A Little Autobiography

A Little Autobiography


A Little Autobiography from Walter D. Falk on Vimeo.

I have said very little so far about who I am and how I came to the conclusion that the holographic universe is my best bet for consciousness survival.

I started out as a typical individual who believed that what I saw about me was the reality. 


All my friends thought so. My parents certainly thought so. My teachers thought so. How could I see things differently?

I grew up as a farm boy. I went to a little country school which in a good year had up to 30 students ranging in grades from one to nine, and in ages from 6 to 14.

The library in my school consisted of a single small book cabinet with about 300 books, many of which were in the category of Peter Rabbit. There was very little stimulation for the mind beyond basic reading.

There were three books in the old dresser that my parents bought soon after marriage. They had both been born in Russia.  They met in Canada in the late 1920s, married, and began their lives together.

The three books were the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and a German book of fairy tales.

As was so often the case in Mennonite households, in my teenage years I became a born-again Christian. I tried very hard to live the Christian life. That is, the Christian life as I understood it.

In our particular variation of Mennonitism the idea was to stay away from any contamination with our secular neighbours. This meant that we had no radio the first six years of my life and later in the 50s no television either.

I was born in 1933, and when the second world war started in 1939 my uncle, my mother's brother who was living with us, and my father, decided to get a small battery radio from the Eaton's store in Winnipeg.

I was six years old at the time, but soon I discovered the Lone Ranger and little orphan Annie and the Carter Family. My father had many doubts about the wisdom of such interests.

And in my earliest teens I also developed a strong interest in how radios work.

At the age of fourteen I was fortunate to acquire a book on radio from the Department of Education in Manitoba. It was the culmination of an effort going back a few years.

I was fascinated. Here was the key to communication via the very mysterious electromagnetic radiation, which I later learned was so very much akin to ordinary light.

Soon I was attempting to build crystal sets using blobs of solder and anything I could make do for a 'cat's whisker.’

I pressed into service any odd lengths of wire, copper and sometimes ordinary iron, that I could lay my hands on or beg off neighbours' kids. Old automobile ignition coils sometimes came in handy.

Storage batteries taken from farm machinery for protection from frigid temperatures were sometimes stored in barns and house lean-tos over the winter; and old bolts wrapped with bits of wire and connected between the terminals of the batteries created electromagnets with which to experiment.

There was the smell of burnt fingers because Ohm’s Law was not understood at first and the wires were too short or carried too much current to control the temperature.  

The batteries often ended up totally ‘dead’.  How this was explained I do not recall.

I dreamed of much bigger projects but these had to be left on the 'back burner' for several years.

As the years passed I learned more, and I also came into possession of more resources that I could devote to my hobby.

I learned that there is something very satisfying about gazing at a collection of tubes and wires and resistors and condensers all carefully wired together, in which the tubes glowed cherry red when their filaments were connected to a battery and the crackle and hiss of static indicated that there was some sort of electrical life in the collection.

Usually there was also some work required to get the device to perform what it had been designed to do. It was rare to find that all this careful design and cutting and crimping and soldering immediately led to success.

My first soldering ‘gun’ was a large nail which I heated to incandescence with a hot plate.  The soldering jobs were grotesque, and it is a miracle that anything I built ever worked.

My first major effort was a one-tube transmitter that I used to receive on a floor radio through which I transmitted my heart-beat amplified to a loud flub-dub.

Along the way I learned that a very small modulation of the electromagnetic field could be picked up by a length of copper wire, and that if the wire was just the right length for the wavelength or frequency of the transmitting station that I could tune between the stations.

The tuning was very broad, and most likely the station I was tuning to would have other stations in the background. But tuning was possible.

I learned that if instead of tuning by the length of the wires, I could design a tank circuit consisting of a coil of wire of just the right length and a condenser of the correct capacity, the tuning was much sharper.

Interestingly enough this combination was referred to as a 'tank circuit'. In other words the reference was to the capacity in wavelengths of the combination.

I also found experimenters had discovered that if they beat the frequency of the transmitting station with a local oscillator frequency, that both the sum and difference frequencies of these two frequencies could be produced, and that these could be amplified by several stages of intermediate frequency amplifiers which were much more efficient at keeping out background stations in the final output.

This kind of radio was called a superheterodyne receiver. Most little mantle radios as well as the bigger floor models had at least one stage of intermediate frequency amplification. Some had several.

The output of this intermediate frequency amplifier could again be amplified and the output attached to a sort of a large earphone nowadays known as a speaker.

