A Spiritual Experience Lived by a 7 Year Old Child

Translation of  “Une Experience Spirituelle Vecue par un Enfant de Sept Ans”

Having reread at one go last night a remarkable little book about the premonitory signs given by a six year old child about her impending death and her rapid return a few years later to the same parents, I remembered an also very remarkable account by David Spangler (a famous spiritual author connected for a time to Findhorn), of the extraordinary experience he had in Morocco one day of his childhood. I’ve never had but in French the later book in which David gave this account, so it is in French that I offer it here, hoping that the same text is in English somewhere on the internet for my English-speaking visitors … but that, I can check only when the internet connection will allow me first of all to post on my blog the French text as follows (replaced here by this translation, a corrected and improved version of the Google Translate text obligingly contributed by regular visitor Nina):

“We are in 1952, I am 7 years old, and on that day I’m driving with my parents, from the air base in Nouasseur to Casablanca for shopping. It is a journey that we have done many times, and I’m sitting in the back, watching the scenery.
Suddenly I am overcome by an energy that is flowing through my body, and I feel myself swell up like a balloon. Before I could realize what is happening, I am out of my body, that I surround though. Looking down and at the same time inwards, in some way, I see my physical form and my parents and our car, which become smaller and smaller, until they disappear completely. And then I find myself alone in a field of continuous white light …
Thus began one of the most powerful and most important experiences in my life. It happened without warning, and seemed like hours (actually a few seconds), giving me a vision of reality different from the one I had before.
I went through four well-defined steps. First of all, a sense of awakening, as if I was coming out of sleep, to perceive the sense of my own identity, which was not that of David Spangler, an inhabitant of the earth, with clear boundaries, but pure entity, which was one with the light around me and with creation. At the same time, I felt a deep joy, a feeling of liberation and jubilation, while boundaries were disappearing.
Then the light became still clearer in some way and I entered the last phase, I could “see” myself (but it was not quite a visual perception). However, the “me” that I perceived was not a body, but a configuration, at the center of which I was, an observer. In this scheme there were other personalities, some which seemed to be physical forms, but most seemed to be sets of qualities. At that moment I understood that they represented other aspects of myself, other lives, other experiences I had lived or that I’ll live, what I called in my earthly vocabulary the future. At the same time I caught a glimpse of births and deaths that I had lived and although I did not recognize any historical character, what manifested itself was a clear manifestation of the eternity of the soul and continuity of self beyond the physical dimension.
Until then it was just as if I woke up in a strange room, but a known one, and I looked around me to get a sense of orientation. I had the feeling of remembering, of remembering in the purest sense of the term. But as soon as I could find my orientation the situation changed and I entered in the third step. Configurations, lives, and even the light in which I was immersed, everything disappeared. Instead, I found myself in a state that I am unable to visually describe, except to say that I was in the embrace of a great presence. In this presence, everything seemed to be a profound unity, filled with love and serenity indescribable and irresistible power.
As if a curtain had risen, I had the visual perception of the universe, a big wheel made of stars and galaxies, all bathed in the golden light of billions of suns, all floating in a sea of spirit. It was as if I could see through the eyes of that presence, and as if for a moment we were one. At that moment I was united with everything that existed, every atom, every stone, every world, every star, seeing the creation not from a great distance, but from the inside, as if it were my own body, my own being. More powerful still than this perception was the consciousness that I had of the creativity flowing in all that I saw, of the joyous embrace of life and its blooming, the pace reminded me of a ball with its music and dancers, as they draw intricate configurations, changing and constantly unfolding.
And then I entered the final stage. Borne away by the cosmic dance, I saw from above both the earth and myself, David. At that moment I felt in myself the intent of being David, the will to be born that had preceded my current identity, my physical life, and that had given it life. I felt the link between that intent and all those configurations that were deployed in the creation, all in relation with what I call the “rightness of being born.” At the same time I came to feel a great love, not only for David but for all manifestations of human life, for all the drama and purpose of human existence, for the choice made by each soul, to incarnate, to be part of the dance unique to this planet. Then raised by the power of this situation, this love, I felt I was moving forward, when I found myself in my body, still looking out the window.
I kept from this experience two lasting impressions that have since influenced my life. The first is the consciousness of the spirit of life and creativity  that goes through everything that exists, and of my relationship with this spirit. It is a perception of the presence of God in creation and of unity through that presence. The second is the awareness of another part of myself, which is much larger than my personality; it is a deeper self, which is present in eternity, just as my daily self is present in time “.

Did Sri Aurobindo & The Mother Foresee This Time?

Yes, we are rapidly coming already towards the last part of this famous Year 2012 that is supposed to mark the end of things as we know them, and the beginning of… Something Else.

Did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother foresee such a special period as the one we find ourselves in presently?

In Sri Aurobindo’s great poem, ‘Savitri’,  there is a passage when Ashwapathy, the King in ancient India who will become the father of the feminine divine Incarnation that will be Savitri, tells how his consciousness, in a moment of extraordinary vision, saw the far future of the Earth:

‘It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past;
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Earth was o’errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
There was a clangour of Destruction’s wings:
The Titan battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.”

Well, even for those readers from the West who have no idea what ‘A giant dance of Shiva’ might mean, the following lines make it pretty clear, and rather frighteningly so, I would say. The present period, with its extraordinary profusion of earthquakes and tsunamis and cyclones and weather extremes and the floods or raging fires they bring all over the planet, to the extent that the kind of catastrophe that usually made the headlines in the news, now hardly gets mentioned at all, seems quite correctly described in Sri Aurobindo’s lines, along with the constant threat of generalized war among the bomb explosions by fanatics murdering people in the most unexpected places and circumstances.
As is said from the start, what this ‘giant dance of Shiva’ does is to tear the past. An awful period, but useful…
And then, surprise: the next lines of Sri Aurobindo’s poem and of Ashwapathy’s vision couldn’t be more in contrast with the preceding ones:

‘I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude,
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them across the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal’s glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the spirit’s light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty’s sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love’s laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture’s golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature’s face.’

Thus we come to know, together with Ashwapathy, that ‘All shall be done for which our pain was borne’.
This is already quite a comforting revelation, which can give us the courage to go through the ‘tearing of the past’ that in our time is possibly still not over.
And some of the parents who have read the lines above may have recognized with awe some of the amazing children that have been born to them in the recent years.
Children being born more conscious than was usually the case before have been noticed also by the Mother among the new-born babies from Auroville who were brought to her as early as 1965, and in the next few years. As the Mother left her own body in the end of 1973, after that date we don’t have her testimony any more to tell us whether this phenomenon continued, but if I myself can judge just from some of the few more recently born Auroville children I happen to have met, my answer will be a resounding ‘Yes’.

I remember also how stunned I have been in my early years of life in Auroville, as I discovered in some documents retrieved from the hasty oblivion of most other human beings,  that the Mother, speaking about Auroville, had made the casual but startling remark that in the future, there would be snow here.
This was said in the late Sixties, at a time when no one had heard yet of Climate Change; and even now what is talked about mostly is the global warming that comes first, but only a few scientists are aware that it is all a cyclical, recurrent change, in which the initial warming is followed later by some form of short Ice Age.

Did Sri Aurobindo or the Mother ever give any date for the major changes they too foresaw in the future of the Earth?

I remember another passing remark by the Mother, in a volume of her ‘Agenda’; she was chuckling while talking about the year 2000: that year, she was saying, would be ‘the beginning of the real changes’…!

As for Sri Aurobindo, as far as I know (but I may be mistaken) he didn’t give a definite date as the beginning or the end of that critical period we seem to be in. But the way he described the final Major Change seems to indicate at least quite clearly that it will happen very abruptly; here are some other lines from ‘Savitri’, on page 55 already, where it is all revealed in advance:

UNIQUE PICTURE: Earth as seen from the outer Solar System (Photo credit: Icarus Kuwait)

‘Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night will be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss,
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
(…)
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.’

Wow.
I don’t know about you, but I hope we are very near the moment when all this will happen and we find ourselves all of a sudden in an inexplicably but wonderfully changed world.
Does the darkness need to deepen yet more? Do we have yet to reach the stage when our corporeal mind is the only lamp? Really, I hope not, for things are already difficult enough, I would say, I certainly don’t want that they get still worse, if that can be at all avoided.
But even if it cannot be helped… Wow.  What incredibly magnificent Future is awaiting us. It was truly all worth it…

‘Twilight’: at last good, great, evolving vampires!

I am especially happy right now, having just seen again and again the very nice few seconds (!) of the teaser released today in advance of the real teaser that will come tomorrow for celebrating Edward Cullens’ birthday, which Tolkien’s Hobbits would call his ‘eleventy’ birthday: yes, ever young Edward will be 111 years old! For all those readers and movie-goers who have followed his story in the four volume ‘Twilight” saga written by Stephenie Meyer and in the films being made out of them, this birthday will indeed be something to celebrate, and so shall I certainly do myself, although quietly at my home in Auroville!…
I wish more people in the world would realize what an incredible breakthrough it is in our Human Collective Subconscious that one of the darkest ‘horror’ myths peopling it, the Vampire, is changing.
And changing for an amazingly better way of being, if you look at how unexpectedly that story unfolds: Edward, the oh, so handsome vampire in Forks, Washington, High School that human seventeen years old Bella falls in love with, and who loves her too more than his own life, is not an ordinary vampire at all; he belongs by choice to a very special Vampire Clan (or ‘Coven’) in which all members, living as one family, have at some point opted for a ‘vegetarian’ lifestyle, that is, to feed only on animals, and never on humans.
This is a very demanding, almost impossible choice, as human blood is for a vampire the normal diet, so extremely appetizing that its very scent is already nearly irresistible. But they are all following the extraordinary example of Carlisle Cullen, who has kept from his long past Human days his idealistic nature and indomitable will-power: turned centuries before into a vampire against his wish, he has put all his determination into remaining the person he truly wanted to be, whatever clamoring that new, imposed outer nature may have exercised on him. Having discovered then that vampires can very well live on animals only, he resolved to do so, and little by little some other vampires around him made the same difficult choice.
Now in our times several other such ‘vegetarian’ covens have come into existence, and this new trend is gaining, although those who are among all vampires the equivalent of Royalty, the formidable but cynical Volturi in their underground Italian palace, see such a deep change with quite a suspicious eye, as well as the growing influence and natural authority that Carlisle is gaining from more and more others simply out of the deep respect they feel for his remarkable sincerity and integrity.
The Volturi on the contrary rule since very ancient times through the fear they inspire to all by their cruelty and their iron laws, few but never questioned, applied mercilessly through their cohort of executioners, all gifted with special powers that terrorize even the most courageous ordinary vampires. Among the Cullen ‘family’, though, some have special inner powers too, that Aro, the chief Volturi, would like very much to add to their own already dreadful personal entourage.
Bella herself, although a mere human, would be for them another tempting addition, as neither Edward’s nor Aro’s mind-reading powers can penetrate her mind, totally protected somehow by the depth and truly loving character of her thoughts. Impressed in spite of himself to find she can resist him, Aro is stunned to see that her love – for one of them vampires! – is so pure and strong she would die to save Edward, nearly put to death when he himself tries desperately to protect her from the gigantic Executioner told by Aro to kill her: as a Human who knows that Vampires really exist and so who could always betray them, she must be executed, and is about to be, once Edward is forcibly kept aside.
It’s only a last second revelation by Alice, another Cullen family member caught together with them by the Volturi, that saves Bella: Alice, who is gifted with vision of the future, reveals that she has already seen Bella as the vampire she actually wants eagerly to become. Edward thinks it is only out of love for him that she wants what is in his eyes such a horrible transformation, so he keeps fiercely refusing to help her realize her wish by biting her as she implores him to, so Alice promises to the Volturi that she herself will transform Bella if needed, but it will be done soon, and they will be informed when it will happen, so they will know there is no need anymore to kill her. With that promise from Alice, Aro and the two other Volturi reluctantly allow them all to go, but the promise will have to be kept, or else…
Back home in Forks the re-united Cullens continue to coexist pacifically with those crowds of humans around them, including Bella’s own family, all still unaware of what those slightly strange but so nice and good-looking Cullens really are. Edward and Bella decide to get married, according to the wish of old-fashioned Edward, and then only will he transform her; ironically – and Bella’s ego cringes with humiliation -, such a marriage at their young age will appear to all as one rendered necessary by a pregnancy, when in reality it is not so at all: Bella had no such principles and would have been quite willing, but Edward had always insisted in having no sexual relations in spite of their mutual desire, not only because of his own principles, but also because he was afraid it could be dangerous for Bella, much too fragile for him with her still human body.
Once they are at last married, though, she manages to convince him to at least give it a try, while she still is human, so that she does get to have a normal human honeymoon before being changed.
In spite of Edward’s lingering fears everything goes fine also for Bella, but what they didn’t know could happen does happen: Bella becomes pregnant. Their unborn baby, a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, is loved instantly by Bella, but its extraordinarily rapid growth quickly puts her life in danger, to Edward’s total despair, but he respects Bella’s choice to have that baby even if it might kill her. A last minute kind of ‘ceasarean’ delivery allows the baby to be born just in time, but practically killing indeed its mother in the process. It is only at that extreme point, when it is a question of saving Bella’s very life, that Edward finally does what he sees now needs absolutely to be done: he bites her softly, lovingly, introducing deliberately at different places into her human body the vampire poison that will, painfully but effectively, turn it into a vampire body. After the few excruciating days that the process always takes, a slowly transformed Bella, seemingly in deep sleep, comes back fully to life, her eyes suddenly open revealing she is indeed now at last what she wanted so much to be: a vampire.
This is the point in the story that is reached at the end of the film ‘Breaking Dawn” Part 1. But having read the book, I know what the Part 2 now being in preparation will be about, as shown already by today’s 10 seconds teaser-trailer and the previous one: so, be warned! Plenty of SPOILERS AHEAD!!! If you don’t want to know, stop reading now…

