By the time I was three and a half years old, my abilities as a medium surfaced, since I’d started conversing with my “invisible friends.” One advantage of having parents who were also mediums was that they too could see these spirits and knew they weren’t a figment of my imagination.
Psychic ability is an inherited, recessive genetic trait, which means that even if it’s in the family DNA, not everyone will possess the trait, which sometimes skips a generation. Both my parents possessed the same recessive trait for psychic ability, which exponentially increased the likelihood that one of their children would have that trait—and that child happened to be me.
Dad was a NASA engineer, and Mom was a commercial illustrator. From outward appearances, my parents, my two older siblings and I were just the typical American family next door. However, growing up in a home with people who could see spirits was anything but typical.
Impetigo
When I was four years old, my family was living in Orlando, Florida. Being part of the space program often required my father to travel for work. One afternoon in late July, Dad was away on business, leaving my mother home with me, my 14-year-old sister and my 10-year-old brother.
An epidemic of impetigo was surging through our community. I contracted this illness and was very sick, running a fever and covered with rashes. Our family doctor instructed my mother to treat the rashes at home by soaking me in the bathtub with a small amount of bleach diluted in the water.
As my mother, Jeannie, put me in the tub, I felt some relief from the itchiness caused by the rashes, but then I took a turn for the worse. My fever soared. In an effort to lower my fever, Jeannie gave me aspirin and added ice to my bath. Despite her efforts, my fever continued to climb. Nothing was working.
What my mother didn’t know was that my case of impetigo was much more serious than originally diagnosed, because I’d developed septicemia, a potentially lethal bacterial blood infection. My condition rapidly deteriorated, and I began choking and gasping for air.
Jeannie sprang into action, instructing my sister to call an ambulance and my brother to get help from the neighbours.
Fireman Rory
My sister grabbed the phone as my brother, Earl Joseph, ran outside calling for help. Rory Roule was a fireman and emergency medical technician known in the neighbourhood as Fireman Rory. My brother spotted him in his front yard across the street from our house.
Fireman Rory bolted to my mother, who held me in her arms.
“Help me! Mark’s dying!”
“Mommy!” my sister called out. “The ambulance is on its way from Orange Memorial!”
“He’s barely breathing!” Fireman Rory told Jeannie. “We don’t have much time! I have to do CPR!”
Jeannie laid me on the ground as Rory started doing compressions on my chest and performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“Keep his head back and air passage open!” Rory yelled between breaths.
“He’s convulsing!” my mother exclaimed.
“Hang on, Mark!” Fireman Rory shouted as the ambulance sped up to his driveway. A paramedic jumped out of the ambulance, got me on the gurney and fastened a ventilator mask on me. Mom leaped in the back of the ambulance with him.
“Go, go, go!” Rory shouted to the driver as he slammed the door of the ambulance shut as it sped out of the parking lot, leaving Fireman Rory with my brother and sister behind. No one had seen that the ventilator hose had been caught in the ambulance door. My oxygen supply was cut off, and I went into respiratory failure.
“He’s not breathing! We’re losing him!” the paramedic yelled.
“The air hose is stuck in the door!” Jeannie shouted, trying to yank it loose.
Flying towards bright light
Suddenly, I shot upward through the roof of the ambulance. It was like jumping up and down on my bed, except I went a lot higher and didn’t come back down. As I soared upward, I could see the ambulance shrinking in the distance as it sped away from my house. I thought it was weird that the ambulance had numbers on its roof. Everything looked smaller and smaller as I flew upward.
I was so happy that I didn’t feel sick anymore. It was fun and even felt better than swimming underwater, as Dad had taught me.
Then a flash of bright light brought me somewhere else. But where?
Through the light, a large crowd of what looked like people formed around me. The weird thing was, they didn’t look like any people I’d seen before. They were shaped like people but were clear like water, and they glowed with light from the inside.
The “light people” came closer, encircling me.
As strange as they were, I wasn’t afraid, because I knew some of these spirits were my invisible friends, with whom I’d been communicating for some time. I didn’t know the other light people, but they knew me.
Although I liked these people and felt safe with them, I wanted to go back to my family. They seemed to know what I was thinking, as their countless voices spoke to me in unison, “Mark, you’ll go back. You’ll see us again. We’re always with you.”
