We Are Spirit: An Immortal Love Story That Spans Two Worlds

By Grayce Dian Comerford and kenneth J Comerford

We Are Spirit is a work of spiritual insight based on conversations between Ken Comerford and his departed wife, Grayce Dian, who began communicating with him telepathically shortly after she passed away in 2012:

"Ken stepped outside of his apartment and glanced up at the stars overhead on a clear Colorado evening. He spoke to Dian about this date being their fifty-fifth anniversary and told her how much he still loved her and how terribly he missed her. Although he had sensed her presence many times since her passing, he was surprised when Dian spoke back to him."

Dian's revelations form the inspiration for this wide-ranging philosophical work that discusses why we are here on earth and what lies ahead for each of us in the many lives that we are to share and experience together in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504912631

Grayce Dian Comerford

Kenneth James Comerford was born in Cortland, New York, in 1934. His diverse higher education includes studies at universities in Arizona, California, and Colorado in the subjects of human communication, international relations and trade, law, and psychology. As a cryptologist, he served in USAF Intelligence during the Korean Conflict and Cold War with Russia. He earned a BA from Arizona State University and an MA in communications and leadership in the organization from University of Northern Colorado, each with honors. He had an extensive career as VP for institutional advancement in higher education, religious and nonprofit organizations. He was a national representative, serving the American Cancer Society for thirteen years. Ken most values his relationships with Native Americans, with convicts to help them build better lives, and in service to cancer patients rehabilitating themselves. He has been a member of MENSA, the high IQ society, for many years.

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© 2015 Kenneth J. Comerford. All rights reserved.

Cover art, The Holy Spirit, oil on canvas by Grayce Dian Cunningham Comerford.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/18/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1261-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1262-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1263-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907823

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1 | Introducing Dian and Ken

Consciousness Determines Your After-Life Status

Dian’s Passage and Inward Journey

The Inward Journey Home

Automatic Writing and the Importance of Mental Preparation

2 | Being

The Creation Story

Our Family

3 | Eternal Ideas of God-Mind

The World is Temporal

The Scientific Statement of Being, by Mary Baker Eddy

Life at Home

4 | Effective Living

The Law is Positive Good – LOVE.

The Power to Choose

5 | Peace and Good Will

New Age Dawning

Attachments

6 | Positive Mind is the Key to Creation

We Must Live the Law of Love and Positive Goodness

7 | We are Here to Manifest Our True Nature and Become Like God

No Messiah, We Are Responsible

8 | Sincere Belief

Faith

9 | We Are Spirit and Part of God Now

Our Immortal Love Story Grew as Ninth Century Vikings

Who Are the Bad Guys?

10 | What Can We Do Now? The Right Thing

I’m Right Here in Your Heart

Believe in Good

11 | Missionary Work

Jesus the Essene

Breaking Free From Traditions

Dogma, Worst Case

What is it All About? What do the Natives Think?

Non-Christian Native Americans

The Hopi Sun Chief

12 | The Brotherhood of Man

13 | The State of Grace

Amazing Grayce

Love is for Sharing

14 | Perspective – The Middle Way

Creation Myths and Different Opinions

Resurrection – Body or Soul?

15 | Life at Home II – No Human Bodies

16 | Cooperative Individualism

New Age Cooperation

This is the Best Time to be Alive in the World

17 | The Visionary, by Dian

Dian speaks in honor of her soulmate

18 | We Must Each Decide for Ourselves

19 | Family Creativity and Oneness

20 | We are Here on Earth for the Sole Purpose of Learning to Love

We Chose the Knowledge of Good and Evil

21 | Trusting Spirit

Our Immortal Love Story

Lakota Prayer

Love Power

22 | Paradigm Shift, A New Covenant and the Good News

The Good News

Be Still and Know That I Am God

We Live Forever in the Loving Bosom of our Creator

No Possibility That the Body of Jesus was Resurrected

Another Opportunity to Do the Right Thing

23 | More About Oneness, Soulmates, and Faith in Action

Faith in Action

24 | The Contract

Your Gift to God

Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet

25 | Our Physical Vehicle

More About Love

We are the Comerfords

26 | Where are we Going and How do we Get There?

