Even a simple protein requires a chain of 100+
amino acids. Again, these amino acids must
be arranged in a specific order to code for a functional protein
because most combinations of amino acids will not fold into a stable
functional protein at all. Remember that DNA encodes for one amino
acid at a time with 3-letter “words”, or specific sequences of
bases. Therefore, to encode for a simple protein requires that 300+
DNA bases be arranged in a specific order so that the amino acids
link up in a proper sequence to produce a functional protein. Then,
add to this the correct words, or codons, for starting and stopping
the protein making sequence. These codes must be at the beginning
and end of the coding region to initiate and end protein production
respectively. This is akin to producing a 100 word paragraph of
coherent text with a capital letter to start the paragraph and a
period at the end. To produce such a paragraph by random processes
is highly unlikely. Just imagine a monkey given a typewriter and
blindly typing letters at random to try and produce an entire
paragraph of coherent meaningful text.
To stress this point once more, consider that
“though proteins tolerate a range of possible amino acids at some
sites, functional proteins are still extremely rare within the whole
set of possible amino-acid sequences”.3 In other words,
if you link amino acids together at random you will be hard pressed
to create a functional protein, just as you would be hard pressed to
create a paragraph of meaningful English text by way of randomly
placed letters. Therefore, if the DNA bases were arranged randomly,
they may exhibit codons (3-letter words) for specifying amino acids
to link together to form a protein, but these amino acids would most
likely link together in such a way as not to produce a functional
protein. In fact, the chances of producing any functional protein of
150-amino-acids by combining those amino acids by chance is 1 in 1074.4
Now take into consideration the fact that many proteins require far
more amino acids than 150.5 As the number of amino acids
in a protein rises, the chances of producing one by linking amino
acids by chance just gets worse. Finally, one has to take into
consideration the start and stop codons that must be in the proper
place to start and stop the sequencing of amino acids for protein
production. So, just as there is a low probability of combining
English letters into a meaningful sequence, especially one that’s
at least 150 words (or letters), in length, by pure chance and
random processes, it is similarly implausible to suggest that DNA
bases could be randomly arranged to create functional proteins.
Meyer refers to the information encoded in DNA
with the term “specified information.” This means that it is
complex, as the information does not follow a repeating pattern, and
specified, meaning that a specific arrangement of bases performs a
specific function.6 This is the kind of information found
in a language or computer code, whereby the specific arrangement of
parts determines its meaning or function and a random arrangement
confers nothing. Basically what's happening when you arrange DNA
bases properly to code for a functional 3-dimensional protein is
that you’re hitting a target sequence out of a vast space of
possible arrangements of those bases.7 That target
sequence does not get hit by 'chance', especially not over and over
again. Meyer further asserts that specified information is only
known to be caused by intelligent agents.8 Computer code
and language are just two examples, whereby a specific arrangement
of 0’s and 1’s in computer code and letters and punctuation in
language confer meaning. However a random arrangement of these
constituents would only produce non-functional or non-meaningful
gibberish.
Now, the argument has been put forth, most
notably by Richard Dawkins, that you could start with just one
protein and then modify it little by little, or amino acid by amino
acid, until it turns into another protein quite different from the
original.9 This would be akin to modifying my last
sentence one letter at a time until it turned into a completely
different coherent and meaningful sentence. You may be able to
anticipate the problem already. To change the sentence letter by
letter, or even two letters at a time, would take that sentence
through a whole host of unmeaningful sequences until it finally
arrived at the new meaningful sentence, whatever that may be. The
problem turns out to be even worse for proteins. This is because if
you change too many of the amino acids in a protein, it will not
only degrade function, but the amino-acid sequence that constitutes
the protein will cease to fold into a 3-dimensional shape
altogether. Therefore, one protein cannot morph into another protein
with a completely novel function. If you start changing the amino
acid sequence of a protein, function quickly degrades, and the
process soon leads to amino acid sequences that fail to fold into a
stable structure at all.10
Dawkins, however, imagines
that proteins can change their shape little by little to
successively approximate a completely different shape necessary to
perform a completely different function. As stated above, this is of
course, a purely imaginary line of reasoning. It does not reflect
reality. Proteins have specific shapes to perform specific
functions, thus emulating language or computer code. And as
Meyer points out, the only known cause of specified information is
an intelligent agent.
What are we to conclude from these findings?
One way out would be to posit the existence of extraterrestrials
from somewhere else in the universe who seeded life on this planet.
However, this only pushes the problem further back to how the Aliens
themselves were created. It is much more plausible, especially with
respect to the findings from NDE’s which we will be discussed
later, that an intelligent consciousness underlies the material
world and is intimately involved with its creation from the atomic
level on up. Because if a consciousness is responsible for forming
the DNA bases into meaningful pairs, where would this consciousness
lie? It must be woven into the very fabric of reality. It must
underlie the material world itself, able to form and direct matter.
Now, we will explore one more line of evidence that points to an
intelligence at work in nature.
In his landmark book, The
Edge of Evolution, Professor of Biology Dr. Michael Behe
explores the inner workings of the cell to conclude the
impossibility of the sophisticated systems therein arising by
randomness and natural selection. As an example, Behe describes IFT
(intraflagellar transport) which constructs and maintains the
cilium, which is just one of many “molecular machines” within
the cell.
In a nutshell, IFT consists of mini railroad
cars (specialized proteins called IFT particles) that carry cargo
(various proteins needed to construct the cilium) to their proper
locations and deposit the cargo for construction of the cilium. As
an analogy, think of railroad cars going up and down a steel
structure carrying building materials to make a building. The cars
have to bring many different kinds of parts, including parts needed
for the floor, parts needed for the walls, parts needed for building
the windows of the building, and parts needed to build the
balconies. Actually, the cilium is far more complex than this,
requiring about 200 different kinds of building materials, or
proteins that construct the cilium.11 So, the cars, or
IFT particles, that carry the proteins must be able to bind to and
carry a vast array of different kinds of proteins. Furthermore, all
of these parts have to be deposited in just the right
location—window parts must be placed at the proper window building
position, floor parts must be placed at the floor position, and so
on--and at just the right time. Another interesting fact about this
process is that the railroad cars, or IFT particles, have two
different “motor” proteins, one for powering the cars up the
cilium and a different “motor” protein for its trip back down
the cilium. Now, here’s the biochemical explanation for how this
construction works. Quoting Behe:
“Biochemical
studies show that IFT can be conceptually broken down into several
parts. The first part consists of the motor proteins that carry the
IFT particles along the interior of the cilium. The motor protein
that carries the particle toward the tip of the cilium is different
from the one that carries it back. The trip out is powered by
Kinesin-II, one member of a family of kinesin motor proteins that
perform a variety of jobs in the cell . . . The trip back is powered
by a dynein motor protein . . . Exactly what causes IFT to shift
from kinesin-powered transport to dynein transport at the tip of the
cilium remains unknown. The second part of IFT is called the IFT
particle. It’s the container that grabs hold of the correct
proteins to be carried in or out and releases them at the proper
point.” 12
Behe further elucidates that “the IFT
particle consists of sixteen separate proteins that bind together in
one aggregate.”13 This 16-protein complex can be
separated into two protein-complexes, one containing six proteins
and the other ten proteins. Each of these structures “contain
substructures that are known to be particularly good at binding
diverse proteins—exactly what you need to transport the many kinds
of protein cargo that travel by IFT along the cilium.”14
Indeed, as mentioned before, the cilium which IFT constructs is made
of about 200 different kinds of proteins. Therefore, the IFT
particle is a specifically designed protein for its job. It is
designed to be able to bind to and carry a variety of different
proteins.
This system of construction machinery also
boasts not one, but two, motor proteins that are designed to carry
the IFT particle up and down the interior of the cilium. If that’s
not enough, when building this system, there is some sensing
mechanism that senses the amount of material that the cilium needs,
evidenced by the fact that “after construction is completed the
trains keep coming at about the same rate, but now some of the cars
are empty.”15
You can imagine the sophisticated control
mechanisms that must go into the construction project, with genes
controlling how much of each protein to build and when to build
them, how many IFT particles to send with loads of protein, and when
to cut production. Furthermore, all of the proteins used in
construction require acute specification. The IFT particles must be
precisely engineered to be able to bind to all of the differently
shaped proteins that make up the cilium, the motor proteins must be
precisely engineered to function as motors to move the IFT particles
up and down the length of the cilium, and each protein that goes
into the actual building of the cilium requires precise engineering
to fit with all of the other parts and create a functional cilium.
As you can tell, this process is integrated, complex, and coherent.
Furthermore, DNA provides the instruction manual for building the
entire structure, including instructions for building the molecular
machines used to construct the edifice, instructions for building
each of the around 200 proteins that compose the building blocks of
the structure, and control instructions for coordinating the entire
process.
It should be blatantly obvious by now that an
intelligence is behind this process. You don’t randomly throw
together a skyscraper. It takes careful planning; blueprints of the
building must be drawn up, resources gathered together at the
building site, all of the construction workers given specific
assignments, and foremen and supervisors to manage the entire
process. A cellular machine requires just as much. In the case of
the cilium, DNA contains the blueprints for making the building, as
well as the information needed to coordinate the project, make the
IFT particles (construction workers) to do the work, and make all
the building materials. The cell is miraculous in that it has the
ability to make both the work force (construction machinery) and all
of the materials needed to make up the structure (essentially many
different kinds of proteins). Stephen Meyer’s concept of specified
information is also relevant here. In IFT, we have a specific
arrangement of parts that perform a specific function. This is
evident in the building process and in the completed structure.
Again, this requires an intelligence to arrange the parts into a
functional pattern.
It is useless to invoke a Darwinian, stepwise
scenario, for this process. That is because the process is so
integrated. Without an IFT particle, there could be no cilium.
Without the control instructions for coordinating the construction
project you would have a mess of unregulated IFT particles, carrying
unregulated proteins, at unregulated times. The project would never
be able to build a coherent machine. And if you are missing many of
the around 200 proteins needed for building the cilium, well, you
can’t build it. Complex integration is the key to understanding
intelligent design. Gradual evolution doesn’t work because without
any one of the parts, the others couldn’t function. Therefore, a
bottom-up approach doesn’t work. Instead, a top-down approach
whereby the end product (cilium) is thought up first, or envisioned
in the mental realm, then the many details of how to build that
product are worked out in succession, and finally the whole system
is implemented at once. Intelligent agents do this all the time. We
think of a new idea, say to build the first automobile. First, we
must think about what function our new structure is to have. In our
example of the automobile, the function is to move people and
objects quickly from one place to another via roads. Then, we should
consider what parts are needed and how they will connect to perform
the desired function. For instance, a car would need wheels that
turn, a motor to power the car, a steering wheel to steer the car,
and so on… We would have to figure out how to connect all of these
parts to produce a functional automobile. Once we have the entire
plan with all the parts and how to connect them in our minds (the
mental realm), we can then begin to manufacture and arrange the
material constituents to conform to our mental image and create the
world’s first automobile. So, we start with figuring out what
function we want a new machine to perform. Then we have to think of
a design that will enable that function to be performed. The design
requires not only the parts that will be used, but how those parts
will connect. Once we have this mental image, we can go to work
building our new structure.
In essence, we take ideas from a mental,
non-material realm, and then manifest those ideas in the material
realm. This is simply an imitation of what a greater intelligent
consciousness does to create the machinery that sustains life. How
else are we to explain intelligent workings at the cellular level
without an intelligence that penetrates into the deepest aspects of
the material world? And where else do we find intelligence than in
the workings of conscious agents? Different types of cells require
different functions, which require different kinds of protein
machinery, which in turn requires the guidance of an intelligence to
form. From DNA on up, life is intricately designed.
So, all of creation is first envisioned in the
mental realm. To implement these creations in the material realm
requires a conscious intelligent entity to arrange and organize
matter in conformance with the desired function and design. For life
to show evidence of intelligent design, consciousness must underlie
material process and have the ability to form and manipulate the
material world. To take a line from Physicist David Bohm, it forms
and in-forms the material world.16 It is the basis and
mover of all energy in the universe. This underlying consciousness
not only forms all of the matter in the universe, it also provides
the information to organize matter into functional systems, such as
DNA and living cells. As we will see after looking at the evidence
for consciousness after death, this consciousness has its source in
a realm outside of our known concepts of space and time. It is a
realm of infinite energy in a non-local space. Our consciousness is
in fact identical to this One Source Consciousness. Now we turn to
the unassailable evidence for life after death.