Much more could be said about this process. And of course in the 1950s transistors were invented and the whole field of mobile phones, computers, and solid-state devices became common.

I became an avid reader of the AARL handbook which is still being published yearly.

I learned that it was not the engineers working for corporations that were the greatest innovators. It was those dedicated amateurs working in basements and garages and living rooms, who did most of the development work.

I was impressed with how slowly and consistently the work had progressed through the years. From the first feeble spark transmissions of Heinrich Hertz to the modern high power world spanning and indeed space spanning developments was a long road.

At first there were only Morse code signals used for communication, but as continuous wave transmission was developed and experimenters found ways of modulating the continuous wave with audio signals, the modern methods of transmission with amplitude modulation, frequency modulation and phase modulation became possible and ubiquitous.

Those first broadcasts of Morse code and later continuous wave were often received in a fairly sporadic way. Long-distance communication dependent on something called the heavyside layer, now often referred to collectively as the ionosphere, that could deflect the radio waves between earth and sky.

At first, radio transmission by electromagnetic waves was not understood very well and it was hard to predict at what times of day transmissions could be heard and over what distances. But much work was soon done and understanding increased.

In my mid-20s I spent fifteen months in the Canadian Arctic specifically studying such phenomena.

By that time I had acquired a second class certificate for radio, and I was called a radio operator and ionosphere technician.

I mention this because, although the radio receiver has to be working very well to consistently pick up transmissions, there are other conditions that also affect reception.

When our receiver stops working, or works sporadically or intermittently, we don't usually question the transmitting station first: we usually understand that there is probably something not working right in the receiver itself or in the atmospheric radio conditions.

And I mention this because years later when I began to work with a medium, receiving messages from spirit entities through the medium, I often likened the medium to a radio receiver that was not working with complete fidelity.

I was often reminded of those first Morse code and later of the modulated continuous wave receptions. I remembered the Carter family broadcasts arriving at the farm in Manitoba and fading in and out, and cross fading with other stations at times, and some nights they were completely absent.

I often think we are in the very early stages of understanding how and why communication with entities who have no physical bodies is possible at all.  I also think that with further research we shall improve on this communication.

I took an undergrad degree in modern physics, and began teaching physics and later mathematics and finally computer science at the secondary school level.  I did my best to keep up with developments in physics through the second half of the twentieth century.

I had learned from the physics that things are rarely what they  appear to be at first sight.

But I also began to have experiences that made me think about the things I had been taught about religion and that I had believed for so long.

I will touch on only a few of the experiences that have convinced me that all things are not as they appear here either.

While I was teaching I also acquired a pilot’s license, learned to rebuild car engines and built a house with the help of my children, occasionally tinkered with amateur radio, became a hypnotherapist and investigated mediumship, so these thirty years were filled with activities.

In the winter of 1953 to 1954 I was teaching in an elementary school and I came across a book 'The Search for Bridey Murphy' by Morey Bernstein. It was my first introduction to the idea of reincarnation. I was fascinated and  frightened and deeply skeptical.

The prospect frightened me somewhat. Having been quite strictly indoctrinated with the religious ideas of born-again Christianity I read it with some trepidation. 

I was afraid for the future of my soul. The whole thing seemed to be rather far out into what I had been taught to believe was 'the devil's territory.'

At this time I did not question the teaching that psychic experiences were from the devil.  I never thought to consider why God should have to be powerless to stop such activity while the devil enjoyed ‘carte blanche’.

However, my fascination with the idea of reincarnation bore me along.  I was ‘hooked’ to find out more.

By chance, at the very beginning of the 60s, I happened upon a paperback in the drugstore in a suburb of Winnipeg with the title ‘There is a River’ by Thomas Sugrue, which was first published in 1942. 

In the early 1990s I read another book titled 'The Sleeping Prophet' by Jess Stearn first published Oct 1, 1989. 

My wife, Mary, died in 1986 and my daughter was in a head-on collision in late autumn of 1989.  She was not expected to live in the first hours after the collision.

At the very beginning of January 1990 I began to attend the Winnipeg Spiritualist Church at the corner of Arlington and  Aberdeen.

I also began to take a course in hypnosis. 

By the middle of the year I had graduated from the hypnosis course which included some work on past life regression and I had even done a demonstration past life regression one afternoon at the Winnipeg spiritualist church.

