HEAVEN IS WHERE YOU STAND (2)

While lunching one day on the roof of a twenty-six floor skyscraper Stephanie Lang of New York walked to the railing with the intent of just looking around. She began to rock, absent-mindedly lost her balance, and pitched forward toward the traffic below. Before she could react, she suddenly found herself ten feet back from the railing, sitting on her bottom with tears streaming. A miracle happened, she was saved from falling. A clear voice in her head spoke: “Are you going or are you staying? If you are staying you have to change.” She credits this rescue to divine intervention. It totally changed her life, afterward, she became goal oriented and excited about taking advantage of every opportunity she could. Even though doubts still assail her from time to time, the deep depressions she once had are gone. This closeness to a spirit, a sense of the Divine of God, propels NDE experiencers into a search for more and better avenues of service, mission, and outreach.


Says Tonecia Maxine of Oxon Hill, Maryland, who at age eleven drowned. “I was mean, self-centered and egotistical before, but when my episode was over, I was more peaceful and I really cared about people and wanted to help them.” She became a nurse as a result, and has devoted her life to taking care of others’ needs.


Many are frustrated by a lack of any clear knowing or message telling them exactly what to do with their lives or how just as many like McMillan – motivated and alive with the faith that where they’re headed is the right path for them,. Jungian analyst James Hillman addresses this frustration in his book The Soul’s Code: Character Calling and Fate. He states: “Psychotherapy has become an exaggerated self-searching to find out who we are but has neglected entirely the search for what the world wants from us – our calling. David Spangler, in his book, The Call expands Hillman’s idea, saying: “You are your own unique self, and if you have the humility to break through the boundaries of ego, you will hear the summons of your Call. Something you may not even know about yourself begins to emerge, and you will discover a service, a gift, a divine purpose behind your actions.


Prayer and meditation take on dynamic proportions immediately following a child’s near-death experience, as does visioning (aligning in consciousness with the divine purpose within us to love and to express greater degree of life and caring) Many of these youngsters who are gifted with native clairvoyance, native to souls who are still innocent about the ways of the world, and thus in purer state of being, actually saw prayers being said for them while they were out of body. They describe how the power of those prayers turned into beams of radiant, golden or rainbow light that arced over them from the one saying the prayer, no matter how many miles away, to where they themselves were “hovering.” Once the prayer beams reached them, the feeling would be akin to a “splash” of love or an incredible warming. Because they can feel the effectiveness of prayer, child experiencers consider it a valid and real way to talk with God while sharing God’s healing love with others.


In her expansive research, P.M.H. Atwater, author of Children of the New Millennium, cites Larry Dossey, M.D. former chief of staff of Humania Medical City in Dallas, Texas, and current co-chairman of the panel on mind/body interventions in the Office of Alternative Medicine of the National Institute of Health, has a lot to say about the power of prayer, both in his books and personally. He states: There is a quality that correlates with the effect of prayer, and it’s something that sounds very old-fashioned. It’s love. And if the individual doing the praying does not have compassion and empathy and love and a deep sense of authentic and genuine caring for whoever they are praying for, these (medical) experiments (on the power of prayer) don’t work very well. Love is the key to success. And if you rate the ‘frequency’ of love, it is most high when it is not ‘put on’ or manipulated to be self-conscious, stemming from a desire for self-gain.


SPIRIT SHIFT

Spirit shifts bespeak a larger agenda, one that transcends personal and societal concerns and expectations, and seems determinant in why some individuals have a brain shift while others do not even if mutual conditions are similar. PMH Atwater, offers this observation without hesitation on her part, for one cannot research on near-death and other transformative states as long as they do it without recognizing a greater power at work.

Repeatedly, it is stated here that experiencers describe this subtle presence as a highly organized intelligent luminosity that plays the role of emissary for the Divine God, Source or whatever title one prefers. Apparently this intelligent luminosity can take any form or color or substance or order, yet it is always available as a nonenergetic force, a Holy Spirit so to speak capable of moving in and through us once we are ready or once we surrender to it.

How this play out with child experiencers of near-death states is worth a closer look. The depth of maturity that emerges from these youngsters threatens as many people as it inspires. Since spirit shifts lack the physicality of brain shifts, PMH Atwater thinks she will rely more in this section on quotes from any case studies to convey the stirring of spirit. In similar manner, I would like to continue relying on quotes from the study of more adult NDEs as in the special case of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, M.D.

From: PROOF OF HEAVEN – Chapter 9th The Core, more excerpts.

Meanwhile, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds – immeasurably higher – flocks of transparent orbs, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them.


Birds? Angels? These words registered when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything, I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wandered if the winged beings were producing it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it – without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word as it self implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and internmingled designs of a Persian carpet… or a butterfly wing.


Aside: an image of a butterfly is symbolic of our human metamorphosis, our innate ability to morph, to grow through morphogenetic levels as all humans are destined to be transformative in character…be born from a hairy, ugly pupa, to shed off into a wormy greenish caterpillar that finally sheds off its worminess into a radiant beauty of light that flies to find its purpose in life. And that its Calling is to flit from plant to plant to pollinate plants to produce colorful beautiful flowers to bloom in God’s garden. This co-creative creature of the Creator is called the Butterfly.