Everything is Energy and Upward Motion

27 | Peter the Rock is the First Bishop of the Church of Christ Consciousness

Afterword

Appendix

Meditation Ken Receives from Higher Consciousness

Meditation Ken Receives from His Father

If Tomorrow Starts Without Me

Our Immortal Love An Ode to Dian

What is Heaven Like?

Glossary

About the Author

Foreword

T his book is not about what anyone else thinks. It is about what we, Dian and Ken, know to be True about love and eternity. We refer to our prior lives and share our Immortal love story. We discuss Eternal life in the world of the True Being, the spiritual self. This is Heaven, the Garden of Eden, Paradise . If you can’t accept that as the Truth then I would ask how do you know?

I, Dian, am in a position to know the Truth. I am no longer encumbered by the body that weighed me down and lived in hospitals and ICUs. I am now free and I love it. Before I passed on to the wonder of the hereafter, I lived in a world of false concepts and dictatorial dogma, pressed upon me by the good ole boys of religion and academia and science. Frankly, I see their materialistic belief system as birdseed. Oops, no offense intended because we are all just doing the best that we can and we are in the same boat. I am your loving sister. I want to be at the wedding; you know, the one with Science and Spirit.

Our book is also about our love story, Dian and Ken. We have been together forever, but we have grown and learned together and have become as One. We have shared ourselves with each other over eons – and our love has grown to Oneness. Not that we are exclusive, because there is plenty of room for others and we will all be One when we recognize who we really are. We want you to be One with us and we really love you. We all belong together as we were created to be by our Father /Mother. Believe it or not, Ken and I really love you and want you to be to be right here with us, in "AGAPE" Love. We are not just in love with each other, we love all of you and that’s what this book is about.

I insisted on including much about Ken’s life and lives, so that readers might realize what a wonderful man and great resource to you that he is. I am available to you at another level, but he is right there amongst you and would love to help you with loving kindness. He is a little uncomfortable with that because humility is a big karmic lesson for many of us. That’s fine, but I want you to get to know him and I do praise him. He is the Best! I insisted that you get to know him and so this book is also a condensed biography of my soulmate. He is the One who may be your New Age Hero, as he is known on this side. He agreed to have me do this my way, but he wants you to realize that all men are created equal, and he is no better than anyone else and he believes with all of his heart in the Brotherhood of All Men (and Women especially)!

Perhaps you have been looking for something more than traditional dogma. Are you tired of being told what you should believe by others – the churches and the physical scientists? Do you feel that you want more than the old stuff that would limit your thinking, your hopes and dreams? Our story is a handbook for you. It is based on personal experience of Heaven and what it is about. It is your guide to effective living.

We do make some suggestions based on what I’ve learned in Heaven, but our message is that you make your own choices and only you are responsible for your life.

This book may be exactly what you have been looking for. We hope so! We wrote it for you.

Love, Dian

Antoninus: Are you afraid to die, Spartacus?

Spartacus: No more than I was to be born.

Spartacus, 1960

Introduction

T here are all sorts of conventionally-acceptable social behaviors following the death of a loved one. Having conversations with them after they are gone is not typically one of them. And yet in the summer of 2013, my mother, deceased since May 2012, started a dialogue with my father which has lasted ever since.

As unorthodox as that may seem, as I researched information on the topic in anticipation of writing the introduction to this book, I discovered many things unknown to me that had previously been recorded about what is termed afterlife communication. In fact, much of what my 79 year-old father was experiencing at that time was not actually even rare enough, as it turns out, to be considered uncommon.

That did not, however, make the experience seem any less miraculous.

My father was introduced to metaphysics shortly after working as a cryptologist stationed on the D.E.W. Line in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean Conflict. The elements of that story, shared later in this book, did not prepare him – or any member of my family – for the events he described following the initial communication from my mother, who had died over a year previously.

Even though some aspects of mediumship, including automatic writing, channeling, and past life regression, had played a significant role in my father’s metaphysical development since he was in his mid-30’s, the conversations he found himself engaged in with my departed mother were entirely different than anything he had experienced previously.

The process of communication began to unfold in daily sessions over a period primarily from September 3, 2013 to December 29, 2013 – although the connection has remained unbroken ever since it was first established. The way my father has described the experience is as one voice, a unification of thought and immediate comprehension between what otherwise would be considered two distinct personalities. This made the non-verbal interaction he was experiencing quite unlike the communication of messages through traditional mediumship, channeling, or automatic writing.

