Visionary encounters with departed loved ones

In his 1993 book entitled Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones, Raymond Moody explains that in ancient Greece three hundred “sanctuaries” were created in memory of Asclepius, “a revered physician.” The most famous of these at Epidaurus functioned, Moody suggests, “as a sort of Mayo Clinic of dream-incubation temples.” In these sanctuaries “visionary experiences were evoked for the purpose of healing.” Pilgrims came and slept in the courtyard at Epidaurus until they had a dream of Asclepius who invited them to enter the central sanctuary. There those seeking healing lay on narrow beds that slightly elevated their heads. Our modern word for clinic is derived from the Greek word, klinis, for these temple healing beds. 

These pilgrims believed that Asclepius entered the sanctuary at night, while they slept, and provided prescriptions or other procedures that led to healing. Inscriptions on the stone walls of the sanctuary ruins that celebrate the powers of Asclepius can still be read today.

Ancient Greek accounts say these visions often occurred between sleeping and being awake, in the state of mind that physicians and psychiatrists identify as hypnagogic. Seeking and experiencing visions, for healing or other purposes, was a common practice in many ancient cultures including Canaan, Israel, Egypt, Japan, and Mesopotamia as well as in Africa and South America. Those seeking a vision also gazed into mirrors, clear pools of water, crystals, or other reflecting surfaces.

Visions such as these may be telling. Moody relates one example from American history: “On the night of the fateful election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln reclined, exhausted, on the couch. Suddenly, in a nearby mirror, he saw a strange double image of himself, one image as he was and one that looked pale and ghostly. Lincoln told his wife, Mary, of this experience. The First Lady interpreted the vision this way: She said that he would be elected to a second term but then would die in office. His mirror vision and her interpretation proved to be prophetic.”

To study mirror-gazing and possible hypnagogic experiences by contemporary individuals, Moody created a quiet and darkened environment with a mirror positioned so subjects gazing into it would not see themselves. At first he invited his psychology students to participate, but soon faculty and many others also asked to take part. At the time of writing Reunions, 300 volunteers had sought a “facilitated apparition” experience and about 50 percent reported “complex communications” either during their time in the apparition room Moody calls a “psychomanteum” or soon thereafter. By 2012 and after several hundred more apparition experiences, Moody reported that more than 80 percent “saw departed loved ones.”

For instance, a businessman who said he was an “interested skeptic” had the following experience.

I saw this mist in there, and to tell you the truth, for just a few minutes I thought you were going to have to call the fire department because it looked like smoke to me. Then I saw colors all over the mirror, patches of color, and I began to see scenes. Some were of my childhood. They were very realistic. Three-dimensional scenes were all around me. Some of them I recognized as things in my life, but others not.

One was of my father a long time ago, sitting on the porch steps. I remembered that happening, so this was just a memory but a clear memory, right out in front of me. I could almost touch it. I felt like I could anyway. But I didn’t feel he was there; this was just a memory in the mirror.

There were scenes, too, of places I have never been to or seen. Very pretty places. I don’t know where they were or what this was, but I got to thinking that the scenes were all around me on the sides, so I was in the mirror.

At the place I went into the mirror, I felt refreshed, as if I were a new me. I knew someone was there with me, but I had no idea who. Then I saw this shape, a person forming up in the mirror and he was the one coming out of the apparition room.

Very definitely the man who was coming into focus was in the apparition room. For a moment I thought I was in the mirror, but then I came back into the apparition room, too, and this man just about my size was in there with me. This was a continuous movement for him. He moved into the light and right out of the mirror into the apparition room in a smooth motion. He popped right out. I was the one who was moving back and forth in and out of the mirror for just a minute until I settled back into the room and was sitting in my chair again.

I must have jumped because when I could see who it was, it was my old business partner. He was about two years younger than I was, and we had worked together for fifteen years. Then one day his wife went home and found him in the shower dead of a heart attack. He had been a young man of thirty-eight, and they had four children.

It is funny, but while we were working together, I didn’t think of him as a good friend. We were just business partners. But when he died, I went down into the dumps. My wife later told me that they were afraid they were going to have to put me in the hospital for a while.

Anyway, when he came into the apparition booth, I saw him clearly. He was about two feet away from me. I was so surprised I couldn’t think what to do. It was him, right there. He was my size, and I saw him from the waist up. He had a full form and he was not transparent. He moved around, and when he did, I could see his head and arms move, all in three dimensions.

He looked just as he had when he died, but maybe a little younger. There was an appearance as if all blemishes had been removed, and he was very lively.