The existence of intelligence in a universe
supposedly constructed from entirely unconscious and unintelligent
energy presents a major philosophical problem from the outset. I
have often wondered at the illogicality of how you get intelligence
from non-intelligence. It seems like a conundrum that is hard to get
around. However, the story goes that through a certain complex
composition of matter, this is indeed possible. I never bought this
idea. No matter how much unintelligent matter you throw together,
intelligence should not spontaneously arise. In any event, we all
experience ourselves as intelligent agents with the ability to think
and act in the world purposively. Where does this intelligence, this
consciousness, come from? That is the central question. Is it
indeed, as science postulates, a temporary manifestation of the
complex workings of a number of unintelligent parts (the brain and
nervous system)? Or does it come from some other realm or dimension
and simply manifest for a time in the material realm before going
back to this other dimension?
Extraordinary evidence from the study of
Near-Death Experiences points to the latter conclusion. How do we
know this? I will provide a couple of examples to explain why
Near-Death Experiences cannot be due to the workings of the brain.
The first is written about in Cardiologist Pim Van Lommel’s book Consciousness
Beyond Life. The story is of Pam Reynolds, who needed an
operation on an aneurysm in one of the cerebral arteries close to
the brain stem. Due to the positioning of the aneurysm, a rare and
risky medical procedure was required that entailed lowering her body
temperature to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit during the operation and
draining all the blood from her head. The electrical activity in her
cerebral cortex and brain stem were constantly measured during this
time and once she had been cooled down sufficiently all activity in
these areas was found to be absent. Nevertheless, she reports
popping out of the top of her head and being able to see and hear
what was going on in the operating room during the operation. While
out of body she observed the instrument used to open her skull,
which did not conform to her prior expectations. Specifically, she
reports “I remember the instrument in his hand; it looked like the
handle of my electric toothbrush. I had assumed that they were going
to open the skull with a saw. I had heard the term saw, but what I saw looked a lot more like a drill than a saw."17
Dr. Michael Sabom, who investigated the case himself and got photos
of the instrument used to open her skull reports that the saw does
actually look like an electric toothbrush.18 However,
this instrument did not conform to her prior expectations of what a
saw should look like, and before the operation this instrument was
covered and out of her view. However, this is not the only accurate
perception she made during the OBE. She also overheard a
conversation between the head neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Spetzler and a
female cardiovascular surgeon. In her own words, “I distinctly
remember a female voice saying:
‘We have a problem. Her arteries are too small.’ And then
a male voice: ‘Try the
other side’."19 Commenting on this experience, Van
Lommel states that “When the cardiovascular surgeon made an
incision in her right groin, she found that Pamela’s veins and
arteries were too small, so she had to switch to the left groin. The
doctors had a brief exchange on this matter. Pamela
heard these remarks and repeated them word for word.”20
This, in spite of the fact that she had loud clicking devices
inserted into her ears that were constantly emitting loud clicks to
monitor her brain stem electrical activity. This fact automatically
excludes hearing the conversation through the use of her physical
ears because the loud clicks would have prevented her from making
out any conversation going on in the room. After viewing the
operation for awhile she then reports a more or less typical Near
Death Experience of going to the Light and communicating with
deceased relatives before reconnecting again with her body.
It should be noted that Pam’s NDE began while
she was under general anesthesia, before her body had been cooled
down and all electrical activity in her brain had ceased. Although
she wasn’t clinically dead at the start of her OBE, the fact that
she was under anesthesia, had her eyes taped shut, and had loud
clicks emitting in each ear should have ruled out perception by
normal sensory means. In fact, she shouldn’t have been conscious
at all. Her experience lasted until she saw her body jump, which is
when she again entered her body again. This was after the operation
had ended and electric shock had been administered to restart her
heart. So, although her experience started before cool down of her
body began, it persisted until after the operation was over. So a
significant part of her NDE, where she entered the light and spoke
with deceased relatives, occurred during a period of time when her
brain was nonfunctional.
Without any electrical activity in her brain,
how could she experience these things? The simplest and most
plausible explanation is that consciousness does not depend on the
brain to exist or experience. The brain begins to resemble more of a
tool that consciousness uses to manifest in the physical world, but
not the producer of that consciousness.
Remarkably, there is another case on record of
this same kind of operation where the patient experienced
consciousness during a period of lack of brain function. This
account comes from the book The Scalpel and the Soul by neurosurgeon Allan J. Hamilton. This
case involves a thirty-four-year-old woman, again suffering from an
aneurysm near the brain stem known as a basilar aneurysm. Again, her
temperature had to be lowered, “to make her core temperature cold
enough to stop her heart so all blood flow would cease."21
At that time, all brain wave activity as measured by an EEG would
stop. While the operation was winding down and they were about to
start warming her body back up, several documented conversations
were recorded that the patient somehow heard and reported after the
experience, even though all electrical activity was absent as
measured by an EEG. After the patient had fully awoken from all of
the anesthetic, she was greeted by her team of doctors. Specifically
she said that she thought she heard someone say “thar she
blows,” and she recalled “A one-and-a-half-carat yellow diamond
from Johnston Fellows. Oh. . . and Morton’s restaurant where
someone fell into a wine case."22 The doctors
present during her operation:
“all
knew that this woman’s brain had been dead—without discernible
electrical activity whatsoever. This meant that no brain cells were
active, working, firing, or emitting electrical signals. Yet somehow
the patient managed to recall the conversation in the operating room
while her EEG was flat. In other words, while she was, for all
intents and purposes, clinically dead—with no ability for her
brain to function—she somehow managed to make or “encode”
specific memories of that conversation in the OR. And this was no
hazy recollection. The patient was reproducing practically word for
word what had been said. Right down to the jewelry store and the
waiter stumbling. No, she clearly recalled what had been said. There
was no doubt about that." 23
After further investigation it was established
that she could accurately report many more details than just those
mentioned above, including exactly where the heart-lung bypass
machine was located in the room (which hadn't been there until after
she was anesthetized), and what the people in the room looked like.24
Unlike Pamela, however, she did not report a deep Near Death
Experience of going to another dimension or encountering beings of
light. Nevertheless, this case along with Pamela’s case strongly
suggests that consciousness can exist independent of a functioning
brain.
A New Way of Envisioning Consciousness and the Brain
Based on quantum theory, Cardiologist Pim Van
Lommel, in his landmark book on Near-Death Experiences Consciousness
Beyond Life, posits that consciousness actually exists in a
non-local space where time and distance play no role. Quantum theory
suggests that all matter can exist as either a wave of spread out
energy or as a discrete particle located in space and time.
Furthermore, consciousness seems to play a decisive role in the
transition from a wave of spread out energy to its collapse into a
discrete particle located in time and space. For instance, an
electron around the nucleus exists as a wave of probability until it
is observed, whereby the numerous possibilities collapse and the
electron is concentrated in a particular spot for everyone to see.25
Underlying reality, therefore, is a sea of infinite energy where all
possibilities exist. If we want to describe consciousness, we could
think of it as an infinite sea of light where everything is
connected non-locally. The light acts like a unified field, whereby
every part of the field is connected to every other part without the
need for energy transfer. In the words of Van Lommel,
“nonlocal
space could also be called the absolute vacuum: it lacks
structure, has no time, and is an empty space in which quarks
(elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter),
electrons, gravity, and electricity have all become one and as such
do not exist. This space forms the foundation for an infinite number
of possibilities.”26
I like to think of it as an infinite field of
intelligent light that holds all knowledge, or information, encoded
in wave functions. The material world, which we are so familiar
with, can be seen as the collapse of these wave functions into a
particular possibility. In Van Lommel’s words,
“the
physical aspect of our consciousness in the material world, which we
experience as waking consciousness and which can be compared to the
particle aspect of light, stems from the wave aspect of the
“complete” and “endless” consciousness created by collapse
of the wave function in nonlocal space.”27
In essence, an infinite consciousness underlies
and forms the basis for our material world. This consciousness is in
direct control of all energy manifest in the material realm because
it is the source of that energy. It literally forms the material
world by creating information, or specific patterns of energy, from
an infinite number of possibilities of that energy configuration.
The material world is but one manifestation of this consciousness
and there is evidence that there are many more dimensions created by
this consciousness. This process of creation is an ongoing and never
ending process.
The real clincher in all of this is that our
consciousnesses are essentially identical to this one consciousness,
which can be labeled Source Consciousness. The brain, then, operates
as a receiver of an aspect of this Source Consciousness into the
material dimension of space and time. In Van Lommel’s words,
“The
brain and the body merely function as a relay station receiving part
of the overall consciousness and part of our memories in our waking
consciousness in the form of measurable and constantly changing
electromagnetic fields.”28
I propose that your waking consciousness is
essentially the light from Source Consciousness manifesting through
the brain and body to experience the energy patterns of the brain
and body. However that energy is not just experienced by
consciousness, but in-formed by consciousness. In other words,
consciousness is in control of how that energy is configured.
Consciousness is the creator of information. I believe the
electro-chemical processes in the brain operate much the same way as
DNA or language, on the idea of specified information which
consciousness provides. Different types of energy produce different
experiences. The electro-chemical energy produced by the brain to
create an image is different from the electro-chemical energy
produced by the brain to create an emotion. Furthermore, the
specific pattern of energy determines the specific image or emotion
that is experienced. To experience a picture of the sun in your mind
requires the “image energy” to be arranged in a specific pattern
that is different from the specific pattern of “image energy”
required to experience a different picture in the mind, say a tree.
Consciousness is the intelligence operating within
the body to produce these specified energy patterns, which you will
remember equates to information. So, consciousness underlies
and collapses the
energy in your brain to produce conscious experiences of thought,
emotion, and action.
Briefly, I will discuss some of the evidence
that consciousness plays a decisive role in the energy configuration
of the brain. Although the brain is influenced by the environment,
consciousness can control the brain activity through focused thought
and belief. Study after study shows that processes within our
bodies can be controlled and manipulated through conscious
intention. We now know that the brain is not a fixed entity, but has
a considerable degree of plasticity.29 It is our
consciousness that can control the neuronal pathways developed in
the brain.
Jeffrey
Schwartz, a neuroscientist at UCLA, has demonstrated this plasticity
of the brain in Obsessive-Compulsive patients. He figured out that
the cause of their OCD was due to an overactive part of the brain
that was "locked into a pattern of repetitive firing."30
His approach to dealing with this problem was to have
patients consciously start thinking in a different way about their
compulsions. This approach included having patients reattribute
their compulsive thoughts with sayings such as, "It's not me:
it's my OCD!" Also, patients would reassign their
thoughts. For instance, they would substitute "go work in the
garden" for "wash hands seven more times." These,
along with a couple of other strategies, worked significantly in 12
of 18 patients who showed "significantly diminished metabolic
activity after the treatment" in the areas of the brain that
were responsible for their symptoms. As Schwartz pointed out after
the study: "This
was the first study ever to show that cognitive-behavior therapy--or
indeed, any psychiatric treatment that did not rely on drugs--has
the power to change faulty brain chemistry in a well-identified
brain circuit"31
Experiments
have also shown that people can control their emotional responses to
stimuli, which are designed to invoke an emotional response, by
consciously trying to detach themselves from that event. This
requires a suppression of brain activity normally associated with
emotional arousal.32 As Mario Beauregard and Denyse
O’Leary say in their book The
Spiritual Brain, “It appears that, in principle, normal humans
are not feeling robots, but are quite capable of adjusting their
emotional reactions.”33
Other
studies have shown that experienced meditators can adjust their
brain waves through meditation. In one study, Buddhist monks, by
focusing their thoughts on loving compassion for all living things,
were able to shift their brain waves into a gamma-ray state and
sustain that state.34 This state is characterized by
heightened awareness, when the brain is in a state of rapt
attention.35 Furthermore, the monks experienced
“permanent emotional improvement, by activating the left anterior
portion of the brain—the portion most associated with joy.”36
Not
only can conscious intention activate or deactivate parts of the
brain, but studies show that you can cause permanent changes in the
brain through focused attention. Neuroscientist at Massachusetts
General Hospital, Sara Lazar, scanned the brains of 20 Buddhist
meditators who had long been practicing mindfulness meditation,
whereby the practitioner focuses on heightening his/her perceptions
of the senses in the current moment. She found that "those
portions of the brain associated with attention, awareness of
sensation, sensory stimuli, and sensory processing were thicker in
the meditators than in the controls."37 Furthermore,
she found that the longer the practitioner had been practicing
meditation, the thicker these areas of the brain were.
In
a similar vein, psychic Ingo Swann, who is well known for his gift
in remote viewing--the perception of objects or events outside of
one's sensory awareness--was tested to see what his brain activity
was like when he used his psychic power. In the experiment, run by
Dr. Michael Persinger, he was hooked up to an EEG machine and asked
to identify objects in a distant room. "At the very moment that
he was able to "see" the items remotely, his brain showed
bursts of fast activity in the high beta and gamma range...Those
bursts of activity occurred primarily over the right occipital
region, the portion of the brain relating to sight."
