To read more about Corey’s private practice, go to www.corebalanceandwellness.com

Currently working in the family’s small business, Kent is also a singer/songwriter.  The couple released their debut CD last June for their band Eclectic Verve.  Following is a link to a video for a song Kent wrote for his cat of 19-1/2 years that was released 12/6.  Writing the song was instrumental in comforting Kent and healing his grief after his cat passed.  Originally, the intent of the song was simply for Kent to describe his relationship with his cat, but the purpose expanded into a message about the spiritual nature of our animal companions and what we can learn from them. http://www.eclecticverve.com/gallery/video/

Following the loss of several family members and friends who crossed over, one of the ways Kent and Cindy sought to work through their grief was by communicating with loved ones through mediums.  This led them to Jamie and as they healed through the messages Jamie delivered, there was also a consistent theme that they could help others heal in this way as well. Kent and Cindy have received training through various classes and also guidance from and through Jamie connecting with their guides that part of their path in life is to be conduits to help people receive messages that they need as well as help spirits deliver the messages they want to give.

To sign up for one of the free channeling sessions please contact Cindy at soar@eclecticverve.org or (720) 248-8396.  For more information about the Colorado couple’s Spirit Communication practice, please visit their website www.eclecticverve.org.

How freeing it is to poke fun at my search for meaning! How light it feels to laugh at oneself, at life, and at all the petty seriousness. There’s a magic to humor that transforms everything – that liberates the mind and bonds us to one another. Struggle becomes lightness and obstacles melt away. What we think is insurmountable becomes but a little hill to climb; what we feel is so important becomes nothing at all. Humor is the grand equalizer. It has the power to dissolve fear and judgment and to break down barriers. It creates  a universal experience that reminds us we’re all in this same boat. Humor can unite us in the most positive ways, and takes the seriousness and criticism out of relationships. We can be struggling endlessly, and suddenly overcome our frustration in a single moment through laughter. To me, it says, “Isn’t this funny – this thing we call life?” It is a breakthrough, a release, and a gift from God. In its purest state, I think humor allows us to pause from our endless reason and experience the right brain.

Humor is so often born out of tragedy, allowing us to cope and to mend, and it holds tremendous power to heal. Laughter can literally cure our bodies and is instantly restorative. We are reminded to enjoy life and to live our moments more fully. Humor celebrates the spontaneity of presence and is always here for us to enjoy. When the day bogs us down, or when we find ourselves stuck with a problem, we can try to see the humor and notice how the situation becomes lightened. We see how to not take our worries so seriously, but to laugh at them instead. Humor helps us to handle our endless mistakes and our humanity, and when we make ourselves open to its possibility and its perspective, everything becomes elevated.

Of course, with this gift comes responsibility, and it goes without saying that humor isn’t meant to exclude or make fun at another’s expense. It’s obvious when this happens – when things just don’t sit well or feel right, and another person or group is made separate. We know in our hearts that we must strive to use humor with reverence, and to be compassionate to others, even when we disagree with them.

I think of the Dalai Lama smiling, and I see his beautiful use of humor to communicate peace, freedom and love. I see how children are the greatest messengers of laughter. When I hear my little boys laugh with all of their being, it brings a kind of therapy to the whole house that is uplifting and contagious. I think about how children arrive here so recently from God’s presence, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that humor abounds in heaven. It seems to me that laughter aligns us with the divine. I think it’s a gateway to love – that transcendent fabric of the universe, and I believe it can deliver us to a higher, more golden existence.

-Suzy
http://sharethespiritual.wordpress.com

This gentle, omniscient strength from within is compassionate, wise, and free. It is loving beyond imagination, with a strong desire to help others, and it is who we really are at the spiritual core. I think that enlightenment is rediscovering our natural power, and when we remember it (for that is what it is, simply a remembering) we can take responsibility, and transform our collective experience into a beautiful one. These changing times we are living in are all about becoming self sustaining – becoming strong in your own spiritual power that can actually help each other, instead of relying on others for what they’ll never be able to provide for you, such as your own happiness. This is why the spiritual journey is, in essence, a discovery of the self, and why it is about finding your own power that has been within you all along.