It will be about how Bella starts her new existence as a vampire, and the unexpected deadly crisis that will still arise:
She is as perfectly beautiful as those Cullens she had so often secretly admired, and as extraordinarily strong too, but otherwise still pretty much her usual self, she discovers with joy.
Most importantly, she feels perfectly able to control the wild thirst for blood that was supposed to take hold of her as a ‘newborn’ vampire and to make her dangerous to all around her for the first few months of her new life. With astonishment on the part of her new vampire family and with relief on her own part, it is seen that thanks to the deeply calm temperament she has probably carried over from her human to her now vampire nature, she is remarkably not dangerous, and her child can already be given to her without problem.
But that child, called Renesmee (from Renee and Esme, the two grand-mothers’ names), soon attracts a much greater danger: she is mistaken from afar for one of those human children turned sometimes into vampires at such a young age that, their growth process being suddenly stopped forever, they couldn’t control or hide their vampire nature, and couldn’t be taught to do so either – so, being a threat for all the other vampires’ needed ‘invisibility’, they all had to be eliminated immediately when found out.
The adult vampire who has seen Renesmee soon reports her existence to the Volturi as one of those forbidden child-vampires, and Alice in a vision sees the Volturi on their way to kill the child and get rid of the Cullens too if they can. Witnesses are called in haste, from friendly other vampire covens, to testify that Renesmee is simply a hybrid, born that way from her human mother and her vampire father, a rare but known kind of child, who is growing actually even faster than normal, and can very much be taught the proper, responsible behavior that will not endanger the vampires’ hidden existence.
Not having anymore that excuse for attacking the Cullens and forcing them to join their own dreadful troops or die, the devious Volturi would attack without any excuse at all if need be, but they, and all other present, are in for a surprise: Bella, who at first kept wondering why she didn’t seem to have any special power like some other vampires had, has finally discovered her Power, and has trained herself intensively in the few days before that final encounter… 
I will not tell more, so that the wonderful secret of Bella is not revealed to my visitors before they either see the film (coming out this November) or read the fourth volume of ‘Twilight’: ‘Breaking Dawn’.

The Dawn that is finally breaking is that of Bella herself, that main character we have followed from her arrival in Forks, the rainiest spot in all the US, to live with her father so that her re-married mom in the sunny Phoenix, Arizona that Bella liked so much more, could be free to follow her sportsman of a new husband in his many travels here and there. Thinking always first of the happiness of those she loves, not of her own, lovely but shy and dreamy Bella was the extraordinarily sincere, naturally good person that Edward in his more than hundred years of existence had ended up believing didn’t exist, so had stopped looking for… 

END OF SPOILERS -

Already on November 18th, 2011, I posted a first article about ‘Twilight’ for the release of the first part of ‘Breaking Dawn’ on the big screen; if you are interested in reading more on what is so remarkable about this story, please don’t hesitate: just go to that date on this blog, or write ‘Twilight’ in the search window, and you will get another dose of further enthusiastic comments from me on this unexpectedly great saga!
   

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November 18, 2011: ‘Twilight’ #4 – ‘Breaking Dawn’

This November 18th, in this year 2011, has had an additional flavor to it besides being for me the anniversary of a major spiritual experience: this time, it was also the day when would be shown in the theaters worldwide the fourth film of the ‘Twilight’ Saga: ‘Breaking Dawn’.
I know, I know, the ‘Twilight’ books by Stephenie Meyer and the films made from them aren’t supposed to be anything worth the attention of anyone past teen-age. So say in a deafening chorus all the professional, usually cynical book and film critics. Also in the general public, many people have been discouraged and disgusted by the crowds of hysterical teen girls who fill up the theaters with their screams as soon as their favorite ‘Twilight’ male actor, either Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner, appears on the screen.
I personally never had to endure that ordeal because I have known those films only in the quietude of my own living-room, as DVDs, so I have been able to watch them and form my opinion about them in a fairer manner.
As surprising as it may seem, these films, and that story as a whole, not only are very interesting, but are even totally relevant for the kind of research I do in the framework of the ‘Laboratory of Evolution’, posting the results of it on this blog.
I didn’t see ‘Breaking Dawn yet, I don’t know when it will come to this area of India, but I am glad to share with you today, through excerpts of a full Essay of mine, how I have discovered the ‘Twilight’ story:
——————————–

‘TWILIGHT’, by Stephenie Meyer – An appraising essay by Bhaga, researcher in Auroville
(June-July 2010, Auroville)

PART I: INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL APPRECIATION

            HOW I CAME TO DISCOVER ‘TWILIGHT’ AND STEPHENIE MEYER 

            I am not interested at all in horror movies – horror in whatever form, stories, novels, plays, comics… whatever is purposely scary and horrifying.
            Many other human beings, I am well aware of that, relish horror stuff – that’s even how some newspapers strive, specializing on horror stuff.  But that’s too bad for them all, I would say… everyone is free of course to choose to have that, if it is what they want.
            The world, I personally feel, is full enough of scary situations and horrifying moments coming down on you by surprise, without deliberately looking for more scare and horror in the virtual worlds of books and movies too, which should be used on the contrary to add more beauty, not ugliness, to the world we live in.
            Long ago, when I was a young adult, loathing myself for being so childlike and vulnerable even to imaginary frightening scenes, I forced myself to go see the film that was then the craze: the supposedly light and funny movie, ‘Le Bal des Vampires’.
            The story was indeed humorous, so I did laugh quite a few times during the two hours that the movie lasted; but during those two hours I found myself nevertheless constantly tense, and during the two months that followed I had vampire nightmares which made me bitterly regret having ever seen that ‘funny’ film.
            So when a month ago my closest friend and collaborator – a French lady like me but much younger, and still very close to the contemporary generation of youth to which her two sons belong – started telling me hesitatingly (she knows me well…) about a great film called ‘Twilight’, that was apparently the new craze after the ‘Harry Potter’ series, and when she pronounced the word ‘vampires’, I cringed and kind of shut off automatically. Only through a considerable effort did I go on listening to her explanations of why she herself found that story interesting.
            We are both researchers at ‘The Laboratory of Evolution’, a unique Center for Research and Documentation in Auroville that studies everything having to do with Evolution, seen not only as the past huge earthly process that has resulted in us, the glorious human beings, but also very much as the present huge earthly process that is starting now to transform us, the after all not so glorious human beings, into something so wonderfully better that those discovering what is to come and trying to imagine it, find it almost unbelievable that such is our future, and the future of the Earth.
             There are indeed already many humble beginnings revealing to the observant eye this gradual transformation of the human species (along with all the other aspects of life on this planet; nothing is left unaffected). Studying all these encouraging signs planetary wise is the passion both my friend and I share: we are all the time looking eagerly in all areas of life for new forms of behavior, and in human life particularly, we keep looking for new concepts, new trends of thought appearing, that manifest a change of the human collective mentality and consciousness in the right direction.
            In that way I introduced my friend several years ago to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (the recent films and also my beloved old books), she reciprocated with ‘Matrix’ and then later ‘Harry Potter’; I discovered with awe and then shared with her the incredible, beautifully inspired old gems of the 80s, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’; but I didn’t expect her to present me now with what?!? A vampire story, of all things!!! I was shrinking away in disgust.
            Still I couldn’t imagine she would have selected something entirely worthless, so I listened with caution, careful not to allow myself to be caught in some horrifying tale I would never be able to take away from my inner world later on.
            Only half-listening, I heard distinctly and remembered clearly afterward only a few words of what she said that day, which, quoted loosely, was something like this: “it was nice and an interesting idea that even vampires could evolve.” That rang a bell indeed in me, right away. But still I said nothing.
            Before going from my home, she left on the table in front of the sofa where we were sitting a DVD of the film recently made from the first book of the series. It was the French version, bought while she was in France a few months earlier. She was hoping I would have a look at it.
            For the next two weeks the DVD sat on that table, untouched, except for being turned face down, so as not to be a constant reminder of vampires when I wasn’t ready at all yet to give that story and that film a try: there were already enough problems and downright harsh challenges in my own real life, without adding to it all some dark tale and terrifying images of bloodsucking entities disguised as humans!!!
            My friend didn’t insist, and just waited.
            Then finally one afternoon when I was alone and my other work for the day was more or less done, I felt up to it, and decided I would take the risk, purely for the sake of research and for honoring the wish of my friend, to watch that movie.
            Well, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into: I looked at it not just one time, but immediately a second time too, eager to understand better all the details of the story which I felt I probably had missed the first time. I had already fallen head over heels in love with the two main characters, Bella and Edward, with the whole ‘family’ of idealistic, ‘vegetarian’ vampires, the Cullens, that Edward is part of, and with the entire situation, totally gripping, described with much talent and considerable beauty in that film.

            When my friend came again as planned, she had the second film, ‘New Moon’, in her hand, and after looking at the first film one more time (in the original English form that now I had procured for myself), we watched also ‘New Moon’ together that very same afternoon.

            In a parallel and complementary hunger, the next few days I devoured, one after the other, all I could find on Stephenie’s website of other appetizing bites from the following books in the ‘Twilight’ series, with even extra passages not in the books, written from the perspective not of Bella as usual, but of various other characters; all was remarkably interesting, although only in draft form yet.          
            I loved particularly the wonderful first 260 pages of what was to be yet another full book, ‘Midnight Sun’, telling the beginning of the story from Edward’s point of view. I am really sad that, because of the trauma of that draft being leaked out and put on the net without her knowledge or authorization, Stephenie lost her enthusiasm for it and decided not to finish it.
            I still hope that she will some day, but at least she chose for the time being to put that half-draft online herself for all her loyal fans to read straight on her own website without having to go to the unauthorized sites.
            Well, I am especially grateful to her about that!…
            For it is through reading that unfinished draft of ‘Midnight Sun’ put online by her, that I felt in full force and was able to identify exactly what I appreciated so much in the whole story of the ‘Twilight’ series. Having since then read fully only the first book and the last one, I don’t know yet all the details of how the story develops, and I will have probably more to say later on; but I know already for sure that much, which sets this story apart and somehow above the similar ones that may come to our mind – of course, first, all the ordinary tales of ordinary vampires (totally worthless in my eyes), but also, on the other end of the spectrum, the love-stories considered usually sublime and supreme.

(About that I will post later on another part of my essay, as it is true love we are talking about, and that deserves special attention).

            The persons who like only ‘action’ films, and so find the more introspective parts of those films too slow, could learn from the very characters in the ‘Twilight’ series: if those persons like challenge, why don’t they take up the most interesting challenge of changing in themselves that which they don’t approve of but which is usually getting the better of them!… This is exactly what a Carlisle has done, and what Edward learns to do, and Bella too, who used to be the weakest and the one needing protection most, and who ends up as strong in her own way as she dreamed to be, able to protect all her loved ones (and they are many and varied!) from those who would destroy them.