He was happy to see me. I was amazed, but he didn’t seem amazed. He knew what was going on, was my impression. He wanted to reassure me. He was telling me not to worry, that he was fine. I know that his thought was that we would be together again. His wife is dead now, too, and he was sending me the thought that she was with him. . . .

I didn’t hear any words or noises. This was all in thoughts that were passed back and forth, but there wasn’t any point in using words. I asked him several questions. I wanted to know something about his daughter that had always concerned me. I had kept in touch with three of the children and helped them out. But there was some difficulty with his second daughter. I had reached out to her, but she blamed me some for her father’s death.

As she grew older, she said we had worked too hard. So I asked him what to do, and he gave me complete reassurance about what I wanted to know, and it cleared some things up for me.

When it was over, he vanished quickly, and I was up out of that chair. I was shaking a little bit when I came out because I was excited. I felt that was him. It was exactly like him being there, as far as I am concerned. I didn’t have any sense of my father being in there, but my partner sure was. I couldn’t think what to do or how to behave. But I do feel I have made my peace with my partner.

Raymond A. Moody, Jr. with Paul Perry. Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones (New York: Villard Books, 1993).

Consciousness is a field of knowledge

Dr. Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist psychiatric researcher, writes: “The many strange characteristics of transpersonal experiences shatter the most fundamental metaphysical assumptions of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and the materialistic world view.” He also noted that any attempt to dismiss transpersonal experiences as irrelevant products of human fantasy or hallucinations was naïve and inadequate—for they represent “a critical challenge, not only for psychiatry and psychology, but for the entire philosophy of Western Science.”

He writes in his audiotape book The Transpersonal Vision: “Materialist science holds that any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of genes. However, it is impossible ti imagine any material medium for the information conveyed by various forms of transpersonal experiences. This information has clearly not been acquired by conventional means—that is, by sensory perception—during the individual’s lifetime. It seems to exist independently of matter, and to be contained in the field of consciousness itself or in some types of fields undetectable by scientific instruments.”

In other words, transpersonal experiences suggest that there’s a field of consciousness—a source of knowledge—that exists independent of any one person’s mind and is accessible to us beyond our ordinary sensory and mind/body ways of receiving information.

Atwater, P. M. H. with David H. Morgan. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near-Death Experiences, 377-78.

Stanislav Grof. is a psychiatrist with over sixty years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness and one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he also received his scientific training: an M.D. degree from the Charles University School of Medicine and a Ph.D. degree (Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine) from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences. He was also granted honorary Ph.D. degrees from the University of Vermont in Burlington, VT, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA, and the World Buddhist University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Currently, Dr. Grof is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness in San Francisco, CA; he has also taught at Wisdom University in Oakland, CA, and the Pacifica Graduate School in Santa Barbara.

Consequences of near-death experiences

P.  M. H. Atwater writes: “we can examine the extent to which the near-death survivor was affected by what happened to him or her. Here’s what we’ve discovered so far . . . 

   21 percent claimed no discernible differences afterward.

   60 percent reported significant life changes.

  19 percent noted radical shifts—almost as if they had become another person.

“On the plus side: A sense of love and forgiveness, a spiritual strength, empowered the majority to make strikingly positive changes in their lives. Latent talents readily surface, coupled with an unusual increase in intellect and hunger for knowledge. Enhanced creative and intuitive abilities, a deep desire for classical or melodious music, and a dedication to service were commonplace—many entered the public sector as reforms or agents for change.

“What hallucination, temporal lobe seizure, or drug or laboratory-induced episode can match the depth of this response?

"The burden of proof remains with the debunkers. Evidence for authenticity clearly rests on the side of researchers and near-death experiencers.”

Atwater notes that the following health care professionals, among many others, have accepted the reality of near-death experiences:

Diane Corcoran, BSN (Nursing), MA (Education and Psychology, Ph.D. (Management). In 2000 25 years in the Army, Vietnam veteran.

Maggie Callanan, RN, CRNH (Certified Registered Hospice Nurse, Hospice nurse 1980-2000). In 1995 received the National Hospice Organization’s ‘Heart of Hospice’ award.

Debbie James, MSN, RN, CNS (Critical Care Learning Specialist). As of 2000, 23 years in critical care nursing. 1999 Excellence in Education award recipient from the American Association of Critical Care Nurses.

Kimberly Clark Sharp, MSW (Social Work). Many awards for community involvement; research on NDEs and assisted Dr. Melvin Morse in his work, author of After the Light: What I Discovered on the Other Side of Life That Can Change Your World.

P.  M. H. Atwater  with David H. Morgan. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near-Death Experiences (Alpha Books), 121-122.

