A spiritual known as "By and By"

We are often tossed and driv’n on the restless sea of time,
somber skies and howling tempest oft succeed a bright sunshine;
in that land of perfect day, when the mists have rolled away,
we will understand it better by and by.

Refrain:
By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home,
we’ll tell the story, how we’ve overcome, for we’ll understand it better by and by.

We are often destitute of the things that life demands,
want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands;
we are trusting in the Lord, and according to the Word,
we will understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

Temptations, hidden snares, often take us unawares,
and our hearts are made to bleed for any thoughtless word or deed;
and we wonder why the test when we try to do our best,
but we’ll understand it better by and by. [Refrain]

African-American composer, Charles A. Tindley (1851-1933). This spiritual was written in 1905.

 

An African-American congregation singing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0IJ9aLBkcE

Telesa H's NDE was a blessing and a curse

December 6, 2017, I was holding my newborn baby who had been born in the evening via c-section. Our family was finally complete, and I was savoring every moment, except perhaps the sleep deprivation.

On December 7, 2017, I was in absolute bliss. The evening had come and my husband and I had just eaten dinner. Then I relaxed against the bed and drifted off to sleep. Moments later it was as if someone had stood up onto the bed and kicked me square in the chest. I sat up clutching my chest, trying to hand the baby to my husband. He took the baby and ran to the hall to get a nurse. My heart was beating so hard that I could hear it in my ears and as I looked down, I could see it through my gown. I was vaguely aware that my husband was panicking, since he could not get a nurse into the room.

Then the light began in the corner of the room near the ceiling, just behind my husband. My energy began leaving my body and flowing into the light. Then went into the sky, flowing with the light. The light carried me off into space, beyond our universe and into a ball of light so bright that I could see it long before I actually reached it. Energy was flowing not only into the massive ball of light but from it as well. The light was heading off in various directions through the multiverse. I entered the ball of light that I now know as the 'central sun.'

I began having visions of my life, not just this one but every life I had ever lived. This life was the last vision I was shown. The visions were almost like those pictographs I had as a kid. I was shown key points in my lives. I then was given visions of the bad things I had done, as well as the good. My good seemed to outweigh the bad; although in past lives, I had done some pretty appalling things.

Then I was shown a vision of the earth. Next I saw the vision of myself approaching the central sun. It was as if I were being shown that the central sun was where all energy comes from and returns to, no matter where one calls home from lifetime to lifetime.

However, I did encounter familiar energies of loved ones who had passed from this lifetime and other past lives. They were not physical matter, just energy. I knew them instantly and they knew me, especially those who had been with me in other lives beyond this one.

These visions came from within my subconscious and I understood things that I couldn't possibly have known. I was not met by another entity who claimed to be 'god.' I suddenly was well-versed in the knowledge of how the universe works and where dark energy and matter come from. This has led me to research quantum physics to try to understand what happened to me.

I was shown a small portion of what my future holds as my purpose in this life was revealed to me. My purpose is to love and be loved and to teach and be taught. I am to be a beacon for those like me, those who have experienced a life-altering reality and are seeking understanding. I was to raise my children to lead from their hearts and accept all of humanity to help them seek balance and understanding.

Everything was hyper-realistic, perhaps more real than I have ever known reality to be. I felt like I was there for years and was sure I had died that day in the hospital holding my baby.

I tried to check in on my husband and kids, only to realize that only moments had passed. I realized time is an illusion and our energy can communicate without word and it can travel without measure of speed.

As I checked in on my family, my newborn daughter cried and I could see my husband crying as well. I then violently slammed back into my body and felt intensely everything they were doing to bring me back. I had 4 IV's inserted in various places throughout my body as the nurses injected me with adenosine, three separate times to try to get my heart rate back down from 225 bpm. It worked on the third try and my heart rate went back down to a normal 80 bpm instantly. I looked over at my husband and told him I loved him and he said he loved me back.

They then wheeled me down for a cat scan. I was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism that had lodged in my heart for several moments before traveling to my left lung. The type of embolism I had was referred to by the nurses as a 'widow maker' because 98% of people do not survive them.

My NDE has made me more grateful for the time I get to spend with my loved ones. It also seems like a double-edged sword as I can vividly remember how calming and serene I felt in the light. In the year since my experience I have met some amazing people with similar experiences as mine, and some vastly different with similar parts to their story as mine. I know there is life after life and that while I am in this lifetime, it is my duty to share my gifts with others. I am also trying to raise my own vibration and those around me through frequency IE creativity and talent in order to awaken their soul to its greater purpose.

