Tzavella: Hello Mr. Maxey and welcome to The New Files!

Dr. Francine Shapiro, the developer of EMDR, refers that the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) method, which is the main source of IADC procedure, had previously been documented by dream researchers in 1964 who were investigating the effects of eye movements in the waking state. Taking into consideration that IADC is based on EMDR and Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase, is it clear at what brain frequency is centered the mind of your patients during the procedure? Or do you center the mind at some brain frequency, for example theta or delta?

Maxey: I really don’t see any difference in their brain activity before we start the EMDR as opposed to while we are doing it. It’s very possible that they can go in and out of a brain state pretty quickly but, of course, that’s not something about I am particularly curious at that point. I am trying to go for the effects. But I do think that the bilateral stimulation or the EMDR  obviously does something that we don’t usually encounter. If you are just thinking about a particular problem or a particular emotion that you are feeling, you feel that in a particular way, and it usually is very familiar to you, you’ve done it before. But when you are in the EMDR process, I don’t know if it is distracting to some degree, but there are two kinds of input coming in at the same time and that makes the whole difference in the way you perceive it, so I am guessing that the brain is going to respond in some way differently. But I don’t think I have ever seen any evidence that this is a delta state or a theta state, what’s usual.

Tzavella: It has been studied that dream visitations from our deceased loved ones occur in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase. Are we allowed to suggest that the IADC procedure  is repeating this mechanism, while the patient is not asleep, because the near death-like experiences are, according to doctor P.M.H. Atwater, “first of all an intense experience of otherworldliness.” And some researchers are saying that the Induced After Death Communication (IADC) Method is a near death-like experience as well.

Maxey: Yeah, I think Dr. Botkin, who admitted IADC really sees a lot of similarities between ADC and death experiences, and what’s really interesting to me is how close to regular experience it is, but also, of course, it has much more impact when you are seeing somebody and talking to somebody, and feeling somebody that you miss, that you have lost. There have been several times that we’ve gotten independent verification that the communication indeed was not just in their imagination, which is pretty exciting too. But the real, you know, just like in the NDE, I know a lot of people who had NDEs and were very transformed by them, and some people not so much. Same thing with IADC – it depends on what the meaning you attach to it, and what you do with it after you’ve had the experience. But I do think that the possibilities of transformation are unlimited as far as both of those things are concerned.

 Tzavella: And the results are long-lasting?

Maxey: Yes, when you know that you are with your deceased loved ones and you are not alone anymore, that changes the world you live in. And that it is a different place and you are a different person in it.

Tzavella: And let us clarify once more this particular part of my previous question, can we say that the IADC procedure is similar to what we call a dream visitation in the REM phase? Is it correct to make this co-relation somehow?

Maxey: Yes, it is very possible. I mean, I’ve had a couple of dream visitations from my father and ex father–in-law, and those were very powerful. The IADC experience that I had with Dr. Botkin when I trained with him was equally as powerful, and I don’t think there is any way to correlate them because, when you are in your dream state you believe that is reality and versus – when you are doing the IADC you are sitting in an office, you are talking to a therapeutist, and you realize that, but the experience you have is just as different, and is just as meaningful as it is when you are dreaming.

So I really do think it’s just like kind of if I am talking to you by Skype or if I am talking to you by some other means – we are still having the communication. And that makes the difference.

Tzavella: I asked you that question because an article by Dr. Nelson, Lee and Schmidt discussed a possible relationship between NDEs and REM phase. They believe that another form of REM intrusion are sleep-related hallucinations, including those that occur while the person is falling asleep (hypnagogic) and while waking up (hypnopompic). In these situations, one is feeling awake and is seeing or hearing things that seem real, but he/she later determines that they were not actually real. And if it is so, are we convinced, Mr. Maxey, that the visions of the patients experiencing after-death communication are not hallucinations?

Maxey: Well, like I’ve said, I’ve had several occasions when there has been verification independent of what we’ve done in the office.

Tzavella: A very important point about the verification, yes.

Maxey: Yeah, and one recent that I had was a lady having an IADC session with a man who was a friend of her father who committed suicide, and she knew that he called 911 and informed them of what happened – of the shooting that he did. She asked him in the session “Did you regret your action after you did it?”, and what she got was “No”, so that was very confusing to her, but she later talked to her father and found out that yes, indeed he did call 911 but only before he shot himself, he wanted to let people know where the body could be found, so what she thought was happening was not happening and was later clarified for her by an outside source, but what she got was that: “No, that was not what happened”, and indeed that turned out to be the case. So, in IADC the question is not usually “Is this real?” – the question is “Does this help?” and the answer is always “Yes”. And Allan Botkin (we call him “Allan”) clearly doesn’t like to do that question and not experiencing answers we understandingly know – this is not a hallucination at all. Hallucinations are sometimes very confusing, they are very confabulatory. What we experience in IADC is very clear and very direct, and very healing. If you’ve never had a hallucination, sometimes you come out of that going “boohoo”, wish you hadn’t had that. That’s not the case with IADC.

