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"John," the voice on the phone said, "I have some very bad news." My best friend George Sebastian Viguet III (pronounced "Vee-gay") had died that day of a massive heart attack in Huntsville, Alabama, his wife informed me. Born in White Castle, Louisiana on January 24th, 1947, he was a vibrant, young man of 40 when his life ended suddenly that Monday morning at 9:30 A.M. on November 9th, 1987, as officially noted on the Certificate of Death. In fact, George drew his last breath in the medical clinic of his family physician located right next door to Huntsville Hospital. So you couldn't ask for a better location to have a cardiac crisis nor a better set of circumstances. That is, as I learned, he drove himself there on the way to his office because he was not feeling well. He had hoped to merely get some medicine and be on his way again. However as fate would have it, that was not in the cards for while being examined by the family doctor the worst possible scenario unfolded; his heart suddenly exploded. Thus all attempts to resuscitate him failed. I had known George for 18 years. We had met in 1969 as soldiers stationed at the U.S. Army Missile and Munitions Center and School, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Along with a few dozen other men undergoing highly-specialized training in computers, electronics, and missilery, we were assigned to the same select military unit, the 116th Ordnance Detachment that had transferred from Fort Riley, Kansas.
Our specific outfit was preparing for deployment as a one-of-a-kind
missile support team to West Germany at the apex of the Cold War. Indeed I was really looking forward to this "field trip" of sorts, too, as I had studied the German language, culture, and history for 3 years while at Central Kitsap High School in Silverdale, Washington. Upon hindsight, or a past-life memory, it was as if I knew subconsciously that I was going to use that knowledge, again.
From Grits and Gravy to Bratwurst and Beer Going overseas on a military assignment is a gut-wrenching experience. There is no greater trauma to a young, newly-married soldier especially than to be involuntarily torn from your loved ones' arms, in my opinion. A civilian has not a clue how difficult a task that is to do. So, of course, that day is forever etched into my mind and heart some 35-years later.
Notwithstanding, we were gratefully bussed down to Nuernberg a few hours to the southeast along the Czechoslovakia border, finally settling into our new living quarters at Merrell Barracks late that evening totally exhausted. I slept like the proverbial log that night oblivious to my stark surroundings. But in the morning I awoke to find myself within a massive, multi-story concrete block structure with bullet-holes visible on the walls. These combat remnants we learned were the calling cards left behind by Allied GIs who captured it from the former Nazi SS occupants in 1945. No doubt if we were in the USA's fashionable mind-set today, we would have seen this sign displayed on a soldier's door somewhere: "Martha Stewart Does Not Live Here!" Whatever the case, the single guys were stuck here for the duration of their tour of duty. In contrast, we married guys began counting the days until our wives would arrive "in country," so we could live downtown like German civilians. I wanted out of here as soon as possible as I did not fit in with this foot-loose and fancy-free single crowd at all anymore.
To digress a moment, George married Kathy, and I, Connie, a couple months
before we had to ship out and so those days of separation were tortuous
for us as I recall. But our wives arrived on April 10th, 1970 on a chartered
flight out of New York City, We likewise partied in our local German villages at every opportunity. A smile comes to my face as I recall us swaying back and forth with our liter-sized beer steins in synch to the native music being played in those big circus-like tents at the Folks Festivals. I loved the yodeling songs and the spirited "Chicken Dance" and the food that added so much joy to these celebrations. These are fond memories for a big eater like me but they ended abruptly on May 7th, 1971 to be exact. For Connie and I returned to Alabama, where her parents lived and I was accepted to attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville under the GI Bill, as did George and Kathy a few months later by the way. Initially I began my collegiate studies in electronics engineering but George, on the other hand, pursued a rigorous curriculum in physics, graduating with honors. This guy was born to be a scientist: He was very bright and very introverted. In fact, I was one of the few persons George felt comfortable talking to about non-technical matters, conversations held late at night usually over cold beer and hotly contested chess games. From these exchanges, I knew that George believed that when you were dead, you were dead and gone, period. That was it, game over.
