When Alexander told me about it, I laughed. I remember thinking it was a very particular sign, but I also knew that, when we talk to our loved ones on the Other Side, they listen. And the universe has magical ways of bringing our signs to us.
Not too much later, I went to do a group reading in the house of someone I’d never met. Right before I began the reading, I asked to use the bathroom so I could freshen up. As I entered the bathroom, something on the wall caught my attention—and at that very instant I felt Alexander’s mother’s energy push into my screen. I looked at the thing that had caught my eye and then leaned in to get a closer look.
Could it be?
Yes, it was.
It was a framed pencil drawing called Metamorphosis. On the left side of the drawing, there was a giraffe. As the drawing moved from left to right, the giraffe began to change shape. On the right side of the drawing, the giraffe had been completely transformed…into the Eiffel Tower.
I took a photo of the drawing and immediately texted it to Alexander. “It was exactly what I asked for,” he says. “And since then, I’ve seen giraffes and Eiffel Towers together on greeting cards in stationery stores, in toy stores, in a gift shop. Sometimes I’ll be pulled toward it. Every time, it’s a magical feeling.”
* * *
—
Just as he had when he was a boy, Alexander spent a long time thinking about what the signs meant, and what they taught him about the afterlife.
“Look, if you live in this physical world, you are always going to have doubts and skepticism about the hereafter,” he says. “You will always wonder if we really do continue to exist after we die. I mean, I have had that very question since I was a boy of eight years old. So maybe that’s why I asked my parents for so much validation. And sure enough, they sent it to me. They sent it to me over and over and over again.
“For me,” Alexander continues, “there simply could not be any other explanation for the song lyrics and for the giraffes and Eiffel Towers except that it was my mother and father, communicating with me and letting me know they were with me.”
Not a day goes by that Alexander doesn’t miss his parents, because no matter how many signs we get, the sense of physical loss is always there. He feels the heartbreak of their absence, and it is crushing. Some days, Alexander will pull out a pair of his father’s shoes that he’s kept—they wore the same size—and slip them on and go for a long walk. “I literally walk in his shoes and think of all the questions I want to ask him, and the answers he wants to give me often just form in my head. And so that is one way I communicate with him. By taking a walk in his shoes.”
These days Alexander doesn’t see giraffes and Eiffel Towers quite as often as he used to, but he still sees them from time to time, and whenever he does, it is special.
“I’ve learned how to trust in these signs, and I’ve become a more intuitive person,” he says. “I completely understand how skeptics feel, because I used to be one. But there’s a lot about life and death that we don’t understand, and I am open to all kinds of possibilities now.”
The couple has two beautiful young children, a girl named for his mother and a boy named for his father. “I want them to know everything about their grandparents,” Alexander says. “Everything that’s happened has taught me that we need to get the very most out of the life we get to lead on earth. We have to take full advantage of the time we have here.”
His experiences, both good and bad—and all the remarkable signs he’s received—have taught him something else, too.
“They have taught me that when we put energy out into the universe, the universe responds,” he says. “And they have made me believe that my mother and father are still very much ‘alive,’ and very much with me every day.”
Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream…It was an unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think about life after death.
—CARL G. JUNG
10
DEFAULT SIGNS, DREAMS, AND INTUITION: TUNING IN TO THE SECRET LANGUAGE
EVEN if we are new to the concept of a secret universal language—even if we’re skeptical that such a language exists at all—the Other Side is already using it, and has been using it, to speak to us.
Our Teams of Light want so much to help guide us, and are so excited to see us happy, that they often simply can’t wait for us to co-create a language of signs. They choose to send us signs of their own in the hope that we will recognize them and act on them. They are resourceful and relentless, and they will use everything and everyone, and try anything, to get our attention. They will keep on trying until we can’t ignore them anymore. Even the biggest skeptic will encounter a sign or an event that he or she can’t so easily shrug off. Let me give you an example.
Michael Shermer is a science historian and the founder of The Skeptics Society, a group that investigates what it calls pseudoscientific and paranormal claims. In lectures and debates, Michael has spent nearly three decades publicly challenging the belief that strange and inexplicable events have meaning. He has said that he doesn’t believe in God. By any measure, Michael is a skeptic with a capital S.
In June 2014, Michael married a woman named Jennifer. Three months before their wedding, Jennifer shipped boxes of her belongings to Michael’s house in California. Many of the boxes contained precious heirlooms that she’d inherited from her beloved grandfather Walter who was the principal father figure in her life, and who crossed when she was sixteen. Unfortunately, many of these items were damaged or lost during the shipping process.
