Power Potpourri EHE Collection 

from Published Sources

"An American Indian woman … told me that her sister had been killed hundreds of miles away from the reservation by a hit-and-run driver. Another car stopped and the driver tried to help her. The dying woman told the stranger that he should make very, very sure to tell her mother that she was all right because she was with her father. She died after having shared that.

"The patient’s father had died one hour before this accident on the reservation, seven hundred miles away from the accident scene and certainly unbeknownst to his traveling daughter."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1995]

"One night in January I came home late from the hospital. It had been a very difficult day and I was only interested in sleep. I turned off my beeper and my telephone and told my wife that I didn’t want to be disturbed for any reason. Then I went to bed.

"As I fell asleep in the darkened room, my father appeared to me in a dream. He just stood there facing me. He spoke very clearly. ‘Melvin, call your answering service. I have something to tell you.’

"I awoke with a start and charged into the living room. ‘My dad just told me to call my answering service,’ I said to my wife. I made the call and was told that my mother had been trying to reach me with an urgent message. It was to tell me that my father had died."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse [and Paul Perry, 1994] retelling a personal incident that convinced him of the continuance of "life after life"

"In October 1979, my husband and two-year-old son Justin and I were living in Cheshire in the north of England, and were within six weeks of returning to Australia. My grandfather who lived eighteen miles from us in Salford, Manchester, had cancer, and although very ill was not expected to die.

"On October 18 at 9:30 a.m. my son was downstairs playing, when I heard him talking to someone. A minute or two later I heard him cry, ‘But I want to, I want to.’ He came into the kitchen and got a shopping bag, and put into it his cup, plate, and teddy bear. I asked him if he was leaving home, and this is what he told me: ‘Poppa (my grandfather) says he has to go now. He says he is good now. I be a good boy for Mama. I want to go with Poppa, but he won’t take me. I got to stay with Mama.’

"At 9:40 a.m. I had a telephone call from my Uncle Bill, who told me that Poppa had died ten minutes before, at 9:30 a.m. Justin stuck to his story and repeated it to my husband when he came home from work.

"The following day my next-door neighbor told me she had been coming in to see me about something, but when she realized I had a visitor she went back home. I asked her what made her think I had a visitor; she said she’d heard Justin talking to a man in our hall. She said she had come in about 9:30 a.m.

"When we explained to Justin that Poppa wouldn’t be at home, that he had gone to see Grandma, all he said was, ‘Yes, he’s better now.’"     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

In the 1970s, Ingo Swann, one of the most gifted OBE adepts ever to work under laboratory conditions in the U.S., carried through with a number of out-of-body excursions in a laboratory setting in which he reportedly visited the planet Mercury (and later Jupiter, under the same circumstances). Much to the gaping amazement of NASA scientists, all of his observations were later proved to be correct by probes sent to these planets.     

--Janet Mitchell ["A Psychic Probe of the Planet Mercury," Psychic 6, No. 4 (June 1975): pp. 17-21; see Mitchell, 1981]

One woman in her late seventies was described as "always nasty, a very mean person. One night she called me to see how lovely and beautiful heaven is. Then she looked at me and seemed surprised: ‘Oh, but you can’t see it, you aren’t here (in heaven), you are over there.’ She became very peaceful and happy. She felt at ease, pleased, and she permitted her meanness to die. She became so much better. I don’t think these are hallucinations, they are visions—very real."     

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

Dr. Kübler-Ross comments about two near-death experiences she had late in life: "…I was allowed to experience and become part of that light that so many people try to explain in words. Anyone who has been blessed enough to see this light will never again be afraid to die. The unconditional love, the understanding and compassion in the presence of this light are beyond any human description."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1995]

 

"As a result of that (NDE), I have very little apprehension about dying … because if death is anything, anything at all like what I experienced, it’s gotta be the most wonderful thing to look forward to, absolutely the most wonderful thing."     

--Tom Sawyer (real name) [See Signey Saylor Farr]

From a psychotherapist who was temporarily electrocuted: "I was no longer afraid of death; in fact, I knew that death was fantastic, death was wonderful, death was radiant and peaceful."     

--Dr. Dianne Morrissey

 

"(I)n the early 1950’s in Italy, two Catholic priests, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli, were collaborating on music research. Gemelli was President of the Papal Academy and Ernetti, an internationally respected scientist, physicist and philosopher, was also a music lover. They worked together in a physics lab with oscilloscopes, filter systems and other electronic gear in an effort to find ways to produce clearer singing voices.