My life since the NDE has been a bit traumatic since the people I have talk to so far cannot understand what I am talking about when I try to explain my NDE to them. Some think I have gone mad. I also notice that I do not connect to people the way I used to. Now much of the human race disgusts me and I have severe anxiety trying to understand their 'issues.' Many times their experiences seem so trivial and self-centered to me that my heart actually aches. I have also some new gifts since my NDE. I can hear, smell and even taste electricity. I hear a humming or buzzing, when an appliance or device is plugged in, even when it is turned to the off position. I can hear peoples thoughts sometimes and get visions of their lives. I can read people's energy and have deja vu often. I dream in vivid color and often leave my body again, as if checking on things at home and reaffirming that what I experienced is real. I remember things from the first 5 years of my life that I never knew before or had never been told.

My whole life has completely turned around and I have found it to be a blessing and a curse as I do not relate to the average person the way I used to. I do hope my story can help others who may be experiencing or have experienced what I went through. Brightest blessings to all who may come across my story.

NDERF.org 

Clairvoyance, remote viewing, and NDEs

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell writes: “Whereas telepathy implies coupling one’s consciousness with that of another conscious being, clairvoyance is visualizing distant or hidden images as though one had a psychic telescope, periscope, or camera. Clairvoyance (sometimes called remote viewing) has reportedly found oil, mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people. It has also been reported to diagnose medical and mechanical problems by seeing inside ill people and malfunctioning machines.

“There are at least two different types of clairvoyant experiences. For some the images arise from their unconscious just as telepathic thoughts do. The image can come spontaneously in a flash, or can evolve over time while the person concentrates on retrieving it. In the other type, clairvoyant experiences occur in what are called ‘out-of-body experiences’ (OBEs).

“Edgar Cayce (1877-1943) is considered the ‘father of holistic medicine; because his recommendations form the basis for much of the holistic medicine still practiced. Starting in 1901, Edgar Cayce did more than 14,000 clairvoyant readings based solely upon the client’s name and address. He told his secretary about his visions while still in a self-induced OBE. Of these readings, more than 9,400 concerned medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

“In 1910 Cayce’s reading for ‘Dr. Wesley Ketchum, a reputable homeopath,’ revealed his condition was due to a pinched spinal nerve, not appendicitis—as Ketchum thought and other doctors confirmed. Ketchum submitted a paper on Cayce’s readings to the American Society of Clinical Research, and The New York Times published an article with the headline: ‘Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.’

“The psychologist Gina Cerminara spent a year studying records of his readings and wrote her conclusions in Many Mansions (1967). She found that many readings were extremely accurate and the clients improved after following Cayce’s recommendations.

“The physician Norman Shealy researched medical intuition in the 1980s with the medical intuitive Caroline Myss. Their study involved fifty patients who individually sat in Shealy’s consultation room while Myss made diagnoses based upon their names and birth dates from her office twelve hundred miles away. She felt that the physical distance was an advantage because personal connections with patients sometimes blocked her ability. The results are described in their book The Creation and Health (1988). Shealy reported that Myss had an overall accuracy of 93 percent. Examples of diagnoses Myss and Shealy made in common were schizophrenia, migraine headaches, myofascial pain, depression, sexual problems, venereal herpes, back pain, anxiety, wasting of the brain or Alzheimer’s, and epilepsy.1

“Research on remote viewing was done at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two former laser physicists, and Edwin C. May, a former nuclear physicist. The federal government funded SRI’s research during the Cold War, because United States intelligence was concerned about the Soviet Union’s involvement in psychic research.

“Initially the SRI studies were done with Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Swann was a New York artist known for psychic abilities who wrote a book called Natural ESP (1987). Price was a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California, who for years had used his psychic abilities to solve crimes. Both Swann and Price became adept at accurately describing distant locations without an observer by being told the location’s latitude and longitude or its address.

“The researchers wondered if there was a physical limit to the distance for successful remote viewing. To test this, Swann was asked in 1973 to draw Jupiter just before a NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. He sketched a ring around Jupiter, which was considered an error until NASA discovered Jupiter’s ring.

“Another result was also considered a mistake at first. Price’s drawing of a site in Palo Alto contained some resemblance to the target, but it was less accurate than typical for him. Years later, Targ read an article about the history of that site. The article included a picture that looked just like Price’s. The site had been a water processing plant fifty years before the experiment. Structures from the past had been incorporated into Price’s picture. Targ concluded that remote viewing isn’t limited to present time.

