Bernie Siegal 's experience of God and the dead

For surgeon Bernie Siegel, “the knowledge that God is a loving, intelligent, and conscious energy” has come from dreams, drawings, and near-death experiences. He believes that: “first, there was consciousness and consciousness was with God” and “consciousness was God, because God speaks in dreams and images―the universal language.” From his experience with patients, Siegel has learned that consciousness can be healing. To a cancer patient Siegel proposed: “visualizing God’s light melting a tumor that appears as a block of ice.” To another: “Let go and let God.” Siegel tells his patients: “By accepting ourselves as God’s creation, seeing beauty and meaning in what we are, just as we are, we accept others as God’s creation too.”

Near-death experiences have led some to see the afterlife as offering reincarnation in this or another world. “I have had a near-death experience,” Siegel confirms, “and, through this, learned that we are more than our bodies. I have had past-life experiences and had messages from dead patients delivered to me through mediums. I have even heard the voices of the dead speak to me.” Instead of denying the reality of these anomalous experiences, Siegel affirms that consciousness, “as a universal field,” is “the source of all creation” and “communicates with our consciousness.”

Bernie S. Siegel, The Art of Healing: Uncovering Your Inner Wisdom and Potential for Self-Healing (New World Library, 2013), 198, 42, 36, 163, 92, 4-5, and 114.

Eben Alexander's NDE - 7

“‘I was blind, but now I see,’ took on a new meaning as I understood just how blind to the full nature of the spiritual universe we are on earth—especially people like I had been, who had believed that matter was the core reality, and that all else—thought, consciousness, ideas, emotions, spirit—were simply productions of it. This revelation inspired me greatly, because it allowed me to see the staggering heights of communion and understanding that lie ahead for us all, when each of us leaves the limitations of our physical body and brain behind.

“Humor. Irony. Pathos. I had always thought these were qualities we humans developed to cope with this so often painful and unfair world. And they are. But in addition to being consolations, these qualities are recognitions—brief, flashing, but all-important—of the fact that whatever our struggles and sufferings in the present world are, they can’t truly touch the larger eternal beings we in truth are.

“Another aspect of the good news is that you don’t have to almost die to glimpse behind the veil—but you must do the work. Learning about that realm from books and presentations is a start—but at the end of the day, we each have to go deep into our own consciousness, through prayer or meditation, to access these truths.

“I never heard Om’s voice directly, nor saw Om’s face. It was as if Om spoke to me through thoughts that were like wave-walls rolling through me, rocking everything around me and showing that there is a deeper fabric of existence—a fabric that all of us are always part of, but which we’re generally not conscious of.

“So I was communicating directly with God? Absolutely. Expressed that way, it sounds grandiose. But when it was happening, it didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt like I was doing what every soul is able to do when they leave their bodies, and what we can all do right now through various methods of prayer or deep meditation. Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it’s the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times. Omniscient, omnipotent, personal—and loving us without conditions. We are connected as One through our divine link.”

 

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Eben Alexander's NDE - 6

After seven days in a coma, Dr. Wade met with Alexander’s wife, Holley, and her close friend, Sylvia, and said to them: If Eben doesn’t show some real improvement within the next twelve hours, we will probably recommend discussing termination of antibiotics. A week in coma with severe bacterial meningitis is already beyond the limits of any reasonable expectation of recovery. Given those prospects, it might be better to let nature take its course.

Alexander’s young son, Bond, who had been listening at the door, ran back into his father’s hospital room and climbed up onto his bed.

“Then he pulled up my eyelids and said, directly into my empty, unfocused eyes, You’re going to be okay, Daddy. You’re going to be okay. He kept on repeating it, believing, in his child’s way, that if he said it enough times, surely he would make it true.

“Sylvia went into the ICU room and stood by the bed next to Bond, as he sat silently rubbing my hand . . . as Sylvia and Bond stared into my slack face, resolutely refusing to accept what they had just heard from the doctor, something happened. My eyes opened.

“Sylvia quickly brought Holley and Dr. Wade into the room, and Dr. Wade carefully extracted the breathing tube from Alexander’s throat.