"For years, Father Gemelli had often silently called upon his deceased father for advice when he faced crisis situations. He’d never received a conscious reply from his father, but things seemed to work out; it was one of those reassuring rituals that everyone uses to get through tough times. Or so he thought.

"On September 15,1952, while Gemelli and Ernetti were recording a Gregorian chant, a wire on their magnetophone kept breaking. Exasperated, Father Gemelli looked up and asked his father for help. To the two men’s amazement, his father’s voice, recorded on the magnetophone, answered: ‘Of course I shall help you. I’m always with you.’

"The two men stared at each other shocked. Father Gemelli began to shake. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Was this the Devil? But Father Ernetti’s scientific curiosity was piqued. He calmed Gemelli. ‘Come, come, let us try the experiment again.’ They did.

"This time, a very clear voice filled with humor said: ‘But Zucchini, it is clear, don’t you know it is I?’

"Father Gemelli stared at the tape. No one knew the nickname his father had teased him with when he was a boy. He realized then that he was truly speaking with his father. Though his joy at his father’s apparent survival was mixed with fear. Did he have any right to speak with the dead?

Eventually the two men visited Pope Pius XII in Rome. Father Gemelli, deeply troubled, told the Pope of the experience. To his surprise, the Pope patted his shoulder: ‘Dear Father Gemelli, you really need not worry about this. The existence of this voice is strictly a scientific fact and has nothing whatsoever to do with spiritism. The recorder is totally objective. It receives and records only sound waves from wherever they come. This experiment may perhaps become the cornerstone for a building for scientific studies which will strengthen people’s faith in a hereafter.’ 

Father Gemelli was emphatic that this story would not get out until very late in his life, if then, and so it was not brought to public attention until 1990.     

–-Dr. Pat Kubis and Mark Macy [1995]

"One of our female patients was blinded in a laboratory explosion, and the moment she came out of her physical body she was again able to see and to describe the whole accident and the people who dashed into the laboratory. When she was brought back to life she was again totally blind. Do you understand why many, many of these people resent our attempts to artificially bring them back when they are in a far more gorgeous, more beautiful and more perfect place?"     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1995]

"Edward, a lawyer in his early seventies, said: ‘When I heard my wife calling my name I was so excited and happy. I wanted to tell the kids, ‘Guess what just happened to me?’ But this was a week after we buried their mother, and somehow my excitement seemed inappropriate when I thought how they might react. And after I had that feeling I felt guilty for being elated while my wife had just been buried. I felt like I should be more reserved, more reverent."     

--Dr. Edie Devers

From one who simply methodically practiced learning to have OBEs until he became truly adept at this skill--here he is talking about one of his first experiences: "My body felt as if it were going to sleep. Something weird was going on, however, because I was still fully awake. I was literally watching my body fall asleep. I could feel myself moving through the stages of sleep while retaining full consciousness. It was fascinating. I was still in my body, but I was no longer connected to it in the normal manner. I couldn’t move my muscles. My eyes were closed, but I could see the room perfectly through my eyelids. Somehow I knew just what to do. I willed myself to move upward. I watched in awe as my nonphysical, or astral, leg moved out of my physical leg, and the rest of my astral body followed. I stood in the bedroom directly in front of the chair containing my physical body and proceeded to walk through the door into the next room. As usual, I was feeling tremendously energized and exhilarated. It occurred to me that I didn’t need doors any more, so I walked through the wall into the living room, sat down in a chair, and went into a fit of laughter. I could hardly believe what was happening. In that moment I knew, in a deeply intuitive way, that my existence was independent of my physical body."    

--Rick Stack

Jimmy, the youngest sibling in our family died in a car wreck at the age of 21.  One day soon after his passing, Mom was home alone trying to mend something with needle and thread. This is a woman who loves to sew and who has planted enough stitches in enough material to wrap a trail around the moon a couple of times and back. But the thread kept knotting up, something that just didn’t happen with her. She had been sitting out on the back porch trying to deal with the latest snarl when the phone rang. She threw the sewing aside and ran just a few feet inside the door to answer it and in plain view of where she had been sewing. A few moments later when she returned, there is just no logical explanation for what she found: the needle and thread were laid out neatly, tangle-free in a straight line!

So how would Occum’s Razor apply to this? The wind did it? That tease of a daschund that owns my parents? Mom has always been convinced that Jimmy did it, and I can’t help but agree with a remark she made once of this kid who had always been such a light-hearted guy, the one in the family who always took care of Mom. She simply said, "That’s just like something Jimmy would do."