Let’s warn the potential readers: the ‘Twilight’ books cannot be reduced to one easily recognisable genre. As Stephenie herself says in the first of the following few extracts from the Wikipedia article on the series (pictures added by me), she doesn’t like being asked to categorize her books :
« I have a hard time with that. Because if I say to someone, ‘You know, it’s about vampires,’ then immediately they have this mental image of what the book is like. And it’s so not like the other vampire books out there–Anne Rice’s and the few that I’ve read. It isn’t that kind of dark and dreary and blood-thirsty world. Then when you say, ‘It’s set in high school,’ a lot of people immediately put it in another pool. It’s easy to pigeonhole with different descriptions. »

  And the Wikipedia article goes on, with more answers from Stephenie on questions she is often asked about :
‘Twilight vampires differ in a number of particulars from the general vampire lore:
« It wasn’t until I knew that Twilight would be published that I began to think about whether my vampires were too much the same or too much different from the others. Of course, I was far too invested in my characters at that point to be making changes… so I didn’t cut out fangs and coffins and so forth as a way to distinguish my vampires; that’s just how they came to me. »
For  Stephenie Meyer says  the idea for the whole thing came to her in a dream on June 2, 2003. The dream was about a human girl, and a vampire who was in love with her but thirsted for her blood. Based on this dream, Meyer wrote the transcript of what is now chapter 13 of the book. Despite having very little writing experience, in a matter of three months she had transformed that dream into a completed novel.
According to her, her books are “about life, not death” and “love, not lust”. Each book in the series was inspired by and loosely based on a different literary classic: Twilight on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Breaking Dawn on a second Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.[16] Meyer also states that Orson Scott Card and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series are a big influence on her writing.[13]
Other major themes of the series include choice and free will: Meyer says that the books are centered around Bella’s choice to choose her life on her own, and the Cullens’ choices to abstain from killing rather than follow their temptations: “I really think that’s the underlying metaphor of my vampires. It doesn’t matter where you’re stuck in life or what you think you have to do; you can always choose something else. There’s always a different path.”
Meyer, a Mormon, acknowledges that her faith has influenced her work. In particular, she says that her characters “tend to think more about where they came from, and where they are going, than might be typical.”[12] Meyer also steers her work from subjects such as sex, despite the romantic nature of the novels. Meyer says that she does not consciously intend her novels to be Mormon-influenced, or to promote the virtues of sexual abstinence and spiritual purity, but admits that her writing is shaped by her values, saying, “I don’t think my books are going to be really graphic or dark, because of who I am. There’s always going to be a lot of light in my stories.[18] (end of extract from Wikipedia)

            Well, I am myself no Mormon and I have no intention of becoming one, but I do appreciate the values they seem to have, at least from what those values seem to be as exemplified in the books… although with a quite significant difference regarding sexual matters and other pleasures in life: her good vampires do enjoy an especially abundant and robust sex life once they have found their mate!!! They may limit it to night time (that is, full night, as they don’t need to sleep), but only in order to keep the days for enjoying what all of their other perfected senses do offer them to enjoy too!… One must keep a balance between all that is to be enjoyed…
            I don’t know if Stephenie fully realized it, but her description of vampire life, as Bella starts experiencing it once the excruciating pain of the transformation is over, makes that other kind of existence sound actually much better in many respects than normal human life: while not losing her human qualities, Bella acquires superhuman capacities that humans have been longing for since ever, eternal youth and immortality in the first place. And while all the others in the Cullen ‘family’ didn’t deliberately change from human to vampire existence, Bella does make that choice quite deliberately; not just for being able to be with Edward for ever, but also because she always felt out of place among ordinary human beings, and only when with the Cullens felt totally at home. 
Paradoxically, then, some human readers or movie-goers may, after ‘Twilight’, end up with a longing to be transformed too into these beautiful, superhuman creatures, some of whom on top of it aren’t devilish any longer, but good, compassionate and admirable beings. Let those Bella-like unsatisfied human beings take heart: when we know that our evolution is still going on, there is not only hope, but a certainty that a whole array of new developments now deemed impossible will indeed take place gradually, and our presently so limited human condition will progressively give way to our secret divine potential… Perhaps it is from this future of our own species that Stephenie Meyer received the inspiration for the qualities of her astonishing ‘good vampires’ !… This is how evolution works: a certain new idea comes down at first seemingly out  of the blue, and then it makes its way into our collective mind,  books and films being the best media for that…

A little Poem: ‘Time Is Not’

Time is not
Space is not
But I am
And I play
At Time and Space…

There’s but Me
All’s but Me
Even you,
Who are me
Under another face…

But I’m you too
All is You too
In the One
That We are
All in the same place…

In the unfolded Fan
Of the unfolding Plan
We play out,
We become
The Future we embrace…

With only for starter
This dense Spirit, Matter,
We are God
Making Earth
A God-worthy palace!

What Mellen-Thomas Benedict also Learned

Here is the last part of Mellen-Thomas Benedict’s account of his NDE, remarks and observations that are of great importance as well, although some affirmations, regarding for example the reincarnation of animals, or the future of the human body, may be too absolute when in reality things are more nuanced than in his presentation of them. Except for this minor and only very occasional defect, the overall picture emerging from this ‘report’ of his is one of the most accurate and complete I have ever read, so I am glad to post it here and I full-heartedly thank him for it!

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The Lessons He Learned

The mystery of life has very little to do with intelligence. The universe is not an intellectual process at all. The intellect is helpful; it is brilliant, but right now that is all we process with, instead of our hearts and the wiser part of ourselves.

The center of the earth is this great transmuter of energy, just as you see in pictures of our earth’s magnetic field. That’s our cycle, pulling reincarnated souls back in and through it again. A sign that you are reaching human level is that you are beginning to evolve an individual consciousness. The animals have a group soul, and they reincarnate in group souls. A deer is pretty much going to be a deer forever. But just being born a human, whether deformed or genius, shows that you are on the path to developing an individual consciousness. That is in itself part of the group consciousness called humanity.

I saw that races are personality clusters. Nations like France, Germany and China each have their own personality. Cities have personalities, their local group souls that attract certain people. Families have group souls. Individual identity is evolving like branches of a fractal; the group soul explores in our individuality. The different questions that each of us has are very, very important. This is how Godhead is exploring God’s Self – through you. So ask your questions, do your searching. You will find your Self and you will find God in that Self, because it is only the Self.

More than that, I began to see that each one of us humans are soul mates. We are part of the same soul fractaling out in many creative directions, but still the same. Now I look at every human being that I ever see, and I see a soul mate, my soul mate, the one I have always been looking for. Beyond that, the greatest soul mate that you will ever have is yourself. We are each both male and female. We experience this in the womb and we experience this in reincarnation states. If you are looking for that ultimate soul mate outside of yourself, you may never find it; it is not there. Just as God is not “there.” God is here. Don’t look “out there” for God. Look here for God. Look through your Self. Start having the greatest love affair you ever had … with your Self. You will love everything out of that.

I had a descent into what you might call hell, and it was very surprising. I did not see Satan or evil. My descent into hell was a descent into each person’s customized human misery, ignorance, and darkness of not-knowing. It seemed like a miserable eternity. But each of the millions of souls around me had a little star of light always available. But no one seemed to pay attention to it. They were so consumed with their own grief, trauma and misery. But, after what seemed an eternity, I started calling out to that light, like a child calling to a parent for help. Then the light opened up and formed a tunnel that came right to me an insulated me from all that fear and pain. That is what hell really is.

So what we are doing is learning to hold hands, to come together. The doors of hell are open now. We are going to link up, hold hands, and walk out of hell together.

The light came to me and turned into a huge golden angel. I said, “Are you the angel of death?”

It expressed to me that it was my oversoul, my Higher Self matrix, a super-ancient part of ourselves. Then I was taken to the light.

Soon our science will quantify spirit. Isn’t that going to be wonderful? We are coming up with devices now that are sensitive to subtle energy or spirit energy. Physicists use these atomic colliders to smash atoms to see what they are made of. They have got it down to quarks and charm, and all that. Well, one day they are going to come down to the little thing that holds it all together, and they are going to have to call that … God. With atomic colliders they are not only seeing what is in here, but they are creating particles. Thank God most of them are short-lived milliseconds and nanoseconds. We are just beginning to understand that we are creating too, as we go along.

As I saw forever, I came to a realm in which there is a point where we pass all knowledge and begin creating the next fractal, the next level. We have that power to create as we explore. And that is God expanding itself through us.

Since my return I have experienced the light spontaneously, and I have learned how to get to that space almost any time in my meditation. Each one of you can do this. You do not have to die to do this. It is within your equipment; you are wired for it already.

The body is the most magnificent light being there is. The body is a universe of incredible light. Spirit is not pushing us to dissolve this body. That is not what is happening. Stop trying to become God; God is becoming you. Here.

The mind is like a child running around the universe, demanding this and thinking it created the world. But I ask the mind:

“What did your mother have to do with this?”

That is the next level of spiritual awareness. Oh! My mother!  All of a sudden you give up the ego, because you are not the only soul in the universe.

One of my questions to the light was, “What is heaven?”

I was given a tour of all the heavens that have been created: the Nirvanas, the Happy Hunting Grounds, all of them. I went through them. These are thought form creations that we have created. We don’t really go to heaven; we are reprocessed.  But whatever we created, we leave a part of ourselves there. It is real, but it is not all of the soul.

I saw the Christian heaven. We expect it to be a beautiful place, and you stand in front of the throne, worshipping forever. I tried it. It is boring!  This is all we are going to do? It is childlike. I do not mean to offend anyone. Some heavens are very interesting, and some are very boring. I found the ancient ones to be more interesting, like the Native American ones, the Happy Hunting Grounds. The Egyptians have fantastic ones. It goes on and on. There are so many of them. In each of them there is a fractal that is your particular interpretation, unless you are part of the group soul that believes in only the God of a particular religion. Then you are very close, in the same ball park together. But even then, each is a little bit different. That is a part of yourself that you leave there. Death is about life, not about heaven.

I asked God, “What is the best religion on the planet?  Which one is right?”

And Godhead said, with great love, “I don’t care.”

That was incredible grace. What that meant was that we are the caring beings here.

The Ultimate Godhead of all the stars tells us, “It does not matter what religion you are.”

They come and they go, they change. Buddhism has not been here forever, Catholicism has not been here forever, and they are all about to become more enlightened. More light is coming into all systems now. There is going to be a reformation in spirituality that is going to be just as dramatic as the Protestant Reformation. There will be lots of people fighting about it, one religion against the next, believing that only they are right.

Everyone thinks they own God, the religions and philosophies, especially the religions, because they form big organizations around their philosophy. When Godhead said, “I don’t care,” I immediately understood that it is for us to care about. It is important, because we are the caring beings. It matters to us and that is where it is important. What you have is the energy equation in spirituality. Ultimate Godhead does not care if you are Protestant, Buddhist, or whatever. It is all a blooming facet of the whole. I wish that all religions would realize it and let each other be. It is not the end of each religion, but we are talking about the same God. Live and let live. Each has a different view. And it all adds up to the Big Picture; it is all important.

I went over to the other side with a lot of fears about toxic waste, nuclear missiles, the population explosion, the rainforest. I came back loving every single problem. I love nuclear waste. I love the mushroom cloud; this is the holiest mandala that we have manifested to date, as an archetype. It, more than any religion or philosophy on earth, brought us together all of a sudden, to a new level of consciousness. Knowing that maybe we can blow up the planet fifty times, or 500 times, we finally realize that maybe we are all here together now. For a period they had to keep setting off more bombs to get it in to us. Then we started saying, “We do not need this any more.”

Now we are actually in a safer world than we have ever been in, and it is going to get safer. So I came back loving toxic waste, because it brought us together. These things are so big. As Peter Russell might say, these problems are now “soul size.” Do we have soul size answers?  YES!

The clearing of the rain forest will slow down, and in fifty years there will be more trees on the planet than in a long time. If you are into ecology, go for it; you are that part of the system that is becoming aware. Go for it with all your might, but do not be depressed. It is part of a larger thing.

Earth is in the process of domesticating itself. It is never again going to be as wild a place as it once was. There will be great wild places, reserves where nature thrives. Gardening and reserves will be the thing in the future. Population increase is getting very close to the optimal range of energy to cause a shift in consciousness. That shift in consciousness will change politics, money, energy.

What happens when we dream? We are multi-dimensional beings. We can access that through lucid dreaming. In fact, this universe is God’s dream. One of the things that I saw is that we humans are a speck on a planet that is a speck in a galaxy that is a speck. Those are giant systems out there, and we are in sort of an average system. But human beings are already legendary throughout the cosmos of consciousness. The little bitty human being of Earth/Gaia is legendary. One of the things that we are legendary for is dreaming. We are legendary dreamers. In fact, the whole cosmos has been looking for the meaning of life, the meaning of it all. And it was the little dreamer who came up with the best answer ever. We dreamed it up. So dreams are important.

After dying and coming back, I really respect life and death. In our DNA experiments we may have opened the door to a great secret. Soon we will be able to live as long as we want to live in this body. After living 150 years or so, there will be an intuitive soul sense that you will want to change channels. Living forever in one body is not as creative as reincarnation, as transferring energy in this fantastic vortex of energy that we are in. We are actually going to see the wisdom of life and death, and enjoy it.

As it is now, we have already been alive forever. This body that you are in, has been alive forever. It comes from an unending stream of life, going back to the Big Bang and beyond. This body gives life to the next life, in dense and subtle energy. This body has been alive forever already.

“We are going to link up, hold hands, and walk out of hell together.” – Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Healing NDEs: Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Anita Moorjani’s recent case (see previous two posts) of last stage cancer not only healed, but healed so fast, reminded me at once of the equally astonishing case I had read many years ago and kept track of, that of Mellen-Thomas Benedict. The most complete version of his NDE is the following, starting with an introduction:
Mellen-Thomas Benedict’s Near-Death Experience

Mellen-Thomas Benedict is an artist who survived a near-death experience in 1982.. He was dead for over an hour and a half after dying of cancer. At the time of his death, he rose up out of his body and went into the light. Curious about the universe, he was taken far into the remote depths of existence, and even beyond, into the energetic void of nothingness behind the Big Bang. During his experience, he was able to learn a great deal of information concerning reincarnation. Because of his near-death experience, he was able to bring back scientific discoveries. Mr. Benedict has been closely involved in the mechanics of cellular communication and research dealing with the relationship of light to life called Quantum Biology. This research is providing dramatic new perspectives on how biological systems work. Mr. Benedict has found that living cells can respond very quickly to light stimulation resulting in, among other things, high speed healing. He is a researcher, inventor and lecturer who holds six U.S. patents.