All is well, I said, radiating that blissful message as much as speaking the words. I looked at each of them, deeply, acknowledging the divine miracle of our very existence. Don’t worry . . . all is well, I repeated, to assuage any doubt.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

 

Eben Alexander's NDE - 5

“The view of human consciousness held by most scientists today is that it is composed of digital information—data, that is, of essentially the same kind used by computers. Though some bits of this data—seeing a spectacular sunset, hearing a beautiful symphony for the first time, even falling in love—may feel more profound or special to us than the countless other bits of information created and stored in our brains, this is really just an illusion. All bits are, in fact, qualitatively the same. Our brains model outside reality by taking the information that comes in through our sense and transforming it into a rich digital tapestry. But our perceptions are just a model—not reality itself. An illusion.

“To understand how the brain might actually block our access to knowledge of the higher world, we need to accept—at least hypothetically and for the moment—that the brain itself doesn’t produce consciousness. That it is, instead, a kind of reducing valve or filter, shifting the larger, nonphysical consciousness that we possess in the nonphysical worlds down into a more limited capacity for the duration of our mortal life.

“There is, from the earthly perspective, a very definite advantage to this. Just as our brains work hard every moment of our waking lives to filter out the barrage of sensory information coming at us from our physical surroundings, selecting the material we actually need in order to survive, so it is that forgetting our trans-earthly identities also allows us to be ‘here and now’ far more effectively. Just as most of ordinary life holds too much information for us to take in at once, being excessively conscious of the worlds beyond the here and now would slow down our progress even more. If we knew too much of the spiritual realm now, then navigating our lives on earth would be an even greater challenge than it already is.

“Why am I so sure of all this? For two reasons. The first is that I was shown it (by the beings who taught me when I was in the Gateway and the Core), and the second is because I actually experienced it.

“Free will is of central importance for our function in the earthly realm: a function that, we will one day discover, serves the much higher role of allowing our ascendance in the timeless alternate dimension. Our life down here may seem insignificant, for it is minute in relation to the other lives and other worlds that also crowd the invisible and visible universes. But it is also hugely important, for our role here is to grow toward the Divine, and that growth is closely watched by the beings in the worlds above—the souls and lucent orbs (those beings I saw originally far above me in the Gateway, and which I believe are the origin of our culture’s concept of angels).

“We—the spiritual beings currently inhabiting our evolutionarily developed mortal brains and bodies, the product of the earth and the exigencies of the earth—make the real choices. True thought is not the brain’s affair. But we have—in part by the brain itself—been so trained to associate our brains with what we think and who we are that we have lost the ability to realize that we are at all times much more than the physical brains and bodies that do—or should do—our bidding.

“How do we get closer to this genuine spiritual self? By manifesting love and compassion. Why? Because love and compassion are far more than the abstractions many of us believe them to be. They are real. They are concrete. And they make up the very fabric of the spiritual realm.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine God as impersonal. Yes, God is behind the numbers, the perfection of the universe that science measures and struggles to understand. But—again, paradoxically—Om is ‘human’ as well—even more human than you and I are. Om understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

The anonymous gospel attributed to the apostle John begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:1, 14)

Eben Alexander's NDE - 4

“During my time out of my body, I accomplished this back-and-forth movement from the muddy darkness of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View to the green brilliance of the Gateway and into the black but holy darkness of the Core any number of times. But each time I reached the Core, I went deeper than before, and was taught more, in the wordless, more-than-verbal way that things are communicated in the worlds above.

“Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows—the kind we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities . . . the glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.

“The primary hurdle that most NDE subjects must jump is . . . how to convey what the love they experienced out there actually feels like.

“We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through. The brain—in particular its left-side linguistic/logical part, that which generates our sense of rationality and the feeling of being a sharply defined ego or self—is a barrier to our higher knowledge and experience.

“We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

“The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make, and as hard as I know it’s going to be to unpack the other lessons I learned while there, I also know in my heart that sharing this very basic message—one so simple that most children readily accept it—is the most important task I have.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Eben Alexander's NDE - 3

“I was in a place of clouds where flocks of transparent orbs flew and produced a huge and booming sound like a glorious chant. Seeing and hearing were not separate in this pace. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way.

“Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

“I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. An orb that was living and almost solid, as the songs of the angel beings had been.