“One of the best viewers at SRI was Joe McMoneagle. While stationed in Germany he had a near-death experience (NDE). His heightened psychic abilities appeared afterward, which is not an unusual story.

“A total of 411 remote viewing trials were conducted and published over a twenty-five-year period at Princeton University by a psychologist, Brenda Dunne, and an emeritus dean of engineering, Robert Jahn. Like Targ and Puthoff, they found that distance between the target and the viewer didn’t matter. However, their success rate declined over the years as the subjects became bored with the experiments and received less feedback on their accuracy. This diminution of accuracy over time has been one reason scientists have been skeptical of the phenomenon.

“The SRI research has led to several conclusions about remote viewing. For one, accuracy and resolution do not appear to be affected by distance. This is very unusual for any kind of signal processing since electromagnetic signals become weaker with distance. Since the Faraday cage did not interfere, it is even less likely that the mechanism involves electromagnetic waves. So the brains of psychics probably don’t receive electromagnetic signals like our televisions and cell phones.2

“Another conclusion was that study results were less accurate when the psychics knew the target possibilities. As in telepathy, one’s preconceptions or expectations can adversely affect results by engaging the brain’s analytical capacities. Everything suggests that psychic material becomes available first to the nonanalytical unconscious.

“Many SRI ‘controls’ were capable of remote viewing, so another conclusion was that it may be a latent ability in all of us. Psychic abilities are like motor skills and become perfected when the analytical mind isn’t in charge of their execution.”3

1 See Mona Lisa Schultz, Awakening Intuition (1999).

2 “A Faraday cage is a hollow conductor, in which the charge remains on the external surface of the cage.” https://science.howstuffworks.com/faraday-cage.htm. Remote viewers in these experiments were inside a Faraday cage, which means they couldn’t have utilized electromagnetic fields for their remote viewing.

3 Powell, The ESP Enigma, 46-71.

 

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

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Emotion makes telepathy more discernible

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell reports that René Warcollier, a twentieth century chemical engineer, “became interested in telepathy after he had a series of telepathic dreams.” His research led him to conclude: “the brain’s circuitry for dreaming is involved.” Emotional stimuli seem to be more discernible through telepathy than nonemotional stimuli. And distinguishing form and color “can be separated in telepathic imagery,” as in dreams “which frequently are in black and white. Warcollier found, as well, that the rational mind interfered with accuracy, and in dreaming the rational mind is absent or muted. Also, the perceived images were often condensed, as images are in dreams.”1

“If people experience concurrent and identical changes in brain activity,” Powell writes, “when only one of the pair is given a stimulus, this would suggest a coupling of consciousness. Research by Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin was done on twenty-six pairs of volunteers, whose brainwaves were measured by EEG simultaneously while they were in separate rooms. If one of the pair was shown video images, the other pair member had corresponding EEG changes, as though the images were shown to him or her as well. Some of this work showed positive results even when the pair were strangers, provided they had spent an hour or so together to form a bond, which can happen with effort within this relatively short period of time.” 2

 

“Other research suggests that the brain may not be the only body part involved in telepathy. A more primitive ‘brain,’ or neural network, in the gut is thought to be involved in emotional responses, or ‘gut reactions,’ which can occur independent of the brain. The gut contains more than 100 million neurons and is the only organ other than the brain with such a complex neural network.

 

“The research studies discussed here give results that are statistically significant by scientific standards. Telepathy has been reported to be more common in creative people. Perhaps telepathy, like creativity, usually happens spontaneously and is difficult to turn on with the flick of a switch.” 3

 

Telepathy, of course, is the standard means of communication during near-death experiences, when the sensory systems of the body are not available. Moreover, telepathy has been widely reported by anthropologists and other Westerners who have observed indigenous peoples, at least prior to their exposure to modern technology and its mechanistic forms of communication.

Barbara E writes of her near-death experience: The next thing I knew I was mildly aware of hurling through a tunnel type atmosphere. Then I was situated in the midst of a startling, seemingly alive, white, white light. Still feeling a bit stunned and confused, I wondered. 'Where am I, what is going on?' Then it hit me. I thought to myself, 'oh shoot (not exactly the word, if you get my drift), I must be dead!'