Furthermore, an MRI scan showed that the large parieto-occipital
right-hemisphere lobe of his brain, which is involved in sensory and
visual input, was "unusually large."38
Again,
as with the Buddhist meditators, we see that advanced awareness and
perception are associated with gamma-ray brain activity, which is
the highest level of electromagnetic frequency. Moreover, we see
that areas of the brain can grow and strengthen their neural
connections through performing tasks that utilize those brain areas.
Most importantly, it is conscious intention that lies behind it all.
Without regularly exercising the large parieto-occipital region of
his brain through the conscious intention to see faraway places and
objects, would this area of the brain be as large in Swann as it is?
It seems likely that it would not be in light of the Lazar study
which showed that Buddhist meditators had thicker than normal brain
areas that were activated during their many years of meditation.
However, it could be that Swann was simply gifted from birth with an
unusually large parieto-occipital region of his brain. Likewise, it
could also be the case that people who are drawn to become
meditating monks already possess thicker portions of the brain
related to attention and sensory awareness. So, we can only
tentatively conclude that focused intention can permanently change
the structure of the brain. Further research will hopefully clarify
this issue.
Now
we've seen examples of people decreasing activity in certain areas
of the brain, as with OCD patients and subjects trying to control
emotional response to stimuli, and examples of people increasing
activity in certain areas of their brain, as with Buddhist
meditators and Ingo Swann. This all shows us that by consciously
focusing our thoughts we can control the flow of energy in our
brains and even control the brains development; clearly,
consciousness is the director of matter.
Another
category of conscious control that deserves equal mention is belief.
The focused attention of your thoughts is one thing, and deeply held
beliefs are another. Everyone knows about the placebo effect,
whereby someone's belief that they are receiving a medicine is all
it takes to make them better, regardless of whether or not they are
actually receiving a pharmaceutical drug. However, this effect takes
many forms, not just in regards to pharmaceutical medicine. One
interesting study, run by University of Michigan researchers, tested
the placebo effect by injecting saltwater into the jaws of young,
healthy men. The saltwater should have created painful pressure in
the subjects jaws. However, the young men were actually told that
they were receiving pain relief. Well, the suggestion worked.
"They reported feeling better. The placebo treatment reduced
the brain responses in a number of brain regions known to be
implicated in the subjective experience of pain."39
In other words, the persons belief that they were receiving pain
relief triggered the brain to respond in accordance with that
belief. Again, ones consciousness is in the driver's seat.
Another
study looked at the effects of "sham surgery." This is
where a person goes in for surgery, is put under, given incisions to
look like something has been done, but no actual surgery takes
place. The patient is simply cut open and sewn back up again. I will
quote one example from The Spiritual Brain:
"...a
2004 study compared thirty patients who received controversial
embryonic stem-cell implants for Parkinson's disease to patients who
received only a sham surgery. Those who thought they had received
the stem cells reported better quality of life a year later than
those who thought they had received the sham surgery, regardless of
which surgery patients had actually received."40
emphasis added
All
of the evidence examined so far shows that consciousness has direct
control over the body. By consciously directing your attention or
thoughts, you can directly control the flow of neuronal activity in
the brain. Furthermore, an ingrained belief also instantiates brain
and bodily processes to conform to that belief.
In
my view, the brain produces conscious awareness while you are in a
physical body, your conscious awareness being what you actually
experience. However, this electromagnetic energy of the brain is the
result of consciousness operating through the brain. Consciousness
is the light that sustains the body and moves the energy within it.
Without conscious light, the body dies. There can be no zombies. The
brain is constantly transmitting information about the body and
outside world, as received through the senses, to conscious
awareness. The brain is also being guided by consciousness to
produce emotions, thoughts, direct awareness to certain sensations,
memories, or other areas of focus, or to move some part of the body.
A conscious thought could be said to be received by the brain, as if
there were some transfer of energy. However, in my view,
consciousness can directly control brain activity. To me,
consciousness is the intelligence using the brain as a medium to
operate through. Consciousness, therefore, has no need to transfer
anything to the brain. Rather, consciousness produces a thought by
directly moving the energy of the brain to create the energy pattern
associated with that thought. Since consciousness underlies
and forms the energy, it is in control of how that energy is formed,
or the pattern that it takes. Consciousness is like the ocean, and
the waves on the ocean are the energy that we see manifest in
physical reality. The wave rests on the ocean and the ocean can
direct that wave and manipulate it in any way it sees fit. So too
can consciousness direct the energy of the material world. As the
basis of the material world, consciousness can create any energy
pattern it wants. Our individual aspect of consciousness can do the
same with the brain, creating specific energy patterns in the brain
to create the desired experience. Furthermore, consciousness stores
all of the information ever experienced via wave patterns. When the
brain is no longer functional (when you die), then consciousness no
longer has an interface to operate through and so separates from the
body and returns to its Source.
Now, we are ready to tie all of the preceding
sections together. There is a supreme consciousness at the base of
reality. It is an intelligent consciousness containing infinite
possibilities. This consciousness contains infinite energy in
potential and manifests the energy of the material world from this
infinite potential, at the same time determining the patterns that
that energy takes. It directs the material universe via what we know
as the laws of nature, which are really like habits of mind of the
creator. The laws of nature are no more than the ideas about how to
run the universe in the mind of God. DNA and cellular structures
show clear evidence of intelligent design. Now, based on this model
we can easily postulate that the Consciousness underlying reality is
the intelligence that forms and directs all the energy of the
material world. It is in direct control, not through some sort of
transfer of energy, but because it manifests the energy in the first
place. Instead of random evolution, then, we may speak of
intelligently directed evolution of life. DNA was created by the
consciousness underlying reality creating specific patterns of
energy, or matter. DNA, can then be said to be an intelligent
formation of cosmic consciousness, just as our consciousness forms
the energy patterns in our brain. Our individual consciousness is
but a tiny aspect of this overall consciousness. Our brain acts as
an interface for this aspect of consciousness to experience material
reality.
We’ve already explored the knock down
evidence that Near-Death Experiences are not a result of some
process in the brain. We may never know the full story about what
happens after we die. Indeed, if we did that would ruin the mystery.
However, the Near-Death Experience comes the closest to illuminating
at least some aspects of life after death. The problem with
NDEer’s (Near-Death Experiencer’s) descriptions of the afterlife
from a scientific perspective is that we can never verify their
descriptions. Science deals only with the material realm. As of now,
there is no way of using scientific instruments to explore other
dimensions.

These can only be explored consciously. So, we must
treat NDE’s more like we treat historical science. How do
archeologists come up with an accurate depiction of ancient cities
and how life was conducted there? There are certainly no experiments
they can carry out in a laboratory to figure out what happened long
ago. Instead they are
left with digging up artifacts and examining the written testimonies
from that time. The more artifacts they find and the more the
ancient peoples wrote, the more accurate will be the historian’s
depiction of that place and time. With Near-Death Experiences, too,
we have no way of accessing directly the otherworldly realms that
NDEer’s describe. Instead, we must rely on the accurate testimony
of people who have consciously experienced them. Now, if a historian
only has one or two testimonies to go on, his confidence is going to
be pretty low with regard to how accurate a depiction he can create
of what life was like in an ancient city. However, suppose the
historian has access to thousands of written records from that same
ancient city. Now his confidence is very high that he can accurately
describe what life was like there. Luckily, the same is true for
NDE’s. We now have thousands of written records of people who’ve
experienced an NDE. This is in large part thanks to dedicated
researchers who have encouraged people to share their extraordinary
stories. The largest collection of such stories is currently posted
online in full text by the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation
(NDERF).41
Every NDE is unique and the specific contents
of any one NDE are highly variable. However, with all the
variability, the experiences show many common elements. If you wish
to explore some of these elements in detail, I will refer you to my
paper entitled The Near-Death
"Experience" posted on the NDERF website. For now I
simply wish to explore the reconnection of individual consciousness
with the Source Consciousness, as this is pertinent to our
discussion.
An out-of-body experience is a typical
beginning of a Near-Death Experience. This is where someone all of a
sudden experiences their minds apart from the physical body. This is
often accompanied by an enhanced perception with exceptional
abilities, including but not limited to being able to see with a 360
degree panoramic view, the experience of being in multiple locations
at once, clearer and sharper perception, the ability to think many
streams of thought at once, and the ability to see through physical
objects.42
Sometimes, but not always, an out-of-body
experience is followed by the experience of being sucked through a
dark tunnel with a light at the end. The following is a tunnel
description from Dr. Jeffrey Long’s book Evidence
of the Afterlife:
“I
then noticed that while it was pitch-dark, it felt as if I was in a
tunnel, and all along the tunnel were doorways, but the whole tunnel
I could sense was like . . . a cave—sort of rocky, not too rocky
but kind of smooth—at least that’s my impression of it. So then
I am feeling a little more afraid, like, what’s going on here? It
felt like I was like that for an hour. Just there, then, I could see
a pinpoint of white light in front of me in the distance, the size
of a pencil eraser head—that size. So I sense that I start moving
in that direction, . . . like something [is] pulling me there; I
don’t feel as if I [am] doing it. At this point I was like
floating [in an] upright position, then going slowly toward that
pinpoint of light. And then I knew that there [were] little doorways
all along this tunnel, and I felt that . . . if I wanted to, [I
could] go into any of those doorways, and I felt at the time that if
I did, I would not come back, but my attention was on the light.”43
The tunnel is very interesting, resembling a
kind of worm-hole that takes you back to the Source. Not all NDEer's
who reconnect with the source experience traveling through a tunnel.
Others may see the light superimposed over the physical environment
or simply pop into a dimension of light without any memory of a
tunnel experience.44,45 The reunion with the light is
experienced as an ecstatic feeling of the most intense love you've
ever experienced and a going home. To explain this I will quote from
three of the experiences found at the Near-Death Experience Research
Foundation website.
"Everything
that I perceived as existing could be experienced as the most
intense light I could possibly imagine. I remember it as being a
hundred times brighter than the sun, but it was not painful to
experience. I had the sense that the light was responsible for
everything I had been a part of since leaving my Earthly body. I
don't know if I can describe this source of light as God or Jesus or
any other divine being. It was far deeper than we can describe in
Earthly terms or feelings. I had an awareness of this
"source" that needed absolutely no means of conveyance or
communication. I had become a part of this "source" to the
extent of oneness. Maybe I had become part of this
"source".
The
thing I remember the most is how distant I had become from the
physical body. When we express as humans the hope to one day be
reunited with departed friends and family there is no way to explain
how we will truly be together again. The reunion is not as Father
and Son or as our dear friend. It's as if our souls are part of an
atom that had been split with all the destructive force of the
universe and then suddenly come back to form a single atom again.
This atom somehow contained every experience ever thought felt or
imagined. Nothing ever beckoned me to the light or tried to persuade
me to come or go. Our souls just know where we belong."46
"I
finally came to the end and floated into a place which was
overwhelmed by a radiant white light that seemed to embody all the
concepts of love. A love which was unconditional and like a mother
has for a child. It was definitely a warm joyful presence, the same
one that drew me into the tunnel in the first place. It seemed like
a giant force field or energy that radiated all the good and noble
emotions known to man. [. . .] I knew in my heart that this was God.
Words can't describe my awe in this presence. It seemed like I
became part of The Light and then the Light became part of me. We
were one. I suddenly understood, without question, how
interconnected we all are with each other, God and all life forms in
the Universe."47
"[.
. .] then became immersed in infinite peace; bliss; ecstasy.
Unimaginable love; understanding so great, powerful; so awesome as
to be humanly incomprehensible. While I was there (and only there),
access was given to knowledge; "everything that ever was, is,
and will be." The true nature of the universe was suddenly
clear as a bell, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It seemed to have a
perfect order to it...in fact, it was evident that I was soon to
become part of it. I was about to join the entity which could only
be described as... God; so vast in dimension and scope only biblical
words can come close to describing. I wasn't able to retain the
knowledge given; the human brain is much too primitive and limited
to house it. This intelligence requires an entirely different
dimension to exist and comprehend. Yet it is part of our three
dimensions as well...just hidden out of view of our 5 senses. Yet I
retain enough to remember the sheer awe."48
The first experience conveys that we are
all a part of this source Light like split off atoms that, when we
die, go back to the one Source. We are intelligent light beings that
are part of this one intelligent conscious light source. The second
experience also shows that we are all connected through this one
Light. Furthermore, this light is experienced as Love.
The last experience shows us that the Light
contains all knowledge. Everything in existence is connected to the
Source non-locally. Non-local means that the information cannot be
localized; it is everywhere. In fact, it is everywhere and nowhere
because it cannot be localized. Each piece of information is
accessible from anywhere in the field of consciousness. Everything
in the field of consciousness is non-local. Since all of existence
is non-locally connected to Source Consciousness, when we go back to
Source Consciousness we have access to all knowledge.
