Transcending the Titanic: Beyond Death's Door Paperback – 27 Jan. 2012

great book, with some very interesting ideas, thought provoking and a book i was not expecting but certainly enjoyed it

Transcending the Titanic: Beyond Death's Door  Michael Tymn: White Crow Books, 2012, 116 pages.In his introduction, Michael Tymn writes, "Basically, the Titanic story is about dying and death, a subject people don't like to think about.... This book is not quite like other books about the Titanic. As the title suggests, it is an attempt to explore the more transcendental aspects of the Titanic story - those suggesting a non-mechanistic universe. The subjects include premonitions, apparitions, out of body experiences, telepathic communication among the living, and after death communication, many related to the Titanic passengers, others offered in support of the Titanic phenomena. Key among the passengers is William T.Stead, a British journalist. Although much has been written about Stead's spiritual pursuits and experiences, very little of it has been discussed in other books about the disaster."The story of the Titanic is told so vividly, that it draws us into the middle of the tragedy, and we imagine ourselves on the decks of the Titanic with all the lights going out as the ship begins to plunge beneath the surface of the ocean. We hear frantic screams, struggles for life, we imagine ourselves joining them in the water, we wonder again what it would feel like to be drowned, and we are led to ask what we would possibly experience as our spirits left our bodies.We identify with those who managed to get onto lifeboats and their feelings about loved ones left on the ship, and we are led to contemplate outstanding selfless behaviour in the face of certain death. One of the people who died, and whose exemplary behaviour stood out in the minds of many survivors, was Stead, and much of the book centres around this man."The Titanic story represents a struggle between man's inner self and outer self, a struggle which many people are interested in but prefer to avoid accepting books or movies." (p. xvi) The book deeply involves the reader in some of life's profoundest questions, and there is valuable spiritual teaching.Chapter 1 gives a general overview of what took place between when the ship hit an iceberg and the time the surviving passengers were rescued. It is a gripping story, with much reference to first hand reports. These words about Stead: "When we, the last lifeboat, left, and they could do no more, (Stead) stood alone, at the edge of the deck, near the stern, in silence and what seemed to me at prayerful attitude, or one profound meditation. You ask if he wore a lifebelt. Alas! No, they were too scarce. My last glimpse of the Titanic showed him standing in the same attitude and place." There were also many examples of less noble behaviour.Chapter 2: "Premonitions of Disaster & Death": In 1892, Stead had written a story, From the Old World to the New, where he described the sinking of the ship as a result of hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. It involved an actual ship named the Majestic, captained by Edward J.Smith, who later captained the Titanic. Stead had written a similar story in 1886. In 1909 he wrote, How I Know the Dead Return, and compared the grave to the Atlantic Ocean and the New World to the Afterlife. Also in 1909, in a speech, he pictured himself as being shipwrecked and drowning in the sea, calling frantically for help.In 1898 American novelist Morgan Robertson, wrote Futility. There is a British passenger liner naming the Titan. This ship collides with an iceberg in the north Atlantic and sinks. The details almost exactly match those of the Titanic disaster in many ways.The rest of the chapter details many other premonitions of disaster for the Titanic and how people acted on them.Tymn describes how warnings from the dead were also reported with great Britain's giant airship R-101, which crashed in France on its maiden overseas voyage in 1930. He also describes other notable cases of premonition of tragedy.Chapter 3 is entitled Apparitions and Telepathic Messages. As usual, there is much of interest here, including bodily manifestations of Stead himself at a number of séances, in which he speaks about his experiences. There is also an account of similar phenomena associated with the disappearance of a plane on a pioneering flight from the US to Britain.Chapter 4: One Victim's Preparation for Death. Stead's life is studied as a preparation for the events surrounding the Titanic disaster. This included Stead's use of automatic writing: Messages "began coming through from a woman named Julia Ames, an American journalist who had died the prior December, not long after a trip to London in which he had interviewed Stead. Julia stated that the messages were for a mutual friend, referred to by Stead as "Ellen." In addition to evidential material, Stead received many letters from Julia Ames describing afterlife conditions. He assembled many of them in a 1909 book called Letters from Julia. Julia spoke on Dying, the Soul after Death, the Life Beyond, Many Realms, Judgment, Outer Darkness, the Higher Self, the Divinity of Jesus, Modern Revelation, Life's Purpose, and more. I believe these letters deserve close study.Chapter 5: Stead Returns from the Dead: In a séance the spirit of Stead says, "Could you but see the misery of those lost, as I saw them, your hearts would bleed for them. Called to part from all their cherished hopes, and from the new life which many of them were born to commence, to plunge into the terrors of the unknown - you would weep with and pray for them. May you all take the lesson out of this sad catastrophe, that God intends you to take." Stead manifested on many occasions, and there were many phenomena of great interest.In conclusion: If I wished to interest a friend in the study of the world of Spirit, I would recommend this lively, and involving book, both wide ranging in its scope and compact in size.

Mike Tymn has cleverly used the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic to take a look at some of the supernormal phenomena associated with it. His main focus is on after death communications from those who went down on the ship (W.T.Stead figuring prominently in this)and on the alleged nature of post-mortem existence. Tymn displays his customary skills of clear exposition and vivid narrative. He is also particularly good at selecting relevant material from a number of the more impressive mediums in the first third of the twentieth century and putting forward a consistent thesis that, if you accept the Spiritualistic hypothesis, makes sense of a bewildering variety of almost unbelievable phenomena. If you do not, however, it just reads like a set of tall tales and I would have liked him to reinforce his enviable skills of narrative, exposition and description with a short critical analysis of each of the mediums involved. There is some but not enough. For example,he mentions Lincoln's apparent premontion of his own death. That whole story has been strongly contested and it would be good for someone of Tymn's investigative skills to get thoroughly to the bottom of it rather than accepting it at face value.

Mike Tymn's new book on the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 combines meticulous research with a horrifying, compelling recreation of the momentous tragedy. But the best part of the book--what makes it distinct from every other book written about the Titanic--is the account of what happened to its victims, not before, but after their deaths. John Jacob Astor, reputed to be the richest man in the world, gets half a chapter, and his pathetic suffering from 1912 to 1916--which he himself recounts to the famous psychologist Carl Wickland--is gripping and extremely sobering. Looked at through the lens of W. T. Stead, another victim of the sinking, but much better prepared to face the tragedy than Astor, the world of the "dead" emerges. This world is at least as fascinating as ours, and far more fair. Stead had been dead for 10 years when he finished dictating his account through the hand of the medium Pardoe Woodman.If you like a book that in parts reads like a novel yet at the same time introduces you to a metaphysics never guessed at by most of the world's philosopers--though the greatest of them all, Plato, was a significant exception--you should not miss this. Many readers will see their values begin to shift toward more spiritual realities. These realities are too vividly told and the research behind them too strong to be dismissed. Those who do so have never seriously confronted the evidence.Tymn is a celebrated researcher of paranormal phenomena and former newspaper reporter. I urge anyone with a curiosity about the nature of the afterlife to dip into this highly interesting and very accessible book. It will lead to further reading and, for many, a radically new sense of life's meaning and purpose.