Almost simultaneous with that realization, it seemed as if the light penetrated throughout me and I felt the most magnificent warmth, peace, and acceptance imaginable. I felt awe. Loved and cradled. It was clear that the light loved me so completely, knew me through and through, had no hesitance in accepting my foibles and weaknesses, and felt quite a bit of humor about how seriously I took myself and my life.

As I settled into the love without condition, I realized more and more how utterly and absolutely intelligent light was. The sheer level of creativity and intellect was emotionally and psychologically beyond comprehension. I knew that because light was telepathically melded with me, allowing me to sense at least a minute degree of what was contained within. There was so much thought and information that it felt as if zillions of scrolls of data about the true nature of reality just kept unraveling. I was lost and overwhelmed and had no comprehension of what it all meant. Yet the central message came through loud and clear. Reality is SO much larger, multi-layered and multi-dimensional than we realize. Consciousness is able to experience so much more than what we commonly practice. Everything has purpose and meaning.  

From NDERF.org

1 Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma, 7-8, 37-39.

2 Dean Radin, The Noetic Universe (2009).

3 Ibid., 41-45.

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

The scientific case for psychic phenomena

Diane Hennacy Powell is a practicing psychiatrist and researcher. She is currently studying autistic savants, who have abilities similar to psychic phenomena. Both savants and psychics experience patterns of anomalous knowing that cannot be explained by the modern paradigm that consciousness is simply the result of brain activity.

She writes: “I find joy in integrating information across these scientific disciplines, both in search of solutions for patients, and to build evidence-based theories to explain conundrums that mystify us. While in San Diego I co-created and directed The McCandless Center for Women, a program treating survivors of sexual assault, and was the first psychiatrist for Survivors of Torture, International.”* 

Powell does not claim to have had an NDE, but in The ESP Enigma she does include the following observation and memory: “Time perception also is altered when we come close to death. I directly observed this when I almost drowned at the age of thirteen in a canoe accident. The passage of time seemed to slow down shortly after I stopped struggling against the river’s current and resigned myself to dying. At the same time my entire life passed rapidly through my mind.” Certainly, this experience shares some of the characteristics that NDE survivors report.

Powell begins her book, The ESP Enigma, with another memory at the age of thirteen: “From twenty feet across the room, the magician read, word for word, the contents of any book that I randomly chose from among hundreds on the bookshelves. There were no mirrors behind me, and I knew that these books belonged to my friend, not the magician. Even if he had memorized all of the books, he would also have needed exceptional luck to guess which pages I chose. There was no rational explanation at the time for what I observed, but it fostered a deep, abiding curiosity.”

“My interest,” she writes, “led me to study neuroscience in college and specialize in neuropsychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. While on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, I encountered a patient who claimed to be psychic. She then told me several accurate details about my life and made specific predictions about my future, all of which eventually came true. So, I decided to systematically investigate psychic phenomena. And over the past twenty years I have gained invaluable insight from patients who shared details of their psychic experiences.”

* “Meet Dr. Powell,” http://dianehennacypowell.com/meet-dr-powell/

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

God is in the creative possibility of each moment

“The gospel of John," biologist Charles Birch writes, presents: “a picture of everything being alive with Life from the very beginning. Such is this particular biblical interpretation of the creative process. It was personal from the beginning, but that only becomes fully evident in the light of its manifestation in human persons. Always it was transcendent to the world. Always it was involved with the world, drawing the world to itself, brooding over the face of the earth.”

“This light flickered uncertainly within the church as it wavered from commitment to a view of the total involvement of God in the world to one restricted to humans alone. In the process both humanity and nature lost out, for neither nature, humanity nor God can be understood alone.”

“To love is to be the recipient of love and to return love. Is the God of love an exception to this principle? On the contrary, God’s love must be responsive, or it is not love at all. Indeed, a God whose influence is divorced form responsiveness and sensitivity is irresponsible. Without that aspect of God’s nature nothing is saved after the world comes to its end in a fiery furnace of the sun or in a frozen waste.”

“The divine passion is God’s feeling of the world as the world is created. As every entity ‘feels’ the lure of God and responds to that lure then God becomes concretely real in a way God was not concretely real before. And that new reality makes a difference to God. God is the one who cherishes all: ‘unto whom all hearts are open,’ says the collect. With each creative advance, be it in cosmic evolution or in an individual life, God becomes different. Every individual experience has its consequence in the life of God.”

