
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would demonstrate these abilities I guess as validation of the gifts of the spirit,
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and then in secular venues as wells doing psychic demonstrations but also periodically having spirit
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communication pop through. So as a young kid, I saw this. So
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I looked at this and said, there is something more. You know.
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I don't understand exactly how it works, but clearly when people die they still
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exist in some form and could communicate. So having grown up like that,
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I didn't necessarily want to be my dad or like him, who wants to
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be their parent anyhow when they grew up, So I took a more conventional
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path. I went to college, got a degree, got married at a
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young age, and had a couple of kids and was just kind of going
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down the normal American lifestyle kind of thing and with career as the focus.
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But unexpectedly, my eighteen year old son passed. And it was a day
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when he was going to go on a hike on the mountains in the McDonald
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Mountains in Scottsdale, Arizona, which was behind our home. And I had
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an uneasy feeling, almost like a premonition feeling, and tried to talk him
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out of going, but there was no stopping him. And he's like,
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the last words he ever said to me were we're going, dad, you
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know, implying stop your worrying, you know. So he went on this
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hike with buddies and he ended up without dragging this out, he ended up
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passing away. His best friend had reported that he was that brand and my
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son had felt like his heart was beating rapidly and his arms were kind of
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numb, and then he tried to revive Stu tried to revive Brandon but was
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unsuccessful. We were away from home at the time. We rushed back after
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getting a call and by the time we got there there were a horde of
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spectators, firetruck, ambulance and helicopter and we were informed within a short period
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of time that he had passed. So that's really what drew me back into
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it. By that point in my life, my dad had been gone for
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a number of years, about twelve, I believe, but my uncle was
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still alive and he had ability similar to my father, and he's one of
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the first people I called and I asked him. He asked if he could
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do anything to help me, and just said, if you get any kind
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of message, I'd really appreciate it. And it was probably three days later
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when I was in the ortuary making arrangements that we connected by cell and at
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that point we had no cause of death. But my uncle said, you
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know, Mark, I tried to connect last night and I couldn't get anything.
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But in my morning meditation today, your dad came to me. He
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wanted to let you know that he was there when Brandon passed. Brandon was
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a little confused at first, but your dad helped him adjust. Brandon wanted
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you to know that you're the best parents he ever could have had, which
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is the fuzzy, nice, warm thing we like to hear. But then
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he said your father's Your dad said that Brandon's death was caused by a lack
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of oxygen in his bloodstream that caused his heart to fail. That was the
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evidence piece, because two days later I got a call from the physician who
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had conducted the autopsy, and she told me that Brandon had suffered a severe
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asthma attack which drove his blood oxygen levels down, causing cardiac arrest. So
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I got the cause of death two days before the autopsy results from my uncle
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through means other than physical examination. So that was really the, I guess,
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the starting point for what drew me back into the field. Let's address
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a little bit more about your dad and your uncle. What was it like
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growing up with him? You had mentioned the fact that you didn't want to
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be like your dad, but what was it like having him in your life?
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It was pretty wonderful. He was a gregarious person who people loved and
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followed some of them. You know, he had people who tried to mooch
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off of him, I guess you would say, but he also he was
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just very interesting and having this ability is just one facet of him, because
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just as a human, he was just a very caring, loving person who
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gave to others, in fact to a point where it was even frustrating the
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family members. At times. He brings a stranger in off the street or
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whatever to stay with us for a while if someone was in distress or in
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a bad spot. So he really tried to live christ Like life, I
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guess in many ways, not that he was perfect by any means, but
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he was a good person, a caring person. It was very interesting,
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you know, just to see how he would affect the lives of others.
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I remember one time walking into a living room when he was he had just
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done a reading for Amanda Blake, who played Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke, and
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she was just crying, but they were like happy tears, so I could
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tell she'd really been touched. My dad counseled other celebrities like May West.
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I got to meet her when I was nineteen years old and tour her apartment.
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You know and so, And I even have a card from Mamie Eisenhower
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from dated nineteen fifty six congratulating my dad on behalf of the president and her.
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That's when my parents got married. So it was just an interesting mix
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of his church, which was non denominational. It was really a place where
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he called it the University of Life. He wanted to have it be a
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very open forum type of place, pushing forth a lot of dogma, but
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more letting people form their own opinions and views based on their experiences, and
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then demonstrating the abilities that he had. And then in secular venues he branched
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out and did you know TV shows, nightclubs, all kinds of things,
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demonstrating psychic phenomena, really to open people's minds to the possibility that were more
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than just a brain and a body. So that was my dad a very
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unique individual. What were some of the most evidential stories you can share about
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your dad's abilities. Sure, I'll tell you. I've had a lot of
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people come to me after the fact years later, and I'm putting these together
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in another book later on. I think one of the most startling that really
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twists you're thinking about the nature of time and space comes from a woman named
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Norma Polling. So I was doing a talk a number of years ago and
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she approached me and said, hey, Mark, I've got a story for
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you about your dad. She actually gave me a typewritten piece of paper with
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the whole story written. But then she told me the story. She said,
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I first saw your dad in nineteen sixty three. It was a psychic
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demonstration. And what he would do is take ten strips of Johnson Johnson white
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medical tape, which if anyone hasn't used that or seen it, it's extremely
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sticky, the adhesa is very strong, and it's completely, I believe,
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completely opaque. So he would take these strips, cover his eyes and then
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put three black blindfolds over that, and then more tape over that down covering
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the bottom of the blindfold, so no one would think that he could see
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downward. It was really overkilled. But then he would ask people to write
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questions on pieces of paper. Those would be collected by someone and then delivered
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to him in a basket. So this woman, Normal Polling, was my
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dad was completely blindfolded at this point or in the process of blindfoldings, and
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she's trying to think about what to ask as a question, so she thought
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of two different possibilities. One was will I have a fourth child? Or
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will I get my map master's degree? So she ended up just writing the
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one about the master's degree. She sent it up and near the end he
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had answered the question and said, yes, you're going to get your master's
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degree, which was great. You know, she actually did get the master's
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degree. But then five years later she went back to see him a second
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time and wrote an entirely new question, and when she sent it up,
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he later answered her and said, oh, Norma, norma polling, I
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see you had that fourth child. So that was a question she'd only thought
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of five years ago but never wrote down. Pretty wild. You have another
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example, sure, So this is one of my favorites, and people really
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like this one. So on one occasion before I met my before I married
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my wife, actually on our second date, I was nineteen years old.
