Josh visits a neurologist to check if tumors are causing his mental fog. While in the MRI scanner, Josh sees a man crawling towards him, with a raspy voice on his medical walkie-talkie telling him, "The door is open" and "There's someone with you." Although Josh doesn't know it at the time, this spirit is alerting him that Dalton has opened the Red Door. After his accidental trip to The Further, Josh finds an old box of photos that belonged to his mother. In the photos, posed with his mom, is Ben Burton, the man responsible for knocking him into The Further in the first place.
After some digging, Josh discovers that this man, Ben Burton, is his father. Josh always assumed that his father abandoned them, but in reality, he died by suicide while committed to a psychiatric hospital. According to Ben's medical records, he had schizophrenia and spoke of his ability to astral project. He left a note that only read, "It ends with me."
In the first two chapters, we learned that astral projection is hereditary. Therefore, Josh must have gotten it from his father, Ben. Given the time when Ben was alive, he possibly thought the things he was seeing in the astral plane suggested a mental illness. He tried to save his son from whatever Ben thought was happening to him by ending his own life.
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