“My situation was, strangely enough, something akin to that of a fetus in a womb. The fetus floats in the womb with the silent partner of the placenta, which nourishes it and mediates its relationship to the everywhere present yet at the same time invisible mother. In this case, the ‘mother’ was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it. This Being was so close there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself. Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite vastness of the Creator, could see how completely minuscule I was by comparison. I will occasionally use Om as the pronoun for God because I used that name in my notes after my coma. ‘Om’ was the sound I remembered hearing associated with that omniscient, omnipotent, and unconditionally loving God, but any descriptive word falls short.

“Through the Orb, Om told me there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.

“I saw the abundance of life through the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond that of humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly. They cannot be known, or understood, from lower dimensional space. Cause and effect exist in these higher realms, but outside of our earthly conception of them. The world of time and space in which we move in this terrestrial realm is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds. In other words, these worlds aren’t totally apart from us, because all worlds are part of the same overarching divine Reality. From those higher worlds one could access any time or place in our world.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Compare the apostle Paul’s transcending experience: “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” (2 Cor. 12:2-4) As an educated Jew, Paul knew of the tradition in Jewish mysticism of seven levels of heavens. (Note in the NRSV, The Oxford Annotated Bible.)

Eben Alexander's NDE - 2

“Below me there was a countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. It was earth . . . but at the same time it wasn’t. It was like when your parents take you back to a place where you spent some years as a very young child. You don’t know the place. Or at least you think you don’t. But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself—a part way, deep down—does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again.

“I was flying, passing over trees and fields, streams and waterfalls, and here and there, people. They wore simple yet beautiful clothes, and it seemed to me that the colors of these clothes had the same kind of living warmth as the trees and the flowers that bloomed and blossomed in the countryside around them. A beautiful, incredible dream world . . . except it wasn’t a dream. Though I didn’t know where I was or even what I was, I was absolutely sure of one thing: this place I’d suddenly found myself in was completely real.

“But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t alone up there. Someone was next to me: a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes. She was wearing the same kind of peasant-like clothes that the people in the village down below wore. Golden-brown tresses framed her lovely face. We were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, alive with indescribable and vivid colors—the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the greenery and coming back up around us again.

“Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

“The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.

We will show you many things here, the girl said—again without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. But eventually, you will go back.

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander's NDE

Eben Alexander was an experienced neurosurgeon at the time of his near-death and his astonishing experience and recovery. At age fifty-four, he was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a coma for seven days. “During that time,” he writes, “my entire neocortex—the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down.”

“When your brain is absent, you are absent, too. As a neurosurgeon, I’d heard many stories over the years of people who had strange experiences, usually after suffering cardiac arrest: stories of traveling to mysterious, wonderful landscapes; of talking to dead relatives—even to meeting God Himself. Wonderful stuff, no question. But all of it, in my opinion, was pure fantasy.”

In the coma, he first was aware of: “Darkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.

“Consciousness, but consciousness without memory of identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what, you are.

“Language, emotion, logic: these were all gone, as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down.

“Something had appeared in the darkness. Turning slowly, it radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart.

“Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Growing in volume as a pure white light descended, it obliterated the monotonous mechanical pounding that, seemingly for eons, had been my only company up until then.

“The light got closer and closer, spinning around and around and generating those filaments of pure white light that I now saw were tinged, here and there, with hints of gold. Then, at the very center of the light, something else appeared. I focused my awareness, hard, trying to figure out what it was. An opening. I was no longer looking at the slowly spinning light at all, but through it.

“The moment I understood this, I began to move up. Fast. There was a whooshing sound, and in a flash I went through the opening and found myself in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen."

Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

Process philosophers: Life after death?

Philosopher Robert McDermott asserts that process thought regards life after death and other paranormal experiencing as completely natural phenomena: “Besides expanding William James’s radical empiricism, with its acceptance of nonsensory perception, Whitehead also developed an ontology that explains the possibility of not only extrasensory perception, but also psychokinesis and evidence for life after death.”

McDermott clarifies that Whitehead “did not believe life after death to be actual.” Nonetheless, Whitehead “acknowledged its possibility because psyche is potentially free to exist and perceive apart from its physical body.”

Robert McDermott, “David Ray Griffin on Steiner and Whitehead, Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).