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I went to pick her up and I asked her if she'd like to go
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see my dad's demonstration. She said yes, So we went there and I
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was running like so by the time we got there, he was already blindfolded
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and giving messages to people. So I encouraged my wife, my wife to
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be, who was just my second date at the time, Susie, to
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write a question down. So she wrote, when will my mother get married?
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And at this time her mom was divorced from her dad, but she
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had been dating a man for a number of years but had been noncommittal,
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so that's why she asked the question. So she sends that question up,
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and a bit later, my dad says, Susie sap soup soap and her
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last name was Sip. And she says, here, this is me,
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you know, And he says, uh, I think you've asked me a
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question about your mother once you'll get married. Well, I don't know about
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your mother, my dear, but you've made your choice of men. He's
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with you tonight. Then I piped. Then I piped up into the dad
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Susie's my date, and he says, Oh, my gosh, I guess
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I just married off my own son. That's so wonderful story. Thank you
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for sharing that. Yeah about here, Plater, we got married. That's
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a wonderful thank you. With reference to the Eisenhowers, did he actually do
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a reading for the Eisenhowers? You know, I can't say because you were
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very secret about some of those things over the years. I got the impression
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that he may have counseled other people in the government at different times, but
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he was tight lipped about it. Maybe he had to be I don't really
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know. I would have to assume that he must have counseled at least maybe.
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I don't know if he counseled the president as well. Otherwise, how
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would she have known him, Why would she be sending him this card.
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So it's kind of a puzzle at this point. But my assumption here is
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that he must have counseled them because of that. Now, you mentioned your
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father. Obviously you said that your uncle was also psychic. Were there other
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psychic people in your family? Yeah, it does, you know, I
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think a lot of people that researched this field have determined that there seems follows
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family lines a lot of the time. My grandmother, my dad's mom,
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ended up being a trance medium, so and then she founded her own church
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in Ashley, Ohio, which is a suburb of Columbus, and my dad's
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grandmother, I guess read tea leaves back in the city, so it does
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follow suit. And I've had my own experiences. My dad always said I
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was very psychic. I never really viewed myself as such because I felt like,
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how can I match with that, you know, that standard. But
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I've had, you know, when I've made an effort at it, I
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have, you know, been able to produce some significant results. And oftentimes
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it's been more spontaneous though with me, because I've not really worked at it.
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But yes, it has gone through our family and even on my mom's
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side a little bit too. My aunt was pretty psychic, my aunt Gloria,
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my mom's sister, and my mom to some degree, I would say
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too. But I think it just in people. It varies the level of
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ability. And then the other part of it is do they work to develop
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it or not. Which of the Claires did your family share? Oh?
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Boy? Well, I think for my dad it was a cross section of
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Claire, williance, Claire, audience, telepathy. It was all of them,
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and I think that's what made his ability so strong. For I would
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say for the others, I can't really say, because I don't know that
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I asked my grandmother about that specifically. For I can tell you for me,
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when I've had it happen, it's really two different things. I would
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say, it's Claire Wallance. For sure, I have to close my eyes.
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I'll give you an example, and this one's more personal. So really,
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even before after my son Brandon passed, before I contacted my uncle,
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the first thing I did was I wanted a direct connection with my son.
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So I went into a darkened room which is actually my walking closet, shut
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the door, and then just tried to quietly meditate. So my mind went
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pretty blank, and I the first thing I visualized, kind of in my
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mind's eye was my son brand and glowing like smiling, happy, but with
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a glow around him. And then right after that was a symbol which was
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a cross with an over loop at the top. At the time, I'd
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seen those, but I didn't know what they meant, So being somewhat analytical,
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I had to then go to Google type in you know, across with
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oval loop atop to find out that that's an AUNC, which is the oldest
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cross of human history, tied to the Egyptians, probably five thousand years old
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or thereabouts, with the lower portion of the cross representing physical life and the
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oval loop representing internal life. So what I got there was kind of a
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coded message that my son still existed and was happy and joyful. Had I
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already known what that symbol meant, then I could have second guessed it and
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said, well, that's my subconscious trying to comfort me. Now. In
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addition, I'd say, I guess you could call this Claire audience. I'm
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not really sure. I think the mediums I've interviewed who are Claire audience,
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very few of them actually here in an auditory way through theirs. Some of
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them will hear in their mind, and some will just have like an idea
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pop in. So a few years ago, for a three year stint,
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I was speaking at this church in San Francisco is called the Goldigate Spiritualist Church,
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who was founded in nineteen twenty four by a woman named Florence Becker,
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who, by all accounts was similar to my father in abilities. She passed
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and I believe nineteen seventy. And when I did these talks over this three
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year stint, I was accompanied by Tina Powers, a really good medium friend
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from Tucson. So this one of those trips Tina was saying to me,
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Mark, I think you're going to get a message, will you share it
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with the congregation and I said, well, sure, if I get something,
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I'll share it, And so she kept bugging me about this. So
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you promised to share it? Yes, I promise, And even the day
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walking into the church, she's like, Mark, if you get a message,
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will you share it. I'm like yes. So we're about thirty minutes
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early. I go sit down in their healing room. I sit on a
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bench for a piano or an organ, and I tried to quiet my mind
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and actually I'm able to get it like totally blank, which is pretty rare
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for me, much like the other experience I just described. But it's blank.