Several weeks after Benedict was born, he may have experienced a NDE when his bowels were ruptured. His body was tossed to one side as a corpse, yet much to everyone’s surprise he later revived. As soon as he was big enough to grab hold of crayons, he started what became a compulsive urge to create symbolic renditions of the black/white yin/yang circles of Eastern religious thought. He has no memory of why he drew those particular symbols.

He spent his grade school years in a Catholic boarding school in Vermont, and was baptized in the Salvation Army religion as a youngster. He traveled extensively because of a military stepfather until the family finally settled down in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Then, Benedict was diagnosed as having inoperable cancer. He had retired from the frenzy of filmdom by then and was operating his own stained-glass studio. As his condition worsened, he spent more and more time with his art. One morning he awakened knowing he would die the next day, and he did. As the typical heaven-like scenario began to unfold, Benedict recognized what was happening as it was happening. The process was familiar to him because he had read many books about the near-death phenomenon previously.

Mr. Benedict’s NDE is reprinted here by the permission of his friends Dr. Lee Worth Bailey and Jenny Yates. Their excellent book entitled The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, published by Routledge, New York, in 1996, is highly recommended by the webmaster. A portion of his near-death experience also appears in P.M.H. Atwater’s book, Beyond the Light. Concerning Mellen’s near-death experience, Dr. Ken Ring remarked, “His story is one of the most remarkable I have encountered in my extensive research on near-death experiences.”

P.M.H. Atwater has the following to say about Mellen-Thomas Benedict: “I can attest that his case is genuine and his claims about the brain tumor and the conditions of his death are true. I have met his mother and step-father, been in his and their homes, and have followed his life since – his struggles and his accomplishments – as he sought to find a way to integrate his experience into his daily life while still honoring the mission he felt guided to fulfill.”

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Here starts Mellen-Thomas’ own account, with headings added by the website:

The Road to Death

In 1982 I died from terminal cancer. The condition I had was inoperable, and any kind of chemotherapy they could give me would just have made me more of a vegetable. I was given six to eight months to live. I had been an information freak in the 1970′s, and I had become increasingly despondent over the nuclear crisis, the ecology crisis, and so forth. So, since I did not have a spiritual basis, I began to believe that nature had made a mistake, and that we were probably a cancerous organism on the planet. I saw no way that we could get out from all the problems we had created for ourselves and the planet. I perceived all humans as cancer, and that is what I got. That is what killed me. Be careful what your world view is. It can feed back on you, especially if it is a negative world view. I had a seriously negative one. That is what led me into my death. I tried all sorts of alternative healing methods, but nothing helped.

So I determined that this was really just between me and God. I had never really faced God before, or even dealt with God. I was not into any kind of spirituality at the time, but I began a journey into learning about spirituality and alternative healing. I set out to do all the reading I could and bone up on the subject, because I did not want to be surprised on the other side. So I started reading on various religions and philosophies. They were all very interesting, and gave hope that there was something on the other side.

On the other hand, as a self-employed stained-glass artist at the time, I had no medical insurance whatsoever. So my life savings went overnight in testing. Then I was facing the medical profession without any kind of insurance. I did not want to have my family dragged down financially, so I determined to handle this myself. There was not constant pain, but there were black-outs. I got so that I would not dare to drive, and eventually I ended up in hospice care. I had my own personal hospice caretaker. I was very blessed by this angel who went through the last part of this with me. I lasted about eighteen months.. I did not want to take a lot of drugs, since I wanted to be as conscious as possible. Then I experienced such pain that I had nothing but pain in my consciousness, luckily only for a few days at a time.

The Light of God

I remember waking up one morning at home about 4:30 am, and I just knew that this was it. This was the day I was going to die. So I called a few friends and said goodbye. I woke up my hospice caretaker and told her. I had a private agreement with her that she would leave my dead body alone for six hours, since I had read that all kinds of interesting things happen when you die. I went back to sleep. The next thing I remember is the beginning of a typical near-death experience. Suddenly I was fully aware and I was standing up, but my body was in the bed. There was this darkness around me.  Being out of my body was even more vivid than ordinary experience. It was so vivid that I could see every room in the house, I could see the top of the house, I could see around the house, I could see under the house.

There was this light shining. I turned toward the light. The light was very similar to what many other people have described in their near-death experiences. It was so magnificent. It is tangible; you can feel it. It is alluring; you want to go to it like you would want to go to your ideal mother’s or father’s arms.

As I began to move toward the light, I knew intuitively that if I went to the light, I would be dead.

So as I was moving toward the light I said, “Please wait a minute, just hold on a second here. I want to think about this; I would like to talk to you before I go.”

To my surprise, the entire experience halted at that point. You are indeed in control of your near-death experience. You are not on a roller coaster ride.  So my request was honored and I had some conversations with the light. The light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images and signs.

I asked the light, “What is going on here? Please, light, clarify yourself for me. I really want to know the reality of the situation.”

I cannot really say the exact words, because it was sort of telepathy.  The light responded. The information transferred to me was that your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before the light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have a chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not.

As the light revealed itself to me, I became aware that what I was really seeing was our Higher Self matrix. The only thing I can tell you is that it turned into a matrix, a mandala of human souls, and what I saw was that what we call our Higher Self in each of us is a matrix. It’s also a conduit to the Source; each one of us comes directly, as a direct experience from the Source. We all have a Higher Self, or an oversoul part of our being. It revealed itself to me in its truest energy form. The only way I can really describe it is that the being of the Higher Self is more like a conduit. It did not look like that, but it is a direct connection to the Source that each and every one of us has. We are directly connected to the Source.

So the light was showing me the Higher Self matrix. And it became very clear to me that all the Higher Selves are connected as one being, all humans are connected as one being, we are actually the same being, different aspects of the same being. It was not committed to one particular religion. So that is what was being fed back to me. And I saw this mandala of human souls. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I just went into it and, it was just overwhelming. It was like all the love you’ve every wanted, and it was the kind of love that cures, heals, regenerates.

As I asked the light to keep explaining, I understood what the Higher Self matrix is. We have a grid around the planet where all the Higher Selves are connected. This is like a great company, a next subtle level of energy around us, the spirit level, you might say.

Then, after a couple of minutes, I asked for more clarification. I really wanted to know what the universe is about, and I was ready to go at that time.

I said, “I am ready, take me.”

Then the light turned into the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen: a mandala of human souls on this planet.

Now I came to this with my negative view of what has happened on the planet. So as I asked the light to keep clarifying for me, I saw in this magnificent mandala how beautiful we all are in our essence, our core. We are the most beautiful creations. The human soul, the human matrix that we all make together is absolutely fantastic, elegant, exotic, everything. I just cannot say enough about how it changed my opinion of human beings in that instant.

I said, “Oh, God, I did not know how beautiful we are.”

At any level, high or low, in whatever shape you are in, you are the most beautiful creation, you are.

I was astonished to find that there was no evil in any soul.

I said, “How can this be?”

The answer was that no soul was inherently evil. The terrible things that happened to people might make them do evil things, but their souls were not evil. What all people seek, what sustains them, is love, the light told me. What distorts people is a lack of love.

The revelations coming from the light seemed to go on and on, then I asked the light, “Does this mean that humankind will be saved?”

Then, like a trumpet blast with a shower of spiraling lights, the Great Light spoke, saying, “Remember this and never forget; you save, redeem and heal yourself.  You always have. You always will. You were created with the power to do so from before the beginning of the world.”

In that instant I realized even more. I realized that WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN SAVED, and we saved ourselves because we were designed to self-correct like the rest of God’s universe. This is what the second coming is about.

I thanked the light of God with all my heart. The best thing I could come up with was these simple words of totally appreciation:

“Oh dear God, dear Universe, dear Great Self, I love my life.”

The light seemed to breathe me in even more deeply. It was as if the light was completely absorbing me. The love light is, to this day, indescribable. I entered into another realm, more profound than the last, and became aware of something more, much more. It was an enormous stream of light, vast and full, deep in the heart of life. I asked what this was.

The light responded, “This is the RIVER OF LIFE. Drink of this manna water to your heart’s content.”

So I did. I took one big drink and then another. To drink of life Itself! I was in ecstasy.

Then the light said, “You have a desire.”

The light knew all about me, everything past, present and future.

“Yes!” I whispered.

I asked to see the rest of the universe; beyond our solar system, beyond all human illusion. The light then told me that I could go with the Stream. I did, and was carried through the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt and heard a series of very soft sonic booms. What a rush!

Suddenly I seemed to be rocketing away from the planet on this stream of life. I saw the earth fly away. The solar system, in all its splendor, whizzed by and disappeared. At faster than light speed, I flew through the center of the galaxy, absorbing more knowledge as I went. I learned that this galaxy, and all of the universe, is bursting with many different varieties of LIFE. I saw many worlds. The good news is that we are not alone in this universe!

As I rode this stream of consciousness through the center of the galaxy, the stream was expanding in awesome fractal waves of energy. The super clusters of galaxies with all their ancient wisdom flew by. At first I thought I was going somewhere; actually traveling. But then I realized that, as the stream was expanding, my own consciousness was also expanding to take in everything in the universe! All creation passed by me. It was an unimaginable wonder! I truly was a wonder child; a babe in Wonderland!

It seemed as if all the creations in the universe soared by me and vanished in a speck of light. Almost immediately, a second light appeared. It came from all sides, and was so different; a light made up of more than every frequency in the universe.

I felt and heard several velvety sonic booms again. My consciousness, or being, was expanding to interface with the entire holographic universe and more.

As I passed into the second light, the awareness came to me that I had just transcended the truth. Those are the best words I have for it, but I will try to explain. As I passed into the second light, I expanded beyond the first light. I found myself in a profound stillness, beyond all silence. I could see or perceive FOREVER, beyond infinity. I was in the void. I was in pre-creation, before the Big Bang. I had crossed over the beginning of time – the first word – the first vibration. I was in the eye of creation. I felt as if I was touching the face of God. It was not a religious feeling. Simply I was at one with absolute life and consciousness.

When I say that I could see or perceive forever, I mean that I could experience all of creation generating itself. It was without beginning and without end. That’s a mind-expanding thought, isn’t it? Scientists perceive the Big Bang as a single event which created the universe. I saw that the Big Bang is only one of an infinite number of Big Bangs creating universes endlessly and simultaneously. The only images that even come close in human terms would be those created by supercomputers using fractal geometry equations.

The ancients knew of this. They said Godhead periodically created new universes by breathing out, and de-creating other universes by breathing in. These epochs were called yugas. Modern science called this the Big Bang. I was in absolute, pure consciousness. I could see or perceive all the Big Bangs or yugas creating and de-creating themselves. Instantly I entered into them all simultaneously. I saw that each and every little piece of creation has the power to create. It is very difficult to try to explain this. I am still speechless about this.

It took me years after I returned to assimilate any words at all for the void experience. I can tell you this now; the void is less than nothing, yet more than everything that is! The void is absolute zero; chaos forming all possibilities. It is absolute consciousness; much more than even universal intelligence.

Where is the void? I know. The void is inside and outside everything. You, right now even while you live, are always inside and outside the void simultaneously. You don’t have to go anywhere or die to get there. The void is the vacuum or nothingness between all physical manifestations. The SPACE between atoms and their components. Modern science has begun to study this space between everything. They call it zero-point. Whenever they try to measure it, their instruments go off the scale, or to infinity, so to speak. They have no way, as of yet, to measure infinity accurately. There is more of the zero space in your own body and the universe than anything else!

What mystics call the void is not a void. It is so full of energy, a different kind of energy that has created everything that we are. Everything since the Big Bang is vibration, from the first word, which is the first vibration.

The Biblical “I am” really has a question mark after it.

“I am? What am I?”

So creation is God exploring God’s Self through every way imaginable, in an ongoing, infinite exploration through every one of us. Through every piece of hair on your head, through every leaf on every tree, through every atom, God is exploring God’s Self, the great “I am”. I began to see that everything that is, is the Self, literally, your Self, my Self. Everything is the great Self. That is why God knows even when a leaf falls. That is possible because wherever you are is the center of the universe. Wherever any atom is, that is the center of the universe. There is God in that, and God in the void.

As I was exploring the void and all the yugas or creations, I was completely out of time and space as we know it. In this expanded state, I discovered that creation is about absolute pure consciousness, or God, coming into the experience of life as we know it. The void itself is devoid of experience. It is pre-life, before the first vibration. Godhead is about more than life and death. Therefore there is even more than life and death to experience in the universe!

I was in the void and I was aware of everything that had ever been created. It was like I was looking out of God’s eyes. I had become God. Suddenly I wasn’t me anymore. The only thing I can say, I was looking out of God’s eyes. And suddenly I knew why every atom was, and I could see everything.