Skeptics, or even traditional psychiatrists, would likely straightaway classify this experience as schizophrenic. However the basis of that prognosis would also likely require evidence that the subject was experiencing increasing dissociation with what is considered ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’, as well as mounting difficulty with so-called ‘normal’ social situations. And yet what my wife and I noticed was that my father’s emotional vibrancy and cognizance suddenly seemed increased. There was no longer any depression or loneliness, or any semblance of grieving whatsoever. While none of those states had been previously overt to begin with, there had lately generally been a tone underscoring day-to-day interactions that were more commonly associated with inspired, aspirational states. For my father life suddenly seemed to have greater meaning, and his remaining time – whatever that might be – to have greater purpose.

These communiqués with my disembodied mother came in the form of sessions – short bursts of interchange that were less like Q&A than mutual dialogue. As such, capturing the flow on the word processor became the most efficient way to record the exchanges. At first the amount of information dispelled – initially only a few typed paragraphs in a single session – began to expand into pages. And it didn’t stop there: very suddenly there was an express goal to set much of what was being discussed into the formal constructs of a book. The book, it now became clear, would be a co-authored collaboration of the one voice emerging in discourse. The result is the text before you now.

Despite my own interest in and acceptance of metaphysical subject matter, I am personally inherently dubious of channeled information. In fact, I have read enough books channeled to the author by some disembodied entity or another to determine that the net effect of the message fails to resonate with me in a way that I can consider it much more than hokum. I have even doubted, and had reason to doubt, channeled messages received by my father over the years. Even in conversations with him on the subject, we found agreement many years ago that the originating source for non-physical messages must be scrutinized carefully. The topic even became a point emphasized in the writing of my friend, John Major Jenkins, in his book Maya Cosmogenesis 2012. He writes, on page 212 of that book:

"Within the New Age movement, channeling strikes me as a warning of this possibility [of autonomous transdimensional entities ready to pursue their own agendas], and we must be careful not to be duped. We should thus challenge and question, in an intelligent, open, and conscious way, people who claim to be conduits for beings from other realms. A friend of mine whose father has been channeling entities for decades told me of a warning his father gave him. He said to be aware that beings contacted through inner doorways are attracted to human energy and desire to extract a unique kind of energy that living, conscious beings have. In the interest of remaining connected as long as possible, some of these entities will say many things, much of which does not make sense. My friend’s words reinforced my feeling that within some of the recent New Age rhetoric it does not even matter if what is said makes no sense – the very idea that it is the spoken gospel of some transdimensional being or dead Maya king is enough to merit reverence and loyalty. The danger is that any lapse in our discrimination or good judgment could lull us into an unconscious spell, rather than stimulate our awakening."

In the references of that quote, I am the friend whose father – my father, Kenneth Comerford – is the channel. And since the turning point of the events in the summer of 2013, I find Jenkins’ outline of the ‘warnings’ about channeled information to be more relevant and cogent than ever before. In fact here I will emphasize for the first, but not the last, time that blind faith at face value in any of the ideas expressed herein would be foolhardy. A discerning personal litmus should certainly be applied while assimilating this information. Yet counter to that, I am also aware that in my own personal experiences, I have entered states of awareness resulting in expanded perception that cannot be explained through conventional modes of consensus reality. Some of the resultant understanding emanates from those experiences that also came in the form of non-verbal communication that possessed wisdom seemingly beyond my regular knowledge.

As emphasized in Buddhism, I believe there is always a Middle Way. In this case, it may be most beneficial to balance the logical discernment of doubt that comes from the rational mind with the lack of reason associated with profound intuitive states of consciousness, and the rapid-fire presentation of seemingly far out ideas. Whatever the case, the messages explored herein are so fundamentally rooted in goodness and benevolence, one may find it challenging to repel the nature of their intent.

At its most basic, it may be critical to understand that, just as two musical tuning forks located in the same room will resonate with each other when the note that they are tuned to is struck upon one of them, the work in this book may be best understood through a personal resonance – far more than logic – in many of its claims and assertions.

