Professional medium James Van Praagh (Talking to Heaven) offers a guidebook for the living, which charts the course of the soul as it journeys through life, death, and rebirth. Beyond his psychic gifts, Van Praagh has a gift for simplifying complex spiritual ideas and writing about them in a conversational tone. Most appealing for Van Praagh fans are his detailed theories on death and the afterlife. For example, when people die sudden deaths, Van Praagh reports, spirits of the dead often linger over their bodies, unable to comprehend what has happened (but still able to see and hear everything that is being done and said around the corpse). This is why spirits of the already-deceased are so useful in helping the dead transition to the other side.

Speaking of the afterlife, or heaven, Van Praagh writes: In the higher realms everyone is on the same level of spiritual understanding, like a symphony of beings in tune with one another. For some this may mean a reunion with members of their earth family. For others it could be a meeting with former friends and lovers from previous incarnations. Finally, Van Praagh returns to his fascinating stories of channeling the deceased to illustrate how the living can stay on task with their raison d'être. If we want to help our souls along on their eternal journeys toward enlightenment, then we must remove the emotional obstacles that are blocking their paths, says Van Praagh, who devotes entire chapters to guilt, fear, forgiveness, and love. --Gail Hudson


From AudioFile
Van Praagh begins with some elementary principles familiar to most students of metaphysics. While he relies on these spiritual touchstones and even resorts to aphorisms and basic guidelines for living in attunement with God, Van Praagh seasons his lecture with remarkable accounts of his contact with the souls of the dead. We learn what the afterlife may look like and how one spends time there. A recurring theme is forgiveness by and for the dead, once they contact the living. Van Praagh has been lambasted by some as a charlatan becoming wealthy on people's hopes and fears. But the author seems truly concerned with his listeners' evolution and happiness. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Book Description
James Van Praagh has touched the lives of millions with his extraordinary ability to communicate with the world beyond. In Talking to Heaven, his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, he shared that gift and showed us how to break down the barrier between the earthly and heavenly realms to reach loved ones we have lost. Now, in Reaching to Heaven, he continues his uplifting and transcendent message and reveals how to chart a course for living as spiritual beings in a physical world that will sustain and fill us for decades to come. In this guide to inner peace and spiritual healing, the renowned medium shows us how we can greatly improve our feelings of self-esteem and self-worth by getting more deeply in touch with our emotional selves and the creative "god-like" nature we all possess. As in Talking to Heaven, Van Praagh shares moving stories of after-death communication. You'll be touched and inspired by true accounts that take us through the grieving process, show is how to ease the pain and hurt of living in the material world, and attain new levels of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and personal freedom. In this unique book, James Van Praagh takes us on a journey of hope, healing, and spiritual growth and enlightenment. Filled with his unshakable faith in our ability to achieve anything we set out to accomplish, Reaching to Heaven offers us an evolving vision of ourselves-- and a spiritual realm-- that is within our grasp

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
When someone close to us dies, the idea that the soul goes on when the body dies brings comfort and hope. In his first book, Talking to Heaven, James Van Praagh wrote that he is certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that the soul does indeed go on after death. How can he be so sure? Van Praagh asserts that he can communicate with the next world, and in Talking to Heaven he recounted many of his exchanges with people who have passed over. These communications, he writes in his new book, Reaching to Heaven, have taught him a great deal about the nature of the immortal soul and its journey through life, death, and rebirth. He explores that journey and offers wisdom on how we can come closer to spiritual enlightenment during our lives through learning to recognize and communicate with the spark of the divine that resides in each of us.

Van Praagh begins Reaching to Heaven by describing the experience of death and the path the immortal soul takes after it departs the body as it has been explained to him by those who have experienced it. He follows this section by recounting sessions in which the living communicate through him with their departed loved ones, sharing the lessons these spirits can teach the living, from moving through the emotional blocks that hold us back in our everyday lives to living a more fulfilling life through conquering guilt and fear and embracing forgiveness and love. He concludes the book with meditations and lessons designed to help us achieve spiritual renewal and pass on these spiritual values to our children.

VanPraagh'suplifting message is that the soul within each of us holds the potential to allow us to live a life of healing, hope, and fulfillment, if we can just learn how to tap it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

James Van Praagh has touched the lives of millions with his extraordinary ability to communicate with the world beyond. In Talking to Heaven, his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, he shared that gift and showed us how to break down the barrier between the earthly and heavenly realms to reach loved ones we have lost. Now, in Reaching to Heaven, he continues his uplifting and transcendent message and reveals how to chart a course for living as spiritual beings in a physical world that will sustain and fill us for decades to come.

In this guide to inner peace and spiritual healing, the renowned medium shows us how we can greatly improve our feelings of self-esteem and self-worth by getting more deeply in touch with our emotional selves and the creative "god-like" nature we all possess. As in Talking to Heaven, Van Praagh shares moving stories of after-death communication. You'll be touched and inspired by true accounts that take us through the grieving process, show is how to ease the pain and hurt of living in the material world, and attain new levels of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and personal freedom. In this unique book, James Van Praagh takes us on a journey of hope, healing, and spiritual growth and enlightenment. Filled with his unshakable faith in our ability to achieve anything we set out to accomplish, Reaching to Heaven offers us an evolving vision of ourselves — and a spiritual realm — that is within our grasp.

SYNOPSIS