Tzavella: Talking about verification, Dr. Botkin said that “another observation that indicates that IADCs are related to some reality that exists separate from us is that we have some strong evidence that two people who do the IADC procedure at the same time can have the exact same experience.” He has called this phenomenon “shared IADCs.”

Maxey: One client was talking to his grandfather and he was seeing him in a particular location, and I was also able to describe to him what that location was, and he confirmed it for me. And I also saw somebody in that location where that happened to be. He did not want to see that person. So he didn’t. We work with this (my wife and I), we did one session where she was at home while I was at the office with a client. She didn’t know who the client was – in terms of confidentiality I can’t tell her that by law, and so I said “Why don’t you just sit here and know that I am at the office doing an ADC with someone and see what you get, while I’m going it, and she was able to pick one fact that we indeed were talking with this woman’s deceased husband. It wasn’t the one-to-one correlation that she is getting this and my client is getting this. It was, you know, different things at different times, but they were the same thing. We think in terms of location and time, and sometimes that’s the real problem for us trying to conceptualize what was going on here, because time really doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s a kind of a timeless state. But, yeah, I was very interested when we did that. We haven’t done a lot of those but they do happen.

Tzavella: We know that at a quantum level all minds are part of each other, and being a part of each other we are entangled in a giant web of interconnectedness, and maybe this is of course a kind of explanation of what we can receive as an information through this procedure.

Maxey: Going back to physicists for a minute – Erwin Schrödinger (the Schrödinger’s cat), a very, very brilliant man, he says that “Consciousness is the singular, the plural of which is unknown” – I think that’s a very appropriate description of what we are dealing with. Think of one mind, or what I call “my mind” – I am very aware of my conscious thoughts and my conscious waking, ideas and problems. What’s not aware to me obviously is my unconscious thinking – what’s going on behind my conscious awareness. I think it might be a pretty good analogy of what is mind all together. We have a number of these little packets of awareness that we are each responsible for, but behind the scene, how big is this unconscious? We have no idea, we have no way to measure to that, but I think it’s very clear that there is a connection. And that’s what IADC is really about. The first part of the ADC procedure is actually reducing the intensity of the grief, of the sadness. My analogy is a kind of like if I ask you to go out and … in my regular world it’s 12.30 in the afternoon. If I go out and look at the stars, I’ve got a big problem – this big bright sun shining at me, I can’t see the stars. Eight hours later I can go out and see it very well. When you bring down the intensity of your grief, of your sadness, you can see what’s already there, which I think is the awareness of the people that you are grieving but your emotion is going to be blocking that awareness, you know, pretty severely, and the first part of the IADC program is to use the EMDR to bring the intensity down, and then it happens very regularly and very quickly.

Tzavella: Dr. Melvin Morse described a “God Spot” in our brain and the role of the right temporal lobe involved in the spiritual and religious visions. But some other scientists opine that we can’t divide the brain into significant and insignificant parts. And they assume that probably the whole brain is involved into this procedure. 

Maxey: Try to think about people who might have brain injury or some serious mental illness like schizophrenia or something like that, where we kind of figure the brain is not going to work like normal. If you think of the brain as a receiver, instead of a producer of consciousness, then obviously that becomes very important. Well, when something is important to human beings, you have a large portion of your brain devoted to it – sight, for example, thirst, sex, anything as a particular part of the brain, that is what lights up when that activity is very that much of an issue. In this case what happens is a lot of brain activity tends to shut off when you are having unitive experiences, the anterior parietal lobe gets quiet. It doesn’t matter if you are a Buddhist or a Catholic, or whatever. That same phenomenon happens. I was talking about schizophrenics, it’s interesting for me though – I had a client – she had to have pretty much moment to moment narrative by somebody because she hallucinated so much that she had to ask people “are there really snakes on the floor or are there really people standing outside my window”, but she also reported after-death communications, where she could see her father sitting at the foot of her bed and talking with her telepathically, and she could qualitatively see the difference between that and the other hallucinations that she would have from time to time, and much, much of the time. So, I mean, obviously those two channels – the one that she is hallucinating on and the one she is talking to her father on, they are both coming through her brain, but she is able to discern differences between those experiences qualitatively, not just in content, but it seems different, it impacts her differently.

Tzavella: Have you ever tried to go through the procedure with a blind patient of yours who had never seen a particular deceased relative?

