Experiences God's love and healing by an angel

In the middle of the night, I awoke with a severe migraine. I'd experienced occasional migraines since I was a teenager, but this particular migraine was extremely painful and I should have sought treatment at the Emergency Room. However, since I had very young children at the time, I didn't want to wake them or my husband, so I attempted to treat myself. I took my prescription migraine medication, but it did not provide any relief from the pain. Instead of waiting an hour before taking the second dose as the instructions advised, I waited 20 minutes and took the second dose. I also took two over-the-counter pills for migraine. I have always been very sensitive to medications, but at the time I did not consider this. I was only focused on relieving the intense pain. 

After taking the medications, I became very sleepy and returned to bed. When I drifted off to sleep, I would awaken by gasping for breath. I quickly realized that when I drifted off to sleep, I stopped breathing. I was fearful I would fall asleep and die. I said a very simple prayer, 'Dear God, please don't let me die. I want to be a mother and a wife.' As I said the prayer, I doubted God would hear me. At that time in my life, I felt insignificant. I was not sure God existed, and if He did, I didn't think he would know me. But I was about to be proven wrong.

Immediately after praying, I felt a presence come over my bed. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed, but I could sense a shadow had been cast as something moved over my body and then stood next to my bed. As soon as I felt the presence, I was frightened and I heard a Bible verse in my mind, 'An angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.' I realized I had received the Bible verse telepathically and an angel had arrived to help me. 

Then it felt as if the angel slipped his hand directly into my stomach. I felt a sensation unlike anything I'd ever experienced. Static was moving in my stomach and throughout my torso. I also saw in my mind's eye a vison of black and white static, as like on a tv set without reception. At the same time, I felt my deceased father's presence and I could hear him speaking into my right ear. He repeatedly said, 'You're going to be ok, you're going to be ok, you're going to be ok.'

As the angel stood to my left and my father spoke to me from my right, a very large, powerful presence hovered over the length of my body. When I noticed the large presence, my inner vision was changed to that of a crystal blue waterfall. The water was sparkling clear and the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. As I marveled at the sight of the water, the static sensation in my torso dissipated and was replaced with a sensation of liquid love rushing into my heart. The love was so pure and overwhelming that I immediately began to weep. The liquid love flowed through my heart and filled up my chest cavity to the point that I could not expand my lungs to inhale. I was aware of having difficulty breathing, but it did not concern me. 

I was so blissed out from the love, that nothing else mattered. I had the realization of, 'This must be God.' It was so large, infinite, and powerful, that I just knew it could have no other name than God. Once I realized I was in the presence of God, my next thought was, 'Oh no, God is going to judge me for taking too much medication.' I waited for the judgement. It did not come. I moved into the flow of God, searching for His judgement. No judgement was there. Not a speck. Only pure, adoring love was in the infinite flow of God.

At this point I lost awareness of my body. I did not recall I was a mother, wife, daughter, friend. I had no recollection of life on earth. I merged into an infinite presence that utterly and completely adored me. God did not speak words to me. The love said it all. I felt as if I was an awareness, a being without a name or identity, and I was expanding to the size of the cosmos. I was home. I realized home was where I wanted to remain forever and in my blissed-out state, it took all the energy I could muster to telepathically communicate, 'Take me.' With these two words, I was attempting to communicate that I wanted to remain in the pure love forever. 

As my presence continued to expand in a state of bliss, it felt as if I was nearing a point where I would explode into a billion atoms and forever be with God. I mentally prepared myself for the explosion and gladly welcomed it. At the very last millisecond before the explosion of my being and my total emergence into infinity, God pulled me out of Heaven and I landed with a shocking jolt into my body.

I lay in my bed, dazed and confused. My hair and pillow were soaked from the tears I had cried as the love consumed my heart and spirit. I have no idea how long I was with God, but when I returned to my body, it was completely healed. The medication had been removed. I was breathing normally. I was not lethargic. And my head felt normal. Usually after having a migraine, my head would be very sore to the point that brushing my hair would be unbearable. Now I could push against my skull and feel no pain or soreness. 

I attempted to process what had just happened. I knew that I had experienced something beyond any earthly experience I'd ever had. I told myself that I would allow myself to believe I had experienced a miracle, if when I awoke in the morning, I remained pain-free. Eventually I fell asleep and when I awoke in the morning, my body had no after-effects of a migraine or medication. I felt wonderful.