Right now, we’re slowly waking up from a deep sleep of conditioned beliefs that say we’re unworthy and hopelessly flawed, and that honor an unhealthy power of pride. It begins early in life, when people tell us – “You don’t know anything, you have to prove yourself (with your ego) in this world, and look at all you’ve done wrong.” We carry this background noise of judgment into adulthood, and many of the old systems around us reinforce this negativity, as does our modern disconnect from nature. The unhealthy power our egos strive for was born out of survival and spiritual forgetfulness, and this has harmed our world, but it has never been our true identity. Now, we can begin to reclaim our spiritual power by breaking free from how we’ve been defining ourselves, which has been primarily with our personality. If you don’t already know it, you are an incredible, direct spark of God, and you have immense power to lovingly co-create life.

I recently found my power for half of a blissful day, and here’s what I experienced. It was a pure feeling rather than a vision – a deep and natural all-knowing within my whole self, not my left brain. The familiar confining layers of life opened up, and suddenly I knew the wide expanse of existence, so that all I felt was incredible joy. This feeling was so benevolent, easy, and euphoric, and filled me with the belief that anything is possible. It turns out we’re not separate from anything, and I laughed at how overwhelmingly free we really are. I knew with certainty that I’m a compassionate co-creator at heart, and always have been, just as you have been too. The feeling lingers with me, and I’ll never be the same.

I believe this feeling is who we really are. We don’t have to live under the control of others and be at their mercy, or go along with agendas that harm our world. We can powerfully lead the creation of a loving environment, and it starts with accepting that we are each worthy of fulfilling our dreams – the dreams within our hearts. We are spiritually powerful, but have simply forgotten amidst the amnesia of life, and I believe that what you seek has always been within you, on this long journey home.

I think power is such a vital topic that I’ll be writing more about it next time. And, if you’re searching for your power, I’ll be offering some ideas on how to find it. Please share your wise voice with me, and stay tuned.

Suzanne Baker Hogan
http://sharethespiritual.wordpress.com/

One can make an overly simplistic case that all fear is irrational, or that it is rational only in immanently threatening situations. My purpose is not to judge the ultimate rationale (that is, the envisioned end which is used to justify the adoption of the affective state) but to examine the antecedents, the co-determinants, and their consequences.

In this case I am referring to what are broadly classed as “materialists”, in the cosmological sense, not the consumer sense. Materialists may generally be described as those for whom there is no evidence of non-material (non-corporeal) agency. If they do not see it under the microscope, it either is not there or they need a more powerful microscope.

While materialists have their conspicuous spokespersons (Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, et al), the majority are simply distributed through the human population’s general demographics. But as different as their daily lives may be, they share at least one commonality; wittingly or not, they have morphed science into scientism, rejecting the often ill-informed magic of other established religions by simply creating their own. Relatively few, in my experience and opinion, either understand science or understand what they have made of it. And, not understanding science, they take what is presented to them as representational of science on faith. Science is not a belief system, despite the often miserable way it is taught in K-12.

Those familiar with my previous work know that much of my focus has been on the inter-dynamism of quantum mechanics and the phenomenology of consciousness, “pre” and “post” death. It is on this area that I wish focus an examination of fear. And, I state clearly that this is an examination of fear, not an exhaustive examination of innumerable studies – which the reader can do at leisure.

Although the field of neuroscience (fundamentally materialist in its orientation) has been for many years evolving out of behavioral psychology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and pharmaceutical psychiatry, it has publicly emerged only relatively recently, especially in seeming response to the earlier emergence of documentary studies of what have come to be known as Near Death Experiences. Just as Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life opened the door to a plethora of other such books, dealing with ever larger varieties of reported and claimed non-corporeal experiences, so too was the door opened, albeit somewhat belatedly, to materialist counter assertions.

Draped in the academic regalia of science, the materialist counter assertions seem to presume that all analyses evidential to favorable interpretations of non-corporeal experiences are robed in the cloth of religion. This is absolutely not the case. As I have stated elsewhere, the common dichotomy poses a choice between:

A. There is an “afterlife”; there is a god.
B. There is no “afterlife”; there is no god.

The assumed linkage within each proposition is itself flawed, as shown by the paradigm in its more complete form:

C. There is an “afterlife”; there is no god.
D. There is no “afterlife”; there is a god.

One can only speculate on the individual motivations and fears of the proponents of any of the four propositions. However, it is historically undeniable that the advent of the Life After Life and related literature was quickly hijacked by religious authors apparently desperate to prove that which they claim should be taken on faith – thus ironically diminishing the province of faith in favor of the province of knowledge.