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I was born less than 24 hours before the Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. That is to say my birth coincided with the apogee of the U.S. Sixties political, social, psychological, psychedelic, and sexual revolutions, which had launched much of the spiritual searching intrinsic to the Hippy movement. Nonetheless, the bright light that had buoyed that era’s most vibrant philosophical ideas – aligned in so many ways with concepts discussed at length herein – were made very familiar and well-covered territory for me, as well as many others of my generation. In fact, as a member of the Raver Generation – a 1990s cultural inheritor of many core values of the Hippies – I moved through circles which actively embraced the common motto of PLUR: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.

PLUR was not some idealistic goal to be attained sometime in the future. It was here, and now, expressed in the moment in every relationship, and recognized as a set of values which helped individuals succeed through community. It was a child-like, non-sexual expression of love in which we could all be better together, even while maintaining the unique facets of our individual expression. In fact, much like the Hippies – minus the motivation of political protest – Ravers collectively cherished coming together to gather for the social and spiritual satisfaction of sharing harmonious joy in a Temporary Autonomous Zone, if only to briefly offset the chaos and robot-like unconsciousness of the rat-race.

PLUR, as the rules of engagement, was simply ordinary to this demographic – one whose seemingly cutting-edge routine activities of the period have gone on to define many expressions of typical behavior in the current era: use of social media, interactive technologies, blogging, viral marketing, and online publishing. Of all these subcultural facets that have been co-opted by the mainstream, a visceral understanding of PLUR has yet to gain widespread acceptance. And the need for that acceptance is, at its heart, what this book is really about.

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My upbringing was perhaps not typical for a child whose parents were too young to have been Beatniks, and too old to have been Hippies. Yet I grew up in a metaphysical household where it was not unusual to come home from grade school to guests reclining in our living room undergoing hypnotic past life regression sessions. My parents, Dian and Ken, started an early New Age business venture – before any of us had heard the popular use of the term New Age – called Creative Life Institute. For the most part, the business was run out of our home and in my parents’ spare time. Later in this book they will recount in some detail about it, but in general, the work was related to reincarnation studies and techniques for recovering past life memories with a variety of clients and partners in spiritual searching.

Both Ken and Dian had seemingly natural abilities to conduct past life regression therapy, and my mother illustrated astral portraits of specific details related to past lives. At an early age I had a succession of my own past life memories; in fact as a child, when playing with other children I always insisted on being called Jim, my name from my most recent previous incarnation. Of course even at a young age it was clear to me that my family shared spiritual views that were very different from those of many of my friends and other adults. Regardless, these views seemed less like faith than fact to me, since some of my most vivid memories were of personalities that preceded my boyhood in the 1970s.

It was rare that these views created any friction in my relationships. However I do remember a couple specific incidents during my attendance at church Sunday School. In one class, I asked our teacher questions about Adam and Eve: if they were the only people at the beginning of Creation, and they had only two sons, where did everybody else come from? Did Cain marry Eve? My teacher fumed with exasperation. For one thing, I think she was perplexed that a small child would comprehend enough about reproduction to ask such a thing; for another, I believe she may have been embarrassed by the fact that she couldn’t articulate a sensible answer.

Another time this same instructor asked if anyone knew what the Missing Link proved. Excitedly I raised my hand and said something to the effect of: The theory that aliens genetically-altered apes to create humans. To which my teacher scolded, No! It’s the proof that God created human beings. Where did you get ideas like that? When I explained that my father had told me some of the theories from a book postulating about ancient astronauts, she shook her head with disapproval.

Having only a few confrontations like this at an early age was probably enough of an indicator to me that I should hold my tongue a little longer before espousing ideas that would be considered weird in most social circles. More importantly for me personally, it was an early indicator that, for the most part, fresh ideas regularly withered in a vacuum of conventional ideology. Consensus reality was, apparently, made up of volumes of relatively boring stuff that should not be contested or questioned. But what I also began to sense was that many people intuited this same feeling, perhaps not recognizing the underlying dissatisfaction of what it meant. Because of this sense we felt as if left in a state of perpetually searching for something – anything – more gratifying on any number of levels. Years later I would come to associate this sense with the basic doctrine of Buddhism: that human suffering emanates from a desperate grasping to hold steady the impermanent, and especially the material, with a base desire to fulfill the Self through external things.

