AA founder experienced God as Light

The cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, was inspired by a near-death experience in 1934. While being treated at a clinic for his addiction, the clinic’s director asked Wilson “if he would like to dedicate himself to Jesus to see if such an act would rid him of his alcoholism. “Depressed and filled with despair, Wilson began to weep. I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let him show himself! He shouted.

The effect was instant, electric, Wilson says. Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white Light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the Light and the ecstasy subsided. As I became quieter a great peace stole over me, and I became acutely conscious of a presence, which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’

“Wilson never drank again. He told Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic in Akron, Ohio, about his experience, and the doctor also quit drinking and began to pursue a ‘spiritual remedy’ for his own alcoholism. The two men, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, became the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Their twelve-step program, Raj Parti notes, was originally based on these affirmations:

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

“When I look at the twelve steps, I can’t help but think that Wilson’s encounter with the Light was similar to my own with the Being of Light. I also couldn’t help but think that he too was asked to devise a means of spiritual healing much like the one I was being asked to devise. Following my surgery, I realized my addiction to painkillers was abating. Soon I took less than what was prescribed and only as needed for my pelvic pain."

 

Raj Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

 

Objective witnesses to death as an awakening

Morse also relates the story of one of Germany’s most noted poets, Karl Skala, who survived a bombardment during World War II that killed his friend in the trenches. Then, Morse writes, Skala  “felt himself being drawn up with his friend, above their bodies and then above the battlefield. He could look down and see himself holding his friend. He looked up and saw a bright light and felt himself going toward it with his friend. Then he stopped and returned to his body. He was uninjured except for hearing loss from the artillery blast.” After the war he wrote this poem:

Would you really call this dying?

In the near light, but far away.
This light which our hope nurtures.
To the star, high above
everyone has traveled there in their mind
before your body, the mind, the spirit
belonged once to the stars
let this light shine deep in your heart, in your dreams on
this earth.
Death is an awakening.

Linda Houlberg, a hospice nurse in Oak Ridge, TN, published in Nursing ’92 an article about experiencing the death of Virginia, who was both her patient and friend. Virginia had fought hard against her cancer, because she wanted to keep living to be with her husband and two sons. But when the pain became too great, she gave up and just wanted to die.

“I’m ready,” she told Houlberg.

Virginia had worked out some of her feelings about dying by painting. One painting entitled The Light at the End of the Tunnel represented what she thought would happen to her as she died. On the night Virginia died, Houlberg had gone to bed about twelve-thirty. At twelve fifty-six she woke up and looked at her clock. She thought Virginia’s death had caused her to awaken, but then:

All of a sudden I saw her painting as clear as day. I felt her presence beside me, and I could see the tunnel in my mind’s eye. We began moving down the tunnel together, passing by the blue-and-black sides of the painting. I could see the yellow light at the end of the tunnel, and as we got closer, the light became brighter and white.

They reached the end of the tunnel together and broke into a field of bright light. Then Houlberg realized that she shouldn’t stay with her friend. “It isn’t my time,” she knew. “I still have things to do.”

In the morning Virginia’s son called to tell Houlberg that his mother had died at one in the morning. Houlberg sums up her own experience:

I can’t explain what happened to me. My psychic side says that I had an out-of-body experience, that Virginia was afraid to go through the tunnel alone, so she recruited me to accompany her. My logical side says that’s foolish. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I knew without any doubt that Virginia was with God—and feeling great.

Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Parting Visions: Uses and Meanings of Pre-Death, Psychic, and Spiritual Experiences (Villard Books 1994).

Visions of angelic beings

Morse also records the experience of Lady Barrett, a surgeon in Dublin who was at the deathbed of a woman named Doris, who was dying from a hemorrhage after birth. As Lady Barrett tells it:

“Suddenly Doris looked eagerly towards part of the room a radiant smile illuminating her whole countenance. Oh, lovely, lovely, she said. I asked, “What is lovely?” What I see, she replied in low, intense tones. “What do you see?” Lovely brightness—wonderful beings. It is difficult to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision. Then—seeming to focus her attention more intently on one place for a moment—she exclaimed, almost with a kind of joyous cry, Why, it’s Father! Oh, he’s so glad I’m coming; he is so glad. It would be perfect if only W. [her husband’] would come too.

“Her baby was brought for her to see. She looked at it with interest, and then said, Do you think I ought to stay for the baby’s sake? Then, turning toward the vision again, she said, I can’t—I can’t stay; if you could see what I do, you would know I can’t stay.

Lady Barrett knew the sister of Doris, Vida, had died only three weeks earlier. But as Doris was in such delicate condition, the death of her beloved sister was kept a secret from her.

Then Doris spoke to her father: I am coming, turning at the same time to look at Lady Barrett, saying, Oh, he is so near. On looking at the same place again, she said with a rather puzzled expression: He has Vida with him, turning again to me and saying: Vida is with him. And then, I am coming.”