Where in the world - or out of this world - is the "soul" of George right now at this very minute? I sincerely wanted to know the truth. This desperate heartfelt plea paid dividends, as George was not dead!
Talking Telepathically with the Dead Although, initially, it was his clothing that really got my undivided attention because George was wearing a brightly-colored, short-sleeved Hawaiian luau shirt with a white beachcomber hat on his head. This was no dream and I stared at my friend like a deer caught in halogen headlights.
George was really alive and now I had to deal with it. That was the tough part as my paradigm - model of reality - clearly did not fit talking to the dead even if we did survive death itself. What about going to heaven and all that jazz? Yet I was a science guy by training and temperament, too, and open-minded, so I started to piece the psychological and physiological facts together. This much I knew then: I had been in an altered state of mind, what I know now we call too casually the state of "trance," when I saw him. That is, suddenly I could see multi-dimensionally and communicate telepathically with George. But one of the most bizarre aspects to my experience that helped me validate it later as a bon a fide after-death communication was that I saw that George had a row of flattened metal beer cans stuffed inside his hat's headband. Now we were both avid beer drinkers at the time of his "death," so that in and of itself was not surprising, but upon deep reflection I grasped the significance to this seemingly comical imagery. This is what ultimately blew my mind: Months later I recollected what I had said to George while at the funeral home in Huntsville, Alabama - not aloud but in my mind. I had leaned over his casket to look him squarely in the face and then projected this thought attempting to alleviate the severity of the situation at least for me. I said mentally to him, "George, a joke is a joke, let's go get a beer!" To the point: George had heard me speak those words to him that day no doubt about it! Unequivocally, he was showing me symbolically by his colorful party attire and "the old beer cans in the hat band trick" that he was still very much alive and, equally, he was giving me a clue as to our own future psychic powers once we too reopen our third eye in era-2012.
In summary, I realize today that mind-to-mind communication - telepathy
- will become the common means of information exchange
© Dr. John Jay Harper, 2007 Extracted from Tranceformers: Shamans of the 21st Century (ISBN 0977790401; copyright 2006) and reprinted with permission of the author and Reality Press. Tranceformers is available online from Reality Press and Amazon.com. |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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THE
STORY YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IS TRUE.
Interestingly
enough, we were going to set-up our shop at one of Adolph Hitler's former
Nazi SS strongholds during WWII. It was called Merrell Barracks now.
The
shock is cultural, climatic, and culinary as well. For example, we departed
Alabama on a warm clear-blue sky day and arrived in Germany on a cold,
cloudy-rainy day at Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt. I went from
"see ya'll later," to "Guten Tag!" I also went from an Alabama breakfast
of "biscuits, grits, gravy, and coffee" to a German lunch of "bread,
bratwurst, sauerkraut, and beer" in 24 hours!
and
we made up for that lost time in a big way - visiting medieval castles
among other things. Specifically, Connie and I took an American Express
Tour of Bavaria, Switzerland, the French Riviera, and northern Italy.
In particular we attended the 1970 Grand Prix of Monaco, watching it
from a hillside overlooking the harbor was surreal. Wow, what a day
for the diary!
But
that was not my belief and at his elaborate Catholic funeral, where
I was a pallbearer, I stared at that metal-box in front of me solemnly.
I kept asking myself over and over again: Where is George? 
This
is ironic, I mumbled to myself: Here I quit my job in Alabama and moved
back to my former hometown, Silverdale, in April of 1988 to get over
the gut-wrenching grief that I was experiencing: Yet there George stood,
plain as the nose on his face!
between the living and the "dead" in the years ahead as well as with
other so-called "alien" species within our living cosmos. This ability
is not an anomaly, in other words, but is sine qua non of the mystic,
prophet, and shaman-in-training as well. Thus I conclude as did science
writer Lynne McTaggart of London, England in The Field: The Quest
for the Secret Force of the Universe: "Death may be merely a matter
of going home or, perhaps, staying behind - returning to The Field."