Although the work that follows is predominantly Judeo-Christian in its orientation, its philosophical universalist underpinnings dovetail with this Buddhist notion. In fact much of what is expressed here in terms of specific religious ideology, I interpret to interconnect with those Judeo-Christian belief systems in order to leverage familiar symbolic representation. In that way I consider its usage to be primarily for the familiarity of the Western audience, and in particular, for a demographic that may not have grasped many of the metaphysical concepts intrinsic to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

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In late January 2014 I was doing a deep-clean of my music studio, in preparation for guests, when I uncovered a burned CD of a conference call broadcast hosted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) featuring author Dianne Arcangel. I had come across the recording a couple years earlier when doing a web search of seminars and retreats that I thought might benefit my wife while we were grieving the recent death of my mother-in-law. The title of the interview was called Afterlife Encounters, and when I had downloaded it, I had burned it to disc for my wife without ever listening to it. In what seems to have been a moment of synchronicity, I set the disc aside to listen to on my commute to work.

The timing, of course, was impeccable. Having had already written many of the notes now assembled here in this introduction, I was newly exposed to this theme of discarnate communication by a former hospice worker, protégé of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and director of the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross Center. Dianne Arcangel (her real name) also turned out to be based in Houston – coincidentally the city where my father had finished his career, and only 45-minutes from where my parents had chosen to retire outside of The Woodlands. Houston was a stone’s throw, as they say in Texas, from where my own mother, Dian, took her last breaths.

Arcangel’s book is possibly the most scientific study of the types of experiences my father has had in communication with my deceased mother. Her book is comprised of tens of thousands of case studies collected over a five-year period, categorized by type, but unified by the spectacular nature of the communication channel they all share. It is the sheer volume of these experiences which lead me to write at the beginning of this introduction that the way in which the source material for this book has been gathered is actually not uncommon.

There are similarly tens of thousands of recorded medical cases involving some type of extrasensory perception, out-of-body experience, or near-death experience. In the cases of individuals like Robert A. Monroe (who recorded decades of his own OBEs in his writing), through the case work of his Monroe Institute, there is even a scientifically replicable system for attaining out-of-body-experience. Thousands of students, including military and law enforcement officers, have undergone this formalized study – some of whom report that they have been able to explore numerous astral planes of awareness, including the waiting room positioned between incarnate lives.

With this volume of data already available, to smugly dismiss these rich and varied paranormal experiences as bogus is wholly unscientific. And yet for a large demographic of reasonable people this approach of dismissal is exactly the one that has been undertaken.

A lifelong fan myself of Science with a big S, through my own meditative awareness one thing had become clear to me: to the degree that Fundamentalism dominates the dogmatic posturing of so many religious belief systems, it also clearly dominates the posturing of many scientific thinkers. During the 1980s, psychologist Robert Anton Wilson coined a phrase for this posturing, calling it Fundamentalist Materialism.

Fundamentalist materialism is simply another mechanism by which the human personality comforts itself with a Belief System (BS) that can point confidently to The Truth – this time under the guise of scientific rationalism – and dismiss whatever evidence (particularly that of the paranormal) that does not conveniently fit with prevailing scientific models or accepted facts. But for the same reasons that Charles Fort was motivated to write The Book of the Damned in order to catalog the evidentiary anomalies of his time that conventional science rejected, there is an equal need today to catalog an expanded range of scientific data related to non-physical experience, no matter how outlandish those experiences may seem at face value. Based on what I have learned of Dianne Arcangel’s 5-year study of Afterlife Encounters, it appears that she is doing her part to align the comfort zone of conventional science with extraordinary experiences of communication between incarnate and discarnate beings.

This is the primary space occupied by the contents of this book. Beyond being a philosophical tome of near-death experience (NDE), it is a treatise on the conduct of life as it should be observed, as recommended by one who should know best – the Dead, or perhaps more appropriately, the discarnate.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been quoted as saying The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. But isn’t that also true of any phenomenon experienced en masse, even when it goes unrecognized by Fundamentalist Materialists? If millions of international citizens have borne witness to UFO phenomena, is it still scientific to dismiss those perceptions because they don’t fit a conventional scientific mold? No. Not even astronomer J. Allen Hynek thought so. Science, even by admission of its most stalwart proponents, is evolutionary in nature, requiring tweaks to previous models as new data is aggregated and assessed. Sometimes all that is required to successfully invert