Flipside: A Tourist’s Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife

Richard Martini  has written a winner in Flipside: A Tourist’s Guide to the Afterlife. I initially read a review of this book on Daz’s blog.  It sounded intriguing and the price was certainly right – .99 cents for Amazon ‘s Kindle.

If you click on to Martini’s link from IMDB, you discover he’s a movie director and screenwriter. But in reading this book, I’ve discovered that Martini is actually something of a mystic with a lot of questions.

His book came about because of the death of Luana Anders, an actress and writer who, for ten years, was his partner. Then she broke it off and they remained close friends. During the final few years of Luana’s life, as she died of breast cancer, Martini took care of her. His descriptions of her – in both life and the afterlife – show us a woman with a quick wit and a restless mentality who seemed to embrace everything with a sense of fun and adventure.

Her death launched Martini’s quest and it led him into an investigation of life after death. And he moved through the field of reincarnation as both a journalist and a participant. He was regressed to a previous life, to a life between lives, and provides the details, blow by blow, and explains how these details relate to his life now. And yes, he and Luana met up during one of his regressions. On the other side, she’s  a teacher who instructs newly departed souls how to utilize energy to create physical objects. 

Martini interviews Michael Newton  – author of Journey of Souls – and his wife about the hypnotherapist’s techniques and life journey. He discusses children’s past lives  and quotes our friend Carol Bowman. He relates stories about the connections between children and their adoptive parents, about the soul families with whom we reunite on the other side, about  his personal experiences in seeing spirits. Martini  has so many questions that his psychic life is  threaded  throughout the material. The book is actually a metaphysical  memoir about his journey, his quest. And the fact that it illuminates mysterious areas for the rest of us is a bonus.

I was intrigued by the descriptions of the afterlife that are included in many of the regressions he observed/filmed. They closely follow descriptions that   Michael Newton talks about in his books – a council of elders, a library where future life options are available for perusal, a gathering of soul families, a life review…But at the heart of all this is tremendous love and compassion.

No one is ever “judged” in the sense that traditional religion teaches. According to Martini’s findings, before we’re born, we agree to play certain roles. This aspect is well illustrated in the regressions where a person returns to a life during the holocaust. Individuals who died in the camps talked about what they learned from those lives, how the situation was actually worse for the perpetrators.

One of the most powerful sections in the book is about Martini’s two kids, how when they were really young, they identified themselves as a Tibetan monk (his son) and someone who lived among the monks. Son and daughter knew each other in that life. They also tell Martini and his wife how and why they chose them as parents.

There’s so much material in this book that when I put it aside for awhile, I find myself thinking about it, mulling everything over. Martini also presents some interesting material on synchronicity. He has an instinctive grasp of what works in a book like this. I hope he writes a sequel!