Maxey: Well, yeah. Actually, I have worked with a number of blind patients, but I’ve never worked with someone who never had sight at all, but in terms of seeing people that they have not met before – well, yes. One particular girl that I’ve worked with had an abortion when she was very young and there was a lot of grief attached to that, but she was able to dive and to see this experience, to feel her, she felt as if she was holding her and touching her, and had a conversation with her. It was very real, very releasing of emotions for her. Later on, after we’ve had that session, she said that there were several times when she actually felt, for example, her daughter climb up on the bed, she would see the bed move and feel a weight next to her, things like that. It was pretty exciting. But, yeah, she was only partially sighted, very limited in sight, but, you know, during the dive-and-see procedure, of course she saw it very vividly, she saw not only her daughter, but grandparents as well – people that she had met but she got a real sense of what this little girl looked like.     

Tzavella: And because I have studied the near-death experiences in details, I would like to ask you: are all the experiences of your patients pleasant, because there are negative NDEs as well?

Maxey: I have never personally had anybody who has had a negative experience. Allan has talked about several that he has encountered. But what they always turn out to be is misinterpretations. He talked about a patient of his feeling lobsters crawling all over him, which was very distressing. And then he kind of went back to it and, you know, wait a minute – that’s not lobsters, that’s my brother holding me or hugging me. I cannot think of one negative experience that any client I have seen or Al has seen, I think that it is also really interesting that all of the distressful ND-experiences that I’ve heard about – the resolution of them happens when they say “Somebody help me, I need help”, and then the help is there, it’s a kind of rescue. I don’t think anybody has really explained or found out at this point why we have negative experiences. But I can see them free from them as far as anybody I’ve worked with.

Tzavella: That was my wonderful guest Graham Maxey! And thank you so much for being so kind to download the Skype program for me! I do hope that every time when you are going to use it, you will recall your first time.

Maxey: I certainly will! Absolutely! This has been very memorable and I’m very blown away by the research done and the questions that you’ve asked – those were marvelous!

It was a February night in 1862 when the Victorian poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, found his wife, Elizabeth Siddall, unconscious on her bed. He hastily opened a little note, an eloquent witness of probable suicide by laudanum overdose. Lizzie, a muse and a pre-Raphaelite model, imbued with the fire of poetry and art as well, was “in very fluctuating health” after the tragic birth of their stillborn daughter. And during those feverish after-midnight hours, there were no sublime words on Gabriel’s lips, but just the same fear that this red-gold haired beauty, and notorious model had lost her soul first in the freezing waters of their marriage. It was a short union, but Lizzie had the premonition many times before this fatal night, saying that Rossetti did not love her enough to save her from herself.  As a 19^th century writer put it, “his love was sincere in its insincerity”. At 7.20 am, Lizzie left this earth. Rossetti, desperate and shattered with guilt, decided to bury in Lizzie’s coffin his manuscript of poems as a “grave sacrifice”. But it was a sacrifice with an expiry date. Six years later Rossetti decided to exhume his wife’s remains and to publish the buried poems.

Lizzie had been twice buried at Highgate indeed, but she was not gone. Her death brought her husband not only to self-isolation, but also to the world of paranormal. According to a biographer, “for the next 2 years, Rossetti saw her nightly at the foot of his bed”.

Modern parapsychologists analyze that most apparitions are seen when the percipient is in bed, and they can be not only visual, but audible as well – for example, hearing of footsteps, voices, window tapping or connected to smells. Physical medium, Alexander Stewart explained for Leslie Kean’s “Surviving Death” book that the spirit people need to slow down their vibration in order to manifest themselves, describing this process to Stewart as “similar to walking through thick mud, or like wearing a heavy, wet overcoat.”      

Rossetti’s psi experiences–not only a result of his mental breakdown at that time–, prompted him to devote the next six years of his life to mediumistic sessions at his Tudor house. He also attended psychic mediumship demonstrations staged by the most sought-after mediums of his time, Davenport brothers. The brothers, Ira Erastras and William Henry had given séances even in the Winter Palace to the Russian Tsar and imperial family.

More than a decade later, in April 1882, Rossetti’s brother, William, was shocked to find Gabriel “in a very prostrate condition physically, barely capable of tottering a few steps, half blind, and suffering a good deal of pain.”  Rossetti was addicted to chloral and alcohol and it was the point of no return for him.

On Easter Sunday, April 9^th 1882, William was also stunned to hear Gabriel’s prophetic prediction of his own death: “I believe I shall die tonight,” he had said. And later, haunted by the memory of his twice buried wife, “as white as snow,” he expressed his deathbed will again: “Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate.” That was all that a man wrapped in hot sheets with mustard poultice, prescribed by a doctor, could have prayed for at a seaside bungalow. And then at 9.20 pm he was carried off by the red-gold waters of the river of death.