Hannah Venchuk was one of the mediums at the church at that time. I remember the regression especially because Hannah (who liked to be called Ann) went into a past life  in the audience. She went so deep that I had to spend some extra time at the end of the demonstration to bring her back.

I did not know it, but Ann did not believe in past lives at that time, being one of the old time spiritualists. Some spiritualists still do not believe in past lives.

On a cool and rainy night sometime around November, 1990 I got a phone call at my rural home. It was Ann with whom I had spoken very little so far that year, having found that trying to get her to expand on the messages that she gave me during the service at the church was not very productive. 

At the time I did not understand that although her eyes were open during the messages she was in trance and did not really know whom she was giving the messages to most of the time.

She explained to me that she was having difficulty sleeping. She was having a recurring nightmare which was so frightening to her that she was even afraid to go to sleep. 

She asked me to come to the city and do a regression with her because she now wondered whether this dream might be some kind of a past life memory.

It was getting later in the evening but I got on my car and drove to the town, getting lost a few times on the way to her apartment, and not very happy to try to find my way around Winnipeg in an unfamiliar part of town, and in the rain.

We did a regression which was at most only partially successful. Although she went easily into a very deep trance, when we came to exploring the dream she could only see that the person who was stabbing her was wearing women's shoes.

Ann described how she was walking down a street in a large city in Europe (she was sure it was London) and she could describe the cobblestone streets and she saw that she was being stabbed, and was able to count the number of stabs and see the monogram on the knife, then described how she died in the street.

We decided to do another regression later, and this time she could see that it was a woman stabbing her, but she could not make out the face. She also described how she was somehow afraid to see the face.

After some time we did a third regression. I had discussed with Ann that I would let her dissociate from herself and she would watch herself without emotions and without feeling any pain.

When we did that she could see the face. She recognized her mother in that lifetime! 

She also understood that she was working as a barmaid, that it was getting toward midnight when she was walking home, and that her mother waylaid her and stabbed her because she thought that her daughter was taking her customers. It turned out her mother was a prostitute.

We spent some time considering the situation and Ann decided that for the sake of her own peace of mind she must let this go and forgive her mother so that she herself could move on with her life.

The process was somewhat longer and more involved than I am describing here, but this is essentially the process that is usually used to let something go during a regression.

What is remarkable was that although Ann had had many sleepless nights before, afraid to go to sleep, and when she did waking up under the dream, that dream never bothered her again.

When doing past life regressions I noticed that there was a lot of variation between the people being regressed where the intensity of the experience was concerned.

Some people saw their passing past lives as a memory, with not too much emotional involvement, whereas others had very dramatic emotional experiences.

Some said the experience was as real as if they were living it for the first time.

The same can be said for dreams, I think. And this may also be true for lucid dreams.

Some day, if we learn to program a computer with enough detail, and we learn to attach it to a living brain, we may find the same thing to be true.

I cannot help thinking that conscious after death experiences are very much of the same kind. Possibly we will not know whether the people that we meet, especially people that we have known in our lifetimes, are 'real' or not. And it may not matter to us, any more than it matters to us when we're having a dream or a lucid dream.

In fact, Descartes had questions of this kind in mind when he said 'I think, therefore I am'. We cannot even be sure whether the people that we meet in this life are not mere projections from our own minds.

When we stop to think about it , we cannot be sure what the perceptions are of the people that we meet and interact with in daily life, even if they tell us.

For instance, when two of us agree that we are seeing the color red, neither of us can be sure exactly what the real perception of the other is.

We may both agree that the color is indeed 'red', but merely what we're agreeing to here is that we have both learned to apply the same name to the same stimulus. What each of our actual perceptions of the 'red' is we cannot say.
We cannot even be sure that the 'other' is anything more than our own perception.

I came to these conclusions when I discovered lucid dreaming.

This was not an accidental discovery. I had asked an entity who claimed to be 'on the other side of life' what it might be like to be so-called dead, as she claimed to be. I was speaking to her through Ann, who was a purported channel for communicating with the spirit.

She told me that I might look into lucid dreaming and that this would be somewhat analogous to the death state.

So I began to read and discovered that lucid dreaming is a rather well-known phenomenon practised by many people. 

I started by asking myself many times during the day whether I was awake or dreaming.

If everything seemed to make sense for the usual waking state I came to the conclusion that I was awake. But this questioning had an interesting side effect. It began to creep into my subconscious.

I had for many years been practising hypnosis, especially focussing on past life and between life regression. Occasionally I also did future progressions. 