Source Consciousness is the source of all
possibilities, containing an infinite amount of energy. It is the
basis and source for our consciousness and the material world. As
Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch writes in his book, The God Theory,
creation is a process of subtraction from infinite potential. He
compares the creation of the material world to the creation of
movies from a projector. From the pure white light of the projector
literally any image can be created. In his book, he writes:
"All
you have to do to project the picture you want is put in the slide
that subtracts the proper colors in the proper places. The white
light is thus the source of infinite possibility, and you create the
desired image by intelligent subtraction, causing the real to emerge
from the possible. By limiting the infinitely possible, you create
the finitely real.
Let’s take this optical metaphor one step further. The white light
of a projector can convey more than just a static image. Project a
series of images in rapid succession and you create motion.
Although, on one level, that motion consists of a series of still
shots, when those still shots are projected rapidly enough, the sum
becomes greater than its parts. The resulting “motion picture”
is more than just the sum of the images created out of the white
light. People and actions and even emotions are made manifest by
acting upon the formless white light in just the proper way, in just
the right sequence. A replica of our real world can thus be created
out of the unlimited potential of the white light through a process
of intelligent subtraction carried out in space and time. A virtual
reality is thus created out of formless possibility. In fact, motion
pictures are a concrete example of how a filter, the film, by
selectively subtracting from a formless potential, can generate a
virtual reality."49
So, as discussed before, the Source light
exists in a non-local space containing all possibilities. This light
creates the material realm with all of its laws as an actualization
of its potential. In my mind it's very similar to the collapse of
the wave function in physics. All “solid” matter can be
expressed as a wave function of spread out energy. What we see as
the material world is the collapse of this wave function into one
possibility, the possibility that we experience. Quoting from the
book Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner:
"There
is no atom in addition to the wavefunction of the atom. If someone
happened to see the atom at a particular spot, that look would
collapse the spread out wavefunction of the atom to be concentrated
at that particular spot for everyone . . . Accordingly, before a
look collapses a widely spread-out wavefunction to the particular
place where the atom is found, the atom did not exist there prior to
the look. the look brought about the atom's existence at that
particular place--for everyone."50
Implying, that from a realm of infinite
possibilities, consciousness brings the material world into
existence. This world is a conscious projection
of the Source Light created by subtraction of infinite
possibilities into the world of space and time that we experience.
It is constantly being projected and guided by this underlying
intelligence. We, as part of this intelligence, are co-creators of
reality.
The experience of the Source Light is not just
an experience NDEer's have. This experience of reunion with the
source has also been described in UFO literature, in transpersonal
experiences, mysticism, and as spontaneous occurrences in everyday
life. I will quote here from a variety of different sources to show
the connections all of these experiences share. First from
Psychiatrist and consciousness explorer Stanislav Grof, who shares a
description of his encounter with the Source after smoking
5-MeO-DMT. This is apparently one of those substances that when the
brain is flooded with it, somehow it can severe the connection
between consciousness and the brain and send consciousness straight
back to its Source. Shortly after taking a 2 or 3 hits from the pipe
he describes:
"My
only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense
proportions that seemed to contain all existence in a condensed and
entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute.
It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same
continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be
pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending
all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic,
terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive--all that and much
more. I had no concept, no categories for what I was witnessing. I
could not maintain a sense of separate existence in the face of such
a force. My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became
one with the Source."51
The ineffability of the experience is quite
evident from Grof's account. Nonetheless, we see definite parallels
to the Source experienced by NDEer's. For one, he describes it as
being extremely bright, although of an unworldly sort of brightness.
Also, it contains all of existence in an abstract (unmanifest) form.
And he too becomes fused with this Source. The next account of an
encounter with the Source is described in Robert Hamilton's
fascinating book, Caduceus. It is an experience that happened
to him when he was simply sitting down contemplating some things he
had read that day. The onset of the experience is sudden. In his own
words:
"Then,
all of a sudden, I was seized, as though by some invisible and
intangible force. It was an extraordinary feeling, utterly unique
and totally different from any sensation that I had felt ever
before. To add to the barrage of the senses came with the experience
a constant whirring sound, which would not abate and remains with me
today. This onset of sudden energy seemed to flood the whole of my
person and the dominant impression, and what was so amazing and
beautiful, although thoroughly confusing at the time, was the
unmistakable sensation of light. The whole experience seemed to
create an incredible luminescence which is almost impossible to
describe as it was nothing like how one would usually envisage
light, whether from the light of the sun or from an electricity bulb
. . . It seemed that what now 'constituted me' was total
consciousness; the focus of my being was entirely of the 'soul', for
want of a better description. It was as if the entire experience
represented moments of revelation where 'everything' was made known
and comprehended, although in a rather indefinable way. Yet, despite
the bewilderment and confusion, I felt the presence of an absolute
and profound sense of peace which was beyond anything I had ever
known previously. And then, quite suddenly, it ended, just as
suddenly as it had begun, with a discernible 'return' of my normal
self and my normal thoughts."52
Again, we have the experience of an unworldly
luminescent light where we are encompassed in "total
consciousness" which allows access to all knowledge and is
accompanied by an experience of deep love and peace.
The last account of an encounter with Source
Consciousness comes from the important work of Ufologist Raymond
Fowler, The Watchers II. Fowler, a grandmaster of ufology,
has written a number of books describing the abductions of Betty
Andreasson Luca and Bob Luca. The accounts of her abductions were
gathered through the use of hypnotic regression. In his book, The
Watchers II, Fowler gives evidence that many (not all) UFO
abductions actually take place in an out-of-body state; a point also
supported by researcher Richard L. Thompson.53,54
Therefore, the person is not physically abducted, but their
consciousness is abducted. This means that the experience may take
place in another dimension, not the material realm. The experience I
am about to quote happened while Betty was in an out-of-body state.
She is aboard the UFO with a tall Elder, who is a human like
personage who works with, and controls, the typical gray aliens.55
He's somewhat akin to a supervisor; he's the man in charge. While
aboard the UFO, he tells Betty that he's taking her to see "the
One." Afterwards, the craft comes to a stop and the door opens
to reveal a place that is very bright. I pick up the experience as
she goes into the light accompanied by the Elder and a grey alien:
"Oh,
we're running toward the light now. Oh-h-h! [breathless] I can see .
. . the Elder is changing to a white light being and . . . the grey
is changing into a light blue one [blows out air] as we're running
closer to the light. Oh, I'm starting to change into a
golden-colored light! Oh, this is beautiful! Oh-h-h. [long sigh,
exhales, sighs again] Oh, this is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Oh, there is such love. [Betty is in pure unadulterated ecstasy.]
Oh, there is such peace. [long sigh] I'm just engulfed in light and
blending into that light. Oh! [. . .] It is just fantastically
beautiful. It's just so much love, so much peace and so wonderful.
It's so wonderful. Oh, it's just wonderful. Oh. It is. It is. It is.
[. . .] Oh, this is everything, everything, everything."56
As this experience is being recalled under
hypnosis, you see her reactions as she is recounting the experience
in brackets. Again, we see a very similar experience, just described
in different terms. She is engulfed by the light and blends into it
(becomes as one with it), it is full of love and peace, and it is
everything (containing all knowledge).
The more sources you have pointing to the same
conclusion makes that conclusion much stronger than if the knowledge
only comes from a single source. We've just examined the knowledge
NDEer's come back with of a Source of intelligent consciousness and
a few of the other sources that are practically identical to the
accounts of this Source given by NDEer's.
However, the NDE gives us not only the
knowledge of consciousness, but a whole different way of viewing
life from a spiritual perspective. I intend to go through five
points of knowledge about life and reality that can be ascertained
by studying NDE accounts. For each of these points I will provide at
least two other sources that give us the same knowledge.
Multiple Sources - Same
Knowledge
Point 1:
The body is a shell
As said before, consciousness is light that
uses the brain as an interface to experience physical life. But
after we die, this light disconnects from the interface of the brain
and is freed from the body. Here is one NDEer's account of what
happened when he died:
"After
that breath I went black, everything was dark. I don't know how much
time had lapsed when I was out of my body. I didn't feel or remember
leaving my body but it was like I was just there, I was standing
over my body with my spirit/soul feet and ankles in my dead bodies
head, I was looking down at myself but didn't remember being hurt, I
had no idea I was dead or injured. I was now a translucent shadow
with hands, feet, a whole body but it was made of energy, power, and
strength. I looked at my right arm and made a fist. I looked at my
left arm and made a fist. I felt so strong and powerful. I was
energy."57
His body
of light/energy is no longer a part of the physical body. It is now
free to move about without any restrictions. Here is one more
account of an OBE during a NDE:
"I
went from lying on the gurney to floating in the air above the
doctors. I watched as they pulled out my intestines, carefully
laying them to the side of my body, and then they began racing
around (I presume in an attempt to revive me). During this, I began
rising, and all at once it seemed as though I knew everything there
was to know. It seemed as if all the mysteries of the world were
being revealed. I understood science, math, life! Simultaneously, I
could see people below me in other rooms; I saw my grandmother and
great-aunt crying outside the operating area. I saw other patients
being treated in other surgery rooms. I saw people outside the
hospital. I saw so much, and I continued to rise."58
In her out
of body state, her mind is fully functional as she is ascending
upwards toward the Source. At the same time she can observe many
events happening below. People in the out-of-body state can still
perceive, think, and feel, often in a much greater way than we are
accustomed to in human life. This points to the conclusion that the
human body is simply a vehicle of consciousness. Consciousness,
while in the body, experiences and directs the dense energy of the
body and brain. However, that consciousness in no way depends on the
body and brain for its existence. This knowledge of the body as a
shell is not just found in NDE reports, indeed it can be found in
UFO abduction literature, past-life regression literature, reports
of spiritual encounters with deceased loved ones, and in reports of
people who have induced out of body experiences outside of the
context of a near death event.
Past-life
regression is a widely used technique that is very valuable in
healing emotional or physical pains that don’t respond to
conventional therapy. It is a technique that uses hypnosis to tap
into people’s subconscious minds where the memories of this life
and past lives are held. Well-known in this regard is the work of
Psychiatrist Brian Weiss who has written many books on the subject.
In his first book on the subject, Many
Lives, Many Masters, he describes the many past lives of his
client Catherine. Based on his many regressions with Catherine he
remarks, “her experience
of death itself was so uniform, so similar, every time. A conscious
part of her would leave the body around the moment of death,
floating above and then being drawn to a wonderful, energizing
light.”59 Sound familiar? This is practically identical
to the reports from Near-Death Experiencers. Psychologist Michael
Newton, author of the books Journey
of Souls and Destiny of
Souls, also describes how patients who are hypnotically
regressed to a past life death experience will leave their body and
float above it. His accounts concur that the out-of-body experience
is followed by a pulling towards a great Light. One of his clients
reliving a death experience reports:
“Oh,
my god! I’m not really dead—am I? I mean, my body is dead—I
can see it below me—but I’m floating … I can look down and see
my body lying flat in the hospital bed. Everyone around me thinks
I’m dead, but I’m not. I want to shout, hey, I’m not really
dead! This is so incredible … the nurses are pulling a sheet over
my head … people I know are crying. I’m supposed to be dead, but
I’m still alive! It’s strange, because my body is absolutely
dead while I’m moving around it from above. I’m alive!”60
Another
patient of his who was killed in a past life from an arrow to the
throat describes being “ejected out the top of my head . . .
it’s as if I shed my skin … peeling a banana. I just lose my
body in one swoosh!” She describes the energy coming out of her
head as “Like a … pinpoint of light … radiating.” She
describes herself as weightless and her energy appears as a
transparent white. She too describes being pulled into a “bright
whiteness.”61
We see
from these accounts that whether it’s an OBE reported after a
Near-Death Experience or one reported by someone reliving their
death under hypnosis, the reports match up identically. They show
that consciousness can get by just fine without a body. The body is
simply the suit of armor consciousness wears to battle through the
world of physical reality. After the battle of life is over
consciousness drops the heavy armor, freeing itself to return to the
peace and comfort of Home in the Source.
