1. God answered his prayer
In February 2000 I visited the state university in Tucson, Arizona, where I met Professor Schwartz of the psychology department. He is Jewish, and he told us an interesting story.
In the 1980s he taught in the psychology department at Yale and directed the university's psychology research center. One night, praying before sleep, he put a question to God: "God, I don't like your name" — meaning "God" — "do you have another one?" Then he waited in devout silence for an answer. After a while he suddenly heard a voice: "SAM." He was thoroughly confused. SAM is short for Samuel, an ordinary given name with nothing special about it — why would he hear that word? Was it a hallucination, something produced by his own devotion? But none of his friends, family or relatives was called Samuel, so where would the association have come from? Unwilling to let it go, he decided to look it up in Webster's dictionary. To his surprise, the first entry for Samuel read: in Hebrew, Samuel means "name of God". It struck him like lightning. He could hardly believe it — God had answered his question.
From then on he knew there was a world of higher spirits, and he decided to spend part of his time studying that domain. Wanting more room to work as he saw fit, he moved to Arizona State University and built his kingdom of psychical research there. In 1999 he reported the first experimental results he took as evidence that residual information does remain after a person dies, and that a capable medium is able to communicate with that residual information.
2. How sacred words in English responded
We tested "SAM" with Miss T, whose abilities were strong, and sure enough, on many occasions she saw a luminous screen and could not see the word SAM at all. Sometimes, even when she did see SAM, there was a ring of bright light around it. Remarkable indeed.
What about other sacred words in English? English is a modern language. Jesus used Aramaic, followed by Greek, then Latin, and only later did English evolve. Could a Christian spirit from 2,000 years ago connect over English? Or did it need Aramaic, or Hebrew? We tried the words Jehovah spoke to Moses in Hebrew, "I am that I am", which stands for God — and sure enough she saw a sheet of bright light. This was a sacred word. We then tried the Old Testament prophets in English, "Isaiah", "Elijah", "Elisha", and "Jesus", and in each case she did see the letters, though every word was ringed with light. This closely resembles what we found with the simplified-character form of Guanyin, 观音: because the writing has been altered, the link to the corresponding information website is still there, but much weakened.
So far "SAM" is the English word that produces the strongest response, which suggests that God's great website will accept an English address. Yet the Chinese characters for Jesus, 耶穌, produced a very strong vision: in Miss T's third eye she saw a hollow cross with light streaming out of it, and no writing at all. From Christian sources such as J.B. Russell's A History of Heaven, we know the gate of the kingdom of heaven is a cross. So the Chinese 耶穌 seems to connect to heaven's home page.
3. How the Chinese characters for Jesus responded
Across four years of experiments from 2000 to 2004, we tried the Chinese 耶穌 with Miss T no fewer than thirty times. She never once saw the two characters. It was always a vision: a cross, as in Figure 1, or a figure of light, or simply light — and sometimes the figure of light would ask her, "Who are you?" Why should the Chinese 耶穌 connect to Jesus, or to heaven's website, more readily than the English "Jesus"? Miss T was born and raised in the United States and spent only ages six to eleven in Taiwan, so she understands Western culture more deeply than Chinese culture. The phenomenon therefore seems to have nothing to do with the cultural background of the person with the ability. One specialist pointed out to us that 2,000 years ago the Aramaic for Jesus was pronounced Yeshua, which sounds much like the Chinese. That matches what we found earlier when connecting to the Buddha's website: getting the sound right is also a condition of connecting. It makes me wonder whether calling on his holy name with the sound he knew is all it takes for an answer to come.