None of these things seemed to work for me.  But I was able to help other people make contact with their own past lives.

So I knew that there were things that could get into the subconscious of a human being and have their effect there.

And, sure enough, there came a dream to me one night during which I became aware that I was asking myself whether I was awake or dreaming; and there was something in the dream that did not make sense for the awake state. I do not remember exactly what this was.

However, as soon as I became aware that I was dreaming I immediately popped out of the dream and woke up. 

Over a period of time I learned to calm myself so that at the instant that I knew that I was dreaming I did not wake up immediately.

Another problem presented itself. Almost immediately I began to wonder whether perhaps I had died during sleep and I was now in the death state. I was so curious to find out whether I was still alive or whether I had died that I kept waking up before I could do any experimenting.

But after a few months I was able to stay in the dream state even though I knew that I was dreaming and that I might be dead.

Now it was possible to do some experiments. My whole surroundings during such lucid dreams became much more expansive than in more normal dreams. And I was able to say to myself  'Here I am. I am dreaming. Let's see how real things seem to me.'

I found that I could create certain objects that I knew were simply figments of my imagination even as I knew that I was simply dreaming and there was nothing in front of me; I could reach out and touch these things and feel that they were solid and gave the impression of temperatures, warm and cold. 

I could also see colors and I was aware that I was seeing colors. And I was saying to myself “This is as bright and as real as anything that I can see or feel when I am awake. And yet I know that I am dreaming.” 

“I know that I'm lying in my bed and asleep and dreaming yet all this reality seems real about me. It seems as real as anything during my awake state.”

I was able to sit on a beach and look out over the sea. And I said to myself “Let's see whether I can make the waves move away from the beach”. 

No sooner said than done. The waves began to move away from the beach and I was perfectly aware in my dream state that I was dreaming and that never in the awake state would I see waves moving away from a beach.

I did numerous other experiments and convinced myself that there is no need for anything to be there in reality for it to appear as real and solid as anything in my waking state. 

It was a great deal of fun to know that the things about me were simply being created by my mind, sometimes as a direct result of my will. Sometimes they came out of nothing without me doing anything about it.

But the net result of it all was that I realized that there is no need for any reality outside of myself.

In documentary number four I told the story of my experience with Henry, my brother-in-law. After he died of liver cancer, he came through Hannah and told me that he saw my wife, Mary, and was surprised. 
      
But there was more to this story.

A few minutes after Henry left another entity took over. This time it was Felicity, the young lady with whom I had many times communicated since I started working with Ann.

She informed me that it was not really Henry's time to die. She said "They made a mistake."

Nearly a week later, on the day of Henry's funeral, I taught in the morning and took the afternoon off to go to the funeral. We met for a light lunch at a home which was also near the school. 

Several members of the family had already gathered, including Henry's wife and daughter.

During dinner I was surprised to see Henry's wife lean across the table and say "You know… Henry shouldn't have died yet. They made a mistake… they didn't watch his potassium levels… at the end they were giving him potassium tablets but it was too late."

Ann spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. After twenty years of working with her I was sad to have to watch her deteriorate mentally to the point where, when I visited her in the home, she would not recognize me. She would often be trying to take her blouse off over her head, spending a lot of time struggling.

I would sit with her for twenty minutes or so although she would rarely even seem to know that I was there.

One day, with no preamble, during her struggles with her blouse, she suddenly said "Walter… Walter… Walter… Thank you… Thank you… Thank you.…"

That was the last time she ever spoke to me directly. I was under the very distinct impression that she was conscious of what she was doing and conscious of me, and for a few moments it was like old times. 

Then she was back behind the impenetrable veil that had enveloped her.

But I knew that Ann was still there. Her brain was no longer functioning to connect the three-dimensional world in which her body still resided with that mental world in which Ann continued but from which she was unable to continue communicating.

 I think it must have been at least a thousand times during the twenty years in which I worked with Ann that I watched her go into trance and come back out.

Most of the time I had the impression that when Ann was leaving her body and the new entity was taking over it was almost as if a pilot was taking a seat in the cockpit of an airplane and adjusting the controls to suit.

Sometimes even entities that I talked to often would have difficulties at the beginning of communication: there would be a moment or two when the communication was not working as expected and the entity would say "One moment please". There would be a pause while adjustments were made and then the voice would come back and say "That's better."

It was as if someone needed to adjust the frequencies in the receiver and transmitter to get right "on station."