David Ray Griffin argues that Whitehead’s panentheism offers two reasons for concluding the universe is meaningful. “On the one hand,” given the primordial nature of God, “our world reflects a divine purpose. On the other hand, every value that is achieved is then preserved everlastingly in God’s receptive side, called the ‘consequent nature of God.’” This means, Griffin explains, that: “Whitehead’s rejection of the materialist identification of the mind with the brain allows life after death to be affirmed, if it is supported by trustworthy evidence.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 345-51, in Griffin, “Whitehead’s Naturalism and a Non-Darwinian View of Evolution,” in John B. Cobb, J., Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 389-390.

Jung on the psyche, mythology, and death

Philosopher Michael Grosso in his 1985 book The Final Choice summarizes C. G. Jung’s psychology: “what is real, effective and fateful is the psyche. We are immersed in a sea of psychisms, deep collective images, linked somehow to vital and cosmic forces. These exist as the living forms of internal existence; what is more, as Jung believed, they are both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’” Jung affirmed that transcendental subjectivity is transcendent objectivity. Grosso, quoting Jung: “What is deeply within leads to what is deeply without.”

Michael Grosso, The Final Choice: Playing the Survival Game (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1985), 125-26.

Jung, writing of the archetypal collective unconscious, after discovering in the dreams of his patients “mythological motifs from cultures of which they had no intellectual knowledge.” He realized, “the human psyche has access not only to the Freudian individual unconscious,” but also to “a repository of the entire cultural heritage of humanity.” And he found comparative mythology useful “for individuals involved in experiential therapy and self-exploration, and an indispensable tool for those who support and accompany them on their journeys.”

Stanislav Grof, “Revision and Re-Enchantment of Psychology,” Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).

Jung had dinner with Einstein several times and wrote in a 1953 letter that Einstein started him thinking about how the relativity of time and space is likely affecting the psyche. In “The Soul and Death” Jung asserts that: “We are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is no form of existence without space and time.” For the psyche in its depth “participates in a form of existence beyond space and time” and “partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’.”

C. G. Jung, On Death and Immortality (Princeton University Press, 1999), 4-5.

In 1944 during surgery Jung suffered cardiac arrest, had his own near-death experience, and later described it as “a glimpse behind the veil” . . .

The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. When you can give up the crazy will to live and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist, then the truly real life begins with everything which you were meant to be and never reached. It is something ineffably grand. I was completely free and whole, as I never felt before.

I found myself 15,000 km from the earth and I saw it as an immense globe resplendent in an inexpressibly beautiful blue light. I was on a point exactly above the southern end of India, which shone in a bluish silvery light with Ceylon like a shimmering opal in the deep blue sea. I was in the universe, where there was a big solitary rock containing a temple. I saw its entrance illuminated by a thousand small fames of coconut oil. I knew I was to enter the temple and I would reach full knowledge. But at this moment a messenger from the world (which by then was a very insignificant corner of the universe) arrived and said that I was not allowed to depart and at this moment the whole vision collapsed completely.

Jung wrote he “was wakeful each night in the universe,” experiencing “the complete vision,” but not as an I.  Instead, he was “united with somebody or something.” As if in “a silent invisible festival permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience.” He learned from his NDE that: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”

Grosso Final Choice, 127-28.

Dr. Tony Cicoria's NDE piano music

In 1994 orthopedic surgeon Tony Cicoria, while at a lakeside family gathering, was making a call at a pay phone to his mother when a bolt of lighting passed through the phone line and struck him in the face. Remembering: I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, “Oh shit, I’m dead.” I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman — she’d been waiting to use the phone right behind me . . . over my body, giving it CPR.

I floated up the stairs — my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be O.K. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of wellbeing and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up. . . . There was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had ’— slam! I was back.

Experiencing pain from his body burning, but otherwise seeming all right. Then, after a few weeks, Cicoria feeling an insatiable desire to listen to piano music. After buying recordings and finding he especially enjoyed a Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recording of Chopin favorites, he felt a craving to be able to play this music. When a babysitter asked to store her piano in his house, he readily agreed, and began teaching himself how to play. Also, he also began hearing music in his head. The first time, it was in a dream, he recalls. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written.

Upon waking, and realizing the music was still playing in his mind, he got up and began writing down what he remembered. Then, whenever practicing Chopin, this music that he had heard in a dream, he says, would come and take me over.