The saying, “Nature abhors a vacuum” comes to mind here as it is increasingly clear that the epicenter of what is being called the conflict of faith and science is the American conscience. An exhaustive reading of the non-corporeal literature exposes a genre in which, while there is still a strong core of rational, phenomenological literature this literature reaches the general public in amounts that are ever diminishing in comparison to the industry of “Christian” literature that is contrived. fictional, and in some cases evidential of serious psychiatric and/or psychological problems in the authors.  The industry has matured in recent years, giving rise to what I have labeled the Trojan Horse literary form. Masquerading as innocent and factual “Gee, look what happened to me” reports, these books find their way into unsuspecting homes and, upon being opened, release the consciousness penetration team of an anthropomorphized god of some sort, divinely ordered moral injunctions, biblical fantasies and mish-mash, and religious characters who want to be your friends.

The American social landscape (it is difficult if not impossible to term it a culture) is roiled with social policy debate, and often with spurious forms of authority for stated positions.  Within the positions in these cyclical debates we can frequently find a phenomenon known as Cognitive Dissonance, the holding of two or more conflicting views. “Right to Life” advocates, sometimes willing to harm abortion providers in defense of a fertilized egg, usually do not blink at imposing capital punishment on a wholly formed person. Materialists, cloaking themselves as advocates of open minded science, dogmatically dismiss contrary evidence as “unscientific”. And, the recent history of American politics has repeatedly demonstrated how a certain political party has hijacked evangelical religious movements into positions which advocate “freedom” while at the same time seeking to impose laws intruding between a woman and her doctor, between a sexually active person and his or her pharmacist, and between loving adults who happen to be the same sex. Evangelical moralists claim to cherish honesty while at the same time engaging in dishonest Trojan Horse tactics through every available medium and across the broad subject matter domain of American life. The end seems to justify the means, any means.

The scientific community, still trying to recover from the 12 evangelical years of Reagan/Bush and the 8 more extreme years of G.W. Bush (described as the most anti-science administration in U. S. history and recognized for its proud, in-your-face ignorance) has allowed itself to be pushed into its own form of anti-science – the knee jerk materialist world view.

Images of self appointed charismatic politico-religious leaders leading mobs of torch and pitch fork bearing peasants to the voting booths are compelling.

Academics are right to be concerned about, for example, the Texas attempt to insert convoluted, skewed, and self-contradictory nonsense into textbooks. Originally called Creationism, the realization that this title gave away the game resulted in it being re-labeled as Intelligent Design; still a pig, but wearing lipstick. But, although there are many in the U.S. who clearly advocate an imposition of theocracy, wholesale retreat into the extremes of dogmatic materialism is not the answer.

Indeed, the materialist camp is not without its own problems. In recent years there have been numerous attempts to explain reports of non-corporeal phenomena. These have included psychological, physiological, bio-electrical, psycho-pharmaceutical, and “dying brain” theories. The studies often appear in popular literature as well as in psychology texts, presented as in a “see, I told you so” style as if having to do a study that would have such an obvious outcome was an imposition the time of real scientists.

What the media reports, and even the text books do not portray is the full context behind and within the study. Some “landmark” scientific studies have never been successfully replicated (e.g. Persinger’s electro-stimulation of the Sylvan fissure of the right temporal lobe). This fails a fundamental principle of science. Some highly quoted studies (Blackmore’s work in the ’90′s) have failed to disclose the true results, even omitting mention of the fact that almost half of the control groups behaved in ways appropriate to and expected of the test groups. Again, this fails not only methodology, but scientific ethics.

In short, each and every point of contradiction or criticism of non-corporeal phenomena has either fallen short, grossly misrepresented the findings, or both. One study currently underway in hospital operating theaters is so absolutely flawed methodologically that it would fail acceptance into a high school science fair. That is so common across the board that it is hard to escape the conclusion that, just like the Trojan Horses of the evangelicals, these are being done knowingly.

The largely rightful fears of theology-creep are, for many, quite similar to the frog in a pot of heating water. Perhaps something is sensed, but it is not yet alarming. The dogmatic materialists, however, risk making themselves irrelevant by their entrenched stance which ultimately says, “If you do not think as me, you are an uneducated, superstitious fool”.  While it is true that the common response to that, “I know what I know”, is epistemologically weak, it should also be true that the materialists could benefit from viewing the full, four part paradigm is set forth above. Perhaps a glimpse at what they do not know might return them to a path to know, away from the current path to believe in their own infallibility.

