Recently, Patrick Huyghe at Anomalist Books was kind enough to send me a copy of Brad Steiger’s latest installment of the Shadow World series, Beyond Shadow World: Our Shared World of the Supernatural. After having enjoyed this book very much, I’m happy to share with you some of the highlights of this masterful evaluation of the spirit realm by one of the most respected experts in spirit phenomenon today.

My introduction to the trilogy was through the intial title Shadow World, for which I wrote a review that appeared at Amazon.com. After this, when the second installment, Otherworldly Affaires, was published, Brad contacted me directly and warned that “because of the controversial nature of the book,” dealing with touchy subjects like sexual relations with members of higher planes of existence, he had hoped I would be willing to review it for him also (today, it remains my favorite book in the series, as well as an over-all favorite as far as books dealing with spirit phenomenon go).

By the time Beyond Shadow World was released, I had expected a dark, brooding culmination of all the most frightening elements of the nether-realms; complete with horrific visions of specters and haunts that both frighten and intrigue us. This, as it turns out, was not the scope of the book at all, however. Instead, Beyond Shadow World was a complete surprise, in the sense that after trudging through shadow-people, demons, disembodied sexual molesters, and God-knows-what-else in previous books, this installment uniquely allows Steiger to illustrate for the reader a cumulative, educational element in the discovery of opening one’s psychic senses.

Many of the people Steiger discusses in Beyond Shadow World are folks just like you or I, having stumbled upon contact with those from realms beyond quite by accident. This seems to be a staple of Steiger’s work, in that rather than detailing the work of famous scientists and spiritualists or simply re-hashing ghost stories he has collected, Brad Steiger himself becomes a character, recounting his hundreds of investigations he has conducted over the years. From the exorcism of a small boy’s spirit left behind after a tragic murder, to the dangers of out-of-body projections and even the methodology behind contacting our “spirit teachers”, the entire experience of Beyond Shadow World involves the reader as an educational experience.

Another element I found particularly unique about this book was continuous mystical quality Steiger is able to bring to his work. Aside from almost literally entrancing the reader, Steiger smoothly conveys the essence of being “a spiritual warrior”, and various ways to contact and learn from higher powers, without endangering oneself in the process. Having studied mysticism and the supernatural for years, I found that early in the book Steiger gives perhaps one of the best descriptions of how this mystical element interplays with our perception of the supernatural, or more appropriately, the Shadow World:

“When an individual achieves a mystical sense of Oneness with All That Is, he or she truly perceives that the only eternal truths are the immaterial products of our soul, our imagination, and our inspirations–all of which have their most profound expression in our shared world of the supernatural.” 

Steiger also comments on the existence of what he refers to as “an as yet unidentified form of energy that is the source of all so-called magical or supernatural powers,” which mystics have used throughout the ages to communicate with “spirit intelligences on other levels of being.” The notion of such “intelligences” and their existence all around us is at once frightening and exhilarating; thus, having read Beyond Shadow World, one who chooses to continue questioning the existence of such entities has engaged an exercise in futility. After all, to deny the reality of inhabitants of the shadow realms seems as irrational as refusing to breathe air until it becomes visible. Whether they are visible or not, much like air, the spirit world and its inhabitants remain ever-present, and they linger all around us.

Brad Steiger has, again, illustrated for us the dark side, but this time with such an element of light, hope and discovery that our ultimate knowledge of the Shadow World can finally be faced without fear, regret, or repression. Every now and then, it is nice to see a light at the end of the tunnel; Steiger has given us perhaps the best perspective of it to-date.