Seeking Your Loved One on the Other Side: Communications with the Invisible Universe

by Matthew McKay, Ralph Metzner Ph.D. (Foreword by)

Overview

How to connect with those who have passed and learning to love in the face of pain

• Shares a proven process that has worked for the author as well as thousands of others to communicate with deceased loved ones

• Explores the use of mediums, past-life and between-life hypnotic regressions, a technique called Induced After-Death Communication, and channeled writing

• Presents revelations about the soul’s life after death, the structure of the afterlife, how karma works, and how to love in the face of pain

If you’ve lost a loved one or had a brush with mortality, you undoubtedly have wondered about life after death—or if it’s possible to connect with souls on the other side. After the tragic death of his son, Jordan, the author embarked on a journey for ways to communicate with his son across the veil. He discovered not only successful methods to connect with lost loved ones but also profound truths about the afterlife, the illusion of loss, and how pain is integral to our life purpose.

McKay recounts techniques he tried in order to connect with his son, including collecting unusual experiences from family and friends, consulting mediums such as Austyn Wells, undergoing past-life and between-life regressions, engaging in a technique called Induced After-Death Communication, and using channeled writing, which he learned with the help of psychologist Ralph Metzner.

The culmination of hundreds of channeled conversations with his son, the author presents revelations about the soul’s life after death, the structure and key events of the afterlife, how karma works, why we incarnate, our future as souls, and how to love in the face of pain. As Jordan reveals, nothing is truly lost. The soul is constant and, while pain seems to damage us, the damage is an illusion. Because, as Jordan says, “there is no end; the conversation goes on . . . between all the souls who love each other, living and dead.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888502334
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Edition description:	2nd Edition, New Edition of Seeking Jordan
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Matthew McKay, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the Wright Institute, cofounder of Haight Ashbury Psychological Services, founder of the Berkeley CBT Clinic, and cofounder of the Bay Area Trauma Recovery Clinic, which serves low-income clients. He has authored and coauthored more than 40 books, including The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook and Seeking Jordan. The publisher of New Harbinger Publications, he lives in Berkeley, California.

Ralph Metzner (1936–2019) obtained his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University, where he collaborated with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert on psychedelic research. He was Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and president and co-founder of the Green Earth Foundation. Dr. Metzner is the author of numerous books, including Overtones and Undercurrents, Searching for the Philosophers’ Stone, and Green Psychology.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Train to Chicago

Sunrise touches the Utah mesas, lighting high orange cliffs above the gray chaparral. The train sways through the curves and switches. Rio Grande coal cars fill a long railroad siding, ending at the broken windows of the Desert Moon Hotel.

Jordan is dead, killed by men who wanted something. Either his possessions or simply the pleasure of inflicting pain. If they hoped to find power by creating suffering, they have succeeded. By putting a bullet in his back, they took our son, and so much of what made life mean anything to us.

As the early light works through the crevices and canyons, we are on our way to Chicago to meet a man who has found a way for the living and the dead to talk. His name is Allan Botkin, and he knows how to induce a state in which those who grieve can hear directly from the ones they have lost. I don’t fully believe, but it’s all I have.

Jude and I sit on the edge of our narrow bunk. We have pictures and mementos of Jordan’s life. The light is stronger now, the world outside the window no longer hidden in shadows. At this moment, our journey feels absurd. The clarity of light suggests the eternal separation of what can be seen from what cannot, of the physical and known from the hoped for and ephemeral.

Jordan’s ashes are in the closet of his room back in Berkeley. They weigh about the same as he did when I first carried him from the nursery to his mother. And now we are trying to find him, to reach past every empty place to hear his voice again.

In Chicago it is gray, with wind careening off the Great Lakes. Allan Botkin practices, weekends only, in the office building of some large corporation. We meet with him in a conference room situated within a rabbit warren of work cubicles.

Botkin explains that the procedure he uses for Induced After-Death Communication (IADC) was discovered by accident. As a psychologist with the Veterans Administration (VA), he often treated post-traumatic stress disorder with core-focused EMDR, Botkin’s own variant of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), developed by Francine Shapiro. It’s a simple process that encourages patients to visualize a traumatic scene and then move their eyes back and forth. The eye movement serially stimulates opposite sides of the brain, inducing a gradual reduction of emotional pain. A large body of scientific literature documents the effectiveness of EMDR; it works with about 75 percent of trauma patients. I am a psychologist. I have used EMDR myself, hundreds of times, primarily with people suffering the effects of early sexual abuse.

Botkin stumbled into his Induced After-Death Communication protocol with Sam, a veteran who had never recovered from the death of Le, a young Vietnamese girl he had planned to adopt. Botkin guided Sam through numerous sets of eye movements as the man focused his attention on his sadness and on the memory of Le lying dead in his arms. When Sam reported that the pain began to subside, Botkin did one more set of eye movements but with no specific instructions. Sam closed his eyes and fell silent. Then he began to cry. When Botkin prompted the man to describe his experience, he said, “I saw Le as a beautiful woman with long black hair. She was in a white gown surrounded by radiant light. She thanked me for taking care of her before she died. . . . Le said, ‘I love you, Sam.’”*

Botkin realized he had witnessed what might be an after-death communication—made possible by a simple variant on the EMDR procedure. He set out to discover if Sam’s experience was replicable. Over the next several years, Botkin initiated the new procedure with eighty- three patients at the VA. All were suffering profound grief. None were told what to expect, other than a general description of EMDR and its effectiveness with trauma and grief. Eighty-one out of those eighty-three patients experienced an after-death communication—98 percent.