NDERF.org #9268

Life review while drowning

I was in a backyard pool (with a deep end) at a swimming party for our Brownie group. Playing with a beach ball a friend accidentally hit me in the face and I went under water. I was told that my mother saw me and tried to get someone's attention, but then I looked like I was ok. I wasn't. I had struggled up to the surface three times, and then had a very warm, comfortable feeling that everything was going to be fine. I saw what I thought was the sun sparkling on the surface of the water, then suddenly the water was gone and I was moving toward a figure. 

Before I got to the person, I had a flash of things that had happened in my life. As short as it was at the time, and can recall three or four things that happened when I was an infant (ivy wallpaper, getting my hair washed, having my tonsils out, my first dog dying, etc.), but there was only a happy feeling, nothing sad. I could then see that the man had a funny hat and the most beautiful face. He smiled at me and seemed to say that it wasn't time yet, but I kept close to him because it felt so comforting to me.

During this unspoken communication, I was suddenly jolted back by a hard pressure on my chest, and then I was floating above a scene by the side of the pool. My mother was crying and kneeling over me while my friend's brother was pushing on my back. It seemed like it lasted for a long time, but I saw several people doing things that I remembered to be strange, as I was 'treetop level' in the yard, (there was only an avocado tree in the yard, not a tall one). At that moment, I came whooshing back into my body, feeling like I couldn't breathe. Back to reality. 

NDERF.org #4277

Consciousness is being attuned to the world

Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at the University of California, has written in his 2009 book entitled Out of Our Heads: "to understand consciousness in humans and animals, we must look not inward, into the recesses of our insides; rather, we need to look to the ways in which each of us, as a whole animal, carries on the processes of living in and with and in response to the world around us. You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are."

Noë explains: "In this book I use the term 'consciousness' to mean, roughly, experience. And I think of experience, broadly, as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world ‘shows up’ for us in perception.”

 

“Conscious states are typically states that you and I can talk about, that influence what you and I do, and so they are states that you and I can make use of in planning.”

 

"The problem of consciousness, as I am thinking of it here, is that of understanding our nature as beings who think, who feel, and for whom a world shows up.

 

"Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.

"Brains don’t have minds; people (and other animals) do.”

"The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience."

Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads, pp. 9-10, 142.

Unlikely that conciousness emerged from the brain

Psychiatrist Elio Frattarnoli in Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain writes: “As for the idea that consciousness must be biological because it ‘emerged’ through the biological process of natural selection, the truth is that consciousness is entirely different from any biological function that has emerged through natural selection. It cannot be explained the way biological functions can―as a result of genetic mutations producing new proteins producing new biological processes producing a new function. No doubt brain processes that are necessary to support consciousness did emerge in this way through natural selection. But they are only the necessary biological conditions for consciousness, not its sufficient causes.

Frattarnoli reminds us that neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who mapped the neocortex of patients with epilepsy, reported: “The only sort of conscious experience he was able to evoke electrically was the passive experience of something happening to the patient or impinging on his awareness―what Penfield called ‘brain-action.’ This was not at all what he had expected. He had started out with the materialist assumption that all conscious functions and experiences must be controlled by the brain and would therefore be affected by the brain events he evoked with his stimulating electrode. But what he discovered instead was a presiding awareness in the patient that was utterly separate and unmoved by any of these brain events―that could recognize, remember, compare, and report on the various conscious experiences evoked by Penfield’s electrode but was itself unaffected by them.”

Frattarnoli concludes that consciousness: “simply cannot be explained in physical, chemical, or biological terms. Without a direct causal link between brain processes and consciousness, there is no persuasive reason to believe that consciousness emerged from the brain, or through natural selection, at all. Since it is a phenomenon of a fundamentally different order from any brain process, it would be much more logical to assume―if we are going to assume anything―that consciousness emerged from a source outside the brain.”

Consciousness is a cosmic principle

In an essay entitled “Science, Soul, and Death” Marilyn Schlitz and John H. Spencer assert: “There are many other contemporary scientists” who argue for a postmaterialist paradigm of science, “such as Lothar Schäfer, a retired professor from the University of Arkansas, where he taught physical chemistry for forty-three years. One of the harbingers of this new worldview, Schafer is optimistic that science is reaching a new way of understanding consciousness.