An easy, and perhaps cute way to start would be to say that we all have the answer, but some still have the questions. The sensation one has when looking at a group that has the answer, but still the questions, is similar to what a group meditation guide must feel when, after sitting for a while, someone asks “Are we there yet?” The presumption that there is a There, at which we are not yet, is the single greatest obstacle to being “there”. Indeed, it makes the position of the guide at least temporarily a contradiction.

But let’s revive that apocryphal story of the group of blindfolded wise men trying to describe an elephant. Each wise man, a specialist in his own field, fumbles about and feels a part of the elephant, leading to disparate exclamations of solution. Modern management consultants, advising big corporations, would label this the “silo effect”; each department is growing upon itself while losing track of what other departments are doing. The end result is widely disparate concepts of mission, goals and objectives; no coherent elephant.

Now let’s re-empower those wise men to examine the nature of Being, giving them backgrounds in the following fields: Philosophy; epistemology; anthropology; linguistics; mysticism; and quantum mechanics. Just as the management consultant looks for connective tissue in the organic institution, we will look for the common fibers, the warp and the weft, which will enable us to birth an image from the seemingly random tapestry of existence. In doing so we will see many fibers we have seen before. But, hopefully, the artificial silos, the mental constraints that impose limits and boundaries, will recede and fade so that we are left to puzzle how we ever thought they were there to begin with.

In addition to the “are we there yet” problem cited earlier, there are several more problems we need to at least name at this point. I see these as including, but not limited to:

1. Common sense;
2. Superficial thought;
3. Truncated memory;
4. Magical thinking.
5. Ego love.

Common sense, an agreement to agree, informs much of our everyday concept of reality. The social power of “common sense” lies largely in the enculturated drive to conform. Faced with the authority of “they say” or “everyone knows”, we are encouraged to avoid being different, particularly where different is often interpreted as “less than”.  However, this does not make it correct. Although the early mathematicians of Classical Greece had calculated, with astoundingly close accuracy, the circumference of this spherical planet almost two thousand years before Copernicus and Columbus, the average person – so we are told, saw everyday proof that the world was flat and the sun revolved around it. After all, the sun did “rise” in the East and “set” in the West on a regular and predictable cycle. The Earth did not appear to move at all, either revolving or hurtling through space. A flat and stationary Earth was then a “given”, a self evident element of common sense. The English language preserves that element in daily usage such as “sunrise” and “sunset”, events we might go out to admire, taking in the illusion like a David Copperfield performance, only free.

Of course, it was Isaac Newton, particularly in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), who pushed Europe past the tipping point in the revolution of thought, laying the empirical foundations of science with the building blocks of: Reality; locality; causality; continuity; and, determinism. Newton’s “Clockwork Universe”, a comprehensively deterministic concept mechanism yielding such necessary primal causes as the (divine) “Prime Mover”, held sway throughout the world of the sciences, with or without the Divine, until the early 20th century. Indeed, some fields, such as Behaviorism, are only reluctantly letting go while others, such as neuroscience, are simply seeking new clothes for a fossilized Emperor.

As we will see in further discussion, quantum mechanics turned common sense completely inside out beginning around 1920.

Somewhat related to common sense is superficial thought.  I am referring here to the information, derived from external sources or from internal thought, which is taken at the “uh huh” level and left at that.

Many children are taught very early that they have a non-corporeal spiritual component, often called a “soul”. Every quality which can be ascribed to consciousness is ascribed to this soul, perhaps in even greater degree. The children are taught that, upon physical death, this soul goes on forever; it is “eternal”, or “immortal”. Uh huh.

Children who persist in asking what eternal means are usually told something on the order of “endless”, “it never dies”. And when does it begin? It begins when God creates it (here we have a fill in the blank continuum from conception to birth, depending on the orientation of the speaker). Who is God? Answered more often by description than by identification, the child is usually told God is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient – the “three heavy Omni’s”.

An anthropologist, a mystic, and a physicist walk into a bar…… Someone, who has obviously preceded them by some hours, is professing her eternal love to the bartender.