One box, however, arrived intact. It contained Walter’s 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio. It hadn’t worked in decades, but Michael decided to open it up and try to bring it back to life. He tinkered with it for hours, but the radio was dead, so he put it in the back of a desk drawer in their bedroom and forgot all about it.
Three months later, on the day of their wedding, Jennifer was deeply missing her family back in Germany. She also wished her grandfather were there to give her away.
Jennifer was feeling so upset that she and Michael headed to their bedroom so she could take a quiet moment to gather herself. As they approached, they could hear music playing in the bedroom. Michael later wrote about this incident in an article. “We don’t have a music system in there,” he wrote, “so we searched for laptops or iPhones and even opened the back door to see if the neighbors were playing music.”
Suddenly Jennifer turned to Michael. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it?” she asked.
She opened the desk drawer, and the strains of a beautiful, romantic song filled the air. The song was coming from her grandfather’s old transistor radio.
“My grandfather is here with us,” she told Michael. “I’m not alone.”
What was especially interesting to Michael was that the music only started playing after Jennifer expressed her loneliness. The radio continued to play music throughout the night, but stopped working the next day. It never made another sound.
“Had this happened to someone else,” Michael later wrote, “I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there’s bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning.” But even so, he wrote, “the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave Jennifer the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core.”
Michael’s followers often ask him if he has ever encountered an event that he simply could not explain in a logical way. After Walter’s special wedding gift, Michael wrote, “My answer is yes, now I have.”
* * *
—
The Other Side does not wait until we a
re perfectly open to receiving signs. Our loved ones and spirit guides will send us signs and messages whenever we truly need them, ready or not. Which means that before we devise a language of our own creation, the Other Side will use default signs to try to connect with us.
DEFAULT SIGNS
Here are many of the most common default signs sent by the Other Side:
Birds and butterflies
Deer
Electrical events (often with cellphones)
Coins appearing in our path
Rainbows
Pictures
Slogans
Billboards
Magazines
License plates
Street signs
Music/songs
Feathers
Ladybugs
Numerical sequences
There is a reason the Other Side uses these things as signs: They tend to be easier for us to recognize—and easier for them to manipulate and put in our path.
The conductive force behind any sign is energy. The universe is made of matter, and all matter is essentially condensed energy. The Other Side comprises the light and energy of all our souls put together. Energy, therefore, is the currency that binds us all—the connective tissue of the entire universe. Even Albert Einstein cited the connection between matter and energy, stating, “Mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing—a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” Our Teams of Light on the Other Side can manipulate energy fields in a way that makes them ideal for sending signs.
I suspect they do this by utilizing the earth’s magnetic field. This field is a massive jumble of charged particles that stretches all the way from the earth’s interior to the farthest depths of space. Scientific studies have shown that many animals use the earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves and to navigate their way in the world. One study in the Journal of Experimental Biology referred to this phenomenon as “nature’s GPS.”
What’s more, all living beings generate electromagnetic energy—a form of energy that emits from objects through electrical and magnetic waves. Animals can sense each other’s electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. Butterflies send out ultraviolet signals, while many birds have built-in compasses that are guided by the earth’s magnetic field. And hunters have long complained about a sixth sense employed by deer, because deer are extremely tuned in to EMFs.
This is why the Other Side often sends us animals and insects as signs, as you’ve noticed in some of the stories you’ve already read.
The Other Side will also use strange and unlikely electrical occurrences—cellphones acting weirdly or receiving inexplicable texts and calls, lightbulbs flickering or burning out, and broken transistor radios suddenly playing music, to name a few.
Coins, too—since they consist of metal—have a level of conductivity that seems to make them easy targets for the Other Side. Look for coins appearing in unlikely places or at unlikely times, specifically when you are thinking of someone you love who has crossed, wrestling with an important decision, or having a difficult day. I once found a dime standing on its edge in my dryer—at the exact moment that I was thinking about my father, who had crossed. The Other Side finds a way to grab our attention, so I interpreted that unusual coin behavior as a sign—a hello and a hug from my dad.
Rainbows are another powerful and popular sign. A rainbow is essentially a refraction and dispersion of light energy, and the Other Side loves playing around with light energy. The appearance of rainbows, and even double rainbows, at perfectly timed moments is a sign our Teams of Light often choose to send.
But the Other Side is extremely clever and resourceful, so you might get a rainbow sign that has nothing to do with an actual rainbow. For example, if a rainbow is one of your signs, part of the secret language your loved one on the Other Side has chosen to use, then you may spot a rainbow decal on a car, or a rainbow printed on a paper bag, or an inflatable rainbow strung across a parking lot. The same is true of animals—instead of a flesh-and-blood deer, you might stumble across an illustration, or a tattoo, or a photo, at precisely the right moment. That’s also where billboards, newspapers, and magazines come into play—they may contain images of the sign intended for you, and they will be shown to you at a time and in a way that makes it clear they are signs.
