The Rainbow Bridge: Intimations of the human soul

My post content

This unusual and evocative study combines research interviews, scholarly study and aspects of the memoir approach to a subject that was initiated by a visionary-dream, that brought an only briefly-met-fellow student to visit the author. What followed began a fifty year friendship as well as a journey to understand such phenomena and their implications, which in this book's view is suggestive of a transcendent dimension to human life.

Reverend Dr. Susan Gabriel Talbot has had a portfolio career spanning the different but related disciplines of teaching, BBC Radio 4 research and presentation for “Woman's Hour” and the Religious Departmen

Later this was followed by doctoral research at Manchester Victoria University, looking into unusual visionary dream experiences. “The Rainbow Bridge” was inspired by what emerged from that study. But this is not an essentially academic book. Rather it is written for any interested in the question of the nature of human life and the question of whether human beings may indeed be said to have within them a spiritual centre.

This book describes experiences that this is so, not from a credal perspective but from the repeating patterns of experience as described in these pages and the potential and actual life-changing, life enhancing implications.

This is a cross-genre study, partly a memoir, describing that journey: a seeking of understanding and insight into some complex questions of the nature of our human consciousness, combining scholarly research with original face-to-face contemporary interviews. Crucial material is drawn from Sue Talbot's experience as university and BBC Radio 4 researcher as well as from twenty years as a spiritual director.

Many of the interviewees have not spoken before, even to close friends and family, of the experiences described in this work. This often hidden contemporary material is suggestive of a transcendent realm and points to a reasonable belief that human beings are not flesh and blood alone but indeed can be said to have a soul and spirit that may have the capacity to cross time and space in the service of love, compassion and truth.