Sufficiently possessed of a few glasses of spirits, our specialists begin to consider “eternal”. Coming from different perspectives, the mystic and the physicist agree on what to them is obvious: “eternal” is nonsense. Although the anthropologist, nurturing an avocation as a quantum physicist, agrees,  citing Einstein’s comment that, “Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once”, there are still those inconvenient fossils of early hominid forms stretching beyond 3 million years in age. Indeed, the “Big Bang” cosmic background micro-radiation, predicted by quantum theory, has been found and dated to just short of 14 billion years. Something appears to be on track.  But what?

The mystic begins by exploring the conceptual nature of “eternal”. Himself citing the 3 heavy omnis, he clarifies that, by definition, having any one automatically gives one the other two. Having omniscience would mean having omnipresence; it would mean that, at least in consciousness, the omniscient entity is entirely and fully in everything, everywhere. There is no thing and no where which is unknown to it. And, having all knowledge and all presence would give one all the power – omnipotence, inherent in everything. Like the shells on a sidewalk huckster’s game table, these variables can be interchanged in any order, all yielding the same result: At Oneness. Eternity, by definition, has no boundaries; it is infinite. Infinity is non-dimensional in that it is not, as commonly conceived, a line stretching endlessly. A line has dimensions; width and depth. Eternity (infinity) is at once everywhere. It does not begin and go on forever, for a beginning, seen backwards, is an ending; it is a point.

And how, asks the anthropologist, does this apply to the “eternal”? The physicist, who up to now had been quietly vibrating to his own private frequency, snaps into consensual existence and explains that what the mystic is saying, in his own intuitive way, is what physics has realized since the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920′s: Not only is everything – every thing, interrelated, every thing is interrelated even with the potential from which it arose and with the no-particular-thing which it eventually becomes.

This is known as “quantum entanglement”. The concept arose from Einstein’s position that time and space are the same thing, just seen from two different perspectives. They are entangled. Yet Einstein was very upset by the implications of his own intuition. When confronted with the many demonstrations of this concept, as shown in the complementarity of paired photons at a distance, the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect dealing with non-locality, he called it “Spooky action at a distance”.

The anthropologist brightens then and says he now understands what Joseph Campbell (the “Father” of modern Mythology) was saying when, in his Masks of God series he said, “There never was a time when there was no time. There will never be a time when there is no time.” It wasn’t just word play; it was the intuition of the truth beneath the words.

The physicist quotes Werner Heisenberg’s book, Physics and Philosophy, saying “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”

To which the mystic replies, citing the two thousand year old works of Nagarjuna, “Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.”

And yet, who saw beneath the words, or symbols? In the 1960′s an easily drawn symbol became ubiquitous, not for its inherent meaning as much as for its prima facie rejection of Western authority. The so-called “Yin-Yang” symbol was held out as deeply meaningful, especially in an age of sexual revolution. Even more than the “Peace symbol”, seen by some as a chicken’s foot and by others as a stylized lingam/yoni of Shiva/Vishnu, perhaps locked in the Sardonic ecstasy of a lysergic acid diethylamide embrace, it supposedly epitomized the non-dualistic conundrum posed by the apocryphal Zen koan regarding the “sound of one hand clapping”, or what you might overhear in a public restroom.

The actual meaning of the symbol was rarely sought. And, should it happen to creep into squeaky, breath held conversation, it often elicited a quasi-meaningful “That’s heavy, Man” response to be followed by offers of another tok. The meaning resides in neither the dark field or the light field; it resides in relationship of the two as expressed in the Chinese concept Hsieng Sheng, or Mutually Arising.

Truncated memory and magical thinking are symbiotic; one feeds off the other to a large degree. This pairing is an example of the principle that, when it comes to people, 1 and 1 make 3. On a societal level truncated memory is seen in those masses of the 2000′s who are old enough to remember their whole hearted embrace of 1970′s literature and concepts, but don’t. A song title resurrected in the 1970′s film hit All That Jazz was seemingly prescient; “Everything old is new again!” At least, it is for some people. Thus, untold numbers of people who should know better have recently foamed and gushed over The Secret, convinced it is the long awaited release of esoteric knowledge, and not remembering Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization of 1970. Hence the rush to buy it and try it out; magical thinking. Before we presume that such movements run their course and die quietly it might be wise to recall an old maxim circulating in the publishing world of such literature, “You never see a house with just one cook book or one diet book.” Meaning that no matter how thin the new veneer, the old stock will keep on selling. “Reincarnation”, once the province of “that Eastern stuff that Beatniks (1950′s – early1960′s) mess with”, roared mainstream in the late 1960′s with major film releases such as The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Since the 1980′s it has been reissued, under the new cover featuring an outspoken psychiatrist, as demonstrated through “regression hypnosis”. Of course, there is no discussion of either the mystic or the physics point of view, and as yet no response to the belatedly current realization that “repressed memories”, as released by hypno-therapists (in some notably serious criminal cases) are >99% intrusions implanted by the hypno-therapist.