Now, we
will look at examples compiled by Ufologist Raymond Fowler of
OBE’s that occur during the initial stages of what is known as an
alien abduction. As mentioned before, Fowler made a detailed study
of Betty and Bob Luca's abductions, the details of which were
uncovered via hypnotic regression. In his book, The Watchers, Fowler writes about a shared abduction that the two
had together. The details uncovered about this incident under
hypnosis show clear evidence that the abduction was not a physical
one, but one in which they were taken out of their bodies and
brought aboard the UFO in a non-physical state. Here is Betty's
account of what happened:
"Bob
and I were upstairs in our bedroom. And I was in the bathroom
brushing my teeth. And he was over by the bed. And he was putting on
his socks or taking them off. He was down on the floor kneeling. And
there came a loud, [pause] dull whirring sound over the rooftop over
the bedroom. Very, very loud. And I turned to look at Bob and he
glanced up at me and suddenly, [pause] he came out of his body so
that there were two of him! And he rushed toward me and toward the
bathroom and stopped abruptly at the door."62
Later, she
describes "I see myself coming
out of myself too! And I'm reaching out to Bob. I'm holding
on[to] him tightly.”63 As she is taken up in her OBE
state she describes that her whole body becomes light and then she
enters a room where there are a number of other human forms composed
of light.64
Interestingly,
the whirring sound experienced by Betty before her abduction is a
common occurrence for out-of-body explorers. Out-of-body explorer
William Buhlman, in his book The
Secret of the Soul, describes many out-of-body experiences that
he has collected from ordinary people all over the world. Often
energy sensations of some sort precede the OBE. One woman from
Rochester, New York reported that:
"I would feel a whirring sensation in my head. Next I
would see my body and the bed from above.”65 Another
respondent reports that: "I would hear a buzzing noise--this is
the only way I can describe it. Then it felt like an electrical line
with electricity running up and down my body. I could feel myself
lifting out ...”66 Now, compare the last OBE report to
this abduction report which is included in John Mack's book Passport
to the Cosmos:
"She
was awakened by a humming sound that seemed to surround the house
and a flash of bright blue light [...] she could not move, and her
whole body began to vibrate. She recalled seeing two small thin
beings with huge heads, large eyes, and long arms and legs, one of
whom was holding a stick or rod that he pressed on the back of her
ear. "They're very skinny," she remembered, and "they
look like they're made of light. But then underneath there's some
physicalness to them like bones. They're not bones though."
Then the light seemed to surround her. One of the beings made strong
eye contact with her ("his eyes are on my eyes") and this
seemed somehow to get her up out of the bed."67
She then
reports floating through her glass window and high over the trees
outside of her house. This high level of energy and associated
whirring noise, whether it occurs seemingly spontaneously as in OBE
experiences or is facilitated by an intelligent being, seems to play
a key role in separating ones consciousness from the body.
All of
these reports suggest that consciousness can be released from the
physical body like the shedding of armor or peeling a banana. The
body is an outfit that we inhabit, but it is only one vehicle of
conscious expression. In the words of out-of-body explorer and
researcher William Buhlman,
"We
possess and function with multiple energy bodies. Each energy body
functions as a vehicle of soul in the various dimensions of the
universe. Each subtle energy body acts as an essential transformer
and conduit of consciousness. The high frequency energy of soul is
progressively stepped down through the various energy bodies so that
soul can interact in the dense outer world of matter"68
The
vibratory and electrical sensations reported just before OBE's is
the transitioning of consciousness from a lower energy body (the
physical) to a higher frequency body of light. To conclude, the
physical body/brain is a conduit of consciousness, allowing
consciousness to express itself and experience in physical form.
However, this body is only a shell or container of consciousness.
Consciousness in no way depends on this body to function.
Consciousness is released from the body after death and also may be
released while still alive.
Convergence number 2:
Everyone has a purpose they must fulfill
before death.
Evidence
from NDE accounts, past-life regression, and LSD Psychotherapy also
suggests that the physical world is like a training ground for our
souls. A general life plan is written for us in the spiritual world
of events and circumstances that we will experience in our physical
lives. Starting with an NDE account, we will learn that our
circumstances in life are chosen in advance based on what we need to
learn as souls. This woman describes the knowledge she was given
about her life during her NDE:
“I
knew I got this body because my mother and father had this little
body and all their close spirits were used up. It was going to
be a very weak, sick female body, but it was what I needed to
experience what I (the spirit) needed in order to grow spiritually.
It was like taking a college class that you hated, (like calculus)
but you knew you had to get a passing grade in it in order to
graduate. So I reluctantly agreed to take this body that
belonged to a family I had never been with before. I also knew
that I had been in a previous body that was a huge mean man who
abused women and children. I needed to experience what it felt
like to be a small, sickly woman. I understood why the body
was dyslexic. Now that was a real challenge back in the 40-50s
when you were humiliated and punished because you didn't know right
from left.”69
This
account suggests many things, including the fact that we choose our
families and the circumstances of our life in order to learn as
souls. As a large man who abused women and children in a past life,
her lesson in this life is to learn what it’s like to be a weak
sickly woman who is abused. Psychologist Michael Newton, in his book
Journey of Souls, also
writes that souls choose their bodies before they're born in order
to learn the lessons they need to learn.70 His knowledge
of this process stems from hypnotically regressing people to past
lives as well as in-between lives. In one of his cases a woman
remembered a past life in New England in the 1800's. At the age of
six in that life she had fallen out of a horse-drawn carriage and
subsequently run over by one of its wheels. The wheel crushed the
bones of her legs just above the knees leaving her unable to stand
or walk again for the rest of that life.71 Upon inquiry
it was found that this incident had been planned in the spirit world
before she was ever born. The reason she chose to become crippled
was to gain intellectual concentration. In her own words,
"being unable to walk made me read and study more. I developed
my mind ... and listened to my mind. I learned to communicate well
and to write with skill because I wasn't distracted. I was always in
bed.”72 She also comments on why she chose the family
she was born into, saying that she "picked a family in a
well-established, settled part of America.”73 The many
libraries in the place she chose along with the loving care of her
parents allowed her to devote herself to scholarship. So again, we
get the impression that our lives and life circumstances are planned
and there is a purpose for them.
Psychiatrist
and consciousness explorer Stanislav Grof also relates a personal
story in his book, When the
Impossible Happens, about the purpose he found behind one of his
relationships. After immigrating from Czechoslovakia to the United
States and establishing his professional life at Spring Grove state
hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, it was time for him to meet a mate.
After many unsuccessful attempts he finally met Monica, who he had
an instant deep attraction for and connection to. He describes how
he fell in love with her quickly and they developed a passionate and
unusually stormy relationship. Furthermore, he states:
"Monica's
brother Wolfgang hated me from the very first time we had met. He
and Monica had an unusually intense relationship that seemed to have
distinct incestuous features. Wolfgang was violently opposed to my
relationship with Monica and treated me like a rival.”74
During
this time in history LSD was being tested for its psychotherapeutic
potential. Grof, having done extensive research in this area and
realizing the powerful psychological agent that LSD is, decided to
volunteer for a high-dose LSD session at the hospital he worked at.
At that time, it was open to professionals to have these sessions
for training purposes. During the session it was his intention to
unravel the complex dynamic that was going on in his relationship
with Monica. As the session progressed, he found himself in a past
life as the son of an aristocratic Egyptian family. While walking in
a hall of an ancient Egyptian palace, his brother in that lifetime
approached him. Grof relates:
"As
the figure came closer, I recognized that it was Wolfgang. He
stopped about ten feet from me and looked at me with immense hatred.
I realized that in this Egyptian incarnation Wolfgang, Monica, and I
were siblings. I was the firstborn and, as such, I had married
Monica and received many other privileges that came with that
status. Wolfgang felt cheated and experienced agonizing jealousy and
strong hatred toward me. I saw clearly that this was the basis of a
destructive karmic pattern that then repeated itself in many
variations throughout ages."75
This
explains the instant connection and deep love he felt for Monica
shortly after they met in his current lifetime, as he was married to
her in the Egyptian lifetime. It also explains the “distinct
incestuous features” of Monica’s relationship to Wolfgang in
this lifetime, as he had been her sibling before and had desired to
marry her. Finally, it explains Wolfgang’s instant hatred for Grof
in the current lifetime, as Grof’s relationship with Monica
stirred up the unconscious memory of his hatred for Grof in the
Egyptian lifetime for marrying Monica. It’s just one big giant
puzzle to which the past is the key to unlocking. We clearly see
that Grof’s current life experiences are in no way accidental;
there is a purpose and reason for them.
While
experiencing the intense hatred coming from the past life figure of
Wolfgang, he decided to try and dissipate this hatred somehow. He
telepathically communicated to Wolfgang that he had taken a powerful
mind altering drug which allowed him to time travel and that he
would like to do anything possible to dissipate this hatred Wolfgang
had for him. He then stretched out his arms in an open position and
telepathically relayed the message:
"Here I am, this is all I have! Please, do anything you
need to do to liberate us from this bondage, to set both of us
free!"76 Next, Wolfgang accepted his offer and Grof
experienced Wolfgang's hatred in the form of two intense rays of
energy which burned his body and caused him great pain. Finally
after some time the rays of energy lost their power and faded away.
Now,
skeptics might chalk something like this up to a psychological
fantasy imagined by Grof. However, an intriguing synchronicity
suggests otherwise. Shortly after his LSD session, Grof received a
phone call from Wolfgang who wanted to discuss a problem he was
having in a relationship with a woman. Grof writes:
"He
thought about discussing the issue with me, but had rejected the
idea because of his strong negative feelings toward me. But then his
attitude toward me suddenly changed radically. His hatred dissolved
as if by magic, and he decided to call me and seek help. When I
asked him when this had happened, I found out that it exactly
coincided with the time when I had completed the reliving of the
Egyptian sequence."77
It's one
thing for Grof alone to experience psychologically the resolution of
this ancient karmic pattern, but quite another for another player in
the karmic pattern, who had no knowledge of what Grof was doing at
the time, to experience the resolution of the same karmic pattern at
the exact same time that Grof did. This suggests that something much
deeper was going on beyond the confines of Grof's own psyche. It
also suggests that Grof was indeed going back to the source of the
karmic pattern that was playing itself out yet again in this life.
We can see
from the previous account that Grof's relationship with Monica and
Wolfgang was no accident. It was meant to happen, as it was part of
a karmic pattern that had been repeating itself since his days in
ancient Egypt. The plan for Grof's life included this relationship.
Somehow this hatred between Grof and Wolfgang needed to be
dispelled. Possibly this resolution could have occurred through
later interactions in this life. However, Grof did it via an
alternate route. In an altered state of consciousness, where his
psyche had access to the information of his past lives, he went back
to the source of the hatred between him and Wolfgang.
Convergence number 3:
Life is about Spiritual Growth
Many times
we get caught up in Karmic complexes, like the one Stanislav Grof
found himself in. The key to life is not the experiences that you
have, but the choices you make and how you deal with those
circumstances. Psychiatrist
Brian Weiss makes this point clear in his book Same
Soul, Many Bodies.
"True,
some soul chose to come back as Saddam Hussein, another as Osama bin
Laden. I believe they came back to maximize their learning
opportunities, the same as you and me. They did not choose to come
back initially to do harm, to cause violence and blow up other
people and become terrorists. They came back to resist that urge,
probably because they had succumbed to it in previous lifetimes.
They came back for a kind of field test in this school we live in
and they failed miserably.
This
is all speculation, of course, but I believe their souls came back
to inhabit them in an effort to find alternatives to violence,
prejudice, and hatred. (The abusive parent's soul comes back for the
same reason.) They amassed money and power, and faced the choice of
violence or compassion, prejudice or teaching, hatred or love. This
time we know their decision. They will have to come back again, face
the consequences of their actions, face the choices again, until
they are able to move forward."78
Once we
master the lessons, such as learning to show compassion even in the
face of violence, then we advance spiritually. Our souls continue to
reincarnate to learn these lessons, as one lifetime is not enough to
learn them all. The lessons themselves are endless ranging from
learning courage, bravery, standing up for what you believe in,
compassion, forgiveness to everything in between. Each lifetime
gives us the opportunities we need in order to learn our lessons and
advance spiritually. The lessons you've mastered continue to
influence you in future lives, while you work on other lessons.