Back in the ambulance, the paramedic told Jeannie, “He’s not breathing, and his heart’s stopped. Even if I get his heart beating again, unless we get him oxygen, he’s dead!”
Opening an ambulance door at high speed was no small feat.
“I’ll do it!” Jeannie exclaimed. “Hold me and wait for the count of three!”
The paramedic grabbed the inside of the ambulance with one hand and tightly held my mom’s waist belt by the other.
“ONE—TWO—THREE!” Jeannie pushed with all her might and pried the door open just enough to pull the oxygen hose inside with her foot.
Meanwhile, in the serenity of this other world, the light people faded from my view as the Light surrounding all of us glowed even brighter. A strong but gentle presence spoke to me. It was the voice of the Light itself, which calmly said, “Eternal Light, Eternal Life.”
“CLEAR!”
The Light vanished as an electrical shock surged through my body.
Back to life
Terrified, I opened my eyes and saw a strange man looming over me, holding two large paddles. He dropped them and thrust his fingers onto my throat.
A strange mask tightly covered my face, its large hose flailed over me, my chest was sore from being pounded on and my skin itched from rashes.
“We got a pulse!” he yelled to my mother over the ambulance’s roaring engine and shrieking siren.
I’d just been electrocuted back into physical life and was strapped down, a strange mask tightly covered my face, its large hose flailed over me, my chest was sore from being pounded on and my skin itched from rashes. I felt horrible, but what hurt most was seeing tears streaming down my mother’s face.
“He’s breathing!” Mom cried out, “Oh, thank God!”
Even strapped to the gurney, my body thrashed from side to side with every swerve of the speeding ambulance. Mom and the paramedic did their best to keep from falling over and to keep me steady. Moments later, at the hospital, people poured into the ambulance and rushed me into the emergency room.
Several hours later, I roused. With the aid of intravenous antibiotics, the septicemia was brought under control, and my fever started to come down. I saw my father standing next to my mother, brother and sister. When Dad heard what happened, he had flown back to Orlando.
“Mommy, Daddy, what does eternal mean?”
My parents looked at each other.
“Tell us what happened, Mark,” Dad asked.
I told my parents what I had seen and what had happened. Somehow they seemed to understand.
Eternal light, eternal life
Even though I’d already been perceiving spirits, a near-death experience was a lot for a four-year-old to process. At the time of my NDE, I certainly didn’t comprehend the meaning of “Eternal Light, Eternal Life.” Why would the Divine Power we call God present such a concise yet complex message to a child?
The magnitude of this message’s meaning has taken years to unfold and make sense to me. Although many people want immediate answers and gratification from spirit communication, spirits aren’t on our timetable. This is partly why it can take a lifetime to fully understand a message received through inter-dimensional communication.
My NDE was the catalyst for recognizing incidents of spiritual synchronicity throughout my life. Years after my NDE, when I was studying quantum physics, my attention was directed to Albert Einstein’s statement, “We are all light beings.” The light people were electromagnetic souls, and my NDE was my first communication with the collective consciousness.
The One Voice, which conveyed the message “Eternal Light, Eternal Life,” enabled me to accept the reality of the afterlife and to glimpse that the collective consciousness is interconnected with an infinite energy, which we call God.
People who emerge from an NDE tend to become calmer, less judgmental, less materialistic, more spiritual, more compassionate and loving. In some instances, NDErs develop enhanced psychic ability as well as a sense of interconnectedness with the universe.
Mark Anthony, JD, the Psychic Explorer (aka the Psychic Lawyer) is the author of The Afterlife Frequency, Never Letting Go and Evidence of Eternity. He’s an Oxford-educated attorney, world-renowned psychic, nationally recognized legal analyst, headline speaker at international conferences and universities, and favourite guest on TV and radio shows. He co-hosts The Psychic & The Doc on Transformation Network and is a regular columnist for Best Holistic Life magazine.Visit him online at www.AfterlifeFrequency.com.
Excerpted from the book The Afterlife Frequency: The Scientific Proof of Spiritual Contact and How
That Awareness Will Change Your Life. Copyright ©2021 by Mark Anthony. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
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