Once Jude and I are settled in the conference room, Botkin interviews us together. Later, we each come alone for the EMDR procedure. When it is my turn, I notice that Botkin’s face seems etched with some residual of the pain he’s witnessed. He moves slowly, as if his limbs carry an invisible weight. To guide the eye movement, he uses a wand made from a thin PVC pipe edged in blue tape. “It works,” he says, beginning a steady movement of the wand.

He asks me to imagine the scene in which I learned of Jordan’s death. It began with a call from the San Francisco medical examiner. “I have the worst news anyone can get,” the man said. “Your son was riding home on his bike late last night—around one thirty—and he was attacked on the street. He was shot. I’m sorry to say he died at the scene.”

And then I had to make my own phone calls. “We lost Jordan,” I would say after apologizing for having sad news. At the time, the meaning of the words had hardly sunk in, but as I sit with Botkin they burn like acid, and I can barely stand to think of them.

During the EMDR, I focus on the sound of the words: “the worst news . . . we lost Jordan.” Over and over, my eyes follow the wand moving. I see Jordan slumping in the doorway where he died. Botkin continues until an odd numbness sets in, a lifting of the weight.

This is the way EMDR works. I have seen it so many times with my own patients—how they begin to let go of the pain, how the frozen images and feelings start to soften.

“Close your eyes,” Botkin finally intones. “Let whatever happens happen.”

Nothing. A distant panic starts—that I have come all this way for silence. That my beautiful boy is unreachable; I will never hear from him again. I wonder if the fact that I use EMDR in my own work, and know what to expect, is getting in the way.

I open my eyes. Then Botkin moves the wand once more and I follow it. Again he enjoins me to close my eyes, to let go to whatever happens.

And now, quite suddenly, I hear a voice. Jordan is speaking, as if he were in the room. He says:

Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad. Tell Mom I’m here.

Don’t cry . . . it’s okay, it’s okay. Mom, I’m all right,

I’m here with you. Tell her I’m okay, fine. I love

you guys.

Those are the exact words. And they convey the two things I most needed to know: that Jordan still exists and that he is happy. The pain of his last moments is long over, and he is in a place that feels good.

The next day we leave Chicago. Jude, despite all our hope, hasn’t heard Jordan’s voice. For her, the silence of the dead remains. All I can give her are words that only I heard. But I feel a sense of reconnection. What had been severed is again whole; what had been lost has been given back to me. I heard my boy. I learned that on different sides of the curtain of death we still have each other.

On the train home I feel lighter. But as we cross the gray waters of the Mississippi, I have a familiar thought: that Jordan can’t see this, that all I experience—and all I feel—is unknowable to him. I touch the window as if reaching for something. Then I remember his words: “I’m here with you.” Moments later, light fades on the old brick facades of Burlington. I imagine showing it to Jordan.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.

Preface

1 Train to Chicago

2 Beginning the Conversation

3 Listening

4 What Is Death?

5 The Other Side: Landings, Recovery, Review

6 Reunions

7 All Together: The Living and the Dead

8 Why Things Happen

9 The Lessons of Uncertainty and Loss

10 How Spirits Help Us

11 What We Do When We Know Where
Home Is

12 The Cycle: Lessons Learned and
Not Learned

13 Another Journey

AFTERWORD TO THE 2025 EDITION
What Happens at the End of Life

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Matthew McKay, a grounded man with a scientific orientation, was unexpectedly transported into an alternate reality cracked open from the passing of his beloved son, Jordan. This tragedy acted as a catalyst, thrusting him into a sphere of experience he had never anticipated. During Matthew’s metamorphosis, he came to understand the continuity of consciousness after physical death and the possibility of communication between realms. He also learned to appreciate the subtle nature of such communication, which required him to tone down skepticism and ‘trust that feeling.’ His insights are a gift to us all, especially those who have suffered the pain of losing a loved one.

author of The Persistence of the Soul Mark Ireland

Once I started reading Matthew McKay’s book, I couldn’t put it down. His story takes the reader on a fascinating journey that begins with his unimaginable suffering over the loss of a son and ends with his profound insights into the ultimate nature of reality and an associated sense of peace and comfort. Because of the work I do, I particularly enjoyed his discussion of science and spirituality at the end of the book.

Allan L. Botkin

Matthew McKay’s Seeking Your Loved One on the Other Side chronicles a father’s pilgrimage from the devastating loss of his son, Jordan, to the discovery of the eternal nature of the soul. Through the use of hypnosis, journaling, and spirit communication, McKay’s book provides a lighthouse, offering hope and guidance for those navigating grief. This book is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the enduring bond between worlds.

Austyn Wells

With Matthew, we are invited to touch the very meaning of life—and life beyond physical death. We find comfort in knowing that love and connection are eternal and unbounded. Yet we are challenged by the gap between the physical and the invisible, the ephemeral and the eternal, our biases or assumptions and the very purpose of life itself. This book is an enormous gift of hope and liberation that reminds us once more that death is not the end but a new beginning.

John P. Forsyth

Matthew McKay makes a strong—and, in my view, convincing—case that science and spirituality belong together. He shows that we can expand our knowledge and learning tremendously if we let go of our obsession with measuring only quantifiable events and also accept multiple independent reports and observations of the afterlife as a valid source of information. This book grabbed and deeply moved me from the beginning and wouldn’t let me go until I finished it—and then it continued to stir my mind and heart even while I was not actually reading it.

Georg Eifert

Matthew McKay’s story of seeking and finding Jordan after death is a masterpiece of psychic detective work, clairvoyance, personal faith, and cosmology that brings the living and the dead into alignment.

author of Bottoming Out the Universe and Homeopath Richard Grossinger