George Ritchie, Part 2

Source: 

George Ritchie and Elizabeth Sherrill, Return From Tomorrow, Chosen Press, Kindle version, 2023.

Michael Newton, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Llewellyn, 1994

In my last blog, I shared how Army Private George Ritchie died of double-lobe pneumonia in 1943. In his NDE, he met the Son of God who took him on an amazing tour of some U.S. cities. After the life review, in which he saw a side of himself that he never understood, Jesus took him to a coastal city where he saw an office building with a man working on a budget. Hanging over the man's shoulder was a disembodied spirit, yelling instructions and advice to the oblivious employee. Then Ritchie was taken to a bar on a Naval base. He was stunned to see more disembodied souls lined up with the military men. The disincarnates were trying to grab at the drinks and cigarettes that were everywhere in the room. Spirits would fight over glasses that they actually couldn't touch. Ritchie saw a glow around all of the living people, but around the spirits, including himself, there was no outline of light. The glow was the life force still active in the living. It provided a kind of shield that kept them from being impacted by the spirit world. Then Ritchie saw something absolutely stunning. A young Navy man staggered away from the bar and collapsed to the floor. The aura around him opened up for just a moment. At that time one of the disincarnates jumped on top of him and disappeared. That same scenario was repeated when the man got up and fell again.

Ritchie was shown desolate suicides apologizing to their loved ones, controlling mothers harping at grown children. One son was as old as the mother. How long, thought Ritchie, has she been nagging at him? He saw a plain of people full of hate and rage tearing at each other in an endless venting. These are souls who died without Christ's salvation, without the growth that He and His word could have brought to their lives. Just before returning to his body, he saw a glimpse of a heavenly city.

The Reincarnation scenario  

Michael Newton, in Journey of Souls, paints a very different picture of the afterlife. There are no angels, no welcoming relatives, no Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammad. Each soul has a spirit guide which stays with that soul through eons of reincarnations. Between each new life in an earthly body, the souls are conducted to a location of sorts, attached to a small group of like-minded companions who recognize each other in spite of a lack of human identifying characteristics. The groups are like little eddies in a vast river floating somewhere in the ether. To the hypnotically regressed client, the souls look like pinpoints of light, like hovering fireflies.

The clients do not clarify what it's like to have 500 to a thousand years of therapy and life examination. When the time comes, the soul is offered a limited number of options from which to choose. Who directs the options? The clients are vague here. Directors. The soul seems programmed to understand that their movements and options are limited, but they then state that they are not limited, they just don't want to do what they are not allowed to do. There is no reason to want to.

The claims from there get very strange. One soul can service two bodies at the same time; when a soul enters a fetus it gets bored, so it leaves the fetus and goes off to 'fool around' for a bit with other souls. Even up to the age of 5 or 6 the soul may periodically abandon the child; when disincarnate souls manifest as people, the eye spaces are black and spooky looking because it takes too much energy to fill them in; spirits in the Bardo practice using directed mental energy to make small prototype solar systems; each newly conceived body needs a soul to be inserted into it, so souls hatch like eggs in nurseries. There is also the occasional suspicion of the author that a soul being interviewed sounds like a stranger inhabiting another's body. The soul denies this, of course.

I have to wonder if Newton isn't being played with by bored spirits. How far will his credulity stretch? Apparently there is no limit. I have to conclude that he is talking to possessing spirits who have found an unprotected body to inhabit. It is also clear that if Jesus is the Son of God, the reincarnating souls may never see Him or His heavenly city.

Part 1 can be found at https://janetkatherinesmith.blogspot.com/2010/02/g-ritchie-in-presence-of-son-of-god.html.