Paul Elder. (2005). Eyes of an Angel: Soul Travel, Spirit Guides, Soul Mates, and the Reality of Love. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. 232 pages. When I come across an interesting NDE account, I’ll try and see if that person published a book. This was the case with Paul Elder. A few years back I watched a video presentation of his here (scroll down to September 2011 - if the page is offline like it appears now, or you can't view it for whatever reason and you want to, you can also see it
here), and I had a very good impression of this guy in addition to his noteworthy experiences - serious but funny, down-to-earth, definitely not flaky, sensitive and smart. Although that video presentation focuses on his NDEs, the book is packed with a lot of his other paranormal experiences, especially his OBE/astral travel (spoiler alert: I’ll be revealing a fair amount of the contents in this review).
One of the things that’s interesting about Elder is that he was a public figure while a lot of this stuff was happening to him. He grew up in a very large, very poor farming family in Saskatchewan, Canada, and eventually went from becoming a disc jockey to a TV and radio news reporter, to the mayor of the town of Swift Current for many years. The book says he had 3 NDEs, but he actually had 2. (The middle one was a car accident at age 17 where he nearly died, and later in life, in one of his spiritual experiences he accessed paranormal phenomena that occurred during that experience, but it wasn’t an NDE per se.) The first NDE was when he drowned at age 12, and it featured an OBE, but though it had a big impact, he didn’t at the time attach any significance to it. The second was at age 41, in 1992, when out of shape he went out to play hockey and had a heart attack. He recounts his leaving his body and floating above the ambulance, and is also able to “go” to his wife and son in their home when thinking of them.
That wasn’t the event that busted his paradigm open though. That occurred just two years prior, when he had a spontaneous OBE while in bed with his wife. Because of the circumstances in which he was raised – the harsh reality of a family eking out a material-grounded existence, in a rigid-minded community -, he was ultra-practical and focused on the physical world, in temperament and attitude. He wittily recounts how, earlier, in 1979, he had seen an interview with Robert Monroe and then read his first book Journeys Out of the Body, but dismissed it in his mind as the story of a nut. When he suddenly has this OBE eleven years later, he recalls this book and is able to have a framework for what is going on. His "mind is blown", though, as he realizes that his mind is not his brain and his body, and that experience sends him on a journey to find out and experience as much as he can of this heretofore unknown greater reality.
Most of the book is taken up with the story of that quest. It mostly involved him learning how to OBE travel, both on his own, and through multiple visits to experiential OBE courses at the Monroe Institute in Virginia (as he recounts in the video, his public persona at the time is being the mayor of a fundamentalist Christian small town, but in his private time, which he has to struggle to have, he’s traveling astral and afterlife realms). He lets us in on the progressive development of his OBE travels, which get more and more more complex and dimensionally and spiritually involved. He gets into contact with spirit guides early on, who progressively teach him, and help him experience, various facts and aspects of that greater reality.
Those things, all of which were a surprise to him, but then also become things he now “remembers”, include facts like: being an eternal being and going through multiple incarnations; being part of a soul group, some of whose members can be incarnated in physical form and others not, who all share the experiences of each of its members, and how those experiences help and accelerate the advancement of the whole group; the reality of “lost souls”, spirits who are dead and aren’t aware of it, and whom Paul joins in some of the OBE workshops, and with the help of his spirit guides, in “rescuing”; that we choose our incarnations with a certain purpose and plan; that forgetting our spiritual origin is necessary for our earthly or physical experience (“In order for us to get what we need out of (this lifetime), it’s important that we don’t remember that we ourselves chose the kind of life we wanted to experience”, his spirit guide tells him, p. 121), and that we choose to undergo that experience because true knowledge comes from experience; that experiencing the “polarity of separation and connection” helps to experientially appreciate and understand the illusion of separation; the many dimensions that exist at different rates of vibration; how in the spirit realm one can create one’s reality; that “God” is the collective consciousness of The All.
Reading through Paul's book, to me it was another experience confirming and validating a shared, congruent body of knowledge that (I’m personally convinced) we can gain from the accumulated information of OBE travel, the better and deeper NDEs, mediumship and other experiential phenomena.
There are also veridical dimensions to those experiences, both in the sense of finding out things through his OBEs that are later verified in the physical world (finding a bent nail in drywall through doing renovations which he had “found” earlier going through the wall through an OBE), and in finding that he visits the same “spaces” or can meet up with fellow journeyers with other OBEr participants at his workshops at the Monroe Institute.
That said, the book isn’t only relating the knowledge Paul gains, but the spiritual, personal journey he is on, where he is learning about the walls he built up in order not to feel and goes through the sometimes very painful process of removing them. This involves learning about, and contacting the emotions underwent, in some of his past lives, as well as in forgotten events in his early life, and the interaction of all this with his relationship with a soul group member, a “soul mate”, whom he meets in this physical life.
At some points, I found myself wondering how the author could retain such in-depth conversations with his spirit guides or all of the aspects of his astral travels, but in addition to having kept notes for years, he makes it clear at the book’s end (which his spirit guides asked him to write) how the process of writing the book included entering altered states of consciousness where he was re-immersing himself in those memories and being helped anew by his spirit guides.
This is more than your average regular NDE-account book and I found it very rich in the combination of its emotional and spiritual impact, and information about extended consciousness realms. There are books you read that provide for you a sense of a connection to spirit as you read them, and for me this was one of them. For the wealth and the felt soundness of its knowledge of the greater reality – the non-physical realms and the meaning of that reality -, this is a book I’ll also return to.
You can find out more about Paul at his website, including his becoming a remote viewing teacher as part of the Monroe Institute.
8.5