License plates and street signs also often turn up as signs. I believe this is because, when we drive, our minds shift into a sort of flow state that makes us more open. So it’s a good time for the Other Side to reach us! Similarly, our teams also use music to communicate with us—through cellphones, iPads, car radios, stereos, even elevators. They have a special talent for letting us hear the song we need to hear exactly when we need to hear it.
Numerical sequences are another common default sign. Consecutive numbers, birth dates, street addresses, telephone numbers, numbers that add up to a meaningful total—these can all be considered attempts by the Other Side to get our attention. Once again, these numbers often appear on electronic devices such as clocks, cellphones, and TVs, and sometimes also on license plates. This makes it easier for the Other Side to put meaningful numbers in front of us and alert us to the sign they are sending.
There are many other default signs—feathers, ladybugs, balloons, colors, clouds, pictures arriving in the mail, even people out in your path. Have you ever thought of someone you haven’t seen in a long time, and a day later you turn a corner and there they are? The appearance of a default sign at an uncannily opportune moment is often referred to as synchronicity—a “meaningful coincidence,” the occurrence of events that seem to have no causal relationship to each other, yet also seem to be meaningfully related.
I noted above that it was Carl Jung who coined the term synchronicity; Princeton University Press published his book Synchronicity in the mid-twentieth century. Uncanny phenomena have been studied ever since, with various terms used to describe events that defy easy, scientific explanation—such as CMPEs (Conjunction of Meaningfully Parallel Events), simulpathity (feeling someone else’s pain from far away), and supersynchronicities (extreme cases of inexplicable connections between events). There is no scientific consensus about any of these events and experiences, but science has not closed the door on the possibility that these phenomena have meaning beyond what can be rationally explained.
I have heard about or experienced thousands of remarkable synchronicities. I have furthermore seen how drawing meaning from these events can change people’s lives in very substantive ways. They are too important, too powerful, too consequential to simply shrug off or ignore.
So be aware of the many default signs our Teams of Light use to connect to us. Because even if we’re not properly paying attention, the Other Side will keep sending them to us until we finally take note.
SIGNS DEFY THE ODDS
One good way to tell if an event or incident is a sign is to consider how unlikely it is. Seeing an elephant in a zoo, for instance, is a lot less surprising than seeing an elephant waltzing down Fifth Avenue. Things that are out of place, or out of season, or otherwise unusual in their timing or appearance are good candidates to be signs.
Our unconscious minds and our bodies will often alert us to these signs before our rational mind perceives them. We may have a physical reaction—a feeling of awe, wonder, or maybe chills running down our spine. We may experience a burst of emotion, a rush of joy, a reflexive smile or laugh.
And when that happens, we need to pause and search for the hidden connections between what just happened, or what we just saw, and the circumstances of our lives in that moment. If a beautiful wild horse runs alongside your car on a country road, maybe that is a message about freedom and self-empowerment. If you’re debating whether or not t
o quit your job and open your own business at that very moment in your life, then maybe that is the hidden connection that gives special meaning to the wild horse.
Pay attention to the happenings in life that provoke an involuntary response in you. The Other Side is endlessly inventive and creative, and the members of our Teams of Light are, in a way, big show-offs. They love to dazzle us. And if they can knock our socks off, even better. If something happens that strikes you as totally odds-defying, chances are the Other Side has just worked its magic.
CONSIDER THE TIMING
Not every sign needs to be a showstopper. The tiniest, most common, least glamorous thing or being or event can also be a major sign. An ant can be a sign, or a cotton ball, or a button. Sometimes what’s exceptional about a sign is not the sign itself, but its timing.
Your favorite pick-me-up song plays on the radio just when you’re feeling especially down. The number 100 appears on your Starbucks receipt just when you’re worrying about flunking a test. The answer to a crossword puzzle clue is randomly spoken by someone on TV just when you’re about to give up on it. All of these simple, surprising occurrences can be signs from the Other Side, because their timing makes us feel connected to the world in a way we can’t quite explain—as if all we have to do is release our feelings of fear and doubt into the universe, and the universe will respond with playful, wonderful reassurances.
And that, in fact, is exactly what happens! The universe is very responsive to our needs—the Other Side knows when we need to receive a sign. A bit later on, when we talk about asking the Other Side for specific signs, you’ll see that timing is also important. But for now, even when we don’t ask for signs, our Teams of Light know when we need them and will send them to us in small but powerful ways. So if the timing of an occurrence seems uncannily perfect, take note—the Other Side understands that timing is everything.
Signs Page 7