Signs from the Other Side: Opening to the Spirit World

ISBN-13: 9781608685523

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New World Library

Publication Date: 03-05-2019

Pages: 176

Product Dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.20(d)

Bill Philipps is a psychic medium who offers individual, small-group, and large-audience readings throughout the United States and the world. Bill’s fresh, upbeat, and direct approach perfectly reflects his warm and relatable demeanor, captivating audiences in person and as a guest on popular television and radio broadcasts. He lives in Southern California.

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CHAPTER 1

Surviving Childhood

No child says, "When I grow up, I want to be a psychic medium!" Even if they were to express that desire, it simply does not happen that way.

You won't find a psychic medium alongside a banker, lawyer, and veterinarian presenting to students at a school on career day. There is no high school aptitude test for your counselor to administer to help you decide if you would be best suited to the occupation of psychic medium. And it's certainly not a family business that you can inherit from your parents or grandparents.

You are selected to receive this gift, a gift the souls in heaven plant in your mind that evolves over time. Once the spirits know that you realize who they are and that you are willing and able to communicate their messages to their loved ones on earth, word spreads among them. Before you know it, your mind has become their sanctuary, and you have become their channel. They trust you, and they rely on you to convey their messages. Thus, a psychic medium is born.

The experience is very similar to what is depicted in the 1990 Oscar-winning movie Ghost. Whoopi Goldberg's character, Oda Mae, is a psychic, or at least she pretends to be one to try to make a living. Patrick Swayze plays Sam, who is shot and killed on the street in what appears to be a robbery attempt gone wrong, though it is actually a premeditated murder. After his death, Sam visits Oda Mae in her psychic shop; she can't see him, but she can hear him. He implores her to tell his girlfriend, Molly (played by Demi Moore), that he was murdered and that her life could also be in danger. It takes a lot of pestering by Sam for Oda Mae to accept that she really can hear a dead person, but after she does, and conveys his message to Molly, other spirits begin to appear to her on a regular basis to try to get her to relay messages to their own loved ones. They have found their channel in Oda Mae.

When it first happened to me, I denied it. I didn't believe it, and I didn't want to believe it. But once I knew it was real, I didn't want to let it go. I realized I'd been given a gift that could bring peace, happiness, and closure to people in ways that they otherwise couldn't experience. As burdensome as it was at times, it was a responsibility I felt I had to assume.

Before I go any further into how I do what I do, let me briefly share with you my bizarre upbringing and how this extraordinary life started for me. You will find many more details in my book Expect the Unexpected, but here is a summary to familiarize you with my background.

My parents both suffered with drug addiction before I was born, and the birth of their first child didn't change their habits. I was raised in Southern California in a toxic environment, a witness to abuse in many forms. The fact that I made it out of my childhood alive was a miracle.

Mom and Dad separated in 1991 when I was six years old. They got back together after a few months, but my mom secretly had a boyfriend. She devised a plan to kidnap me from my dad, and she followed through with it one day after he left for work. We fled to a friend's house, where we stayed until late in the evening as Dad drove up and down the neighborhood streets searching and screaming for us. Afraid he would find us, Mom dragged me to an abandoned school bus in a ditch, lit with gas lanterns. We hid there with her junkie friends, who were high on crack, jabbing themselves with needles, and performing sex acts on each other. I buried myself in the backseat of the bus with my ears covered and eyes squeezed tightly shut while Mom joined them.

The next day my mom, her boyfriend, and I boarded a Greyhound bus. We spent several days traveling cross-country to Brooklyn, New York, where her boyfriend had family. We lived there in various houses and apartments, and I often had to visit the closest church to get food since I didn't have any at "home." I didn't realize we were homeless, because I never slept on a street — but we were. I rarely had a bed. I often slept on floors in rooms with multiple people I didn't know. Once I was settled under my blanket for the night, Mom would give me a kiss, tell me she loved me, and then usually hit the streets for her drug fix. Sometimes she was home by morning; other times she wasn't.

I was shuttled back and forth between a couple of schools each year, depending on where we were living at the time. I managed to keep up my grades, though I'm not sure how, given the instability in my life. A lot of things I saw daily — drugs, guns, violence — scared the crap out of me, but given that it was all I had known since the day I was born, nothing surprised me.

I lived in New York for three years. My stay there ended when my mom's boyfriend's sister, who had been housing us and taking care of me anytime Mom was on a drug run, had had enough. She tracked down my dad, who was living and working in Las Vegas. She told him if he'd send a plane ticket, I was all his. He did.

I was happy to be with my dad, but the living arrangements were like those in New York. We spent about six months in an apartment in Vegas, where Dad struggled to make ends meet and continued to suffer with his addiction. We then moved back to Southern California and lived in different hotels. This transience continued for almost three years until I was twelve, when my grandma (my dad's mom) took me in to give me some stability for the first time in my life.