A specific
example of learning a lesson comes from the book, Same
Soul, Many Bodies. Psychiatrist Brian Weiss explores not only
the past lives, but also possible future lives, of his patients. One
patient, named Chitra needed to learn to balance compassion
and love, which must be received as well as given. She reviews a
number of lives where she’s either giving love and compassion
without really receiving much back, being on the receiving end
without having to give much, or where she strikes a balance between
the two. These are future lives which depend on her choices in this
life. In this life, forced to care for her Hindu mother, she was
being suffocated by having to give up her own goals and happiness to
constantly care for her aging mother. Chitra had to learn not to
sacrifice her goals because of cultural values, individual
circumstances, or guilt. As a result of her regressions, “she was
able to express her anger and resentment toward her mother and her
siblings for trapping her in the caregiver role—despite the
cultural taboos prohibiting such rebellion—and by so doing freed
herself.”79 As Brian Weiss concludes:
"If
Chitra continued stuck in her present family pattern, then she might
have to experience a future as the paralysis victim forced to
receive love [being on the receiving end]. If she just gave up,
abruptly ending her relationship with her mother, abandoning her
without a reasonable compromise, she might have had to come back as
the mother of the seriously impaired child [having to give lots of
love but receive little]. Because that is how it works: We
face similar situations again and again as we seek to learn the
proper balance between giving and receiving, between sacrifice and
compassion for ourselves--until we achieve the state of
harmony"80
Once
learning is achieved, we may go on to learn other lessons. Another
good example of a lesson that needs to be learned comes from the
fascinating Near-Death Experience of Amy C. While in the spiritual
world, she meets a guide/teacher who has mastered the lesson of
Humility. He is with a group of people who had "casual
disregard for life" or who took "flagrant and selfish
risks" that interfered with the lessons they had to learn and
eventually led to their demise. The Guide/Teacher is there to teach
them the valuable lesson of humility in the spiritual world before
they go back to be tested while in another body on earth. Quoting
from Amy's experience:
"The
teacher continued to offer more information. He explained how
in aborting their own lives, these people would have a rest period,
but that learning what they needed to learn would be difficult.
I came to understand that as much as they were taught and infused
with good and helpful information there, and even if they agreed
"wholeheartedly" with what was being taught.. or what they
needed to learn, that learning without a body is like learning to
get over an addiction to drugs with no opportunity to do the drugs!
Or like learning to love one's own enemy without having enemies to
deal with. He explained how he needed to teach this group of
people how vital it is to let go of themselves. How to lose
their obsession with themselves. How they will be stagnant in
all progress if they cannot unchain themselves from their own
self-obsessions. He had to teach them the importance of
humility. And yet, he shook his head, smiling slightly, and he
implied that there was still very little he could help them with,
without their bodies. His hope was to instill more of a
passion for what he had to teach, strong enough that it would leave
a seed of Light that might stay with them through their
sojourns."81
After being taught the lesson in Humility by the Master, these souls will
then go into new bodies to test their learning in specific
situations on Earth. The fact that life is about learning is also
found in the annals of UFO research. Under hypnosis Bob Luca
uncovered a conversation between him and a "white-robed
Elder" during a UFO abduction. He comes to understand that:
"Life
is wonderfully fair. Those of us in this plane just don't understand
it. When you see a small child that becomes ill and dies, people
weep, they cry, they grieve. They grieve for themselves. The child
does not need to be here any longer. The child has already advanced,
much as you would skip a grade in school. It is not a bad thing.
People that are sick or injured . . . their faith is being tested.
The reactions are recorded. This determines whether or not they need
more teaching. They need to advance spiritually. Can they go to the
next step? Is there more they must learn?"82
Convergence number 4:
The Problem of Evil
This
inevitably brings up the question of Evil. Why do some people live
in slums while others live as kings? Why do some people grow up in
loving families, while others suffer at the hands of abusive
parents? As we have already learned, the basic experiential complex
of our lives is predetermined to some extent in the spiritual world
before we're born. The circumstances that we're born into are the
circumstances that are conducive to our learning needs. But
disregarding all of that, at the most basic level Evil is a
necessary precondition for Good. As we live in a world of polarity,
without evil good could not exist. I will discuss the insights into
the operations of evil on the physical plane as found in Near-Death
Experiences, Consciousness research, and UFO experiences.
Consciousness
researcher Stanislav Grof does an excellent job at explaining why
there is evil in the world in his magnum opus The
Cosmic Game. He explains that "the existence of the shadow
side of creation enhances its light aspect by providing contrast and
gives extraordinary richness and depth to the universal drama.”83
This is a very telling and accurate statement by Grof. People just
don't understand what the world would be like without the existence
of evil. In one sense, it seems great if we could instantly gratify
any and every desire we had. But if you really think about it, would
there really be any desires at all without evil? We desire food
because we're hungry, sex because we haven't had it in awhile, drink
because we're thirsty. But without hunger, sexual desire, or thirst
there would be no need or desire to fulfill. And further think about
being able to immediately satisfy any desire. At first it would be
great, but after awhile you would see that it is a very boring way
of existence.
Grof
further explains how the eradication of evil would at the same time
eradicate the good in life. In his own words:
"Together
with the [elimination of] diseases we eliminate the entire history
of medicine--medical research and the knowledge it imparts, the
discovery of the causes of dangerous illnesses, as well as
miraculous cures for them, such as vitamins, antibiotics, and
hormones. There are no more miracles of modern medicine--life-saving
operations, organ transplants, and genetic engineering. We lose all
the great pioneers of science, like Virchow, Semmelweiss, and
Pasteur, the heroes who dedicated their entire lives to a passionate
search for answers to medical problems. There is also no need for
the love and compassion of all those who take care of ailing people,
from physicians and nurses to a variety of good Samaritans. We lose
Mother Teresa together with the reason to award her a Nobel
Prize."84
You easily
see that the existence of evil is actually a very valuable part of
creation, for without it there would be no need for creation. We
could just all rest in a state of bliss as perfect Cosmic
Consciousness. To put it simply, if life is to be about learning and
growing spiritually, then evil is necessary. How could the
spiritually advanced be tested without evil? How could we learn
without any evil? These sentiments are clearly expressed in the
writings of UFO researcher Raymond Fowler. While under hypnotic
trance, Bob Luca recounts the following message:
"Without
those who are detrimental to society, those who are advanced cannot
be tested. Hussein serves a necessary purpose. Evil serves a
necessary purpose. Without all evil to overcome, the righteous could
not advance and triumph. It's all...part of the system--I guess you
could say--the order of things, just as the planet must rotate about
the sun. There must be a degree of evil. There must be sorrow. There
must be suffering, because without these things, there is no
advancement and nothing to overcome."85
Without
evil there is no growth and no advancement. In retrospect, there
couldn't even be good without evil. For, to define something you
must have something to define it against. I can define what a table
is because I can separate it from other things. But if there were no
other things, then all would be table without definition. Evil is
just part of the plan, part of creation. There's nothing to worry
about because in the end everything serves a higher purpose and all
is Good. As one Near-Death Experiencer explains:
"I
remember I knew that everything, everywhere in the universe was OK,
that the plan was perfect. That whatever was happening--the wars,
famine, whatever--was OK. Everything was perfect. Somehow it was all
part of the perfection, that we didn't have to be concerned about it
at all. And the whole time I was in this state, it seemed infinite.
It was timeless. I was just an infinite being in perfection. And
love and safety and security and knowing that nothing could happen
to you and you're home forever. That you're safe forever. And that
everybody else was."86
In
the Light, everything becomes united in the perfect Good. While in
physical reality we constantly judge things as either good, bad, or
neutral. We are stuck in this sense of duality. But all is just
experience and our judgments of good and bad mean little in the end.
We are here to experience, learn, and grow. For that to be possible
we need the "good" and the "bad".
Convergence number 5:
We exist in a multi-dimensional universe
Finally,
a vast body of knowledge from UFO research, NDE research, and
consciousness research suggests that there are multiple dimensions
that can be consciously experienced. We're all familiar with the
material dimension that we experience on a daily basis. This is the
dimension we know best, and some naively conclude it's all there is.
But we should not be so naive to think that the reality our brains
are trained to reconstruct inside of our skulls is the only reality
that exists.
In
fact, we all experience an alternate dimension when we sleep at
night. During our dreams we have fantastic adventures. We experience
a whole other world complete in and of itself. We interact with
people and do all sorts of things in our dreams. And while the dream
is going on, it is our reality. It is only when we awake that we
realize “it was all just a dream.” Our minds, it seems, are
capable of constructing a whole different reality inside our skulls
while we are asleep. Our dreams for the most part are a subjective
reality, constructed and existing only in our minds. However, other
dimensions could well be freestanding dimensions created by Source
Consciousness, or the combined consciousness of a number of beings.
These dimensions would be places your consciousness could connect to
and experience.
Near-Death
Experiencers often enter just such a dimension after death. There
are a great number of accounts describing heavenly paradises,
typically with green grass, crystal clear water, and rolling hills.
One Near-Death Experiencer describes the following:
".
. .then I noticed this rotating hole in the wall like a tunnel with
the most beautiful blue and whitest light that offered so much peace
that I followed the white light down the blue crystal tunnel then I
entered into the most peaceful green valley surrounded by trees on
both sides with the morning dew and fog still present the vegetation
was so lush and the air was of a[n] angelic almost dreamy like
pleasure to breath it was effortless and then my grandfather met me
and I was so happy to see him he had already died, but he was as
real [as] when he was alive. I am still in shock today but it is and
still is wonderful to dream and remember the experience. My
grandfather was wearing a long white rob that almost glowed or was
illuminated with the whitest white you could believe . . ."87
He emerged from the tunnel into a whole new world. It has many
characteristics of our physical world, but chances are that it is
not located in the physical universe we know of, but in another
dimension altogether. It exists on another plane that your
consciousness can travel to, but not your physical body. Another
NDEer, David Oakford, even describes visiting a spirit city during
his NDE. There he saw spirits working and playing as if on Earth.88
Conversely, sometimes people experience hellish realms, such as the
following NDE:
"Soon
I came to the entrance of a tunnel in the black. The tunnel seemed
to be constructed of gray cloudlike material and wound far away and
up to the right. Then it branched and I couldn't see where it
led. From the branching on the right extended a yellow white light
that helped to softly illuminate the tunnel. I glanced down at
myself and noticed that my body was gone. It had been replaced by a
blue white light sort of equilimbed cross/star that pulsed. This
seemed" natural and pleasant to me at the time. It was very
freeing to no longer be attached to a weighty form.
Looking
back into the tunnel, I noticed there were doorways in both sides of
the structure. A few other cross/stars were wandering about in the
tunnel, some blue like myself, some amber colored. Two other blue
cross/stars appeared beside me and gently propelled me into the
tunnel. I floated along and up observing that some
"door-ways" were open while others seemed to have been
shut. The first doorway I peered into resembled a classic Hell.
There was the sound of shrieking and agonizing screams. Naked human
beings were strewn about a blasted landscape with pools of bubbling
excrement and jagged boulders. Devils and other animals were
torturing people in all imaginable ways; and people were also
torturing each other. As I neared the doorway to this sinister
scene, I felt a sucking sensation drawing me in like a whirlpool,
and I found myself "flying" above the miserable landscape.
The smell was putrid and the heat was almost unbearable but a part
of me was fascinated by the seemingly infinite varieties of pain and
anguish that was being inflicted on the inhabitants of this realm.
Most of me wanted to leave so I had no difficulty and my feeling was
that anyone could leave if they wished. I felt that no one or
nothing had put those people in captivity except their belief in the
agony they continued to suffer. I "flew" back to the
doorway which was clearly visible from everywhere in the
"Hell" I left with nothing but joy, but I still had a
sense of myself as apart from that joy. The next doorway in the
tunnel wasn't much better. As far as the eye could see people walked
on barren yellow ground with their heads down, completely engrossed
in their own depressed self- pitying thoughts, unaware that anyone
else was around them. A great feeling of loneliness and isolation
emanated from the scene, and I shied away from getting too close,
although no sucking sensation was felt near this opening in the
cloud tunnel."89
Sarah also experiences a tunnel, this time with
doorways or passages leading to different realms. These are other
dimensions that seem to exist independently; they are freestanding.
Different souls, no doubt, are attracted by their very nature to
experience different dimensions whether hellish or heavenly. All
dimensions are essentially conscious creations. Even your very
thoughts are a sort of dimension, created by your own consciousness.
But other
dimensions are often
a
collective effort; the creation of many units of consciousness. As
out-of-body explorer William Buhlman explains, "the creative
energies of consciousness create the various dimensions. Each
dimension is an expression and extension of consciousness." He
also says, "there are countless nonphysical realities or
heavens. Many exist as consensus realities created by the thoughts
of large numbers of
beings.”90
Indeed, the specific "reality" that you
experience immediately after death can take many forms. To show the
variety of dimensions in the afterlife, I will include here one more
NDE account from Doctor Jeffrey Long's book Evidence
of the Afterlife. This NDEer also saw doorways in the tunnel
which he felt he could go through if he wanted. However he kept his
attention on the Light. He thought about his Grandma who had
previously died and then found himself in the Light. After entering
the light, he describes the following encounter with his Grandma:
"She
invited me to sit and have coffee like we used to all the time at
her house. Her table was there, the chairs. She looked like she did
when she was in her thirties. She had on a purple dress, like a nice
one she had with flowers on it, except that the flowers seemed to
glow a fluorescent yellow. Then I noticed that there was a
fluorescent light that emanated from the top of the room [. . .] I
then kind of got a little panicky 'cause I noticed that there was no
light source; it was just there. That's when she touched my hand,
[and] I noticed that I looked down and could see my hand also. It
was there, but it looked white, almost fluorescent [. . .] And she
said, let's drink the coffee. I did. But I notice[d] that it was not
hot and had no taste. It was lukewarm, but yet there was steam
coming from it, like it was hot but was not. It's like when you are
sick and there's no taste [. . .] And then I noticed that the room
was domelike, that in one section, the left side of that domed room,
was like a curtain, and I saw my grandfather on my mom's side peek
through, and I [saw] another lady, heavyset, short, with a long
black ponytail. I wanted to say something, and that is when my
grandmother told me, "You have to go; you can't stay here; it's
not your time.""91
The tables, chairs, and coffee all resemble things
like they were on
the physical plane on Earth. However, these things are simply
conscious creations in the afterlife. In the afterlife, where things are more energetic and free-flowing,
your thoughts can be projected to create different realities. This
is evident in the fact that many of the deceased individuals
encountered during an NDE have an appearance of themselves as they
were in their prime, not just before they died. This is because they
choose what image to project in the afterlife. Therefore, the most
likely explanation for this room is that it is a conscious creation
(projection) of his Grandma and maybe some other individuals who
also desire this kind of setting. It could be meant to make the
NDEer comfortable.
