Spirits Terri and I were together for ten years, we married on May 16th 2016 but, tragically, she passed away on June 16th. Terri and I were very close; in those ten years we didn’t have a single argument. I have lost Terri physically but I haven’t lost her spirit: I sense both Terri’s internal spirit (within me) and her external spirit (outside of me). The Internal Spirit When we touch, feel, hear, or see something, the place we feel, hear or see is not in our skin, ears or eyes, as our senses tell us, but in part of our brain – although the brain tricks us into thinking otherwise. So all my experiences of Terri, my sensations of her, what I saw, felt, heard or touched – as well as the emotions I had about her – occurred in my brain, residing there still in my memories. If we are close to someone – and Terri and I are indeed close – then those experiences and memories of the other person form an entity, a discrete network of neural pathways if you like, that are uniquely them: in a sense their spirit within us. Terri’s spirit is definitely still here within me, in my mind. Similarly, Terri’s sense of me, my spirit, is also within her. Just as our experiences of others are felt within us, so our experiences of ourselves are also within us, in our brains or minds, as a discrete entity called ‘self’ or ‘self awareness’ – our own spirit within us. My own sense of myself is within me, just as Terri’s sense of herself is within her, so Terri and I have four spirits between us: one each of ourselves and one each of each other. The External Spirit The big question for me is, what happens when someone dies so that their corporeal being, specifically their brain, is no longer capable of containing their own spirit within them (also, if we are close to them, our spirit within them)? I used to think that the spirit within or mind, just evaporated, just as the electrical memories (RAM) in a computer disappear when it is switched off. However, it is possible to store the ‘dead’ machine’s memories in physical form on a hard disk, removable memory or in ‘the cloud’. Most people will reject this thought as ‘wishful thinking’ but I believe there is indeed a natural ‘cloud’ out there in the form of another world where our own spirit within us may be stored. One theory is that every moment in time still exists but, because our minds are trapped on a constantly moving sense of going forward – time - we cannot access the past. I think that if the conditions are right then we can indeed connect not only with the past but with the continuing spirit of another person. Connecting with Spirits All my life I have been plagued by the terrors of evil spirits so much that I was an unhappy, fearful child, always on edge with fear and anxiety. At an early age I was encouraged to exploit this ‘gift’ but, on the contrary, I have, until now, seen it as a dreadful affliction, pushing it away, just enduring the occasional horrors. I always leave the room when there is an attempt to contact spirits in any way because, if I am not very careful, it ‘opens the door’ to the evil side of that other world. It was fairly recently that I first encountered a partly-benign spirit. It was a woman: when I saw her I was amazed that for the first time had no fear. However, although the woman accepted my coming into the building, she turned extremely hostile as I prepared to leave for any length of time (the opposite to my expectation), such that I would be in a panic by the time I closed the front door. The woman is also hostile to other women. The partly-benign experience compares with that of the utterly hostile spirit in my father’s bungalow. After I had visited my father in hospital, I went to his bungalow with the intention of staying the night. However, as soon as I opened the door I was assailed by an extraordinarily powerful, hostile, angry, violent presence. It was not my father. I ran back to the door in a ‘blind’ panic, shut it quickly then fled to a nearby (not too near) hotel. After my father died, Terri did feel his presence in the bungalow: she felt him run his fingers through her hair but there was no hostility. Terri is the daughter my parents always wanted (not me, the second son) so the tenderness is understandable. It was with considerable fear and trepidation that I returned to the lodge where Terri had passed away – I was again on the verge of panic. At first Terri didn’t visit me there or at the flat; I guess because she knew it would ‘spook’ me. Instead, Terri usually comes to me when I am outside, usually in places we have been together, although once she came to me when I was walking in the street in Plymouth. I feel nothing but calm when I sense Terri’s presence: we love one another so why should she want to harm me? I talk to Terri every day, including when I go to bed: I put on her marriage-ring and three of her other little rings that I keep around my neck. I don’t see Terri as a full-blooded person as before: I see her vaguely – in different strengths at different times - sometimes not in human form at all, as if she is having difficulty breaking through a barrier between the other world cloud and this world. Usually, Terri’s words are unclear or cryptic – such as when she said, “Sleep the sleep of the innocent, Brian”: I had never heard that before; I still don’t know what it means. Connection is difficult, communication often hard to interpret. I conclude that if we are so close to someone that the four spirits:- their external spirit outside of us; their internal spirit within us, our spirit within them and our own spirit within us are all in harmony, then we can connect. Perhaps that connection depends on the sensitivity of one of both of the parties to ‘break through’ to and from the other world ‘cloud’. Laugh at me and call it wishful thinking and imagination if you like; but do bear in mind that for 70 of my 71 years, ‘wishful thinking’ would have been for no communication. We won’t know until we either do or don’t know. Brian Rayden March 2017