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I'm just sitting there, relaxing, trying to prep you know, just
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not quiet my mind before the talk. But all of a sudden, the
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name pops into my mind. Max And then immediately after Maxine, I thought,
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oh maybe it's Maxine or not Max. Now I didn't hear it,
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I didn't see it. It came to me like an idea would come to
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you or a memory would come to you. That's it. It just just
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popped in. So when it was my turn to talk, I gave the
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talk and then at the end I said, Tina made me promise to share
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anything I might get so I have to ask if the name is Max or
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Maxine mean anything to anyone here, and the pastor of the church is jaw
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dropped, and he said, well, Max and Maxine were twins that were
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born to the church founder of Florence Becker. They were delivered stillborn and grew
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up in spirit. He said that only a few people long term church members
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know this, and then he took me upstairs afterward to show me a painting
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that I believe is done by Florence Beckert. Was a landscape with a whining
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road and two little figures at the end. He says, that's Max and
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Maxine. So first, now you know, in hindsight, I could say,
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now I know why Tina pushed me so hard to say that, because
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the way it came to me was so subtle that I could have just dismissed
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it as my imagination and gone on. But to have not one, but
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two names that aren't that common, you know, together was pretty long odds.
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So that's how it worked for me. So I would say, I
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guess you could call that clare audience. Even though I didn't hear anything,
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it just popped in. Maybe it would be telepathy telepathy with a deceased In
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nineteen seventy five, I was in the Air Force. I was stationed in
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Korea, and one morning I woke up and I heard in my head,
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and this is the way I get it. I get clare audience, but
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I don't hear it a sound externally. I hear it within my head of
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voice. And it said, you have to call your mother back in New
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York or something wrong and she needs to hear from you. And whenever that
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voice would speak to me, I would always respond in kind. I learned
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to differentiate between the ego voice, which is the voice that sort of shouts
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at you, and the softer voice, the reassuring voice that says, this
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is what you really need to do. And so consequently I'd call back to
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New York, six thousand miles away. And in those days, we had,
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as you know, extension telephones, and my sister and mother picked up
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the phone simultaneously, and I said, Mom, what's wrong? And I
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heard my sister say, oh, my god, how did he find out?
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And it turned out that she was scheduled for major surgery the next day,
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and the voice told me to share with her that the surgery would be
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a complete success, she'd have a full recovery and everything would be fine.
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And I shared that with her. Obviously, everything that I said transpired,
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and that conversation, that call reassured her and made her feel really good.
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So that's one of the gifts of spirit that I'm grateful for, that the
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inner voice that has guided me at many different times during my life. I
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think that every human being, every sentient being, has within them capacity for
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some of these gifts. Do you Yeah, that was just like Socrates there,
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but that's also I'm not familiar with that story. Oh, just that
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he had a voice that always told him what to do and kept him out
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of trouble on the on the right path. Ah, I didn't love it.
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It's his damon, but which is not the same as a demon.
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But yeah, that he had a voice that always guided him to do what
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needed to be done to make the right decision. So yeah, but yeah,
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I do think that my dad felt that. I think everyone has this
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to some degree. The gifts are varied. I mean, some people maybe
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have healing gifts. Other people may have, you know, an intuition some
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and I think that this is broader too. Even like my dad felt the
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creative endeavors are closely related to some of these abilities, like music or art,
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so people that do those things that kind of opens them up more.
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I just think that in terms of intuition, psychic abilities, mediumship, there's
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kind of you have X amount of natural aptitude, and I think some have
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more than others, just like athletes, you know, some athletes are better
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than others. Others make it to the pros through hard work. They're not
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as talented or gifted, but they can still get there. So I view
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it as like there's people that are the very best, you know, and
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one of them that I know today is Gordon Smith, who's a medium out
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of Scotland's just phenomenal. He's the closest thing to my dad that I've seen.
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And then there are others that are very good. But I think his
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is a case of having a lot of natural aptitude but also really training and
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development and commitment to it. Back in my dad's day, you know,
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I think it was a different world and the people that were in that area
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through usually through spiritualism. Then now it's broader. Would you know, they
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didn't have smartphones, they didn't watch TV, they had a lot more quiet
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time and they were very dedicated. It took a lot of time and work
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to get to that point and meditation, you know, eventually my dad figured
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out two meditations at fifteen minutes of crack per day was really what worked for
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him. But I do think everybody has it to some degree. And even
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if you just use it to give yourself guidance, so you're not always seeking
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outwardly asking for reassurance or guidance someone to do. You can hear that still
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inner voice that guides you to making good decisions. There's something to that and
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I think it can benefit anyone absolutely. My guest is Mark Ireland. We're
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going to be talking about his new book, The Resistance of the Soul,
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Mediums, Spirit Visitations and After Life Communication. Mark, please share with our
22:42
listeners that can get your books and find out more about you. Yeah.
22:47
My website has links to all the places that sell it, including Amazon,
22:51
Barnes and Noble and others, and it's available in eleven countries on Amazon It.
22:56
My website is Mark Ireland author dot com that's marked with a K Ireland
23:00
like the country and author markirelandauthor dot com. And we'll be back with more
23:06
of Mark after these words on the own Times Radio network, The Cutting Edge
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of Conscious Radio ome Times Radio IOMFM. Ome Times Magazine is one of the
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leading online content providers of positivity, wellness and personal empowerment. A philanthropic organization,
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their net proceeds are finaled to support worldwide charity initiatives via Humanity Healing International.