This story shared by Lady Barrett with her husband, Sir William Barrett, physics professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, inspired Sir Barrett, Morse writes, “to undertake a systematic study of deathbed visions. His was the first scientific study to conclude that the mind of the dying patient is often clear and rational.”

Also, “Barrett reported several children who were disappointed to see angels with no wings. In one such case he described a dying girl who sat up suddenly in her bed and said, “Angels, I see angels.” Then the girl was puzzled. “Why aren’t they wearing wings?” If deathbed visions were simply a fantasy of the mind, says Barrett, why did this girl see something different from her expectations?” Morse adds that at least fifty percent of the children he has studied see “guardian angels” as part of their near-death experience.

Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Parting Visions: Uses and Meanings of Pre-Death, Psychic, and Spiritual Experiences (Villard Books 1994).

Mothers learn (from heaven?) their babies will die

Pediatrician Melvin Morse in his book Parting Visions: Uses and Meanings of Pre-Death, Psychic, and Spiritual Experiences reports on many such extraordinary experiences documented in his practice and research. For instance, that the mother of a newborn boy named Jason had an “extraordinary visit” from her deceased father.

I was sitting in my living room reading a paperback book. The baby was asleep in his crib, and I was resting because I had been up half the night with his fussiness. As I was sitting there in the quiet, I had the feeling that I was not alone. I wasn’t afraid, I just wasn’t alone. I looked up and there was my father. He had been dead for a year, but there he stood. For some reason I wasn’t surprised at all. He was just there for a second or two, but I heard him tell me, “Jason is coming with me.” I knew exactly what he meant. He meant that my baby was going to die.

Her knowledge that Jason would die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was confirmed by his death a week later. Describing her experience as a dream or hallucination doesn’t alter the fact that the information she received during this extraordinary experience was accurate. Her experience may have been subjective, but the information she received was objectively confirmed.

Morse’s also describes the experience of a patient named Judy. “When she was seven months pregnant, she had a puzzling vision, one that took place while she rested on her bed in the afternoon, fully awake. As she told it:  

I suddenly found myself floating out of my body to the ceiling of the bedroom. I hovered in the air, looking down at myself. Suddenly I realized that there was a lady floating in the air next to me. She glowed with a soft white light. The lady and I looked down at my body. It was as though that person on the bed was someone else. The lady began to talk about the person on the bed as though it wasn’t me. 

“You know,” she said with great love and compassion, “she can’t keep the baby. It is going to die.” I wasn’t angry. Instead I felt great love and compassion when she said that, as if this baby’s death was part of a greater purpose and plan.

Judy’s child died of SIDS less than a year later. Morse comments: “SIDS happens in only three of every thousand babies born.” 

Melvin L. Morse, Parting Visions: Uses and Meanings of Pre-Death, Psychic, and Spiritual Experiences (1994).

A prayer for life and death

O God of life and death.

May your grace and peace come,

may your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Keep us healthy and 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 do not tempt but keep us safe from evil.

For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light,

now and forever. Amen

Mother reunited with deceased son in vision

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody ends his book Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones with the following testimony of communicating with a dead loved one.

A woman who came for a visionary reunion with her son sums it up better than I can. Her son had died two years before of cancer, which he had been fighting for several years. His battle against this disease had been typical of the many who fight it. The cancer would go into remission, and just as they thought that it had been beaten, it would come raging back again. Finally, after several relapses, he simply gave up.

The woman missed her son terribly. She came in hopes of seeing if the pain was gone.

We prepared all day for the encounter, and then I had her go into the apparition booth. The experience she had was satisfying. She saw a number of “memory visions,” vivid snippets from his childhood. She also reported a strong sense that her son had been present with her in the booth. “He was sitting there with me,” she said when she came out. “We sat there together and watched events from our life together.”

A few days later I received an incredible call from her. A few days after her visit to my clinic, she awoke from a deep sleep. She didn’t simply wake up, she became “hyper-awake. Far more awake than normal.”

There, standing in her room, was her son. As she sat up in bed to look at him, she could see that the ravages of cancer were gone. He now looked vibrant and happy as he had before his disease.

The woman was in a state of ecstasy. She stood up and faced her son and began carrying on a conversation. She estimates that they spoke for several minutes, time enough for her to find that he was now pain-free and happy.

They talked about a number of things, including the remodeling that the woman had done to the house after the son had died. She even took him on a tour of some of the rooms where changes had been made to show him what had been done.

Finally it dawned on her what was happening. She was talking to an apparition of her late son. “I couldn’t believe it was him,” she said to me. “So I asked if I could touch him.”

Without a moment’s hesitation this apparition of her son stepped forward and hugged her. Then, the woman said, he lifted her right off the ground. . . .

“What happened was as real as if he had been standing right there,” the woman told me. “I now feel as though I can put my son’s death behind me and get on fully with my life.”

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

Moody's vision of his paternal grandmother

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody also includes in Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones his own surprising experience of communicating with the dead.