As the cosmos evolves: “God as divine Eros, transcendent to the universe, becomes immanent within the new creation. This is God’s presence in the world. In addition, the world is present in God as the divine Passion responds to each new creation and each existing one. This is not the image of the world as a contrivance and God as the artificer working from a pre-planned blueprint of the future. It is an image of the world as organically related to God who provides the purposes and values of creation moment by moment yet leaves the creation with its degree of freedom and self-determination. In this sense the future is not determined. It is open-ended. The possibilities of creativity are immense, but not all possibilities are relevant at any particular stage of the evolving cosmos. We are caught in the web of history. Yet our future is still open-ended within the realm of possibilities relevant to that history.”

“In the worlds of the Jewish scholar Abraham J. Heschel, ‘God is waiting for us to redeem the world.’ For us to fail to respond to the forward call of life is not just a personal failure. It is a cosmic tragedy.”

“The whole organizes and even creates the parts. The lower levels of organization are to be interpreted in terms of the higher. This principle is recognized in recent developments in quantum physics. It has validity over the whole spectrum of individuals from protons to people. The basic principle is this: we understand what is not ourselves by analogy with what we know ourselves to be.”

"The heavenly city of the Enlightenment has not arrived. We still have with us ‘children of darkness’ who are evil because they know no law beyond self. Their wisdom is that they understand the power of self-interest. The ‘children of light’ are wise because they believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law."

What is this higher law? It is not the authority of any individual, group or institution. It is not any created good at all. These all tend to become idols. It is the source of all good, the source of all creativity. The moral and spiritual resources for a just, peaceful and sustainable global society are pressing daily upon us, seeking entry into life and blocked only by self-interest. There is a way through. Repentance is still possible.”

 

Charles Birch, The Purpose in Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).

Evolving: a cosmic life, a divine life, life on earth

Biologist Charles Birch (1918-2009) in A Purpose for Everything writes: “Either we and the rest of the creation have no permanent value or else we may say that there is a cosmic life, a divine life, able to appropriate and retain as experiences in its life our lesser lives and that of other individuals of creation. Either we and the rest live for what transcends ourselves or we live without ultimate meaning and ultimate purpose."

"To have self-determination is to exhibit mind. It is to have some degree of freedom, no doubt minute at the molecular level. I am not saying that having investigated the life of the cell and its molecules biologist have found mind. What they have found is more consistent with the proposition that the cell as an entity and the DNA molecule as an entity have internal relations."

"There is but one theory, known to me, that casts any positive light on the ability of brain cells to furnish us with feelings. It is that brain cells can feel! What gives brain cells feelings? It is by the same logic that we may say—their molecules. And so on down the line to those individuals we call electrons, protons and the like. The theory is that things that feel are made of things that feel."

"Because of the unity of life, human love is something that can be extended to the whole creation. The humanist loves his fellow humans and appreciates nature. The ecological model of life implies that human love is to be extended to the rest of nature in the sense of sympathetic identification with the life of other sentient organisms."

"The old notion of a divine being controlling the universe from outside is no longer credible. The relevant question now is, in what sense, if any, is there divine activity in the universe."

"The power of the Christian gospel is the experience of divine love that transforms life. We experience God first and then spend the rest of our lives trying to understand that experience and its relevance to the whole world. The God of the universe touches us as we experience life in its fullness. But God is vaster than our experience. When I go down to the ocean and swim on its shore, I get to know one part of the ocean—its near end. But there is a vast extent of ocean way beyond my ken that is nevertheless continuous with that bit of the ocean I know. So it is with God. We touch God at the near end, yet that same God extends into the farthest reaches of the universe and there too is pervasive love. This is the full meaning of incarnation. The universe exists by its incarnation of God in itself. It is the sort of universe in which God can be incarnate. God could not be incarnate in a machine! The divine Eros works in the universe through influence (literally meaning inflowing) as its universal mode of causation."

"To see the universe as a whole in this way, with the same God working in the universe at large, and in the life of Jesus, and in the lives of all of us, was put in highly symbolic language by the apostle Paul in his letter about the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in Colossians 1. In verse 4 is the phrase ‘In him all things hang together.’ This affirmation is repeated no less than five times in this chapter. It was Paul’s conviction that the same spirit which was in Jesus animated the whole universe. The universal principle of reality is the free act of experiencing. For many people in his time the world was a dualism. Not so for Paul. God is the God of ‘all things.’ Nature as well as human history is the theater of grace."

 

Charles Birch, A Purpose for Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).