What is this place? Who am I? Why am I here ?

Eben Alexander, M.D. : Each time I silently passed on these questions, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing water. What least important about these bursts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them directly. But in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate – hotter than fire and wetter than water – as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also indefinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. An orb that was living and almost solid, as the songs of angel beings had been. My situation was, strangely enough something akin to that of a fetus in a womb. The fetus floats in the womb with the silent partner of the placenta, which nourishes it and mediates its relationship to everywhere present yet at the same invisible mother. In this case, the “mother” was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it. This Being was so close that there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself. (Aside: I needed this kind of reassurance --that the Lord God makes me feel so 'special' among the infinite multitude of others, and yet at the same time sense the infinite vastness of his/her Presence) Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite the vastness of the Creator, could see how completely miniscule I was by comparison. I will occasionally use "Om" as the pronoun for God because I originally used that name in my writings after my coma. “Om” was the sound I remembered hearing associated with that omniscient, omnipotent, and unconditionally loving God, but any description falls short. I had the Orb as my companion. In some manner I couldn’t completely comprehend but I was sure of nonetheless, the Orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this extraordinary presence surrounding me.


It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the Orb (who remained in some way connected to the Girl m the Butterfly Wing, who in fact was she) was guiding me through this process. (aside--my comment: is the Girl the Blessed Virgin Mary as one NDE child saw a beautiful lady pass her by in her own episode while seeing also a glowing Orb of light nearby) Later, when I was back here in the world, I found a quotation by the 17th century Christian poet Henry Vaughan came close to describing this place – this vast inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself). I remember someone said: can there be Light without darkness? Vaughan: “There is, some say, in God a deep dazzling darkness….” That was it, exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.


….Through the Orb, "Om" told me that there is not one universe but many – in fact more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there would be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours (Aside: in the lower worlds where we exist, darkness denotes Karma, law of cause and effect, the choice between good and evil must be willed in the larger picture … Goodness, Godliness and Love are overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant)


A COMMON EXPERIENCE -- Chapter 29 – excerpts from the book Proof of Heaven

Finally the day came when I had written down everything I could, every last memory of the Realm of the Earthworm’s Eye View (this refers to the time when he was still an earthworm prior to becoming a butterfly), the Gateway, and the Core. Then it was time to read. I plunged into the ocean of NDE literature – an ocean into which I’d never so much as dipped a toe before. It didn’t take me long to realize that countless other people had experienced the things I had, both in recent years and centuries past. NDEs are not all the same, each one is unique –but the same elements show up again and again, and many I recognize from my own experience. Narratives of passing through a dark tunnel or valley into a bright and vivid landscape – ultra real – were as old as ancient Greece and Egypt. Angelic beings – sometimes winged, sometimes not – went back, at least, to the ancient Near East – as did the belief that such beings were guardians who watched the activities of people on earth and greeted those people when they left it behind. The sense of being able to see in all directions simultaneously, the sensation of being above linear time – of being above everything, essentially that I had previously thought of as defining the landscape of human life, the hearing of anthem-like music, which entered through one’s whole being rather than simply one’s ears; the direct and instantaneous reception of concepts that normally would have taken a very long time and a great deal of study to comprehend, without any struggle whatsoever … feeling the intensity of unconditional love.


…Quite simply, I’d never held myself open to the idea that something of us survives the death of the body, I was the quintessential good-natured, albeit skeptical, doctor. And as such, I can tell you that most skeptics aren’t really skeptics at all. To be truly skeptical, one must actually examine something, and take it seriously. And I, like many doctors, had never taken the time to explore NDEs. I had simply ‘known’ they were impossible.

I also went through the medical records of my time in coma – a time that was meticulously recorded, practically from the very start. Reviewing my scans just as I would have for a patient of my own, it became clear to me at last just how fantastically sick I had been (See Appendix A and B). Though the experience is as old as history, “the near-death experience” (regardless of whether it was seen as something real or a baseless fantasy) only became a household term fairly recently. In the 1960’s, new techniques were developed that allowed doctors to resuscitate patients who had suffered cardiac arrest.


Unbeknowest to them, these physicians were, through their rescue efforts, producing a breed of trans-earthly voyagers, people who had glimpsed beyond the veil and returned to tell about it. Today they number in the millions. Then in 1975, a medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life, in which he described the experience of a man named George Ritchie. Ritchie had “died” as a result of a cardiac arrest as a complication of pneumonia and been out of his body for nine minutes. He traveled down a tunnel, visited heavenly and hellish regions, met a being of light he identified as Jesus and experienced feelings of peace and well-being that were so intense he had difficulty putting them in words. The era of the modern near-death experience was born.


… The more primitive parts of my brain – the housekeeping parts – functioned for all or most of my time in coma. But when it came to the part of my brain that every single brain scientist will tell you is responsible for the human side of me: well, that part was gone. I could see it on the scans, in the lab numbers, on my neurological exams – in all the data from my very closely recorded week in hospital. I quickly began to realize that mine was a technically near-impeccable near-death experience, perhaps one of the first convincing case in modern history. What really mattered about my case was not what happened to me personally, but the sheer, flat-out impossibility of arguing, from a medical standpoint, that it was all fantasy.  (To be continued)