Lighting the Way

by Karen Gadiel

It takes courage to write and publish one's beliefs, particularly when these differ from much of what the rest of the world accepts as reality. As a musician and composer, Ithaca musician Laurie Conrad has routinely broken new ground in creating new music. A lifelong mystic, she's lived comfortably with a reality others might consider "alternative," imbued with certainties in areas where most of the rest of us simply wish and hope.

Among these is the absolute conviction of the existence of many other realms of being. "I think much of the music I write, I am trying to draw from other realms," Conrad says. "I am trying to bring it here for people. And obviously, trying to go to the higher realms for that."

.... To see beyond this conventional reality is ordinary for her. "The clairvoyant images I have had about lost animals have always been correct," she says matter-of-factly. "If I dream about the future, those events always happen; if I clairvoyantly see a lost animal or person, they're always found there ...
 

 

In Realms of Light, Conrad discusses her own and others' clairvoyant experiences of life after death. "We are supposed to look through this reality to a divine reality," she says, adding quickly, "Being human, I'm not capable of doing that all the time." Much like her previous book, The Spiritual Life of Animals and Plants (Authorhouse, 2002), this book is an outgrowth of experiences demanding to be shared.

Conrad, who works with the Distant Healing Network, said, "I kept getting healing requests [from people] grieving for someone they loved who had died, and more than a few of them were having a terrible time recovering. They asked me to write the book. And then, after my piano student Jeremy died, he appeared and told me I'd be writing books."

... Realms of Light vividly presents compelling evidence that life as we know it does not come to a complete end after the death of the physical body. "Those in higher realms will pray for us and try to help us," Conrad writes. "The relationship continues, it has not ended just because they left the physical body. They will shower Love on us, if we allow it."

She explains, "There are still huge relationships from realm to realm, in many ways better and deeper. Their soul state reflects back to me my own soul. They are bringing a love and a clarity they did not have on earth, whether we are conscious of it or not."

"I just happen to be clairvoyant," she adds casually. "One of the reasons I wrote the book was to tell people the relationship doesn't end. It grows deeper and stronger. If you're quiet, you'll often feel that love surrounding you. But sometimes you have to be quiet and look for it."

To Conrad, there are no coincidences. A mystic by nature, she is someone who watches how things "turn out" and draws meaningful conclusions from the natural unfolding of events in her life and the lives of others. Enriched by painful experiences, like the accident she mentions early in Realms of Light, as well as the deaths of friends and family members, she has thoughtfully extracted the deeper meanings, and used things that have happened to her to help others.

... "If you're not clairvoyant, you should at least imagine a higher reality that coexists with this reality, so we don't get trapped here in conventional reality," she says.

... In Realms of Light, Conrad's view of life and death as a continuum rather than an abrupt set of arrivals and departures feels warm and comforting. If there's a lesson, Conrad says, it's "Gratitude with a capital G. It's all a gift and we forget. We should be grateful for all the time we have with someone. It was never our daughter or our mother, God was always the parent. The element of gratitude allows the healing to come in, and gives us the detachment and perspective we need to heal."