The desperation to prove cyclical reincarnation as a cohesive and intact entity hopping from body to body through time not only ignores all the fundamentals we are coming to understand about quantum entanglement, “time-space”, and the delusion of linearity, it speaks of a level of ego-love which borders on the pathological.

Even acknowledging the risk of Cartesian reductionism, we can still reasonably say “You’re not the person you were a moment ago”. This is fundamentally self evident. But should I grieve the “loss” of that former person-state? Or, should I celebrate the flowering of the new, incorporating as it does all that came “before”? The deeply felt need to cling to the “now” person-state is in truth a deeply felt fear of becoming.

But what of all those reports, especially of children who claim to be reincarnations and who can speak other languages, name other people, and describe other places?

William of Occam, lost to history except through his axiom of the principle of parsimony (“Occam’s Razor”), would remind us that the complex weave of ifs connected to maybes, seasoned with defiant ignorance, underlying the Western view of body hopping “reincarnation” logically collapses of its own weight.  Far more elegant is the view that, as entanglement shows us, nothing ever “dies”. In the same way that a thoroughly authentic “medium” such as Jamie Butler is able to access and facilitate the being-components of a “previously living” individual and enable that individual to communicate in the “now”, these children are unwittingly channeling, through their unhardened openness, the being-components of someone who, by circumstances and ways presently unknown to us, exists on a common substrate with them. It’s not that there is a deceased person sitting in the cosmic penalty box (the ultimate “time out”) until a young skater drifts by whom they can ambush. We all, at once, at every given “time” are interconnected – entangled; most of us do not sense it, a few like Jamie do.

Our revels are now ended. These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air……….
……We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

–Shakespeare, The Tempest

The following article about a ghost hunt Jamie participated in appeared in the Darien News in Darien, GA.

Are you familiar with Julianton Plantation? This expansive acreage at Harris Neck was originally the home of one of the first successful planters of sea island cotton, Francis Levett. Named for his mother, Juliana, Julianton has over 1,500 acres of high ground and an equal amount in marsh, a fabled holding with abundant low country grace and centuries old charm.

In recent years, Julianton passed from the Stebbins family to a private owner, and then to a development group. With a soft real estate market and an economic recession, plans for development stalled time and again. A previous owner, Gene Slivka, moved three historic homes to the site, adding to the mystique and romantic appeal of Julianton. Rumor has it that these houses are haunted.

How I came to write this story

I never ate a meal at Hunter’s Café or took my boat out at Shellman Bluff without looking across the river at Julianton Plantation and wondering what it would be like to explore that mysterious area.

Previously, I worked as a realtor at Eagle Neck and Delta Plantation in North McIntosh County. During that time, I met a past owner of Julianton Plantation, Gene Slivka, hoping for an invitation to his property that never came.

I had seen pictures of the historic Thorpe house being barged from the east side of Harris Neck at Spring Cove down to Julianton. (This is the large home you see from the river as you boat from Shellman Bluff out to Sapelo Sound.) I heard stories of the owner living in the Thorpe house without electricity and of elaborate parties held under the adjacent oaks. Party guests were allowed to walk on the porch and peer in the windows but could not enter, adding to the home’s aura of mystery. These stories piqued my interest about Julianton and the secrets it held.

In 2008, I learned Julianton Plantation was purchased by a big company which planned to build a championship golf course, a twelve-story hotel and a high-end residential golf community.

Fast forward to January 2009 when I sat in a restaurant in Richmond Hill one evening with a dozen other people. We had just finished a ghost tour of Jim Williams’ home in Richmond Hill (Williams authored Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). One of the ladies at the table was telling about visiting the Coldbrook Plantation in Chatham County a few years ago and looking for the plantation house recently only to find out it had been moved. (This reputedly haunted house was featured on the cover of Savannah Spectres, a book on haunted homes of Savannah written in 1984 by Margaret Wayt Debolt.)