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Through their commitment to creating community and providing conscious content, they aspire to
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uplift humanity on a global scale. Home Times co creating a more conscious lifestyle.
23:41
Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week is Mark Ireland. We're
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going to be talking about his new book, The Persistence of the Soul Mediums,
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Spirit Visitations and After Life Communication. Mark, tell us about your first
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book, Soul Shift. Yes, Soul Shift was really a recounting of the
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journey we talked about in the first segment, the journey I took after my
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son Brandon passed. It was kind of reintroducing myself to the field my father
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had been in that I always saw and grew up with. But I don't
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want to say I abandoned, but I wasn't really engaged in it for quite
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a few years. And what you know, I think the first part,
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I talk about Brandon, and you build tell people what he was like and
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what he was all about. Very good kid, good hearted, friendly towards
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people who aren't popular, and all that. Just an old soul, i'd
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say, you know, in terms of how you define people and what they're
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like. And so from there I talked about, you know, the day
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that they passed, and then some of the experiences that happened after that,
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and then my introduction to four top mediums, my engagement with an experiment at
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the University of Arizona who was testing mediums at the time. So I guess
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to get there, I'll give you a couple of tidbits. So early on,
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I think two weeks after Brandon passed, I went to an intuitive and
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one of the things she said was, I believe you're going to see Brandon
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at the side of your bed in about six months. So six months later,
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we did go on a cruise. So my wife and I we took
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our older son, Steven, and then we took Stu, who was Brandon's
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best friend. This was going to be Brandon's high school graduation gift to go
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on this cruise, but since he couldn't physically go with us. We took
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Stu the day that we got back. Now I guess before I jumped to
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that. Before we left the trip, we loan Brandon's bass guitar because Brandon
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was a bassist to a friend named James Linton. James was a musician,
25:41
guitar player, composer, singer, and he had an in home studio he
25:45
was recording some music and he asked if he could borrow the bass before we
25:48
left, and so we did loan it to him. And we'd met James
25:52
because he had actually been on the mountain the day Brandon passed. He had
25:56
come to the area where Brandon was laying on his back and wanted to help,
26:00
but he was too late. So he was really frustrated by that,
26:03
and he told me that he asked God, like, well, why do
26:06
you put me here in this situation? I can't even help this kid.
26:08
So we found him because he had written a response on an online obituary and
26:14
said that he had been there that day and if we wanted to reach out
26:18
to him, he gave his contact information. So anyhow we became friends.
26:21
We met him and became friends, and so this is again six months afterward,
26:26
after Brandon's passing, We go on the cruise, we come back the
26:29
day that we're Just as we get home, my wife is actually sitting at
26:33
the foot of our bed and she feels Brandon's presence and she sees a shadow
26:38
figure out of her peripheral vision that she knows is him. Now here's what
26:42
really makes the story even more compelling. The very next day, we get
26:47
a call from James Linton and he says, Susie, I've got something to
26:49
tell you, but I don't know how to tell you. And she's like,
26:52
well, she was afraid he'd broken the bass or something, but he
26:55
says, well, I was recording a song and while I was sitting there,
27:00
a presence in there with me, and I saw a shadow figure out
27:03
of my peripheral vision, and I saw flashes of white light, and I
27:07
thought I was hallucinating. So I went and got water, I got food,
27:10
I took a shower, but each time I came back it got stronger.
27:14
Now keep in mind, James didn't know about Susie's experience. He's just
27:18
telling his experience at this point. He then finally gave in and said,
27:22
okay, Brandon, what do you want? And he said at that point
27:26
he felt guided to redo the lyrics of this song and the bassline specifically,
27:32
and at the end of it, it ended up being a song called The
27:34
Other Side. He said, this is the best song I've ever written,
27:37
but I didn't write it, so that was pretty compelling. That was one
27:41
of the early experiences that happened. Another thing that kind of led me into
27:47
the path of meeting some of the researchers in the field, and I'm friends
27:49
with a few of them. Now I know a few of them as well
27:52
as the top mediums. Going back to just three weeks after Brandon's passing,
27:57
I was watching my news clip on the NBC affiliate in Phoenix about a research
28:03
study being done at the University of Arizona, you know, one of the
28:06
few that would actually look into mediumship or psychic phenomena. And what they had
28:11
going on there was they had a medium who was little known at the time
28:14
but later became a big name, Alison Dubois, because of the show Medium.
28:18
She was being tested with some test sitters. Now sitters are the people
28:23
who received the reading, and she couldn't see them visually, and she couldn't
28:29
and they couldn't talk to her, but a third party of proxy was asking
28:32
her questions and she was doing really well, it appeared. And then at
28:37
the end they debriefed with the sitters, and I was really impressed because there
28:41
was a lot of specific information, not just generalities, but specific information pertaining
28:45
to people who had passed that were close to the sitters, and a thing,
28:49
you know, characteristics about them, what they liked to do, where
28:52
they like to go, all these kinds of things that were all validated.
28:56
And I thought to myself, cheese, I'd love to get a reading from
28:59
her someday, and I'd love to be a sitter in that lab. Well.
29:02
The very next day, I get a call from a man named Jerry
29:04
Concer, who had been a close friend of my father's, and Jerry says
29:08
to me, Hey, Mark, I know what you've been through, and
29:11
I know someone who might be able to help you. Her name's Alison Dubois
29:15
and here's the phoneum, you can call to get a reading from her.