The interesting point was that I went into the void, I came back with this understanding that God is not there. God is here. That’s what it is all about. So this constant search of the human race to go out and find God … God gave everything to us, everything is here – this is where it’s at. And what we are into now is God’s exploration of God through us. People are so busy trying to become God that they ought to realize that we are already God and God is becoming us.. That’s what it is really about.

When I realized this, I was finished with the void, and wanted to return to this creation, or yuga. It just seemed like the natural thing to do.

Then I suddenly came back through the second light, or the Big Bang, hearing several more velvet booms.. I rode the stream of consciousness back through all of creation, and what a ride it was! The superclusters of galaxies came through me with even more insights. I passed through the center of our galaxy, which is a black hole. Black holes are the great processors or recyclers of the universe. Do you know what is on the other side of a black hole? We are; our galaxy; which has been reprocessed from another universe.

In its total energy configuration, the galaxy looked like a fantastic city of lights. All energy this side of the Big Bang is light. Every sub-atom, atom, star, planet, even consciousness itself is made of light and has a frequency and/or particle. Light is living stuff.  Everything is made of light, even stones. So everything is alive. Everything is made from the light of God; everything is very intelligent.

The Light of Love

As I rode the stream on and on, I could eventually see a huge light coming. I knew it was the first light; the Higher Self light matrix of our solar system. Then the entire solar system appeared in the light, accompanied by one of those velvet booms.

I saw that the solar system we live in is our larger, local body. This is our local body and we are much bigger than we imagine. I saw that the solar system is our body. I am a part of this, and the earth is this great created being that we are, and we are the part of it that knows that it is. But we are only that part of it. We are not everything, but we are that part of it that knows that it is.

I could see all the energy that this solar system generates, and it is an incredible light show! I could hear the music of the spheres. Our solar system, as do all celestial bodies, generates a unique matrix of light, sound and vibratory energies. Advanced civilizations from other star systems can spot life as we know it in the universe by the vibratory or energy matrix imprint. It is child’s play. The earth’s wonder child (human beings) make an abundance of sound right now, like children playing in the backyard of the universe.

I rode the stream directly into the center of the light. I felt embraced by the light as it took me in with its breath again, followed by another soft sonic boom.

I was in this great light of love with the stream of life flowing through me. I have to say again, it is the most loving, non-judgmental light. It is the ideal parent for this wonder child.

“What now?” I wondered.

The light explained to me that there is no death; we are immortal beings. We have already been alive forever! I realized that we are part of a natural living system that recycles itself endlessly. I was never told that I had to come back. I just knew that I would. It was only natural, from what I had seen.

I don’t know how long I was with the light, in human time. But there came a moment when I realized that all my questions had been answered and my return was near. When I say that all my questions were answered on the other side, I mean to say just that. All my questions have been answered. Every human has a different life and set of questions to explore. Some of our questions are universal, but each of us is exploring this thing we call life in our own unique way. So is every other form of life, from mountains to every leaf on every tree.

And that is very important to the rest of us in this universe. Because it all contributes to the Big Picture, the fullness of life. We are literally God exploring God’s Self in an infinite Dance of Life. Your uniqueness enhances all of life.

His Return to Earth

As I began my return to the life cycle, it never crossed my mind, nor was I told, that I would return to the same body. It just did not matter. I had complete trust in the light and the life process. As the stream merged with the great light, I asked never to forget the revelations and the feelings of what I had learned on the other side.

There was a “Yes.” It felt like a kiss to my soul.

Then I was taken back through the light into the vibratory realm again. The whole process reversed, with even more information being given to me. I came back home, and I was given lessons on the mechanics of reincarnation. I was given answers to all those little questions I had:

“How does this work?  How does that work?” I knew that I would be reincarnated.

The earth is a great processor of energy, and individual consciousness evolves out of that into each one of us. I thought of myself as a human for the first time, and I was happy to be that. From what I have seen, I would be happy to be an atom in this universe. An atom. So to be the human part of God … this is the most fantastic blessing. It is a blessing beyond our wildest estimation of what blessing can be. For each and every one of us to be the human part of this experience is awesome, and magnificent. Each and every one of us, no matter where we are, screwed up or not, is a blessing to the planet, right where we are.

So I went through the reincarnation process expecting to be a baby somewhere. But I was given a lesson on how individual identity and consciousness evolve. So I reincarnated back into this body.

I was so surprised when I opened my eyes. I do not know why, because I understood it, but it was still such a surprise to be back in this body, back in my room with someone looking over me crying her eyes out. It was my hospice caretaker. She had given up an hour and a half after finding me dead.. She was sure I was dead; all the signs of death were there – I was getting stiff. We do not know how long I was dead, but we do know that it was an hour and a half since I was found. She honored my wish to have my newly dead body left alone for a few hours as much as she could. We had an amplified stethoscope and many ways of checking out the vital functions of the body to see what was happening. She can verify that I really was dead.

It was not a near-death experience. I experienced death itself for at least an hour and a half. She found me dead and checked the stethoscope, blood pressure and heart rate monitor for an hour and a half. Then I awakened and saw the light outside. I tried to get up to go to it, but I fell out of the bed. She heard a loud “clunk”, ran in and found me on the floor.

When I recovered, I was very surprised and yet very awed about what had happened to me. At first all the memory of the trip that I have now was not there. I kept slipping out of this world and kept asking, “Am I alive?” This world seemed more like a dream than that one.

Within three days, I was feeling normal again, clearer, yet different than I had ever felt in my life. My memory of the journey came back later. I could see nothing wrong with any human being I had ever seen. Before that I was really judgmental. I thought a lot of people were really screwed up, in fact I thought that everybody was screwed up but me. But I got clear on all that.

About three months later a friend said I should get tested, so I went and got the scans and so forth. I really felt good, so I was afraid of getting bad news.

I remember the doctor at the clinic looking at the before and after scans, saying, “Well, there is nothing here now.”

I said, “Really, it must be a miracle?”

He said, “No, these things happen, they are called spontaneous remission.”

He acted very unimpressed. But here was a miracle, and I was impressed, even if no one else was.

Well, I, Bhaga, was extremely impressed when I read of this ‘spontaneous remission’ that had been actually instantaneous!!! This is indeed what is usually called a miracle.

In his fear of acknowledging that such an incredible but true event was incomprehensible in the present state of Western medical knowledge, this so-called scientific doctor was showing, alas, the ridiculous arrogance too many main-stream scientists still show for such matters, refusing to admit that Western Science doesn’t know everything yet… and makes it in fact impossible for itself to truly understand anything at all, by denying to start with the existence of Spirit within even what they call Matter. 

Luckily, we have also the mavericks who, like Mellen-Thomas, with the help of such experiences, conduct their own investigations and arrive at their own more honest conclusions about what is that huge, mysterious Reality we are all part of…

Healing NDEs: Joel Hall

Today I will present a second case of  what I call a ‘Healing NDE’.

From Joel Hall on his blog ‘Simply Put’, here is the first part and the end of the account of all that happened: the second part I’ll put up also, but in a second stage, I’ll explain later why.

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Death, Where is Thy Sting?

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Joel Hall
© Copyright 2009, 2010 by Joel R. Hall – All Rights Reserved

Although it might sound like fiction, this is a true story. Strangely enough, this story starts with my death. Yes, my physical death. Granted, I didn’t stay that way, otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this now. No, I only got to pay a little visit home before being sent back here to complete my purpose. Part of that purpose is the writing of this story.

I will attempt to fulfill that part of my purpose as accurately and completely as possible. Having said that, I can not guarantee that my memories are 100% completely accurate. The best I can do is avow that I have striven with every once of my being to recount them as accurately and honestly as humanly possible, and I can attest that the essence of the story has been accurately preserved.

Before I begin, let me simply and clearly state that practically every experience or event described during the time in which I was not inhabiting my body is, at best, a pale metaphor. It is simply impossible to accurately describe what I experienced in terms that are directly analogous to the “normal” experiences processed by the brain of a living human being. My “senses” while dead were somewhat similar to those we employ while in a living human body, but would best be described as augmented. And, since human languages were created to describe the experiences collected through the sensory organs of living bodies, they therefore prove woefully inadequate when trying to describe experiences gathered through these augmented senses. Consequently, please bear with me as I struggle to describe my experiences while body free, knowing that my description will be, at best, an approximation of what I experienced. And now, the story.

It all started around 10:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 28, 1976. At that time in my life, I was a confused 18 year old from College Station, Texas. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and had elected to take a year off between high school and college to “find myself”. I was living at my parent’s house and had taken a job selling men’s blue jeans at the J.C. Penny store located in the Manor East Mall of neighboring Bryan, Texas. I had arrived at work around 9:45 A.M. to start my shift at 10:00. As required, I was dressed in suit and tie, which I thought an odd thing to wear when selling jeans, but, rules are rules and my boss, Mr. M, was nothing, if not a strict adherent to rules.

Mr. M was around 35 to 40 years old, fairly tall, balding, with a bit of a middle age paunch. To the best of my ability to tell, there were two groups of people he detested. The first group was college students. I suspect that he envied them their future once they had a degree with which they would quickly bypass men like himself on the corporate ladder. The second group, which he detested even more than the first, was college age kids that weren’t in college. In other words, me. I worked hard for Mr. M, but no amount of effort was ever enough. If I cleaned the changing rooms and returned all the stock back to the racks in perfect order, he would nonetheless complain that I had taken too long or that I had left too many pins lying about the dressing room floors. In short, he made my life while at work as miserable as possible. In his defense, I suspect he was trying to do me a favor by giving me a reason to quit that dead end job and get enrolled in school.

At any rate, my shift began in the standard way. I had ensured that the changing rooms were clear and ready and went about ensuring that all the stock was properly sorted on the racks. Along about 10:20, a beautiful young coed from Texas A&M University approached me asking for help. She explained that she had been trying to find jeans in the Lady’s Department but since none of them fit her the way she liked, would I mind helping her to find a pair of men’s jeans in a specific size since in the past, men’s jeans in that size tended to fit her better than any pair of lady’s jeans she had ever tried on. I must admit that my enthusiasm for this task was a bit higher than usual due to the striking beauty of this lovely customer. I took her over to the racks and began to search for the specified size. I quickly concluded that we did not have any in that size on the floor, but I was positive we had them in our warehouse. Assuring my customer that I would be back shortly, I headed for the warehouse door. Once through, I headed for the farthest corner of the farthest recess where the jeans were kept. Our warehouse had an unusual L shape with one of the arms being rather long and narrow. It was down this narrow arm that the jeans were kept. I remember thinking to myself as I wound my way between boxes heading for the jeans area that “I could die back here and no one would find me for weeks”. Little did I know at the time how close I came to having that thought become reality.

Once I arrived at the boxes of jeans, I began to dig in the box that I knew contained the size requested. It was a rather large box, being almost a perfect yard cube, about half full of jeans. I was bent over digging through the contents when a very odd thing happened. Suddenly, it felt as if someone tapped me very lightly on the back of my head, right at the crown. This was odd for two reasons. One, there was no one else around and two, it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to reach that spot with the way I was bent over. But the sensation was very distinct and surprised me so much that I started and stood up very suddenly. The moment I stood up, however, I realized that something was wrong: VERY WRONG. I instantly felt absolutely terrible. I was, quite literally, deathly ill. The room lurched and I became so weak that I feared I would collapse on the spot. My recent thought about dieing in that dark recess rang in my head and the fear it evoked in me gave me the strength to struggle back toward the entrance. It was slow going. I was weak, dizzy, and disoriented, but somehow I managed to get back to the entrance and reenter the store. I staggered through the aisle back towards the jeans department, clinging to clothing racks, shelves, counters… anything to help me stay upright. I finally made it back to my area and saw Mr. M standing with his back to me having a conversation with another associate. It was my good fortune that they were right next to my department for I fear I would not have lasted long if I had needed to search for him.

As I approached, I spoke with a drunken sounding slur: “Mr. M, I don’t feel very well.” The moment I spoke, I could see the red rise up the back of his neck and his shoulders clinch. He whirled on me, exposing a red faced mask of disgust and anger, ready to unleash what was probably an angry exposition on my need to get back to work. I will never know what it was that he had originally intended to say, however, since upon seeing me, he froze in place while his expression changed quite rapidly from anger to astonishment and then to what almost looked like fear. It was as if he was looking at a ghost. During this transformation, he uttered not a word, but when he did finally speak, he uttered the one phrase that none of the stunned associates within earshot had ever thought him capable: “Good God. You look terrible. Go home right now.” If I had not felt so totally out of it, I probably would have laughed at the stunned looks of amazement on the faces of the other associates. But upon looking from him to me, they also adopted the visage of those gazing upon a ghost. I must have looked REALLY bad.

I stumbled through the jeans department, through the passage into the employees “lounge”, checked out, and stumbled out of the building to my car. In reality, I stumbled to my sister’s car. Of all the “coincidences” that occurred during this sequence of events, the fact that I was driving my sister’s car that day was probably one of the most unlikely. Given the condition I was in at the time, there would have been absolutely no way I would have been able to drive a manual transmission vehicle. I barely had enough coordination left to start the car. So it was somewhat miraculous that I wasn’t driving my manual transmission ’72 Bug.  Instead, due to some sort of quantum flux in the space time continuum surrounding my older sister which had occurred the previous weekend, I was driving her automatic transmission ’74 Monte Carlo.