 

Experiencing God as The One True Light

Near-death survivor P. M. H. Atwater writes: “The vast majority of adults in any country see God/Allah/Deity as a formless, shapeless brilliance so powerful and so strong and so magnificent that Its Beingness is felt as if a power voltage equivalent to 10,000 suns. You’re instantly ‘fried,’ yet there is no pain, nothing negative or hurtful. The present of this Light is associated with Deity. And this Light knows your name, knows all about you, can converse with you answer questions, and give guidance. There’s nothing this Light doesn’t know, especially the things you don’t.

"And this Light loves you and forgives you, but can be cryptic in the giving of mission and what next needs to be done to heal, help, and uplift self and others. You cannot fool this Light, nor can you hide or pretend in Its Presence. Other-worldly guides and guardians, angels and greeters of every strip, can appear, too, and ‘fill in the blanks’ for you if you missed anything.

“There is an undeniable electrical component to near-death experiences and the aftereffects that spring from them. Here’s a ‘for instance’: the electromagnetic field in and around experiencers alters afterward, with displays of electrical sensitivity becoming common place.

“Pardon me, but isn’t that what near-death, mystical, spiritual, and religious experiencers have claimed for centuries? That the Light of Enlightenment is actually, that, literally a waking up to the Light, an illumination of Light, a reunification with The One True Light. And there are groups, isms and schisms, that decree how people can reach such a state of enlightened knowingness. The rules are many, the pathways numerous, still, the goal is always the same . . . union with the source of your being . . . God!

“You know the Light is God. No one has to tell you. You know.

“You can no longer believe in God afterward, for belief implies doubt. There is no more doubt. None. You now know God. And you know that you know. And you’re never the same again.

“And you know who you are . . . a child of God, a cell in The Greater Body, and extension of The One Force, an expression from The One Mind. No more can you forget your identity, or deny or ignore or pretend it away.

“There is One, and you are of The One. One. The Light does this to you. It cradles your soul in the heart of its pulse-beat and fills you with love shine. And you melt away as the ‘you’ you think you are, reforming as the “YOU’ you really are, and you are reborn because at last you remember.

“Although not everyone speaks of God when they return from death’s door as I have here, the majority do. And almost to a person they begin to make references to oneness, allness, isnss as the directive presence behind and within and beyond all things.

“I’ve noticed that although God never changes, God is forever changing. As our perceptions alter, as personal experience trumps what we thought we knew, the name of God can and often does undergo a ‘make-over.’”

P. M. H. Atwater, Dying to Know You: Proof of God in the Near Death Experience (Rainbow Ridge Books, 2014), 9-12.

A Soviet dissident's powers when "dead" and alive

P. M. H. Atwater, a survivor of three near-death experiences, tells the story of George Rodonaia, a vocal Soviet dissident during the Cold War who had earned his master’s degree in research psychology and was working toward his doctorate when he was assassinated by the KGB. He felt the pain of being crushed beneath car wheels as he was run over twice by the same vehicle. But what bothered him most was the feeling of an unknown darkness that came to envelop him.

“As he focused on what was occurring, he was surprised to discover the range and power of this thoughts and what he could do with them. A pinprick of light appeared, then bubbles like balls of molecules and atoms, life-making cells moving in spirals, revealing to him higher and higher levels of power with God as the highest. He found he could project himself anywhere on earth he wanted to go and experience what was there, and that he could do the same thing regarding events in history. Being extremely curious, he did just that, amusing himself by projecting invisibly into various time and places to find out what he’d see and learn. Among other things he discovered that he could get inside people’s heads and hear and see what they did.

“He returned to the morgue, saw his body, then was drawn to the newborn section of the adjacent hospital where a friend’s wife had just given birth to a daughter. The baby cried incessantly. As if possessed of x-ray vision, George scanned her body and noted that her hip had been broken shortly after birth (a nurse had dropped her). He ‘spoke’ to the infant and told her not to cry, as no one would understand her. The infant was so surprised at his presence that she stopped crying. He claims that children can see and hear spirit beings; that’s why she responded. He then had a past-life review that involved reliving not only his own life, but the death of his parents at the hands of the KGB—something he had not known as he’d been raised by relatives who had withheld the truth about what happened to his mother and father.

“George’s corpse was stored in a freezer vault in a hospital morgue for three days (he doesn’t know what the exact temperature was). He revived while the trunk of his body was being split open during autopsy. The shock of seeing this sent the physician in charge screaming from the unit. (His own uncle was one of the doctors in attendance.) All his ribs were broken, his muscles destroyed, his feet a horrible mess. It took three days before the swelling in his tongue went down enough for him to speak. His first words warned the doctors about the child with the broken hip. X-rays of the newborn were taken, and he was proved right. During the nine months he was hospitalized, he became something of a celebrity.