29:18
So that seemed rather synchronistic to me, like my dad was trying to help
29:22
out from the other side. So I did eventually get that reading, and
29:26
then a year later I was in that lab as well. As a test
29:30
sitter with another medium, Lori Campbell. But I did go on and have
29:34
a series of readings with Alison, with a man named Jamie Clark, with
29:38
a prominent English medium Linda Williamson, and then finally with Lori Campbell in the
29:44
lab. So I chronicle all these different things that happened. There's a lot
29:48
of synchronicity, there's a lot of validations in the readings, and a lot
29:53
of the information overlapped. There was consistency there too, So it was that's
30:00
that's kind of the long and short of what Soul Shift was about. It
30:03
was a memoir, you know, a personal journey that really brought me to
30:08
a place of greater peace and understanding. And then subsequently, I know the
30:14
book has been helped really healing for a lot of folks around the world.
30:17
I've even had people write to me and say they had contemplated taking their own
30:22
life, read the book and then decided not to. They felt more hopeful
30:26
and saw a purpose in life at that point, and that you know,
30:30
they're better off not doing that. And what inspired your new book, The
30:36
Persistence of the Soul. So this, you know, it's really a blend
30:41
of two things. I wanted to write a more scholarly book because I wanted
30:45
to address some of these issues, like extreme skepticism, which is really the
30:51
debunker type of skepticism, which isn't open minded skepticism. It's not really skepticism
30:56
at all, because skepticism is supposed to be an open minded inquiry, inquiry
31:00
to determine truth or following the evidence, so I wanted to address that.
31:07
I also know that there were a lot of folks in more fundamentalist religious back
31:12
with more fundamentalist religious backgrounds who have a problem with these phenomena and are afraid
31:19
of them because of maybe what they've been told or just traditional thinking within their
31:25
churches. So I wanted to dive deeper and address that through looking at scripture
31:30
and working through that. But I also wanted to keep the personal stories going
31:33
too, like I had with Soul Shift. So it's a combination of two
31:36
things. So it's really almost like two books in one. It's intended to
31:41
be educational, so I'm giving personal stories and examples of various phenomena supportive of
31:45
the idea that we do that our personality, our soul survives physical death.
31:52
But then also the history and the science to support it where possible. So
31:56
I go back and talk about the early cases through the Society of Psychical Research
32:00
and some of the best evidence for this over the years. I'm mingled with
32:07
my personal experiences. I talk in there. I detail an experiment that I
32:13
did with my sister Robin before her passing. I have a chapter touching on
32:20
reincarnation as an issue. I interview two psychic mediums too, because a lot
32:24
of people, if they get a reading or they hear psychic medium talk about
32:29
their experiences. The medium may say, oh, I see this or I'm
32:31
being told this, but really, what does that mean? What's the experience
32:36
like? So I dive deeper into that to get that firsthand experience from them,
32:39
like, well, what is this when you say you heard from spirit
32:43
or you saw spirit? What does that mean for you? So I get
32:45
into that. So it's kind of a cross section of a scholarly book and
32:51
a book of personal experiences. So if someone is more just I don't care
32:54
about the science, I just want to read the stories, they can they
32:59
can skip just to those parts. Conversely, if someone's more just interested in
33:02
the science and the scholarly part of it, they could just read that and
33:07
some people want to read it all. So that's really where that book came
33:10
from. And I've had some really good endorsements from a number of people in
33:15
the field, Stanley Kripner, who's been a parapsychologist for quite a few decades,
33:22
Larry Dacy, Alison did Wagho, I mentioned earlier, the late guy
33:25
Lion Playfair who was with the spr and a number of others. So that's
33:34
what that book's about. You had mentioned that experiment you conducted with your younger
33:37
sister. Can you explain that process without giving away the outcome? Sure,
33:42
be happy to. So my sister been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which metastasize to
33:47
her liver. She had a finite period of time to be here on the
33:51
earth in a physical body, probably a year or less. So as we
33:55
were getting closer to the end, she was in hospice care and I I
34:00
was thinking about, you know, is there something we could do to help
34:02
people have more confidence that life goes on after, you know, physical death.
34:07
So I thought about what kind of experiment we could do, and I
34:12
kind of went back to the Houdini code. Now, a lot of people
34:15
may or may not know this, But Harry Houdini was a debunker or tried
34:19
to debunk mediums, but at the same time he must have had some measure
34:22
of believer in him because he wanted to do an experiment by leaving a secret
34:29
code with his wife Beatrice before he died, and he told her that if
34:34
anyone should give you this phrase, that you'll know it's me and that I've
34:37
made it, I still exist. And anyhow, after that, after his
34:45
death, the mediam Arthur Ford actually did deliver that phrase to her. But
34:51
then skeptics came out of the woodwork, claiming that they must have been in
34:54
cahoots together and they just wanted the publicity or some said it was a and
35:00
knowledge what the phrase was. So all this stuff kind of blew it up.
35:02
And if you were to google this today, it would say that it's
35:06
never been solved. But in fact it was solved. But the you know,
35:09
the the the debunker types got a hold of it and basically convinced people
35:15
that it never was solved. So I asked myself, well, what was
35:19
wrong with his methodology? Why was it why was he you know, why
35:22
did they come after him, and why didn't it hold up strong, and
35:25
I thought to myself, really, because any living person knew what the phrase
35:30
was, so they could allege that they had, you know, the person
35:32
that had spilled the beans. So I thought to myself, well, a
35:37
better way to do this is to have my sister write a phrase or a
35:39
message of some sort and then put it into a sealed envelope where no one
35:44
knows what it is except for her. And that's what we did. And
35:47
then I consulted a doctor, Don Watson. He's since passed two, but
35:52
he was a neuroscientist who was very interested in these type of phenomena and he
35:57
helped me devise kind of an experimental not to try and pull this off.
36:01
And we reached out to a number of mediums, told them about that and
36:06
asked who would like to participate, and then we started getting responses and we
36:09
put those together and categorized them, and then, you know, further down,
36:13
we eventually opened the envelope. He had asked me to send him the
36:16
envelope so that I would never be implicated as having peaked at it or anything
36:21
like that. So he got the envelope immediately it was it was unsealed.
