The Psychotherapist Who Sees Ghosts - A Memoir

The Psychotherapist Who Sees Ghosts

For nearly fifty years, Noel Eastwood, a former registered psychologist now retired, lived between two worlds. In one, he was an ordinary Australian: a teacher, husband and father who eventually became a psychologist. He worked with traumatised people, including severely disabled children, and spent years helping patients confront the hidden parts of their lives. In the other, something very different was happening.

From childhood, Noel experienced strange presences that seemed to watch over him. As he grew older, he began having out-of-body experiences, encounters with the dead, visions, altered states of consciousness and experiences he could neither explain nor forget. He explored meditation, hypnosis, astrology, tarot, Taoist practices and the mysterious territory of the unconscious. He also learned to keep quiet.

The professional world in which he worked had little room for experiences that could not be easily explained. Even when two psychologist colleagues expressed an interest in astral travel and out-of-body experiences, telling them the truth about his own experiences came at a cost - neither spoke to him again. So for decades, Noel carried on with his ordinary life while keeping another life largely to himself. Then there were the ghosts.

Some appeared unexpectedly, others seemed to need help. Noel describes encounters with people who had died, experiences of guiding the dead, and one extraordinary encounter with a presence that tried to kill him. There are stories of healing, trauma, past lives, archetypes, unexplained visitors and encounters that seemed to cross the boundary between psychology and something beyond it. And then came the experience that changed everything.

In a profound altered state, Noel encountered a mysterious figure who told him: “You will die on Sunday. Prepare for it on Friday.” What followed became, in his interpretation, an initiation involving death, rebirth and the ancient figure of Mithrais. Decades later, he would still be trying to understand what happened.

This is not a book asking you to believe, it is the account of what happened to one man. Noel describes these experiences as honestly as he can, while acknowledging that their ultimate nature remains uncertain. Were they encounters with another reality, manifestations of the unconscious, products of altered states, or something else entirely? He does not claim to have all the answers. What he does know is that they happened to him.

The Psychotherapist Who Sees Ghosts is the story of a life lived between the seen and unseen: childhood visions, out-of-body experiences, encounters with the dead, psychotherapy, trauma, meditation, past lives, mysterious beings and a lifetime spent trying to understand where one world ends and the other begins.

After nearly fifty years of silence, Noel Eastwood finally tells his story.