“For a year afterward, his wife, Nino, would not sleep in the same room with him. She had great difficulty dealing with his miraculous return and the fact that he had correctly ‘seen’ everything she had while selecting his gravesite—even quoting back to her all her thoughts when she was considering other men to marry now that she was a widow. I asked Nino about this, and she said, ‘How would you like it if you had no privacy, not even in your own mind?’"

P. M. H. Atwater with David H. Morgan. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near-Death Experiences (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 2000), 161-62.

Sharing self-forgetting is like a glimpse of heaven

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, essayist, novelist, poet, and author of an autobiographical account, Born on a Blue Day. The American Library Association in 2008 praised the book about his life with the Asberger syndrome as a "Best Book for Young Adults."

"Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion’s emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who benefit greatly from stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled “Stairway to Heaven; Religion and Belief,” Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying."

"Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial in people’s lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christians beliefs in the early part of the twentieth century."

"Chesterton was a remarkable person. At school, his teachers described him as a dreamer and ‘not on the same plane as the rest,’ while as a teenager he set up a debating club with friends, sometimes arguing an idea for hours at a time . . .. He could quote whole chapters of Dickens and other authors from memory and remembered the plots of all the 10,000 novels he had evaluated as a publisher’s reader. His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject. Yet he was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to phone his wife to help him get back home.”

“Reading Chesterton as a teenager helped me to arrive at an intellectual understanding of God and Christianity. The concept of the Trinity, of God as composed of living and loving relationships, was something that I could picture in my head and that made sense to me. I was also fascinated by the idea of the Incarnation, of God revealing Himself to the world in tangible, human form as Jesus Christ. Even so, it was not until I was twenty-three that I decided to participate in a course at a local church . . .. At Christmas in 2002 I became a Christian."

"My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes.’ I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God’s image."

“There are many beautiful and inspiring passages in the Bible, but my favorite is the following from 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient . . .. So faith, hope and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.”

With his gay partner Neil, Daniel write with Neil: “All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.” Like a “glimpse of heaven.”

Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (Free Press, 2006), 223-226.

Only our selfless characteristics will endure

Astrophysicist David Darling writes: “Those who have come close to death have, as it were, poked their noses into this greater world beyond human life. They have felt, briefly, incompletely, what it is like to be free of self and in contact with the absolute nature of things. No hallucination or fit of delirium could generate such an experience. Rather, it is ordinary life that, by comparison, begins to take on the air of unreality.

“The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the ‘I’ who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process―the totality of being―that has no start or end.

“The scientist within us may rail at this and demand, ‘How can there be any sort of life after death? How can consciousness exist without a brain?’ But we can see now that these questions stem from a failure to grasp the true nature of consciousness and the brain. Better surely to ask, ‘How can there be consciousness with a brain?’

“We see the world as being full of relatively stable objects, such as trees and rocks and ourselves. But there is no stability anywhere, not even for a microsecond. Only our minds create that illusion. There are no trees, only a tree-air-earth-sun-cosmos process that never stands still. There are no people, only a people-air-food-cosmos process that is forever breathing, digesting and growing, breaking down and healing itself. There are no objects or things at all, but just one great interconnected system that is the whole of reality. All the world is a living, dynamic movement—continuous change and impermanence its only genuine characteristics.

“It is no coincidence that behavior which people everywhere consider intrinsically good―generosity to our fellow humans, working for the benefit of others, valuing all forms of life―serves also to lessen our preoccupation with self and to encourage the realization that we are part of an undivided unity. Only when there is no self left, is there no one who can die.

“Only those aspects of us that are selfless―qualities we might put under the unifying heading of ‘love’―will endure.

“Death is to be welcomed, when in due course it draws near, for with it we shall be freed from our terrible isolation. It is the one event that draws us all together again, back into the single true mind of the universe. Death is not a failure or a finality, but a triumph and the start of an experience we can hardly begin to imagine in our present form.

“Proper, spiritual preparation for death involves a dedicated search for the true nature of reality. And that, in turn, calls for a lifelong voyage of discovery into consciousness without self.

“Each to his or her own. There are many ways to break through the illusionary world of the rational mind. Prayer, charity, music, poetry―a million different roads.

“Only by pursuing a life course that diminishes our obsession with self, with material and emotional ‘me-ness,’ can we gain the deeper insights needed to face death with equanimity. A wonderful future lies ahead of us, following the trial of death, but not as individuals. In store is nothing less than a grand reunion with reality, an expansion of consciousness that can only occasionally be glimpsed through the dim portals of our senses and brain.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 168-187.