While living with my dad and grandma, I regularly kept in contact with my mom by phone. Despite what she had put me through, I loved her deeply, and I knew how much she loved me. Because of my dad's obvious distrust toward her, I wouldn't return to New York to visit her until August 1999, just a few weeks short of my fifteenth birthday and nearly six years after I had last seen her. I went back because her boyfriend called to tell me she had pancreatic cancer and was failing fast. She had mentioned to me a few days earlier that she had some medical issues, but she didn't let me know how dire they were because she didn't want me to worry. I caught a red-eye flight to New York on a Friday to see her. I arrived Saturday morning and went straight to the hospital.

That evening, alone with her in the room and with her hand in mine, I watched as she quietly passed away.

Two days after my mom's death, in the guest bedroom of an old home I was staying in on Long Island, I was awakened by a natural light in the far corner of the room. Actually, a supernatural light.

It was my mom.

She was young, beautiful, healthy, and happy — not the sickly, beaten-down woman I had just seen die in the hospital. When I realized that it was her and acknowledged her, she smiled. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but I knew this was not a dream. I was awake, and she was there, like an apparition. She appeared to be more alive than I was at that hour.

"Billy, I want you to know that I'm okay," she said in a soft, soothing voice. "Also, know that I will take care of you."

And then she vanished.

I stayed awake for a while in case she returned, but she didn't. I continued to sleep in that room for the next couple of nights, hoping ... but to no avail.

Within a few weeks after I returned home to Southern California, my dad suddenly began a yearlong journey toward quitting his drug habit. I know it was fueled by my mom's death, which bothered him a lot. He cried when I called from New York to tell him she had passed. They'd had some serious differences, but I always knew they loved each other, even when they didn't outwardly show it. Since the end of that year, my dad has been clean. I believe that when Mom said she would take care of me, this is what she meant. She helped my dad sober up, which was a very big deal for me considering I was only fifteen years old at that time and had just lost her. She couldn't take care of me in her earthly form because of her own drug addiction, but she made up for it when she entered her next life and helped Dad kick his addiction.

An Unlikely Path

Toward the end of the summer after my mom's death, I was walking through a strip mall in Southern California with some friends when we passed a psychic shop. The psychic came out and stopped me.

"Wow!" she said. "You have an amazing gift." She was moving her hands in the space around me, like she felt some sort of energy. I watched her as if she was out of her mind. "You should be doing what I'm doing. But the thing is ... it's going to take you about three years to understand what I'm saying."

Was she serious? My friends and I had a good laugh and moved on.

But right on cue, three years later, just after my eighteenth birthday in October 2002, a weird thing began happening to me: I would go to bed each night with chills and a feeling that someone was in the room with me. I shared my experiences with my friend's mom, Rachel, who believed in the spirit world and was someone I had often turned to for advice. She was fascinated by my story and suggested that I visit a metaphysical shop nearby. I wasn't thrilled about the idea because I didn't put much stock in places like that. I initially resisted going, but since the strange feelings hadn't subsided, I decided to give it a shot.

On the night I went, the store happened to be holding a two-hour class on how to develop mediumship skills, or how to communicate with the deceased. The teachers immediately tagged me as someone with "an aura," something I shrugged off as nothing but a setup for a future sales pitch. As the youngest person there and one of the few not dressed like a gypsy, I was most concerned with where the exits were and how I could get the heck out of there.

But I reluctantly stuck with it, and two hours later, I could not deny that the aura existed. I went through two tests, one that measured my extrasensory perception, or ESP, and one that tested my ability to connect with someone or something through the energy of an object. Not only did I pass both with tremendous ease, but I boggled the minds of the instructors and every other person in the room. I even brought one woman to tears because I was able to connect her with her close friend who had died.

When I reported to Rachel what had happened, she was ecstatic. She tested me further by having me give a reading to her. The spirit that came through to me during that reading meant nothing to her, but she told me to be patient. About a week later, Rachel met with one of her business clients. Through casual conversation, she figured out that the spirit that had come through during my reading with her the previous week was connected to this client, so she eagerly set up a meeting between us.

That client's son had recently died. During my reading with her, I found I was able to tell her specific things about him that nobody else knew, as well as give her direct messages from this spirit, who I felt was actually inside my mind telling me what to say. So, a reading I had given to Rachel had been meant for someone she knew, which taught me that those on the other side had the power to orchestrate meetings between two complete strangers — her client and me — in order to communicate their messages to their loved ones.

As intriguing and exciting as this was, I didn't drop everything and instantly become the channel that the spirit world obviously wanted me to become. As a recent high school graduate, I was about to start taking classes at the local community college, and I was going to continue voice lessons. I loved to sing, and I had been blessed with a rare operatic tenor voice. I was also working up to forty hours a week as a barista at a café. I decided to stick with the classes, lessons, and job while giving readings when I could. I figured, still being young, I had plenty of time to determine what I should — or was destined to — do with my life.

* * *

I worked on my psychic medium skills at the café by trying to determine the names of customers. I would pick them out of the line, ask the spirits for their names, and then ask the customers their names when they would come up to place their order. I listened for that inner voice from within, and nearly every time I was able to correctly name them or come awfully close. If I were completely wrong, I would usually discover that the name I had heard was that of someone else standing close by, such as next in line. Or I would learn that the name I had received wasn't that of the customer in line but rather of the actual spirit tied to that person.