36:24
My sister wrote on the outside, she initialed it and when we opened it,
36:30
then we compared all the responses to it. So it was a It
36:32
was an interesting process, and I think it could also give people ideas for
36:37
other forms of types of experiments that could be done along these lines. And
36:43
there's a learning I think whenever you do something like this for how it could
36:45
even be further enhanced. What explains the debunker mentality? Why did the bunkers
36:52
want a debunk? In my view, it's it's because of their worldview.
36:57
They're married to a physicalist, realistic paradigm that's been perpetuated in academia for a
37:04
long long time. It really goes back to I think the split between religion
37:07
and science back at a time when science was being scientists were being persecuted by
37:12
the church, so that caused that split, and then there's never been a
37:15
reconciliation. And unfortunately a lot of those folks equate religion and spiritual spirituality with
37:22
religion is one and the same, and they're not necessarily the same. And
37:30
I think it's also comes out of a sense of arrogance, kind of like,
37:32
oh, I'm in we're intellectually superior because we don't believe in all this
37:37
wu woo stuff, and it's a shame because really we should be doing more
37:42
research into this this field. And there are some organizations in the universites that
37:46
do, which I applaud them, but I think we need a lot more.
37:50
I mean, there's all kinds of research being done and things and spending
37:53
our tax dollars on that aren't really that important to people. I don't know
37:57
of any subject matter that's really any more important than you know, Who are
38:00
we? Why are we here? Where do we go after we die?
38:04
Right? We talk about the survival of consciousness and personality, and then we
38:08
also talk about reincarnation. Is there a point where that communication with the consciousness
38:15
and personality that is, the soul, the spirit, whatever you'd like to
38:17
call it, goes on and can no longer be contacted. Yeah, this
38:22
is speculative on my part because I can't say that I know the answer.
38:27
I think I kind of answered this in one of two ways, or two
38:29
possibilities. One. I've heard a theory that implies that part of us,
38:35
maybe our over soul or the main part of us, is never It's always
38:38
on the other side, it never comes here. We're like a subset of
38:44
that soul here for physical experiences in a physical world, and we're like,
38:51
there's a feedback loop there that goes to our real soul, our eternal soul,
38:57
and that's always there. It's it's it's fully gone if you will,
39:01
or coming over here back and forth. The other thing is that, you
39:06
know, I think the duration of time on the other side in between incarnations
39:10
may vary widely, and perhaps maybe you're not coming back right away. On
39:16
my dad, it felt like there were cases, many cases where people might
39:20
be on the other side for what would be we would consider on this side
39:22
one hundred years or thereabouts. I know other folks feel like reincarnation can happen
39:28
very rapidly, So I don't really know the answer to that, but I've
39:32
not seen cases. I've seen very few cases where someone couldn't be contacted or
39:38
couldn't communicate through a really top medium. So I'm kind of mixed on which
39:45
view I take. Maybe the former, I might lean to it a little
39:49
more than the latter. Absolutely. My mother passed in January of twenty twenty,
39:54
and after she passed, I started seeing these visions of circles and rings
39:58
in my mind's eye, and this poem came through me. May I share
40:01
this with you? Sure, I'd love to hear it. It's called Circles
40:05
and Rings, the path of great beauty and so many things, from atoms
40:09
to galaxies, circles and rings, natural wisdom that dwells there within from not
40:15
to three sixty, that magical spin. We circle each other in Gravity's dance,
40:22
as Guy a circle soul, the solar romance as Luna circles us in
40:27
life giving motion, drawing the tides and inner emotion. And the age of
40:31
the oak is found in its rings, as in woman and man and all
40:36
living things. And when the rings stop and life comes to an end,
40:40
we'll all circle back and dance once again. You know what's really interesting about
40:49
that? It's wonderful, beautiful. There's a friend of mine who lives in
40:53
New York, Colum Dor, and he's also an author, and he was
40:58
friends with and mentored by another psychic medium, Clifford Bias, who was friends
41:04
with my dad. I think my dad actually introduced them, but Colin told
41:08
me that Clifford had told when Clifford was near dying, I think he said,
41:14
we shall dance again. That's wonderful that cons that confirms the sense that
41:21
I had. That's wonderful. My guest is Mark Ireland, his book The
41:27
Persistence of the Soul Mediums, Spirit Visitations and Afterlife Communication. We'll be back
41:31
with more after these words on the Old Times Radio Network. Humanity Healing International
41:38
is a small nonprofit with a big dream. Since two thousand and seven,
41:44
HHI has been working tirelessly to bring help to communities with little or no oh.
41:50
Our projects are not broad mandates, nor are they overnight solutions, but
41:54
they bring the reassurance then no one is alone and that someone cares to learn
42:00
more. Please visit Humanity Healing dot org. Humanity Healing is where your heart
42:06
is. Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week is Mark Ireland,
42:12
his book The Persistence of the Soul Mediums, Spirit Visitations and After Life Communication.
42:20
Mark, why did you start a medium certification program? Well after my
42:24
first book came out, I was kind of being barraged with people asking for
42:30
recommendations for mediums, for good mediums, and what I'm talking about are evidential
42:34
mediums, ones that just don't tell you your grandmother loves you and things like
42:39
that, but provides detailed information and So anyhow, as a result of that,
42:45
I knew at that point just maybe a half dozen people that were really
42:50
good, but a lot of them were celebrities at that point had long wait
42:53
lists, some up to two years, and some charged more. You know,
42:58
I'm not going to judge people what they charge. It's great for some
43:01
people to not charge anything or charge very little, and others charge more.