However, we don't have to die to gain access to
other dimensions. An alteration of brain chemistry may also do the
trick of releasing our consciousness to experience other realms.
Now, many people because of their conditioning that the material
realm is all there is will suggest that if it's a chemical causing
the experience, then it's not real, just a hallucination. However, a
quick study of the literature on psychedelic substances will show
that the experiences people have while on these substances are not
always hallucinations. I will give one example, written about in When
the Impossible Happens by grandmaster
of consciousness research Stanislav
Grof. It involves a patient named Richard undergoing LSD treatment
for psychological problems. In one of his sessions, he enters
another dimension:
"He
suddenly found himself in a space that had an eerie luminescence and
was filled with discarnate beings who were trying to communicate
with him [. . .] One of the discarnate beings implored Richard to
connect with the being's parents in Kromeriz, a city in Moravia, and
let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was
well taken care of. The message included the couple's name and
telephone number; this was information that was unknown to both
Richard and me and had no relevance to either of us. [. . .] After
the session, I decided to do what certainly would have made me the
target of my colleagues' jokes had they found out. I went to the
telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak
with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of
the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a
broken voice: "Our son is not with us anymore; he passed
away; we lost him three weeks ago.""92
The simplest explanation for the above experience
is that his consciousness gained access to another dimension where a
discarnate being conveyed specific information to him. Hallucination
is not even a possible explanation in this case because the
information is both specific, accurate, and previously unknown to
the recipient. But how can a chemical like LSD allow you to gain
access to other dimensions?
A new conception of how the brain works is of
course needed. And a predominate theory has emerged. Aldous Huxley
in his famous work The doors
of Perception says that the brain is like a reducing valve, only
allowing a measly trickle of reality to get through. Our brain,
then, is trained to only pick up information from the material realm
and relay that to consciousness.93 But, certain
substances such as LSD may alter the brain's receiving capacity so
that information from other realms is allowed through to
consciousness. Moreover, these substances may fundamentally change the
reality that is picked up by the brain so that one loses touch
altogether with the physical world and experiences only another
dimension.
Psychiatrist Rick Strassman takes a similar view
in his book DMT: The Spirit
Molecule. In his view, the brain is like a TV set tuned into
"Channel Normal." Channel Normal would be equivalent to
everyday material reality. However, the brain is capable of tuning
into other "channels" or dimensions that always and
continuously exist, but that we are usually unaware of.94
The reason for Strassman's startling conclusion is because of the
experiences of people who were injected with Di-methyl-tryptamine (DMT)
in a controlled study conducted by Strassman at the University of
New Mexico. DMT, like LSD, is a psychedelic substance which can
allow one to access other dimensions of reality.
One of his subjects, Sara, reported going to a
void of darkness and meeting beings there who were glad to see her
and wanted to learn more about physical bodies. Then after coming
down from that "trip" she took another dose where she was
again blasted off into never never land and made contact with the
very same beings again. She says, "They knew I was coming back
and they were ready for me. They told me there were many things they
could share with us when we learn how to make more extended contact.
Again, they wanted something from me, not just physical information.
They were interested in emotions and feelings.”95
Other times, the entities on the other side of the veil wonder what
this newly arrived being is doing there.96 His subjects often found themselves in alien
environments, but some experienced environments that resembled
Earth. Intriguingly, the "volunteers not only saw these things,
but felt an unshakeable certainty that they actually were there.
Opening their eyes at any time superimposed this reality with their
now-manifest but previously invisible one.”97
Taken at face value this evidence is suggestive of
the reality of other realms of conscious experience. Considering the
fact that they communicated with beings who in some cases were
waiting for them to come back in another DMT session and the fact
that they continued experiencing this reality even with their eyes
open suggests that their brains were indeed picking up information
from another realm and transmitting it to consciousness, just as our
brains normally pick up information from the material realm and
transmit it to consciousness. Strassman comments that he repeatedly
thought: "This sounds
like nothing I've ever heard about in my therapy patients' dream
life. It is much more bizarre, well-remembered, and internally
consistent.”98
The UFO mystery also provides us with rich
evidence of other dimensions. Most intriguingly, UFO's seem to be
craft that can manifest in this dimension from another. It's a
reversal of how DMT or LSD takes us into other dimensions. Now, it's
beings and craft from other dimensions manifesting in our world. UFO
abductee Jim Sparks, in his book The
Keepers, describes a time when a UFO manifested over a beach he
was at.
"I
turned, and for some reason I knew exactly where to look. Right
there, hanging stationary in the sky in broad daylight was a
diamond-shaped ship. It looked as though the sky had partially
opened up to let it in because directly behind the ship was a streak
of bright white light with a hue of blue. It was beautiful, just
hanging there. [. . .] Then, in a flash, it disappeared."99
The craft had a bright white light behind it and
then disappeared in a flash, like it just winked out. This is not
just Sparks who reports these things. Another UFO reported by
Jacques Vallee in his book Confrontations
is said to have "remained in position for three minutes and
vanished on the spot, “as if someone had
turned off the light.""100 Again in his book Dimensions
there is a case where a doctor observed a UFO that sent a shaft of
light which lit up his front yard and shone right into his face.
Immediately afterwards, "a bang was heard and the disk went
away, leaving behind a whitish glow which was slowly blown away by
the wind."101 Likewise, the
apparitions at Fatima of the Virgin Mary follow the same pattern. Regarding
Fatima, Vallee
reports that on one occasion "a clap of thunder was heard,
followed by a bright flash. A small whitish cloud was forming around
the tree."102
This flash of light and the sudden appearance or
disappearance of a craft or ball of light suggests that these things
are popping into this dimension from somewhere else. It reminds one
of the sudden appearance and disappearance of electrons or other
minute "virtual" particles in the microscopic realm. We
also have other correlative evidence of this flash of light and a
sudden manifestation of a being from another realm. One such case
was reported by a police officer on the Coast to Coast radio program
hosted by George Noory. This officer found the dead body of a
deceased sexual predator after he failed to show up for work for
many days. At the time he found the body, he actually saw the ghost
of the man standing over his dead body. Then one night, the officer
woke up from something slapping him on the foot. He describes that
in a flash, another spirit came into the room and got between him
and the other spirit and he fell back asleep. The officer reports
that a psychic later told him that his grandfather was the spirit
who intervened between him and the other spirit of the deceased man.103
Describing the coming of this other spirit as "in a flash"
suggests a flash of light. And where would his Grandfather come
from, except from the dimension of the afterlife? It's time we
remove our naiveté that the material reality we see with our
physical eyes is the only reality and recognize that there are other
realms of conscious experience. Furthermore, crossover is possible.
One can access other dimensions while in a physical body and
conscious entities in other dimensions can manifest in ours. There
is ample evidence for this. It is only the mechanics of such
manifestation that are unknown. How do UFO's manifest in our world
from another? This is the mystery.
We can not leave this inquiry into dimensions alone without mentioning UFO
abductions. Although some abductions suggest an actual physical
taking of the individual, there are many instances where it seems
more likely that what was abducted was the individuals conscious
mind, not their physical self. A prime example of this is an event
in the life of Sequoyah Trueblood, as reported by Dr. John Mack in
his book Passport to the
Cosmos. One day while relaxing by the pool, Trueblood was
compelled without knowing why to go to the airport where he boarded
a plane to Oklahoma City. There, he contacted a friend who drove him
to the home of another friend in Norman, Oklahoma. Feeling a little
strange, Sequoyah asked to lie down and rest. After lying down,
"he saw a kind of vortex of swirling lights "like a
rainbow," into which he was sucked.”104 These
swirling visuals of intricate color are also described by many of
Strassman's volunteers who were injected with DMT. After going
beyond these visual displays his participants found themselves in
other strange worlds.105 After being sucked through the
color vortex,
"Sequoyah then found himself standing in a beautiful garden
surrounded by hedges. He was now wide awake, "no different than
me sitting right here with you now." In front of him was a
silvery saucer-shaped craft and a shimmering small silver-looking
being standing on steps that were coming down from the bottom of the
craft. The being looked grayish and had a large bald head with large
eyes, and Sequoyah sensed it was "androgynous," neither
male nor female. The being communicated telepathically that it was
from "another place" and had been sent to take him there
because "they" wanted to talk to him."106
He then boarded the craft and traveled to "a beautiful white city in
what he felt was another planet in another realm or universe.”107
While in this city he communicates with one of the persons there,
who are described as having fair skin, wearing white robes, and
having hair that glowed like sunlight. This figure tells him about
his mission in life to teach people "about the great peace and
love that fills all creation.”108 They relate to him
that the events of his life have been preparation for this task.
Finally, Sequoyah returns the same way he came, by boarding the
craft, traveling back to the garden scene, proceeding through the
vortex, and awakening on his friends bed. Sequoyah dismisses the
possibility of this being a hallucination because he had had drug
induced hallucinations before the experience, but they were more
fragmented and recognizable as a symptom of toxicity or withdrawal.
His account of what happened, however, was much more clear and
coherent. Could it have been a simple dream? This of course is
possible, but then we have the problem of his sudden impulse to
leave his house and travel to another state. This uncharacteristic
behavior suggests that something of a higher order is going on, like
a higher intelligence is influencing him. At face value a more
likely explanation is that his consciousness was sucked through the
vortex and taken to another dimension through the influence of some
higher intelligence. This would be to suggest that we do indeed live
in a multi-dimensional universe that is populated with other
intelligent conscious entities. Also, it would suggest that our
consciousness is capable of connecting to and experiencing these
other dimensions.
Another UFO abductee, Jim Sparks, also describes the dimensional nature of
his experiences. His abductions, as described in his book The
Keepers, would be preceded by "a low-pitched whirling
sound, which slowly got louder.”109 This would be
followed by "a tremendous rushing feeling" and
acceleration as if he were on a rollercoaster.110 Then
everything would stop, the whirling and acceleration, and he would
find himself in an alien environment. Then when he was finished
there, the whirling and acceleration would come again and he would
find himself back in bed.111 So, just as people
experience energetic sensations preceding an out-of-body experience,
we have the same phenomenon occurring in regards to UFO abductions.
Whatever is happening in the body as such moments must be tied to a
releasing of the consciousness of the person. Or at the very least
it is a reorientation of the conscious mind to "tune into"
and experience a different dimension.
To explore this idea further, it is useful to look at one abduction where
Sparks did his best to try and keep conscious awareness during the
abduction. Usually, he blacked out sometime after experiencing the
whirling sound and intense energy going on in his body. Then he
would wake up in an alien environment. But on one occasion, he
fights to keep his awareness through the whole experience and
reports the following:
"The
living room furniture started turning transparent. My television,
chairs, sofa, then the walls themselves started to fade away. I
discovered that I could turn my head to the right, left, up and
down. The whirling sound became so loud I almost blacked out. I
could feel the soft fibers of my carpet against my bare feet. I
could also feel my rear end sinking into the foam rubber sofa
cushion. Slowly my feet began to feel cold as though they were
dangling in the air. At the same time I could feel cold hard metal
under my butt. I looked down. my feet were dangling in the air as if
propped on a hospital table. Yet at the same time I could see my
feet firmly planted on my living room carpet. How could this be?
Then I glanced down at my lower torso. I could see and feel myself
sitting on a metal table, and I could see and feel myself still
propped on my sofa. Somehow, I could also feel the cushion of the
sofa at the same time that I could feel cold hard steel under my
rear end."112
One reality, that of his living room, is slowly fading away, while another
reality, that of sitting on a hard steel table, is slowly coming
into focus. He finds himself for a time able to see both realities
at the same time. However, later on the reality of his living room
fades to nothing and he is completely immersed in this new setting.