There were times that entities attempting to get through and speak using Ann's vocal cords were simply not able to do so. Sometimes they would come back later and try again. Often they were successful after several attempts. On the other hand, some never bothered to try again as far as I can tell.

I would have to go through my notes on these twenty years to be able to count the number of distinct individuals that either attempted or were able to communicate with me during those years. 

What was amazing is a number of different voices that came through, both male and female, including one who claimed that he had never been human. I use the pronoun 'he' because although the voice sounded rather mechanical it did have more of a masculine than a feminine ring to it.

To believe that Ann could have mastered so many voices and so many distinct personalities and invented them on the spur of the moment coming out of sleep or going into trance during the day is far more difficult than to believe that they really were who they claimed to be. 

What they claim to be is personalities that have existed as males or females in life on earth in the past.

Some of the personalities I talked to during those years told me their names and their occupations during life. They would tell me how they had died and how they had lived. And there were many who seemed to have forgotten their names.

One entity that I met was an interesting character who had been an itinerant farm worker in Saskatchewan, probably in the late 1800s. He had loved to work at harvesting and he was still doing that.

He had been something of a lover of the bottle and of women. He told in some detail how he liked to go into town where he would wear steel rimmed glasses on his nose and with a Bible under his arm. He said in his experience religion was good for 'getting the women'.

He was hoping to do it all again but he was having difficulty convincing some people in charge of these things because they were insisting that they would not let him go back until he showed some signs of wanting to improve. He definitely did not want to change.

He told me how he seduced one farmer's wife behind the summer kitchen. He loved to joke and he was really very funny but when I said one day that I would've like to meet him in life he cut me short by saying that I would have had nothing to do with him if I had met him.

It was around 1999, and I had been working with Ann for almost ten years when I was asked to hold seances for a few friends who were thinking of possibly contacting deceased relatives, when Dr. Hamilton first made himself known to me.

I had heard rumors about his early work in the 1920s and 1930s, but really only knew his name and nothing about the actual work that he had done.

A young lady who was rapidly developing into a mature medium one day during a seance asked all of us - there were several people present: “Does anyone here know a Dr. Hamilton?”

We all scratched our heads, trying to recall someone by that name in our lives. 

After some time of trying to recall someone by that name we all had to admit no success.

Suddenly a thought occurred to me and I hesitated a guess “Would this be the Dr. Hamilton who used to holds seances in Winnipeg?”, I ventured.

There was an immediate affirmative response and a request of me that I look into his notes at the University of Manitoba.

I was not convinced that I would find anything of consequence there, and I procrastinated another four years, until the spring of 2004, before I took the bus to the Elizabeth Dafoe Library at the University.  

What I found amazed me.

There were nineteen boxes of written and typed notes there.  After about half an hour of looking into them I was convinced that there was something valuable that needed to be made easily accessible in computer searchable form.

This was the beginning of seven years of work.

I had been given a new digital camera - these were just arriving at that time - and I photographed the collection -   about 5000 photographs - and began transcribing the notes into the Wordperfect word processor and storing the photographs and notes on DVD.

Eventually I created a website and uploaded the notes and photographs.

In the two years after 2004 Dr. Hamilton contacted us another twenty times, according to my diaries.  He continued to show a strong interest in my work with the notes, both in seances with various groups and in channelling through Ann when we were alone.

Ann was an octogenarian by this time and went to live in assisted living and finally into personal care while I began to travel across Canada, finally settling in Victoria.

In the seven years after 2004 I uploaded about 4,600 pages of notes and about 700 photographs that Dr. Hamilton took during his seance work.

The website is at www.thehamiltonfiles.info.

So much more could be said about these experiences, but I think this will be enough for now.

In conclusion I would just like to repeat the quote from the preceding documentary:

What I have learned so far has given me a very different view of the universe and its possibilities than I started out with at the beginning of my life.

I am now much more willing to accept this statement of one of the outstanding physicists of the twentieth century when John Wheeler said:
“In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.”

And he went one to say:

“There may be no such thing as the ‘glittering central mechanism of the universe’ to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery, but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.”

If we accept this assessment, then the current fascination with Harry Potter may not be a great surprise. 

We may be remembering something from our between lives existences.

A phrase keeps echoing in my mind - a phrase I remember hearing often repeated by my friends whom I met through Hannah:
“Remember”, they said “anything is possible.”

And we may be at the stage where we will finally recognize that the magic is not something that is done by some magician out there: we may see that we ourselves are both the magician and the magic. 












 Ann

Ann