The lower Reaches of Heaven: Thirty Years Among the Dead with excerpts from The Gateway of Understanding

Dr Carl Wickland and his wife, Anna spent over 30 years treating psychiatric patients and their hallucinations beginning in 1894. I say he treated his patient’s hallucinations because he and his wife used spiritual methods to psychoanalyze the hallucinations themselves as if they were real psychiatric patients. Anna was a trance medium, and under her husband’s supervision, she would allow the patient’s hallucination to temporarily possess her body so that Carl could talk directly to it.

These “hallucinations” were, in fact, earthbound spirits who had become ensnared in a living person’s aura. This may surprise you, however using this “phenomenological” approach Carl and Anna had remarkable successes, not only in freeing their patients of their hallucinations, but also in assisting ignorant earthbound spirits to “cross over” into their proper place on the other side of the veil. Furthermore, this took place long before modern drug therapies could be used to mask the symptoms of mental illness. The Wicklands’ treatment did more than mask the symptoms. They actually permanently cured their patients.

Carl’s original book, Thirty Years among the Dead, was published in 1924, a time when the moral structure and customs of Americans were very different than they are today. This volume, The Lower Reaches of Heaven, is a more modernized version of the original with historical commentary and images, as well as commentary on the structural aspects of the spiritual world.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the insight into the “mindset” of the type of ignorant earthbound spirit that can infect the aura of a susceptible human being, as well as the conditions they face while adrift in the shadowy world of the earth sphere. Earthbound spirits always maintain the habits and attitudes they had when they were alive, and the scores of dialogs you will read here are reminiscent of the type of lower-class people and petty criminals who lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. This is a snapshot of the existence of an earthbound spirit as well as mores and customs of their day.