“Like Tanzi and other postmaterialist scientists, he speaks about wholeness as the core of reality, countering the materialist and reductionist worldview that reduces the world to its parts while pretending there is no whole. While he made his career in physical chemistry, measuring, manipulating, and explaining the microscopic world, he sees the basis of matter as nonmaterial and the universe as interconnected.

“’All things are connected,’ Schäfer explains. ‘Not in the empirical world, but in their nonempirical roots. The argument is this: if the universe is wholeness, everything comes out of it, everything belongs to it, including our consciousness. In that case, consciousness is a cosmic principle. The only chance you have that your consciousness survives when you die is that there is some consciousness outside. What may be in us is perhaps not our consciousness, but a cosmic consciousness’ (Schäfer, quoted in Schlitz, 2015)

“In discussing his own cosmology, Schäfer acknowledges that a personal transformation linked his views of death with his scientific worldview. When he was younger, he was frightened about death. Today he finds nothing frightening about it. Not that he has any clear opinion on what happens after; still, he believes that ‘there is a cosmic mind with which we are connected. If there is a cosmic mind, it would be strange if it wasn’t connected with ours’ (Quoted in Schlitz, 2015).”

Marilyn Schlitz and John H Spencer, “Science, Soul, and Death” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Science 2020 (p. 409). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Schlitz, M. (2015). Death Makes Life Possible. Sounds True: Boulder.

Schrödinger affirmed the awareness of our soul

Marilyn Schlitz and John H. Spencer in an essay entitled “Science, Soul, and Death” include these comments and quotes from Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961).

“Schrödinger offers an interesting perspective on why it is so difficult to pinpoint the experiencer or observer in our scientific investigations: he writes that ‘the reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it’ (Schrödinger, 1967, p. 138.).”

“Additionally, any awareness of anything implies that there must be some sort of separation from the physical events that we are aware of, and that anything that can be self-aware must necessarily be nonphysical.”

“Schrödinger even went so far as to argue that consciousness is universal and singular: ‘there is only one thing and what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA)’ (Schrödinger, 1967, p. 95 (original emphasis).

“Schrödinger also agreed with psychiatrist Carl Jung that ‘all science...is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted’ (Schrödinger quoting Jung in Schrödinger, 1967, p. 129). Even if Schrödinger would have preferred the word ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness,’ he does not shy away from Jung’s use of the word ‘soul.’

“In either case, they are both referring to the same thing—the very subject of awareness, the nonphysical locus of all experience, the self or being or consciousness that ‘I am.’ While it may be beyond the limits of science to directly access soul, it is not at all scientific to deny its reality. Soul, in this sense anyway, is presupposed by the possibility of being able to do science in the first place.”

Marilyn Schlitz and John Spencer, “Science, Soul, and Death” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, 2020 (p. 414). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Schrödinger, E. (1967). What is Life? & Mind and Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., is a social anthropologist, researcher, writer, and charismatic public speaker. She currently serves as President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

John H Spencer, Ph.D., was awarded his degree from the University of Liverpool, specializing in the Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Physics. He is the multiple award-winning author of The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics, and Ultimate Reality.

Brain imaging evidence with mediums

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora) and Founder and Director of the Research Center in Spirituality and Health, Brazil, writes that his research group:

"Performed a functional neuroimaging study with SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) with 10 mediums. We compared writing complexity of the produced texts and brain activation patterns during "psychography" (trance writing) and control writing (non-trance, regular writing).

"Experienced mediums produced texts during psychography with higher complexity scores than during control writing. However, despite this more complex writing, they presented lower activation in several brain areas related to the cognitive processing and writing planning (left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus).

"These findings are consistent with mediums' reports of automatic (non-conscious) writing and their claims that an ‘‘outer source’’ was planning the written content (Peres et al., 2012)."

Alexander Moreira-Almeida is Chair of the WPA (World Psychiatric Association) Section on Religion, Spirituality and Psychiatry and Coordinator of the Section on Spirituality of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association. He is the editor of Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship, and is also a co-founder of the Campaign for Open Sciences to promote the movement toward a Postmaterialist Science.

Alexander Moreira-Almeida, “Consciousness and the Brain: What Does Research on Spiritual Experiences Tell Us?” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Paradigm, (p. 301-317). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Peres, J. F., Moreira-Almeida, A., Caixeta, L., Leao, F., & Newberg, A. (2012). “Neuroimaging during trance state: a contribution to the study of dissociation.” PLoS One, 7(11), e49360.