It's not as if his consciousness is necessarily going anywhere, but
that it's tuning into a new reality in a different dimension. If one
were to walk into Spark's home during this experience, they would
most likely find him sitting on his couch in some sort of coma or
sleep like state. His consciousness at the time being totally
immersed in this other reality, he would not be aware of you walking
in the door. However, if you shook him, his conscious awareness may
snap back to the material world, leaving the other world behind.
This is of course conjecture, but the question has been addressed in
the book The Watchers II by Raymond Fowler. Under hypnotic regression,
abductee Bob Luca is asked what would happen if someone came into
his home and jostled him while his consciousness was in this other
plane. His was asked if his consciousness would be returned to
"Channel Normal," or the material realm. He responded
affirmatively and added that "it would be done in an instant--a
flash of an eye.”113
Considering this rich bank of evidence, from NDE accounts of going to
heavenly or hellish realms, psychedelic trips to other worlds, UFO's
suddenly appearing and disappearing in the material realm, and
abductees claims that they are consciously transported to another
dimension during their experience, we need to consider the definite
possibility of the existence of other dimensions. Otherwise, what
explanation for these experiences are we left with? Hallucination is
an unlikely candidate when you consider that people sometimes come
back from these other realms with information that they could not
have previously known. Also, the accounts are coherent and not
fragmented. Dimensionality is the most likely explanation if we
eliminate the hallucination theory. If we consider reality like a
giant radio, then the material world is a specific narrow set of
frequencies, like one radio station of this giant radio. All about
us, other bands of frequencies are broadcasting other realities just
as real as this one. Our brain, which our consciousness interfaces
with, is trained to pick up only the frequencies of the material
world. However, whether chemically induced or guided by higher
intelligences, our brains may be re-tuned to pick up a different
range of frequencies, or bypassed altogether allowing our conscious
minds to freely escape from the body for a time and travel to other
dimensions. And if we can travel to other dimensions, then it's no
leap of imagination to think that beings in those other dimensions
can travel to ours, as UFO's seem to be doing.
Read more... Don't miss this
subject related article:
Dimensionality
A supreme intelligent consciousness underlies
reality. This consciousness manifests all of the energy in the
universe and provides the information necessary to create stars,
galaxies, planets, and life. In other words, it forms and directs
the matter of the universe. This explains the creation of DNA and
cellular structures which show clear signs of intelligence. It also
explains how the mind can control brain and bodily processes.
Near-Death Experiences provide clear-cut
evidence that after death, consciousness continues to exist.
Our individual consciousness is part of a larger
Consciousness and may experience union with this Source after death
or while alive. Experiential union with this source consciousness is
experienced in terms of love, light, and knowledge.
Accepting the underlying consciousness, or
intelligence, to the universe opens up a new paradigm. Not only is
consciousness fundamental and eternal, but life begins to resemble a
cosmic play in which every individual aspect of consciousness plays
a part. The human body/brain allow our aspects of consciousness to
experience the material dimension. As I have shown, however, the
body is only a shell. Consciousness can disconnect from the body.
Life, far from being a meaningless accident in
a far off corner of the universe, serves a purpose. Since our
individual aspect of consciousness is ultimately identical to the
Source, we have created the material universe to experience. A vast
body of knowledge from NDE's to LSD psychotherapy shows us that life
is about spiritual growth and everyone serves a purpose. And indeed
this makes sense in light of the new paradigm. Why would you create
a universe that served no purpose?
Because life is partly about spiritual growth
and learning, evil serves a necessary purpose in the universe.
Whether we like it or not, the sword of logic tells us that there
can be no good without evil. Without evil, there can be no learning,
no growth, no test.
What people need to learn is that there is
nothing to worry about. Our ultimate home is in complete love and
bliss, which we return to upon death. Even though evil exists on the
material realm, we exist as multi-dimensional conscious beings
capable of experiencing in many dimensions. We can connect with
other dimensions while alive or after "death." Conversely,
conscious entities from other dimensions may cross over into this
one. The material realm is simply a dimension of consciousness. It
is created by Consciousness and sustained by it. There are many more
creations of consciousness which may be experienced.
If nothing else, this new paradigm will help us
to expand our ideas about what's possible. The true power, though,
is that it empowers us. We, as co-creators of reality, have a duty
to accomplish in the universe. We are all here to serve a valuable
purpose. We need no longer fear death, for it is only a new
beginning. Instead, we may embrace life and ask the universe to
guide us on our journey. And all the while, we must know that no
matter what troubles we have in this life, after it's over we will
return to the Light.
1. Meyer, S. C. 2009. Signature
in the Cell. HarperCollins:
New York, pages 102-103.
2. Ibid., p. 99
3. Ibid., p. 211
4. Ibid., p. 211
5. Ibid., p. 212
6. Ibid., pp. 107-110
7. Ibid., p. 362. This is based on William Dembski's work on design
detection.
8. Ibid., p. 341
9. Dawkins, R. 2009. The
Greatest Show on Earth. Free Press:
New York, page 241.
10. Meyer, S. C., Ross, M., Nelson, P., and Chien, P. "The
Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang." In Darwinism,
Design, and Education. Ed. John Angus Campbell and Steven C.
Meyer, East Lancing, MI: Michigan
State University Press, 2004. Page 373. You can also find this
article online here: http://www.darwinismanddesign.com/excerpts.php
11. Behe, M. J. 2007. The
Edge of Evolution. Free Press:
New York, page 86.
12. Ibid., pp. 90-91
13. Ibid., p. 91
14. Ibid., p. 91
15. Ibid., p. 89
16. Lommel, P. V. 2010. Consciousness
Beyond Life: The Science
of the Near-Death Experience. HarperOne:
New
York, page 247.
17. Ibid., p. 171
18. Broome, K. (Director). (2002). The
Day I Died [TV Documentary] United Kingdom:
BBC.
19. Lommel, P. V. 2010. Consciousness
Beyond Life: The Science
of the Near-Death Experience. HarperOne:
New
York, page 172.
20. Ibid., p. 175
21. Hamilton, A. J. 2008. The
Scalpel and the Soul. Tarcher/Penguin:
New York, page 191.
22. Ibid., p. 195
23. Ibid., p. 195
24. Ibid., p. 200
25. Rosenblum, B., & Kuttner, F. 2006. Quantum
Enigma. Oxford University Press:
New York, pages 72-77.
26. Lommel, P. V. 2010. Consciousness
Beyond Life: The Science
of the Near-Death Experience. HarperOne:
New
York, page 245.
27. Ibid., pp. 266-267
28. Ibid., p. 265
29. Beauregard, M., & O'Leary, D. 2007.
The Spiritual Brain.
HarperOne: New York,
page 33.
30. Ibid., p. 128
31. Ibid., p. 130
32. Ibid., p. 132
33. Ibid., p. 135
34. Ibid., p. 71
35. Ibid., p. 70
36. Ibid., p. 71
37. Ibid., p. 74
38. Ibid., p. 75
39. Ibid., p. 142
40. Ibid., p. 143
41. http://www.nderf.org/
42. Neiman, D. (2010). The Near Death "Experience".
[Online Article]. Available from http://www.nderf.org/nde_general_info2.htm.
Also see: Brumblay, R. J. (2003). Hyperdimensional Perspectives in
Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences. Journal
of Near-Death Studies, 21(4), 214-215.
43. Long, J., & Perry, P. 2010. Evidence
of the Afterlife. HarperOne:
New York, pages 95-96.
44. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Analisa D's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/Analisa%20D's%20NDE.htm.
45. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Bill W's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/bill_w's_nde.htm.
46. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Roger M's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/roger_m's_nde.htm.
47. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Mary's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/mary's_NDE.htm.
48. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Daniel A's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/daniel_a_nde.htm.
49. Haisch, B. 2006. The God
Theory. Weiser: San
Francisco, page 29.
50. Rosenblum, B., & Kuttner, F. 2006. Quantum
Enigma. Oxford University Press:
New York, pages 76-77.
51. Grof, S. 2006. When the
Impossible Happens. Sounds True:
Boulder, pages 254-255.
52. Hamilton, R. 2009. Caduceus.
Apollo Publications: London,
pages 152-153.
53. Fowler, R. E. 1995. The
Watchers II. Wild Flower Press:
Newberg, pages 215-218.
54. Thompson, R. L. 1995. Alien
Identities. Govardhan Hill:
Alachua, pages 355-356.
55. Fowler, R. E. 1995. The
Watchers II. Wild Flower Press:
Newberg, pages 102-106.
56. Ibid., pp. 141-144.
57. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Paul G's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/paul_g_nde.htm.
58. Long, J., & Perry, P. 2010. Evidence
of the Afterlife. HarperOne:
New York, pages 185-186.
59. Weiss, B. L. 1988. Many
Lives, Many Masters. Fireside:
New York, page 53.
60. Newton, M. 1994. Journey
of Souls. Llewellyn: Woodbury,
page 7.
61. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
62. Fowler, R. 1990. The
Watchers. Bantam: New
York, page 154.
63. Ibid., p. 155
64. Ibid., p. 158
65. Buhlman, W. 2001. The
Secret of the Soul. HarperSanFrancisco:
New York, page 43.
66. Ibid., p. 33
67. Mack, J. E. 1999. Passport
to the Cosmos. Three Rivers Press:
New York, pages 73-74.
68. Buhlman, W. 2001. The
Secret of the Soul. HarperSanFrancisco:
New York, pages 250-251.
69. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Sylvia W's NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/sylvia_w's_nde.htm.
70. Newton, M. 1994. Journey
of Souls. Llewellyn: Woodbury,
page 221
71. Ibid., p. 226.
72. Ibid., p. 226.
73. Ibid., p. 227.
74. Grof, S. 2006. When the
Impossible Happens. Sounds True:
Boulder, page 143.
75. Ibid., p. 144.
76. Ibid., p. 144.
77. Ibid., p. 147.
78. Weiss, B. L. 2004. Same
Soul, Many Bodies. Fireside:
New York, page 15.
79. Ibid., pp. 89-90.
80. Ibid., pp. 90-91.
81. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Amy C NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/amy_c_nde_4720.htm.
82. Fowler, R. E. 1995. The
Watchers II. Wild Flower Press:
Newberg, page 344.
83. Grof, S. 1998. The Cosmic
Game. State University of New York Press:
Albany, page 114.
84. Ibid., p. 115.
85. Fowler, R. E. 1995. The
Watchers II. Wild Flower Press:
Newberg, page 345.
86. Ring, K. 1984. Heading
Toward Omega. Morrow: New
York, page 62.
87. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Frederick F NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/frederick_f_nde.htm.
88. Oakford, D. L. 2007. Journey
Through the World of Spirit. Reality Press:
Foresthill, pages 46-47.
89. Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Sarah’s NDE. Accessed on November 23, 2010. http://www.nderf.org/Sarah_nde.htm.
90. Buhlman, W. 2001. The
Secret of the Soul. HarperSanFrancisco:
New York, page 250.
91. Long, J., & Perry, P. 2010. Evidence
of the Afterlife. HarperOne:
New York, pages 96-97.
92. Grof, S. 2006. When the
Impossible Happens. Sounds True:
Boulder, pages 177-178.
93. Huxley, A. 2004. The Doors
of Perception & Heaven and Hell. Harper Perennial:
New York, page 23.
94. Strassman, R. 2001. DMT
The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press:
Rochester, page 315.
95. Ibid., p. 215.
96. Ibid., p. 199.
97. Ibid., p. 183.
98. Ibid., p. 314.
99. Sparks, J. 2008. The
Keepers. Wild Flower Press:
Columbus, page 158.
100. Vallee, J. 2008. Confrontations.
Anomalist: San
Antonio, page 89.
101. Vallee, J. 2008. Dimensions.
Anomalist: San
Antonio, page 175.
102. Ibid., p. 198.
103. Noory, G. (Host). (2010, April 16, Hour 2, 26:05-31:45). Coast
to Coast AM. Available from: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2010/04/16.
104. Mack, J. E. 1999. Passport
to the Cosmos. Three Rivers Press: New
York, page 188.
105. Strassman, R. 2001. DMT
The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press:
Rochester, pages 189, 213.
106. Mack, J. E. 1999. Passport
to the Cosmos. Three Rivers Press:
New York, page 188.
107. Ibid., p. 188.
108. Ibid., p. 189.
109. Sparks, J. 2008. The
Keepers. Wild Flower Press:
Columbus, page 17.
110. Ibid., p. 18.
111. Ibid., p. 22.
112. Ibid., p. 112.
113. Fowler, R. E. 1995. The
Watchers II. Wild Flower Press:
Newberg, page 342.
Copyright 2011 by Daniel Neiman
Author's website:
http://www.anomalousexperience.com/
All rights reserved.
Presented with permission.
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