As the lady told the ghost stories of the Coldbrook house, my son called. He was at Julianton in Harris Neck. The caretaker wanted me to do a ghost hunt at the Coldbrook house, which now resided at Julianton. Scarcely believing my luck, I jumped at the chance. The next day I made arrangements to view the Coldbrook house and the rest of the plantation for the purpose of having a ghost hunt.

My ghost hunt idea was to get a dozen or so folks together with an interest in psychic phenomena and visit a home or building suspected of being haunted. Each guest is armed with a digital camera in hopes of capturing a ghostly image or light orb in a photo. Psychics add to the fun by interpreting what the spirits have to say. Further, guests express their interpretation and feelings during the ghost hunt.

My first Julianton visit

On a cold January afternoon, I arrived at Julianton Plantation. The electronic gate, usually locked up tight, was wide open. I felt like a kid in a candy store as I drove to a midpoint on the property where the caretaker’s office was located. Just beyond the gate, I noticed a modest home on the right. This was the caretaker’s cottage recently built to look as though it was constructed in the 1800s. Flanked by stately oaks, it had a dirt drive and no established landscaping.

Continuing on, I traveled down a dirt track through the forest. I could see into the woods lining the road for a 150 yards or so because the underbrush had been cleared. Large oaks and hickory trees dominated. My feeling was that I stepped back in time, maybe late 1700s or early 1800s. This feeling stayed with me throughout my visit.

After meeting the caretaker, we drove toward the south end of the island. We came to a high brick wall with a white wooden gate. I was told this was originally a formal garden complete with a green house. When the plantation was last sold, Slivka removed the plants. Weeds and high grass were the only vegetation in this once thriving garden. This could have very well been a garden in the 1800s, but the formal architecture seemed more suited to England than Georgia.

We drove three or so miles from the north gate to the south end. Julianton is a haven for wildlife like the graceful osprey, the red-tailed hawk and the covey of wild quail that we flushed. I also saw deer, feral hogs, turkey and armadillo.

The first home we came to was the Thorpe house. This wonderful plantation home was built between 1790 and 1810, replete with spacious rooms and high ceilings. I was cautioned not to take my guests out on the story porch since it was in disrepair. The same with the two outbuildings. One had been used by the previous owner as a kitchen and the other was his library. The porch off the kitchen had nearly fallen off, and the steps were dangerous going into the library. In spite of this, all three buildings had been and still are grand structures.

Credit: Debbi Zepp

Traveling behind the Thorpe house we passed a garage and then on to the Coldbrook house. I knew it at once, from the picture on the front of Savannah Spectres. From my research, the Coldbrook home was built in the 1700s and is possibly one of the finest examples of an 18th century southern plantation home still standing in America. I entered the home but the caretaker didn’t follow. Curious, I asked him why. He admitted being afraid, saying he felt spirits watched him from the windows. With a little prodding, he joined me for a quick inspection. We saw no spirits.

What was a little strange was the room on the right downstairs side was very cold, the hallway was warm, and there were warm and cold spots as you walked the halls and stairwells. There are no lights or running water in the Coldbrook house. It is a comfortable home with large rooms, high ceilings, two stories, and large attic. We hurried through the Coldbrook house, feeling it would be better to explore it with a group…. not that I was scared, you understand!

As we drove away, I looked back and in the upstairs window it seemed someone or something was watching us. But that could not be so because I had just left that room and there was no one in the house

On the southwest part of the island is a brick barn with the stables opening to the outside. It is a strange looking barn; one story and no breezeway. Perhaps it was a duplicate of something built for a nobleman? Although I did not go inside, I could tell this was not a traditional south Georgia working barn.

On the west side of Julianton, we explored an extremely nice dock and dock house. The building behind the dock house contained a walk-in cooler and storage room. In recent years, the cooler stored oysters from a commercial oyster operation that Slivka ran. In the dock house, a bay boat hung from the hoist.

North of the dock house and nestled back in the woods on the west side of the property is the River house. A plaque on the front door says “River House” and a year in the late 1800s. The River house is old, less elegant than the Thorpe house, less stately than the Coldbrook house. In the back of River house is a modern kitchen. There are two bathrooms in this one-story house. The forested setting of hickory and oak adds an air of enchantment to the old home.