43:05
But you know, some of those folks quit careers too in the business world
43:09
just to support themselves so they could do it full time. But I thought,
43:14
well, it would be nice to make it accessible to more people.
43:17
So I thought, you know, there must be other folks out there with
43:21
these abilities that are refined that just aren't well known and don't charge a lot
43:25
and don't have long wait lists. So I put together a plan to develop
43:31
protocols and have a program to test mediums and have them earned certification. And
43:38
to that end, I participated in a mediumship research project or experiment with a
43:46
doctor Emily Williams Kelly at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. That's
43:52
the same department that was founded by doctor Ian Stevenson, who is a reincarnation
43:58
researcher and Grayson works there as well. Primarily has been focused on your death
44:04
experience phenomena. Jim Tucker now have picked up the picked up where Ian Stevenson
44:09
left off on the reincarnation research. But anyhow, through the process of working
44:15
on this experiment, a mediumship experiment with doctor Kelly, I learned what her
44:21
protocols were, so I kind of use those as a guideline. And then
44:24
another friend of mine, Tricia Robertson, who had been the president of the
44:28
Scottish Society of Psychical Research, helped me kind of refine those and so what
44:32
I ended up putting together was a process of where any applicant has to conduct
44:38
five blinded readings via zoom with no video on for someone they don't know.
44:45
The sitter the recipient of the reading would provide their first name only at the
44:52
beginning and again no video. They can't turn video on later but not in
44:57
the beginning. And then the the medium has to give the reading for about
45:01
the first ten minutes, they just give whatever impressions come, and then if
45:06
the sitter wants they can ask for a connection with a specific first name only.
45:10
So this is all recorded, and then at the end the sitter is
45:15
charged with transcribing it and then grading it. And the way that works is
45:20
the sitter will have to take see if there's a paragraph worth of information,
45:24
they need to break that into individual statements that can be validated as correct,
45:30
incorrect, or indeterminable. And if something's correct and it's highly significant to the
45:36
sitter, they can award bonus points. And there's two levels of that.
45:40
There's a two point bonus and a five point bonus. So, for example,
45:44
let's say the medium says that the sitter, I believe I have your
45:47
son here. His name starts with an A, and I think his favorite
45:52
food is pizza. The sitter might say, okay, well, those three
45:58
things are correct. My son passed. His name was Aaron, so that's
46:01
an A and ame that's good, and pizza was his favorite food. So
46:06
maybe they'd say, okay, that's pretty good. I'm going to give a
46:08
bonus point for the pizza and for the A name. But if the medium
46:13
says, I believe I have your son here, his name is Aaron and
46:15
he liked pizza with anchovies, black olives, and green peppers, that's highly
46:22
specific, and then the sitter would probably not only call those correct, but
46:25
give five point bonuses for those two statements, So that kind of gives you
46:30
a feel for how it works. But at the end of the day,
46:31
once the once the five are conducted, it's the overall result that the passing
46:38
requirements are to have a score of seventy five or better as a minimum,
46:43
and what that consists of is the percent accuracy is part of the number.
46:46
So in other words, sixty five percent is the minimum that one can.
46:52
They have to be at least sixty five percent accurate to pass, and then
46:57
with enough bonus points they could hit seventy five. So for example, let's
47:00
say somebody was sixty five percent accurate and they had two five point bonuses and
47:05
they got seventy five points, they would pass just barely, but that would
47:07
be a passing grade. Or someone seventy five or seventy six percent accurate with
47:13
no bonuses they could pass as well. Now the indeterminable statements get pushed to
47:17
the side. Those would be things like predictions of things that haven't passed yet,
47:22
or maybe a piece of information that citer can't determine. Maybe it was
47:25
pertaining to someone that their loved one knew in Europe, or whatever, and
47:30
they have no contact information for the person, so they can't validate the statement.
47:35
But I limit the indeterminables to thirty three percent of all statements. If
47:39
somebody exceeds that, then to me, it's really not a good reading.
47:43
So anyone, any of those over thirty three percent get cast into the incorrect
47:47
bucket. And today this is you know, I started this in twenty fourteen,
47:52
so nine and a half years later, I've got about forty people who
47:55
have been certified, and some really good ones. I mean some have scored
47:59
in the ninety five to ninety eight percent range, or not percent, but
48:02
ninety five to ninety eight point range, and some with accuracies, you know,
48:07
in the high eighties to low nineties too. So and then I've done
48:13
this all on my own. It's I don't make any money from it.
48:15
I don't collect the dime. It's just linking. It's a public service thing,
48:20
linking resources to people who need them so that folks can go to a
48:24
credible source. There's no guarantee that they're going to get a good reading,
48:29
but the odds are greatly improved, and they're going to somebody who's trustworthy.
48:32
And most of these mediums too. If they if a consider gets a substandard
48:37
reading, they'll they'll get a refund if they ask for it. So that's
48:42
that's really why it's there. Please tell us about the Helping Parents Heal HPH
48:49
organization and how it was founded. Sure, so the way it came together
48:55
was back in in two thousand and nine, two thousand and ten, I
49:00
was promoting my first book and I was doing some workshops and this particular workshop,
49:07
we had a break and a woman approached me during the break and she
49:09
said, Hey, I'm Susanne Wilson. I just moved from Florida to Arizona
49:15
and I came here to meet like minded people. And in the course of
49:20
what she was describing to me, she goes, you know, interestingly,
49:22
I met another mother whose son had passed on a mountain. It was in
49:27
the Himalayas that he was on a school trip and they had apparently taken the
49:30
bus up the mountain two rapidly and he ended up dying of altitude sickness.