Getting up at 4 in the morning, practicing piano, writing down his music, and at home after work at the piano again, practicing and playing. My wife was not really pleased, he admits. I was possessed.

Three months after surviving his lightning strike, Cicoria feeling the only reason I had been allowed to survive was the music. Beginning to think he’d been given a mission, to tune in to the music that he called, a bit whimsically, the music from Heaven. Coming to him, usually in an absolute torrent of notes, without spacing between the notes.

Oliver Sacks, “A Bolt from the Blue,” The New Yorker, July 16, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/23/a-bolt-from-the-blue.

Psychologist Oliver Sacks, interviewing Cicoria for The New Yorker magazine —saying to him, after looking into my eyes as if looking through me — that the music went through an awful lot of trouble to get here, so the least you can do is write it.

Cicoria recalling, I was so shaken by what he said, I went home and bought a Sibelius music writing program. Then, Cicoria, spending the next seven months writing and intensely practicing the piano, performing a year later the piece at the Goodyear Performing Arts Theater at the State University College in Oneonta, New York. And making a CD, Fantasia The Lightning Sonata.

 

Tony Cicoria, “The Electrifying Story of the Accidental Pianist & Composer,” Missouri Medicine, 2014 Jul-Aug; 111(4): 308, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179476/.

Experiencing dead loved ones as apparitions

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody, knowing many bereaved family members long to see deceased loved ones, making an unexpected discovery. In a bookstore, browsing in the psychology section, and knocking a book off the shelf entitled Crystal Gazing. The author, Northcote Thomas, describing in 1900 the practice in ancient cultures of communicating with the dead, by gazing into pools of water or crystals or mirrors. Known in history as scrying. Moody, building a dimly lit booth with a mirror tilted so subjects wouldn’t see their own image but might see an apparition of a deceased loved one. Then inviting students and colleagues to join in this experiment. 

His first participant, a forty-four-year old nurse, hoping to see her husband who had died two years earlier, but instead seeing her father, who “actually emerged from the mirror to talk with her.” A man, reporting somehow “entering” the mirror and meeting with two deceased cousins. Concluding, “It seemed as though they were waiting for me.” A stunned woman, exclaiming her grandmother came out of the mirror into the booth and hugged her. Moody, reporting in his 2012 book Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife, that 80 percent of those using the apparition booth reported seeing “departed loved ones.”

Recalling his response to an interviewer’s question: What do you think happens when we die? Moody writes: “My mind flashed back to the thousands of people I have listened to over the years as they told their story of near-death and the miraculous journey they took at the moment they almost died.” Moody, also remembering his journey to the brink of death,” recognizing, “I was very experienced in both objective and subjective research into life after death.” Then answering: “I think we enter into another state of existence or another state of consciousness that is so extraordinarily different from the reality we have here in the physical world that the language we have is not yet adequate to describe this other state of existence or consciousness. Based on what I have heard from thousands of people, we enter into a realm of joy, light, peace, and love in which we discover that the process of knowledge does not stop when we die. Instead, the process of learning and development goes on for eternity.”

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife (HarperCollins, 2012), 180, 197, 226, 245.

The Light&Love Prayer

 I’ve written this prayer following the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer, but also using:

o   Paul’s greeting of “grace and peace” in many of his letters,

o   Way as in the Acts of the Apostles,

o   Love as central for Paul (1 Cor. 13) as well as the gospel and letters of John,

o   Light as in John’s gospel and as in many near-death-experiences (NDEs),

o   Truth from John 4:24 (“worship in spirit and in truth”).

 

As well as replacing the phrases:

o   “Our father in heaven” with “O God of Love.”

o   “Thy kingdom come” with “May your grace and peace come.”

o   “Give us this day our daily bread” with “Keep us humble ‘til our time has come.”

o   “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” with “And as we forgive those who’ve done us harm, forgive us for the harm we’ve done.”

o   “And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” with “And keep us safe from temptation and evil.”

o   “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever” with “For you are the Way, the truth, and the Light, now and forever.”

 

O God of Love. May your grace and peace come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Keep us humble 'til our time has come. And as we forgive those who've done us harm, forgive us for the harm we've done. And keep us safe from temptation and evil. For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light, now and forever. Amen.

 

Robert Traer