To this day, I can think of no logical explanation for this. All I can do is relate the basic scenario. My Bug was actually a hand-me-down from my older sister via my older brother. It had been her first car given to her as a gift by my grandparents upon the occasion of her 16th birthday. She had driven it until her graduation from high school in 1973 at which point, my grandparents gave her a new Monte Carlo as a graduation present. It was a shu-wweet ride: V8, plush seats, power everything… I loved that car. But I had never been allowed to even sit behind the wheel, no less drive it, in the entire time she owned it… until that week and never again afterward.

She had been visiting from Houston the previous weekend and out of the blue asked if I would mind trading cars with her so she could “drive the Bug for old times sake?” I didn’t hesitate. We traded keys and I found myself cruisin’ around town in the car of my dreams. But what I still do not understand is why. It is not now and was not then the sort of thing my sister would do. It was just plain weird. But for whatever reason, the car I found myself driving on my delirious way home from work that day was a ’74 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and not a ’72 VW Bug. Granted, I had no business driving anything. I was far worse off then most drunk drivers would ever be. I should have been riding in an ambulance, not piloting a car.

Somehow, I managed to turn left out of the parking lot onto Villa Maria road and made it all the way to where Villa Maria dead ended into Finfeather. The last thing I remember from that drive was passing over the railroad tracks that ran between Welborn Rd and Finfeather and then stopping at the blinking red light. The next thing I remember was waking up in the driveway of my Mother’s house with the engine still running. I must have driven the rest of the way in some sort of stupor, because I have absolutely no idea how I got home. At the time, I was too disoriented to worry about it, so I just turned off the car and staggered into the house.

Once I entered the house, I was beyond the point of being able to think straight. I was quite literally on death’s doorstep. I couldn’t even think to say anything to my mother who was washing dishes as I passed through the kitchen toward the living room. All I could think of was to sit down somewhere before I fell down. So I shuffled through without saying a word and collapsed into an easy chair in the living room. My mother remarked that I was home early for lunch and asked me what I wanted. All I could manage to get out was “I don’t feel good.” Upon hearing this, she turned off the water which had been running in the sink and came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a dish towel. As soon as she saw me, her face got that “seeing a ghost” look and she immediately shifted into Dr. Mom mode. I will never forget her placing her still damp hand on my forehead to check for fever. She told me later that she knew something was very wrong when she saw the moisture from her hand evaporate off my forehead in an instant. After telling me that I was “burning up”, she proceeded to retrieve two aspirin and send me to bed.

Somehow I managed to stay on my feet long enough to make it into my room and even get my clothes off. I don’t remember doing it, but I must have for I ended up in bed wearing only my underwear. I collapsed on the bed and managed to pull the covers over myself before completely passing out. I immediately descended into a very deep sleep. In fact, I descended so deeply that I came out the other side: I died. I don’t know how long I slept before my death. It must have been at least thirty minutes but it could have easily been over an hour. I simply don’t know. All I do know is that at some point not too long after I lost consciousness, I came through the other side of unconsciousness into a whole different kind of consciousness.

It happened gradually, rather like waking up slowly after a nice night’s sleep. The first thing I can remember upon “waking” was an awareness of total stillness. Up until that moment, I had never realized exactly how much our sleeping brains process all sorts of stimuli. It’s not like our bodies turn off the inputs while sleeping. It’s more that our brain chooses to ignore the vast majority of that input. Of course, a loud, sudden sound or other extreme input will indeed cause our brains to restore us to consciousness, which just goes to show that the inputs are indeed working. But I had never realized exactly how much we really are aware of our surroundings while sleeping until that moment. Indeed, we see, hear, smell, feel, and taste even while deeply asleep. But when I “woke up”, for the first time in my experience, it was absolutely silent, absolutely dark, absolutely still.

At first, I didn’t realize what was going on. I realized that I was conscious in that I could clearly think and assess my situation, but I couldn’t quite figure out why I couldn’t sense anything. All I knew was that I was awake and I was completely cut off from everything and seemed to be hovering in absolute darkness. I really didn’t have an opportunity to process this state of affairs, however, since almost instantly, my still state was interrupted by an odd sensation unlike any I had ever experienced before. So odd, in fact, that it defies description. The closest I have ever been able to come is to liken it to the drawing sensation created by holding the hose of a vacuum cleaner up to your skin. I felt like I was being drawn out of my body, most specifically out of my head. The result was that I suddenly found myself “lying” on the ceiling of my room staring down at my now still body.

It was a very odd experience to look down upon myself. In my previous life, I would have imagined that I would be upset or frightened by that sight, but in that moment, all I felt was peace. I had absolutely no emotional upset whatsoever. In fact, it was perhaps the greatest sense of peace I had ever experienced. I can remember quite clearly gazing upon my lifeless body and thinking to myself, in the most ordinary, matter of fact way, “I’m dead.” To give you some sense of the “tone” of my inner voice when thinking this, it would have been about the same tone used to say something like, “Hmmm, grass is green.” On the other hand, something odd was going on in my consciousness: multitasking. I remark on this since, like most men and unlike most women, I rarely, if ever, multitask. But it wasn’t just multitasking in the normal sense of that word. This was mega-multitasking. It wasn’t just that I was able to process two, three, or even four things simultaneously. It was much more than that. It went beyond processing thoughts. I was suddenly able to observe everything around me all at one shot. It was like spherical awareness and this awareness was not constrained by physical barriers, either. I could see through things which allowed me to see my body through the covers but simultaneously see the covers over my body. It was very wild!

While I was looking at my body, I was also examining the house around me. In a single instant I noted that I was alone, which mildly surprised me since my mother and grandfather had been home when I had collapsed into bed. In that single instant I “saw” that they were gone and that my grandfather’s car was no longer in the driveway, and I saw EVERYTHING else concerning the state of the house and grounds instantly. My brain processed this information by focusing on those things that were most important from my perspective, but I was acutely aware that I could “see” everything, or at least, choose to be aware of anything I wanted.

After a brief period, I once again felt that vacuum cleaner sensation, except this time it was drawing me through the ceiling. In an instant I found myself in a very dark, very still place, much like it felt while still in my body with the exception that I had the sense that this space was much larger. After a very short moment of dark stillness, everything changed. I felt as if I were accelerating at a VERY high rate through the pitch blackness. It was like no acceleration I had ever experienced before and had me, even in the midst of the sensation, wondering how it was that I could possible “feel” acceleration since I didn’t seem to have a body and I had always assumed that it required a body to “feel” acceleration. Be that as it may, that was exactly what I “felt”. This sensation went on for a LONG time, which eventually led me to wonder how “fast” I must be going since such a long period of such extreme acceleration would surely mean that I was going way faster than any object I had ever heard of in the “real universe”. In fact, I was wondering if I had not left the speed of light far behind and was now hurtling at unimaginable speeds. But that was just conjecture as I had nothing else to occupy my thoughts at the time. For some reason, I don’t ever remember questioning where I was going. I know that sounds strange. It even sounds strange to me, as I would previously have assumed that would be the first and foremost thought in the mind of someone freshly departed, but for whatever reason, it never even crossed my mind.

The dark acceleration went on and on until I began to think it would never end. With no light, it was impossible to gauge my speed or determine if there was anything whizzing by me. Just at the point when I finally began to wonder if I was going to simply accelerate forever, a very, very, very small (atomic) white dot suddenly appeared as if suspended in space in front of me. Before I had time to think or in any way react, the dot suddenly exploded into a round “portal” much like the end of a tunnel. This happened so fast, that I could only barely perceive it and in the next instant, the acceleration and darkness were gone. I had emerged into the highest expression of wonderful, beautiful, fascinating, astounding, fabulous, amazing, awe inspiring, indescribable place / existence / community / presence / totality / Love that exists. I was overwhelmed, overjoyed, peaceful, excited, amazed… I knew immediately who I was encountering. The Joy and Love that flooded over me in that moment were infinite. There are no words in any language sufficient to even come close to describing who and what I experienced in that Now. Nonetheless, I will try.

The closest analogy I can come up with for what I experienced upon exiting from the dark acceleration tunnel is that it felt like being a fish awash in an infinite, living, sentient Ocean of Light and Joy and Love. The Ocean had the appearance of liquid crystal filled with the purest Light imaginable. However, it would be inaccurate to describe the Light as being separate from the liquid crystal of the Ocean. The Light was the liquid crystal.

And much as crystal on earth refracts light in such a way as to appear filled with a rainbow of colors, so too was this Ocean filled with glints of rainbow colors. And what colors they were! Every color you have ever perceived with your earthly eyes was indeed present, but these were but a small subset of all the colors flashing through the Ocean. The sheer range of hues was beyond imagining. And these glints of color were not merely a trick of refraction. They were alive! They lived in the Ocean and the Ocean lived in them, but they were distinct from the Ocean. In fact, I myself may have been one of these glints. (I don’t know for sure since I never thought to look at myself.)

And the glints were more than just light. The Ocean was filled with music which seemed to emanate from the glints. Each one had it’s own tune and yet somehow managed to blend perfectly with a symphony comprised of the sum of all the disparate glint tunes. And the colors emitted by the glints varied with the music in such a way that the collection of the colors of the glints also combined to make a grand pattern similar to the music. Combined, the symphony of music and light created a synergy of light and sound that redefines the idea of music. As if this combination of aural and visual coherence were not enough, I could also “feel”, “taste”, and “smell” the musical color symphony. This is, of course, makes no sense from the perspective of how our bodies process colors and sounds in our earthly experience, but in the Crystal Ocean, it made complete and perfect sense. In fact, I instantly realized that our earthly experience is actually a dim shadow of the augmented senses of the Crystal Ocean existence, as if putting on flesh hides from us the true nature of our senses.

The effect of this was almost overwhelming in it’s beauty and power, but even as I floated in dumbstruck awe at the sheer fractal beauty of it all, I was simultaneously fully aware of the fact the the Ocean itself was alive. It was more than alive. It was Life. And emanating from the Ocean and from the glints was a warm, glorious, palpable feeling of Love. I had never known the meaning of Love until that moment. I felt fully accepted, fully appreciated, and fully understood. Of all that I experienced in that initial flood of stimuli, that was the most powerful. I was flooded with Joy and Peace and a sense of echoing the Love back to its source. It was wonderful!

I recognized the Ocean. I had sensed that Love to a smaller degree on Earth. It was my Lord, the redeemer of my life. I was home at last.

I don’t know how long I floated there soaking in the experience before the Ocean communicated with me. It could have been a second. It could have been a lifetime. Time made no real sense in that Now. All I know is that communicate with me the Ocean did.

I use the word communicate because this wasn’t speech in the sense of what we use to communicate on earth. It was somewhat like speech, but really more like thought, conveying much more than spoken communication could ever do. There was absolutely no ambiguity and each meaning, much as the music, affected all the senses. This was palpable communication. However, for the sake of this account, I will refer to this as a conversation using the words of speech, such as said, heard, spoke, etc. This is simply a convenience to convey the meanings without constantly having to try to describe the sum of all I experienced as that would be too cumbersome. What follows is the small bit of conversation I remember with Yeshua’s words in italics. In addition to the words, I am including the emotions that accompanied them in parentheses. Be advised that some of what I write here would normally be considered internal dialog only heard by me, but in this setting, it was all part of my dialog with Him. The conversation started with Yeshua speaking my name.

*** begin 1st remembered conversation snippet, beginning with Yeshua ***

Joel… (Very warm and full of Love, but also somewhat amused.)

Yes. (I love you too! Wow! This is great! I’m so glad to be here! etc)

We have much to discuss before you return. (Gentle, concerned, and consoling.)

What?!? Return?!? I just got here! I’m not going back! (Angry, hurt, scared.)

*** end 1st remembered conversation snippet ***

As you may have noticed, there isn’t much to this “conversation”. The reason for this is quite simple: the conversation was much longer but I can’t remember anything else specifically until the very end. This is very hard to explain. I know we talked. I know it was a very long conversation. I know that the topic was my life: past, present, and future. I even can vaguely recall some of the emotions I experienced during that conversation. I simply can not remember the specifics. The closest analogy I have ever been able to come up with to describe my memory of that conversation is to liken it to a long letter written in ink upon a sheet of paper which was subsequently dropped in water, causing the ink to run and smear to the point that it is possible to tell that there were indeed words written on the paper but impossible to make them out. You might be able to pick out a word here or there, and might even be able to discern the topic, but anything beyond that simply can not be retrieved. The next bit of conversation that I can specifically recall was when He said to me:

*** begin 2nd remembered conversation snippet ***

And now it is time for you to return. (Gentle. Happy. Proud. Encouraging.)

(Happy. I knew I had chosen to go back. Anticipating. Determined. Filled with purpose.)