I eventually took my gift to another café on my off days, not as an employee but as a customer. I would sit at a table and try to figure out names of other customers and of the staff. I tried to be discreet in these self-tests, but the times I did tell people what I was doing, my efforts were met with unbridled enthusiasm. I thought they would freak out and call me crazy, but instead they wanted more, and word of my gift quickly spread. Customers would try to time their visits to the café with mine and sit by me. Sometimes they would bring their friends in to "show me off." Servers would argue over who got to wait on me, with the hope that they could get a reading. I then began doing readings outside the café for many of the people there, meeting them in parks or in their homes, and they paid me for my time. This gift was taking on a life of its own, and it was taking over mine.

As a result, in January 2003, I left my job at the café. I enjoyed working there, but I was spread too thin and needed to give up something. With the readings providing me money for college and voice lessons, I made mediumship my job instead.

* * *

Every reading I gave increased my knowledge of the extent of my capabilities. Like anything else in life, the more I practiced this skill, the more I mastered it.

I learned that when I did a reading, I had to enter a trance-like state. Those on the other side were throwing information at me nonstop. Therefore, I needed to be laser-focused and share it immediately with my client as it came in. The message from the spirit was like the sound waves of music passing through a radio (me) to a listener (the client). I then had to help the client interpret it. When we were finished, it was necessary to completely disconnect myself from it so that I could psychologically prepare for the next reading. Each time, I expended an enormous amount of energy. If I hadn't consistently "discarded" each reading when it was finished, my brain would have crashed from the overload of information.

I also learned early on that those on the other side were often fighting for position in my mind so that I would hear their messages. If I was reading for a group, it was as if their deceased loved ones were pushing each other out of the way to get to the front of the line. It was my job to try to separate their energies, like untangling a bunch of cords. That is why in a group reading it would likely take me a while to figure out whom the spirit was trying to reach, and why I counted on the clients to help me determine that.

Something else I learned was that a message from a spirit did not always immediately make sense to a client, but it would with time. For example, if we had determined that a client's grandmother was coming through to us and she talked about some letters in a shoebox, the client might have had no idea what that meant: "Letters? I don't know anything about any letters." But that didn't mean the letters didn't exist and wouldn't materialize at some point in the future. The client and I both needed to trust what the spirit was saying, no matter how little sense it made at the moment. In time, if the client had an open mind and open heart, the message would become clear.

I continued with the readings, voice lessons, and school for the next couple of years, until January 2005 when I made a major decision: I was going to attend the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music to train as an opera singer. A few months earlier, I had been among roughly a hundred candidates who auditioned for just one open spot at the school — and I got it. The faculty identified me as a "young dramatic tenor" with a very rare "young Wagnerian" voice. They viewed me as someone who had tremendous potential to succeed in the world of opera. As successful as I had been doing readings, this was an opportunity I could not pass up.

But guess where the spirit world goes when you decide to move to San Francisco? With you to San Francisco. The spirits couldn't have cared less about what my career plans were or that I was moving. I had been their channel, they trusted me, and they weren't going to let that go.

As it turned out, my time at the Conservatory sharpened my skills as a psychic medium in a couple of ways. One way was by singing onstage, which taught me how to handle pressure in front of audiences and to trust my talents. The other way was through the vibration of the music, which was very similar to the feeling I had when tuning in to spirits. Music can raise your energy and cut through any negativity you are experiencing. For me, music connected my energy with my soul and produced an exhilaration that helped me connect with the spirit world.

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Excerpted from "Signs from the Other Side"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Bill Philipps.
Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

I. Who I Am and What I Can Do

Chapter 1: Surviving Childhood

Chapter 2: An Unlikely Path

Chapter 3: Making the Connection

II. Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

Chapter 4: Believe It Can Happen

Chapter 5: Recognizing Signs

III. True Testimonies of the Spirit World

Chapter 6: Take Me Home, Country Roads

Chapter 7: The Laughing Hummingbird

Chapter 8: “Oh, That Sly Grin…”

Chapter 9: The Power of Two Strands of Tinsel

Chapter 10: A Spirit’s Road Rage

Chapter 11: That Hawk, and More Hawks

Chapter 12: More Than Just a Dream

Chapter 13: “Hey, Baby Girl…”

Chapter 14: The Power of Numbers

Chapter 15: A Man by the Same Name

Chapter 16: “I Am Happier Than I’ve Ever Been”

Chapter 17: “96 Tears”

Chapter 18: Preplanning a Sign

Chapter 19: 708JPG

Chapter 20: A Pond of Fish Beats a Pot of Gold

Chapter 21: “Oh My Gosh, It’s a Ghost!”

Chapter 22: A Spirit Travels Abroad

Chapter 23: From Discouragement to Delight

Chapter 24: Running with Angel(s)

Chapter 25: Cookie

Chapter 26: A Sign from a Funeral