I chose my maternal grandmother as the person I would attempt to see. I had often missed her in the years since her death and would gladly visit with her again, in whatever form she took. I spent many hours one day preparing for a visionary reunion with her. I brought dozens of memories to mind and looked at photographs of her, evoking a deep sense of her tender kindness.

Then I went into a place I called the apparition booth, and in the room’s dim light I gazed into the depth of a large mirror, offset in such a way that I gazed into a sort of three-dimensional clarity. I did this for at least an hour, but felt not even a twinge of her presence. I finally gave up and assumed that I was somehow immune to visionary reunions.

Later, as I unwound from the experience, I had an encounter that ranks as one of the most life-changing events I have ever experienced. What happened altered my concept of reality almost totally. I was sitting in a room alone when a woman simply walked in. As soon as I saw her, I had a certain sense that she was familiar, but the event happened so quickly that it took me a few moments to gather myself together and greet her politely. Within what must have been less than a few more minutes, I realized that this person was my paternal grandmother, who had died some years before. I remember throwing my hands up toward my face and exclaiming, “Grandma!”

At this point I was looking directly into her eyes, awestruck at what I was seeing. In a very kind and loving way she acknowledged who she was and addressed me with the nickname that only she had used for me when I was a child. As soon as I realized who this woman was, a flood of memories rushed into my mind. Not all of these were good memories. In fact many were distinctly unpleasant. Although my reminiscences of my material grandmother are positive, those with my father’s mother were a different matter.

One of the memories that rushed to mind was the annoying habit she had of declaring, “This is my last Christmas!” She did that every holiday season for the last two decades of her life. She also constantly warned me when I was young that I would go to hell if I violated any of God’s many strictures—as she interpreted them, of course. She once washed my mouth with soap for having uttered a word of which she disapproved. Another time when I was a child, she told me in all seriousness that it was a sin to fly in airplanes. She was habitually cranky and negative.

Yet as I gazed into the eyes of this apparition, I quickly sensed that the woman who stood before me had been transformed in a very positive way. I felt warmth and love from her as she stood there and an empathy and compassion that surpassed my understanding. She was confidently humorous, with an air of quiet calm and joyfulness about her.

The reason I had not recognized her at first was that she appeared much younger than she was when she died, in fact even younger than she had been when I was born. I don’t remember having seen any photographs of her at the age she seemed to be during this encounter, but that is irrelevant here since it was not totally through her physical appearance that I recognized her. Rather, I knew this woman through her unmistakable presence and through the many memories we reviewed and discussed. In short this woman was my deceased grandmother. I would have known her anywhere.

I want to emphasize how completely natural this meeting was. As with the other subjects who have experienced an apparitional facilitation, my meeting was in no way eerie or bizarre. In fact this was the most normal and satisfying interaction I have ever had with her.

Our meeting was focused entirely on our relationship. Throughout the experience I was amazed that I seemed to be in the presence of someone who had already passed on, but in no way did this interfere with our interaction. She was there in front of me, and as startling as that fact was, I just accepted it and continued to talk with her.

We discussed old times, specific incidents from my childhood. She reminded me of several events that I had forgotten. Also she revealed something very personal about my family situation that came as a surprise but in retrospect makes a great deal of sense. Due to the fact that the principals are still living, I have chosen to keep this information to myself. But I will say that her revelation has made a great deal of difference in my life, and I feel much better for having heard this from her.

I say “heard” in an almost literal sense. I did hear her voice clearly, the only difference being that there was a crisp, electric quality to it that seemed clearer and louder than her voice before she died. Others who’d had this experience before me [in similar apparitional reunions] described it as telepathic or “mind to mind” communication. Mine was similar. Although most of my conversation was through the spoken word, from time to time I was immediately aware of what she was thinking, and I could tell that the same was true for her.

In no way did she appear “ghostly” or transparent during our reunion. She seemed completely solid in every respect. She appeared no different from any other person except that she was surrounded by what appeared to be a light or an indentation in space, as if she were somehow set off or recessed from the rest of her physical surroundings.

I have no idea how long this meeting lasted in clock time. It certainly seemed like a long time, but I was so engrossed in the experience that I didn’t bother to look at the clock. In terms of thoughts and feelings that passed between us, it seemed like a couple of hours, but I have a feeling that it was probably less than that in what we consider to be “real” time.

And how did our meeting end? I was so overwhelmed that I just said, “Good-bye.” We acknowledged that we would be seeing each other again, and I simply walked out of the room. When I returned, she was nowhere to be seen. The apparition of my grandmother was gone.

“What took place that day resulted in a healing of our relationship. For the first time in my life I now appreciate her humor and have a sense of some of the struggles she went through during her lifetime. Now I love her in a way that I didn’t before the experience.

“It also left me with an abiding certainty that what we call death is not the end of life.

“As a veteran of altered states of consciousness, I can say that my visionary reunion with my grandmother was completely coherent with the ordinary waking reality I have experienced all my life. If I were to discount this encounter as hallucinatory, I would be almost obliged to discount the rest of my life as hallucinatory too.”

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