49:37
But she told me about this other mother, and apparently the way she came
49:42
to meet her was rather interesting because she was trying to rent office space so
49:45
she could have clients come in there. And then the landlord didn't really know
49:51
what a medium was or whether it was believable, so she put her through
49:53
a test, and the test was one where the landlord showed a car like
50:00
a greeting card, a holiday or Christmas card to Suzanne and said, tell
50:05
me something about the people on this and the card really featured three young people,
50:09
two girls and a boy or young adults on there. Well, it
50:15
was the young man who had passed. She didn't know that, but she
50:19
said, well, this young man, I feel his presence. And then
50:23
she shared a number of validations that were pretty interesting, one of which was
50:28
she saw him with a blowhorn. Another a big teddy bear. Well,
50:34
it turned out that the son, Morgan, had been a cheerleader for the
50:38
University of Arizona football team, and he used a blowhorn and the cheerleaders called
50:45
him big Bear because of his big bear hugs. So the big teddy bear,
50:47
you know, made sense. There there were probably half a dozen or
50:52
more validations like that. Those are the ones I remember. Anyhow, So
50:57
I told Suzanne, I said, you know what, here's a copy of
51:00
my book. Why don't you give this to the mother who had the son
51:04
pass and here's my contact information. So it was no more than a day
51:07
or two later I got a call from Elizabeth Boyson, who's now a president
51:12
of Helping Parents Heal, and she said, I read your book in one
51:15
sitting. I want to meet you and your wife. And so we did
51:20
meet really soon and thereafter and she says, well, I started a group
51:23
called Parents United in Loss on Facebook, but I'm going to have my first
51:29
ever in person meeting. Would you like to be my first speaker? And
51:32
I said, okay, sure. So a while later we went to this
51:37
meeting. I think she drew maybe thirty or forty people something like that.
51:39
It went really well and I could see that was very therapeutic for people.
51:45
And then she started doing these meetings every month. Fast forward to late twenty
51:49
eleven. I was leaving a corporate job and talking to my friend Tina Powers,
51:52
who I had mentioned earlier in the interview. And Tina said to me,
51:55
Mark, I think your real purpose in life is to help other parents
52:00
who have been through the same thing you have, have you, why don't
52:02
you think about if you could start some sort of organization to do that.
52:07
I said, okay. So I was mulling it over, and I thought,
52:09
you know what, why reinvent the wheel. You know what Elizabeth put
52:12
together works. The only limitation is that it's just one location and she doesn't
52:16
have a website, she doesn't have a newsletter. So I thought to approach
52:22
her. I called her and said, hey, Tina, gave me this
52:23
feedback and I think she's onto something here. Would you like to partner with
52:28
me and kind of blow this thing out and make it something bigger where we
52:30
could blueprint what your process is and take it out to other locations, other
52:37
cities and have more of these types of meetings. And also I'll help put
52:43
a website together and we'll start a newsletter. And she said that'd be great.
52:46
And I said, and maybe we could use a new name, like
52:50
Helping Parents Heal. She says, I love that name. I didn't like
52:52
my name Parents United and Loss. It sounded too depressing. And the reason
52:58
why we really started this was because there have been and still are other parents
53:04
support groups for grieving parents, but they don't allow the discussion of afterlife evidence
53:08
or spiritual experiences. So that was our differentiator. And now fast forward to
53:15
twenty twenty three, we have one hundred and seventy six affiliate chapters around the
53:20
world. We have twenty six thousand members, and we will have our third
53:24
conference in twenty twenty four in August that will draw a thousand people. We
53:30
had one last year that drew nine hundred sold out the hotel, and interestingly,
53:37
the hotel staff were really concerned about having a group of Berief parents there.
53:40
They were afraid that it was going to be a real downer and depressing.
53:44
And at the end of it, they said, you were the best
53:45
group we've ever had, and it was so uplifting. I had half a
53:50
dozen people approach me and say thank you so much. No I don know
53:52
if they're talking about my books or about the organization, but they said you
53:57
saved my life. And that kept happening again and again and again. I
54:01
just saw people that were in a really dark place when they got there,
54:05
that were really uplifted and quite frankly, there's a lot more participation of this
54:08
of women than men. But since we had this conference, the women brought
54:14
their husbands, so a lot of the husbands were exposed to things that they
54:16
hadn't considered before, and they got some healing out of it too. And
54:21
we really have some top notch presenters there too. We had Mark Anthony,
54:25
Suzanne Geeseman. This next one we're still going to have those two, plus
54:30
we're going to have Gordon Smith back, Suzanne Wilson, doctor Mary Neil and
54:38
a lot of other people, really really good lineup. So that's what started
54:43
with this little nugget to this massive organization today that's really providing a lot of
54:47
healing for folks around the world. The wonderful work of Mark Ireland, his
54:52
latest book, The Persistence of the Sole Mediums, Spirit Visitations and Afterlife Communication.
54:59
Mark more time, please tell our listeners where they can get your books
55:01
and find out more about this wonderful work. Yeah, if you just go
55:05
to my website, it's Mark Ireland author dot com, mark with a ka
55:09
Ireland like the country author, Mark Ireland author dot com. Not only will
55:15
you find my books there, I have a media tab and you could see
55:17
other interviews. You could see the clip of the Discovery Channel show when I
55:22
was at the University of Arizona participating in a research study. There you could
55:28
see a short documentary that was done on my story. There is a link
55:32
on my page to the Helping Parents Heal website. There's also a link to
55:37
see the video of my dad on the Steve Allen Show back in nineteen seventy
55:40
one and some other clips of him as well, and then there's also a
55:45
link to the Certified Medium site, so everything is there that you might want
55:50
that we've talked about today, Mark Ireland author dot com. Mark, thank
55:53
you so much for joining us and sharing this very special message. Sure thing
55:58
that there's been my pleasure and thank you for joining us on Destination Unlimited.
56:02
I'm Victor the Voice Firman. Have a wonderful week.