*** end 2nd remembered conversation snippet ***

I did not respond. There was no time. The moment He concluded His last statement, I was instantly rocketing back into the tunnel. The portal instantly shrank to an atomic white dot and then was gone. The whole trip back down the tunnel was exactly the opposite of the initial passage: a strong sense of deceleration that lasted for a very long time until, at last, I came to a complete stop. After a brief moment of stillness, I once again experienced that drawing sensation and shortly found myself back on the ceiling gazing once again upon my unmoving corpse.

It’s funny. That image is burned into my memory. My body was lying on its back with the right leg straight, the left leg bent and splayed slightly outward with the left foot up against the right calf, the left arm straight against the left side, the right arm bent with the right hand resting on the stomach, and the head turned slightly to the right.

I hovered there for a brief time before the drawing sensation began, and just before my augmented vision of my body faded into the blackness inside my skull, I saw the smallest flicker of movement from my heart. I was once more “alive”. I remained conscious inside my skull for a while, mulling over what I had just experienced, and then slowly “fell asleep” except in this case, it was more like rising than falling.

(…)

Then I woke up! I was still very, very ill and was no doubt delirious from my high fever, but the thing I was mostly was scared beyond description. I don’t think I have ever felt fear so strongly as I did in the instant of my waking. In my disoriented state, I was convinced that the end of the world was at hand and that I had been left behind. I struggled from my bed and wandered around the house calling out for anyone. After a short period of panic, I remembered that I had seen that I was alone while dead and realized that my mother had probably taken my grandfather to his doctor’s appointment. This allowed me to calm down and go back to bed. Once I lay back down, I went immediately to sleep.

As I mentioned earlier, I fell ill around 10:30 A.M. on a Thursday. I remained very ill, running a high fever and unable to eat or drink, all through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and even into Sunday morning. During this time, I don’t think my temperature ever dropped below 102 Fahrenheit. When I did try to eat or drink, it came right back up. Most parents should probably have taken me to the E.R. very early during this period, but I was the son of a veterinarian who seemed convinced that any illness could be cured at home with the proper dose of tetracycline. At any rate, I languished in my ill and delirious state until early on Sunday when I had another very vivid dream. Unlike the previous dream, this one was very short. The whole dream consisted of the image of a humongous orange. In my dream, it appeared to be the size of a house and in my dream, I could smell that orange with an intensity that was overwhelming. As that smell washed over me I suddenly had the greatest food craving I have ever experienced. It hit me in a palpable wave while still immersed in my dream and stirred me so profoundly that I immediately awoke to full alertness as if I had been catapulted from dream to wakefulness in one instant. So rapid was the transition that I could still smell the orange and the craving was wrapping itself around my insides like a boa constrictor.

When I awoke, it was around 10:15 on Sunday morning. I sat up in bed and immediately began calling for my mother at the top of my lungs. The urgency in my voice brought her literally running into my room. Upon entering, she immediately asked me what was wrong while simultaneously reaching out the back of her right hand to feel my forehead. But before she could say more or even touch me I blurted out “Do we have any oranges?”

The question caught her off guard and she stopped dead in her tracks with a look of confusion on her face. After a moment’s thought she replied, “Yes, I think we have a few, but…”

“Good!” I interrupted. “Get them for me.”

I must have had a slightly lunatic look about me because my rude insistence upon having the oranges brought at once caused my mother to adopt a look of extreme concern and to complete her motion to feel my still quite feverish forehead. After assessing my fever, she stepped back and said, “You are still burning up and with the way your stomach has been acting, I think you aught to eat something a bit more bland.”

With every passing second, the boa constrictor of my orange craving further tightened around my stomach. I was becoming desperate! “Mom! Just bring me the oranges! All of them!”

She tried again to object but I would not hear of it. “Mom! Bring me the oranges!”, I insisted.

Finally, she gave in. With a roll of her eyes she turned to leave saying, “Let me see what we have.” She left the room still muttering leaving me to wrestle the boa. The craving was now so strong I could barely contain myself. After what seemed like an eternity, she returned saying, “All we have are these three”, and brandished the oranges, two in her left hand, one in her right.

As she approached, she said “Here, let me peel one for you.”, but as soon as she entered range, I snatched the orange from her right hand and practically shoved it down my throat, peel and all. I wish the scene had been captured on video because I’m sure it would have evoked howls of laughter to any that saw it. I must have looked like some sort of insane, starving monkey, snarfing down that orange whole with my shocked mother looking on, mouth flapping open and shut as she tried to speak through her disbelief at what she was watching. By the time she collected herself enough to say “Aren’t you going to peel that?”, the last of the orange was disappearing into my engorged mouth.

In answer, I simply grabbed the two remaining oranges and proceeded to stuff one in after the first. My mother was aghast at my behavior. From the look of fear and concern on her face, I suspect she truly believed I had taken full leave of my senses. This didn’t really register with me at that point, however, as my mind had ceased to process anything but the need to feed the orange craving boa in my gut. And so, as my mother continued to object to my feral eating behavior, I continued to send those poor innocent oranges into the maw of the beast that had taken up residence in my stomach. Within seconds I had devoured the second orange and had started on the third, while a river of pulp filled juiced coursed down my chin and throat. I didn’t care one bit. I have never tasted anything so wonderful as those oranges tasted in that moment. It was heavenly!

And then it was over. As I swallowed the last bite of the last orange, it was as if I suddenly awoke from a bad dream. My fever, aches, and nausea  that had been the definition of my existence for the last three days was suddenly and completely gone. If it hadn’t been for the sticky glazing of pulpy orange juice covering my face, chest, and abdomen, it would almost have been as if the illness of the previous 72 hours had never existed.

Again, I would have loved to have this on video as I suddenly swung my feet out of bed and said to my mother, who still had that “I need to call the sanitarium” look on her face, “I feel great. I’m going to take a shower.”

The effect of this pronouncement on my mother was immediate and profound. Her look of fear and dismay deepened. She placed her hand on my shoulder to stop me saying, “Hold on right…” but the sentence faded away as the evidence of my now cool skin sank in from where she was touching my shoulder. The look on her face went from fear to puzzlement to surprised delight in a matter of seconds as she confirmed my lack of fever by placing both her hands on my forehead. Her shock at my sudden lack of fever and apparent health sent waves of puzzlement, amazement, and joy across her face as she confirmed and then confirmed again that all fever had fled. She even made me wait while she got a thermometer to verify that I was totally fever free, but I knew without a shadow of doubt that I was completely and totally well. In fact, I have rarely felt so healthy as I did in that moment.

Finally, after Dr. Mom had completed her exam, I departed my sick bed for the shower while she removed the sweat and orange juice soaked sheets for washing.

I don’t pretend to understand exactly what that was all about. I can only report what happened to the very best of my memory. All I know is that I fell deathly ill on Thursday, October 28, 1976 at around 10:30 A.M., died sometime later that day while lying in my bed at home alone, left my body, traveled into a Crystal Ocean of Light and Love that I recognized as my LORD, had a long conversation with that Light, returned to my body, had a prophetic dream about future events in my life, lay seriously ill until having a strange, powerful dream about an orange on the morning of Sunday, October 31, 1976, awoke with an overpowering craving to eat oranges, and, upon eating three unpeeled oranges, found myself suddenly and completely cured of my illness at around 10:30 A.M.

Healing NDEs: Lorraine Tutmarc

One of the contemporary phenomena I have been attracted to and researching since thirty years in my overall research about the present signs of further evolution in humanity are the reports brought back by people who have had what has come to be widely called ‘Near Death Experiences’.

Those of these experiences in which the person went out of her or his dead physical body, and from a distance watched it, as well as whatever was going on around it, observing medical personel trying in vain to revive it, hearing what they said, seeing everything not only in the room but in adjacent rooms or distant halls or far away places as well, all correctly it was found when they came back to life, are already very precious experiences because they show us that our consciousness and our senses are not limited to our physical body and go on even when our consciousness goes out of that body: which means that we are more than that physical body, a first conclusion of rather momentous importance already in itself.

I am attracted especially, though, to those experiences which go even further, and in which the person saw the very special, loving, all-pervasive Light some of those experiencers describe, and met and communicated with that Light perceived as God Himself, or as one of the great spiritual beings that lived on Earth and left some teachings for us to follow: such experiences are actually in themselves deep spiritual experiences, which changed for ever the life of the experiencers.

But the kind of NDE experiences that interest me most are those in which this contact with the Light healed the sick body of the person, who came back to the same physical body, minus the ailment they had died from: the body too responded to that Light of Love, and not only returned to life, but did so in its normal and healthy condition, to the astonishment, expressed sincerely or played down, of the doctors.

I have kept a small selection of such cases that I want to share with you who visit this blog, so that we can later reflect together on certain facts revealed by those cases seen all together.

So today I’m presenting the first case, from the files of one of the biggest and most important site about NDEs: the IANDS.

—————————————————–

LED NDEA Seattle IANDS Near-Death Experience Story
Healed by Christ During my NDE by Lorraine Tutmarc

When I was 22 years old, in the Spring of 1928, I was pregnant with my third child. Unfortunately I had a miscarriage and efforts to remove the tissue were unsuccessful. Peritonitis set in, causing blood poisoning. My condition rapidly deteriorated. Although I went to the hospital several times, they sent me home on each occasion saying there was nothing they could do. Antibiotics were not yet available. I can remember my doctor visiting our house at regular intervals, asking my husband in a voice that was unfortunately too loud, “Has she gone yet?” For about three months I had pain throughout my body, was almost too weak to move, couldn’t eat, and required intravenous feeding.

One morning I awoke and noticed almost a numb feeling from my head down. All the pain was gone. And then, slowly, I was rising from the bed. I felt an immediate, terrific sense of freedom, as though I’d just taken off a heavy coat. I was floating and euphoric with peace. But I can also remember asking myself, “How did I do this?” I looked down on my body which appeared to be sleeping. Nearby I saw the doctor, the nurse and my husband, who was sitting next to my bed. Then, from the upper corner of the room, I began to move backwards. I glanced at my physical body. It was the last thing I saw as I went through the wall.

I found myself in a region of total darkness up to my neck in water. My bodily pain, absent moments before, had returned. The water was very cold and moving around. I was quite panicky because I cannot swim. In my mind I asked, “Where am I?” In response I heard a loud, loving and beautiful voice, sounding almost as though it came from a megaphone, saying, “This is eternity! This is eternity! You are lost! You are lost!” In some way I knew that was God’s voice. “What is this?” I again asked in my mind. God’s reply was, “This is the river of death.”

Struggling in the darkness I suddenly found myself being carried into the upper portions of a large whirlpool. I fought to keep my head above water, but gradually was drawn lower into the pool where the water was whirling more quickly. By the time I was sucked into the bottom of the pool I was completely exhausted. Emotionally, fear and hopelessness had drained me. So, as I was going underwater for what I was sure was the last time, I completely gave up! It was then that I saw light enter the water around me. The water turned warm.

I turned, looked up and there was Jesus, about four feet above me. I was staring at the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. The love I sensed coming from Him was beyond description. Light coming from Him lit up the entire area around me, but He was so wonderful to look at that I kept watching Him. His robe was pale ivory, with a red blotch in the chest area. His hair was auburn colored, shoulder length. But it was a look in those eyes that I could not turn away from, which I will not forget. They were large, full of meaning and kind. While loving, the gaze was also penetrating, a look that said that He knew everything I’d ever done, and everything I could ever do, both bad and good, and that no matter what, He would always be there. I could count on Him. His love would never fail.

I remember wondering about the red blotch on the robe, and the same deep loving voice I had heard earlier said that it represented the blood Jesus had shed for us on the cross. In the background I heard what sounded like millions of tiny bells whose sound had the purest tone. Throughout the rest of my near-death experience they were always detectable as a distant presence.

Then in a voice that was powerful and loving He said “Follow me.” I answered, “Yes, I will.” Instantly the water disappeared. He lowered His right hand and held my left. His hand was warm; then I felt the power of God moving through my body. And I’d never heard of the power of God! It was like sparks from smitten steel you could say, just coming right through my body, from my head to my toes, over and over again. As it came I grew stronger and stronger, until finally I thought, “I’m well! I have no more pain! This is real! This real!”

I rose so that I was next to Jesus. Although I was still holding His hand, He had turned and I followed His gaze. Both of us seemed to float toward a gold wall that stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Around us I felt a warm breeze carrying with it a scent of flowers. We stopped perhaps fifteen feet away. I noticed that the golden wall which was about nine feet high was transparent to a depth of about eight inches.

Around me it seemed like the dawn of a new day, as though it was about 5 a.m. From behind the wall I sensed activity. Things were happening. This was something felt rather than heard and I noticed it until the end of my NDE. I began to hear birds singing and chirping. As I listened to them for several minutes, their number and volume increased, then died away. String instruments then began to play enchantingly. Their volume and number also grew slowly, then disappeared. Finally, I heard a heavenly choir of the most beautiful harmonized voices singing in a minor key. They too grew in number, until hundreds of voices were apparent. I was captivated and drawn toward this realm. It seemed that the music spoke to me and welcomed me. I was still holding Jesus’ hand, but stepped toward the wall to search for a gate or door. None was apparent. I turned back to look at Jesus. He was gone.