Julianton Plantation did not disappoint. It was as grand as I had expected it to be. Now I needed to put a ghost hunt together. I knew of a famous psychic in Atlanta who has her own television show and is extremely busy. Jamie Butler (http://www.withloveandlight.com) accepted my invitation. Psychics Sara Richardson from Statesboro and Barbara Witton from Savannah also agreed, as did sixteen other folks.

The ghost hunt at Julianton

On a Friday evening in late January, a caravan of excited folks arrived at the River house on Julianton. They unloaded sleeping gear and light snacks before loading up and heading back to the Thorpe house. Here they divided into two groups. Sara and Barbara took half the group into the Thorpe house and Jamie Butler took the other group into the Coldbrook house.

It was well after dark when Sara and Barbara’s group reached the Thorpe house. They sat in a circle on the floor. Sara described the spirits in the house and talked about things that had occurred in and around the house.

Credit: Debbi Zepp

She described a man in a wheelchair in the outbuilding that had been used as a library. She also described a lynching that occurred in the yard beside the Thorpe house. The group experienced strange noises and lights upstairs in the house.

They heard someone walking in the next room, but when they investigated no one was there. This group snapped pictures of light orbs.

As the group I was in entered the Coldbrook house, Jamie Butler said there were many spirits in the house. We went into the right downstairs room. This is where I previously noted feeling cold, and the room the caretaker said had watchful spirits.

Jamie brought a desktop computer and a recorder in the room with us. Both instruments worked fine before we left the River house. Neither worked in the Coldbrook house. (They worked fine the next day at the River house.)

Credit: Debbi Zepp

Jamie talked about a little girl in the room being afraid of her grandfather, who was outside in the hall. Jamie said there were many more spirits in the house, spirits from many generations. The spirits were confused about being here, and they never went outside because of the Indians (spirits) in the woods around the Coldbrook house.

We asked questions of the spirits. The older spirit complained about the deteriorated condition of the house. This spirit, through the psychic, let us know he did not care for the previous owner, Gene Slivka. As we sat in a circle, Jamie Butler told each person in the circle who their guardian spirit was, and she also told people in the group things about the people that only they knew. For instance, she talked to my son about him being a boat captain in Alaska, a fact that is not widely known.

After the ghost hunt, we returned to the River house. Some spent the night. Others went on an adventure in the dark driving around the area. I doubt anyone got much sleep, including me, on this haunted estate.

Though the fate of Julianton continues to evolve, I am thankful for the opportunity to view the beautiful grounds and historic homes. The land feels unchanged, a land out of time. For now, this spirit-rich plantation remains a haven for wildlife and a storehouse of memories past, present and future.

There’s a biblical passage from Matthew that says: “Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light.” I want to feel this every day and fully connect with others on the soul level. I want to get out of my head and enjoy more of the magic exchanges of living – to truly flow with the river of life instead of struggling on the banks of separation. I’m trying to show reverence for each human being I meet throughout the day by looking into their eyes with gratitude for our meeting. This mindfulness also honors the self. If we all made meaningful, loving eye contact, I think this could be a different world. We’re often taught to look up or down at people, but we are equals and the eyes reveal this, dissolving our imagined hierarchy. For example, I find it interesting that we’re not allowed to look directly into the eyes of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, because it would reveal that our souls are equally powerful.

Our eyes are indeed powerful, revealing our shining light from within – that unmistakable life-force we each contain. If we use our eyes with love, our experience opens. If you’ve ever had a “God moment,” you know that God is looking out through our unique perspectives, experiencing creation. As healer Maxine Taylor says, “If you want to see God, look in the mirror.” I think our eyes are more than windows to the soul – they are windows to God. Looking into each other’s eyes is a mindful exercise that aligns our spiritual connection, shows reverence for each other, and lets us experience presence and beauty. I feel it’s a conscious way to raise consciousness. To me, it says, “I see you, and we are sacred.”

With Love and Light, 
Suzanne

Suzanne is the author of Share the Spiritual. For more of her work please click here.

On Friday, May 6th, put your seat belts on – Lawanda is retuning to Love and Light! Jamie will be channeling Lawanda on the topic of Sexual Energy. Please be advised Lawanda 2.0 is for a mature audience only.