I felt myself return into my body, going back the same way I had come. When I opened my eyes the doctor, nurse and my husband were around me. I exclaimed, “I’ve seen the Lord! I’ve been to heaven!” I repeated this and added, “I’m healed! I’m healed!” I can remember my husband staring at me and trying to restrain me. I was extremely hungry and insisted on eating something. Despite protests from the doctor, I eventually enjoyed my first meal of tea, toast and asparagus. I can remember the doctor saying, “I’ve always been an atheist, but now I’ve seen a miracle.” Two weeks later I was painting the inside of my house. I never had a pain after that.

This experience was not one that I was searching for nor expecting; I hadn’t been to church since I was quite young, nor had I ever read the Bible. For me it was an intensely personal experience that went far beyond the boundaries of denominational religion. It also led to my awareness of God’s presence in the world and an insatiable hunger to read the Bible.

Occasionally, I find myself waking in the middle of the night and hear for a short period of time the sound of those bells I first heard during my near-death experience.

Editor’s note: Lorraine left this world several years ago, but while she was alive here she brought hope, love and inspiration into the lives of many.

Return to Seattle IANDS NDE stories page.     Return to Seattle IANDS home page.

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Altai, Belovodia & the Physics of Time

If there have been people during the last few days visiting this blog in the hope of a new post, I apologize for the unusually long delay in putting up this one: I had no internet connection for all this time… Now that the technical aspect is again working properly, here is the new post at last!  And this long interruption has given me time to start also on the next post, which then should be ready to be posted soon as well.

Having again mentioned young Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi towards the end of my previous post, I felt I had to re-read once again, still with the same keen interest, her first book, ‘Entering the Circle’, looking especially for the moments when she has an unmistakable contact with her soul, something she herself learns to notice because of the specific ‘symptoms’ (my word) she experiences when that happens.
This is very important, so I decided to make of it my next post – this one – for it constitutes a major difference with Castaneda’s description of his training with Don Juan, Don Genaro etc, where no such contact with his soul happens at all, it all concerns only the occult planes and the contact with the powerful but obscure and dangerous beings and forces that, whether we are conscious of it or not, do try to invade us and make puppets out of us.

During Olga’s few days away from her big hospital in Novosibirsk and inside the two remote villages of Siberian Altai where she goes, she too will encounter  those hostile occult realities she has had to face already through some schizophrenic patients; this time, once back in his Altai village, her ex-patient Nikolai, the young man who has guided her and her sick friend Anna there, realizes that he isn’t becoming insane as he feared, but simply being changed into the new ‘kam’ (the real Altai word instead of ‘shaman’) needed for replacing his uncle Mamoush, the old kam who just died; the problem is, Nikolai’s normally friendly consciousness inherits at the same time the devious intentions towards Olga from Mamoush, for perpetuating the kam-lineage he and now also Nikolai belong to; but in the other village, Olga’s own newfound feminine mentor, the healer Umaï, although strange and sometimes scary in her behavior while she quite effectively cures an Altai woman and then also Anna, is actually a wise, warm and often smiling woman-kam from another lineage, dedicated to good; she protects Olga and very soon makes her discover the Spirit Lake within herself and her true Spirit in it, ever to guide her if she calls upon it.

The images, symbols and terminology aren’t the same as the ones from, say, the traditional spirituality of India, but still the inner realities perceived and the characteristic feelings are essentially the same, so I’ll summarize the part leading to the Spirit Lake, and then quote from what is said about it:
As conscious individualized energy, entranced Olga experiences herself at first as the undulating smoke rising from the fire lit in the middle of the isba’s earthen floor on which she lies, then as the fire itself going up, then as a snake struggling to come out of some very deep, resistant waters, desperately swimming up and up to reach the surface:
‘Finally the moment comes when I break out of the water and float on the surface of the ocean. Instantly it becomes a place of peace and calm. I love this ocean and could float like this in it forever. Nothing disturbs me. There are no thoughts other than appreciation for this water that now holds me up. I begin swimming. I swim and swim until I see the coastline. I realize that land meets that mysterious body of water on all sides and that I am swimming in a big round lake. Now I notice what is on the coast. It looks like a city. I can see buildings, cars and people. Panic takes me again. This is my city, my friends and my relatives. I don’t want to go back to them. I want to perceive nothing but the soft, flowing water.
A soft, feminine voice comes through my panic. “Be calm. I will talk to you now.” It is Umaï’s voice. I don’t know what language she speaks, but I know it is Umaï and somehow I understand her words.
“Now you are in your inner space, the place of the Spirit Lake. This is your first conscious time here. Each of us has this inner space, but during the lives of most people, it becomes smaller and smaller. As we go through life the world around us tries to fill up and kill this inner space, your Spirit Lake. Most people lose it entirely. Their space is occupied by legions of foreign soldiers, and it dies.
“Now you have experienced this space within yourself. Now you know it. You will no longer be afraid of the world around you. Your space will never be filled up with anything but yourself, because now that you have experienced it, you recognize its feeling and its pulse. You will continue to explore it. Later you will also learn that there is an important Inner Being who lives there. You will need to meet and learn to understand this Spirit Being. I will help you do this when you are ready.”‘

All this is already important enough, but even more is told to Olga then:

‘Umaï’s voice is soothing, and I hang onto every word as she continues.”This next thing is the greatest secret I could tell you. We have the task of building two things while we are in our physical lives. Our first task is to construct the physical reality in which we live. The second task is the creation of ourselves – of that very self that lives within this outer reality.
“Both tasks require equal attention. Keeping the balance between them is a very sacred and demanding art. As soon as we forget one task, the other can capture us and make us its slave forever. This is why the place of the Spirit Lake, the home of the Inner Being, becomes empty and dead for so many people. They come to truly believe that the outer world is the only one worth their attention. Sooner or later they will realize their mistake.
“For you, the main danger is not this but only in exploring your inner self. This is why you were already so interested in other people’s minds. You were using that information to try to understand your own psyche. You must learn to accept the importance of creating your own reality. Believe me that your work in the outer world has an absolute and equal power and ability to satisfy. Don’t be afraid of the shore around you now. Everything you see there is your own manifestation, and it is ridiculous to be afraid of your own creation. I will help you.”‘

By revealing this truth to Olga, Umaî helps her already to learn how to protect herself from her own possibly threatening creations:
1/ by remembering that outer situations in her life are only that, her own creations; and
2/ by not accepting the reality of those situations, but on the contrary asserting her own inner power to change them.

I personally appreciated particularly the remark about Olga’s way of being, more turned inward than outward, as I myself have the same tendency; the advice given by Umai has helped me to be less fearful of the threats from the outer reality, and sometimes already I have been successful in transforming them  into a more positive reality. Thank you, Umaï!… And Olga too, for writing this book!

Speaking of threats, we have to remember that all this was happening in Olga’s life while still under the Soviet regime.
One of the book reviews I copied for my first post about ‘Entering the Circle’ contained among other things this summary of the events that follow:

‘The author’s involvement with shamanism is fraught with danger, for in the Soviet Union, interest in the occult can lead to psychiatric commitment. But Kharitidi manages secretly to incorporate her new powers into her practice at the hospital. During her trance voyages, she visits Belovodia, more commonly known in the West by its Tibetan name of Shambhala, where a parallel human race with advanced spiritual knowledge hints at a radical new future for humanity. Others are also discovering Belovodia, Kharitidi learns, particularly a Soviet physicist researching the nature of time.’

What was put there in a nutshell I need now to expand about, for the ‘Conscious Evolution’ purpose of this blog:

One of Olga’s patients had been a sweet, idealistic and naive very young man, Victor, whose only crime at seventeen had been to say openly or even write things like ‘Soviet society is imperfect and could be improved in many ways’.
Interest in metaphysics and ‘anti-soviet’ ideas were always diagnosed as schizophrenia and ‘treated’ in ‘special clinics’. It was after having been sent to such a ‘special clinic’ that young Victor had been brought to Olga, a broken man:
‘(…) all his answers carefully memorized and rehearsed, (…) repeated without change: “I was sick. I understand it now. I want to continue taking my medicines to prevent the disease”.
‘There was only one time that I saw even a trace of remembered animation on his face. He had noticed a forbidden samizdat book that had been secretly reproduced for me on a copying machine by a friend. It was by Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and mystic, and I normally kept it hidden in my desk. After Victor glimpsed it, our relationship slowly began to change. It was the beginning of his trust for me.’

When reading Olga’s story for the first time, how moved I have myself been to discover the precious help Sri Aurobindo’s books had represented for all those Russian people oppressed also inwardly, by the heavy materialism inherent to the Soviet regime… How glad I have been to learn one of those books had been the silent, secret bridge between Olga and Victor.

He had never been really insane, and didn’t need any medical care except for recovering as much as was possible from the terrible ‘treatment’ he had received. Worried, though, about sending him back home to an egocentric and vain mother who rejected him, all the more now with the stigma of having been in the ‘crazy house’, Olga kept him in the hospital under her own safe wing for as long as she could extend his stay, but in the end, he had to be discharged and sent home.
‘After his release, Victor had written me a short letter telling about his attempts to find a job. He had been rejected at the few places he had tried, but he still hoped to find something. He also mentioned that his mother had sold all his books while he had been gone.’

Six months later, it is this poor Victor’ suicide, when she is informed about it upon returning to hospital duty after her Altai leave, that shakes Olga with deep enough sorrow to bring into her a new determination: she will discretely start making use of the changes that have occurred in herself and in her whole understanding of sanity, insanity and healing, for the sake of her patients, even at the risk of being discovered.

By one of those ‘coincidences’ that start happening in your life when you are aware of your Inner Being, a patient not really sent to her knocks anyway ‘by mistake’ at her office’s door in the hospital, and she gets invited to visit this Dmitriev, a renowned physicist, at his laboratory in the very important and highly respected ‘Academy cum City of Science’, Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. In spite of her original intention not to go, after Victor’s death Olga finds herself following not that mental decision, but her intuition, and eventually she does go to that laboratory, another turning-point in her life: confirming by direct personal experience the usefulness of the cutting-edge, strange-looking new equipment devised by Dmitriev, Olga’s consciousness shifts frequency and enters for a short while the dimension of this very Belovodia she longed to learn more about.

There she meets at last in person the man in white who had acted as her inner guide already in several major ‘dreams’: this masculine being is actually a part of Belovodia…. and so is Umaï, he reveals to her, so Olga needn’t worry, Nicolai’s claim that Umaï had died was a lie, she cannot die; but it wouldn’t be good to remain too attached to her emotionally, for that would hamper Olga’s own growth. Olga does have a deep inner connection with the tattoed mummies from an ancient unknown culture, and those mummies themselves are linked with Belovodia too: although they are seemingly dead, ‘their intentions are alive’, she is told. The discovery and opening of those tombs is one of the visible signs that a new evolutive step is already started on Earth. For individual human beings as well as for humanity at large, the most important thing is to be in contact with one’s Heart Self, which for humanity is precisely Belovodia/Shamballa, so it will come to be known more and more, also with the help of scientific devices like Dmitriev’s invention and the notes users like Olga are able to write while in a deep trance inside.

A few days later Olga has on her own another ‘dream’, at the end of which Umaï appears again to her, to reveal some more invaluable inner secrets for the true Healer Olga is indeed meant to become.
Following trustfully the advice received from Umaï, she has so much success with even supposedly ‘incurable’ cases that she can see these new approaches do work. Her colleagues and superiors see it too, but she presents her strange methods as taken from innovative experiments elsewhere!…
Every time, calling upon her ‘Spirit Twin’ inside herself makes her behave and speak in just the right, if apparently crazy, way, to help a patient… or, when she is finally suspected of ‘subversion’, to escape being found out by the dangerous interrogator she has to face… This moment turns out to be one of the funniest moments in the whole book!!!

Akademgorodok

Longing to have another session inside the curved, tubular ‘mirrors’ of Dmitriev, Olga goes again to his laboratory… only to find that in the meantime he himself has been able also to reach Belovodia, following the same wavelength frequency route that she had spontaneously and unwittingly used. Just to curl up again inside the ‘mirrors’, and there to read Dmitriev’s moving notes of his own visit to Belovodia, is enough for Olga to go back home fully satisfied again, as if she had had the experience herself. The story of Belovodia as told to Dmitriev traces the origins of humanity and of its various main religions back to that area of the world, and particularly the Altai region, long ago, when its climate was entirely different and this specific people there very developed spiritually.

It is so moving to realize the long foreseen vision that this people must have had of our times, of this later period of humanity when we would become ready to welcome again this spiritual wisdom that patiently waited for us to grow enough, and these beings who in the meantime, from their secret and protected realm of existence, have helped us at every step through their inner influence – or, as in the case of Umai, also through their physical presence with us here… Even mummies not so dead as they seem to be have helped and are helping still, through their ‘alive intentions’!
How beautiful and encouraging those teachings are, that together with Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, have shown Olga Kharitidi, and all of her readers, and now all of mine too on this blog, the great promised evolutive Future that is joining more and more our far evolutive Past to form in our Present the New Earth and the New Life we need so urgently!…