A nurse observed, "He died on a Tuesday in Connecticut—the day after his sister’s death in Ohio. He mentioned seeing his sister Mary in the hospital (where he died), but he did not know that she was dead. He and Mary were very close."     

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

A universal phenomenon of observed deathbed events is an awareness of those who have preceded the one dying into the Other Side. Dr. Ross has succeeded in developing an effective means to investigate this. 

She suggests that the "best way perhaps to study it is for us to sit with dying children after family accidents. We usually did this after the 4th of July, weekends, Memorial Days, Labor Days, when families go out together in family cars and all too often have head-on collisions, killing several members of the family and sending many of the injured survivors into different hospitals.

"I have made it a task to sit with the critically injured children since they are my specialty. As is usually the case, they have not been told which of their family members were killed in the same accident. I was always impressed that they were invariably aware of who had preceded them in death anyway!

"I sit with them, watch them silently, perhaps hold their hand, watch their restlessness and then, often shortly prior to death, a peaceful serenity comes over them. That is always an ominous sign. And that is the moment when I communicate with them. And I don’t give them any ideas. I simply ask them if they are willing and able to share with me what they experience. They share in very similar words.

"As one child said to me, ‘Everything is all right now. Mommy and Peter are already waiting for me.’ 

"I was aware in this particular case that the mother had been killed immediately at the scene of the accident. But I also knew that Peter had gone to a burn unit in a different hospital and that he, as far as I knew, was still alive. I didn’t give it a second thought, but as I walked out of the intensive care unit by the nursing station, I had a telephone call from the hospital where Peter was. The nurse at the other end of the line said, ‘Dr. Ross, we just wanted to tell you that Peter died ten minutes ago.’

"The only mistake I made was to say, ‘Yes, I know.’ The nurse might have thought that I was a little coo-coo.

"In thirteen years of studying children near death I have never had one child who has made a single mistake when it comes to identifying – in this way – family members who have preceded them in death. I would like to see statistics on that."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1995]

"Pierre Jovanovic believes that an angel saved his life. He is a war correspondent for several well-known French magazines who has interviewed Idi Amin and covered the death of Ceausecu and the fall of Romania. I had a hard time understanding why he would spend his time investigating angel stories.

"He told me that while driving alone through the war-torn streets of yet another hot spot in the world, he suddenly felt a hand push him down onto the passenger seat. At the same time, a sniper'’ bullet passed through his windshield and past his head. He would have been killed if he hadn’t been pushed down on the seat.

"He was shaken by the experience, not only to have come so close to death, but to have been saved by an unseen hand, without word or explanation. He began to speak with his fellow correspondents and found that such stories were very common. He went on to write the definitive book on angels from the perspective of an investigative reporter. He told me that he concluded that angels are real, very powerful, and often very funny.

"If it is true that people can interact with angels when they are dying, it follows naturally that we can interact with them during other phases of our life. The only other explanation for Pierre’s story is that he was in fact saved by some sort of coincidence. We could suppose that he had some sort of seizure or involuntary muscle spasm that caused him to lurch sideways in his car, and that it was a matter of wonderful luck for him that it happened just as a sniper fired at him."      

--Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry [See P. Jovanovic's own book, An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels.]

"The case of Lurancy Vennum/Mary Ross is (a) … striking example of possession exhibiting veridical memories. Mary Roff lived from 1847 to 1865, her later years in an asylum. Lurancy Vennum was a girl born to a nearby family in Illinois, in 1864. She exhibited no signs of abnormality until 1877, when she began to suffer spontaneous trances. After one of these trances, she lost all memory of the Vennums (her real family), declared herself to be Mary Roff, and begged to be taken to the Roff’s home. When the Vennums finally consented to let her live with the Roffs, she greeted the Roffs emotionally as her own parents. She also exhibited many of the preferences and memories known only to Mary and the Roffs. 

"To quote (William) James’s account: ‘The girl, now in her new home, seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago; recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that had transpired during her natural life….The so-called Mary whilst at the Roff’s would sometimes "go back to heaven," and leave the body in a "quiet trance," i.e., without the original personality of Lurancy returning.

"After detailed study and subsequent publicity, this case came to be known as the ‘Watseka Wonder,’ after the Illinois town where it occurred. Philosopher C. J. Ducass (almost as famous in his day as William James, his contemporary), among others, considered the Roff/Vennum case good evidence not only of split personality, but of the survival of memories and character traits after death."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker

"A young mother whose child was murdered in a most brutal rape and subsequent drowning returned home in a forlorn state of mind, after wandering around aimlessly for several days. When she was finally able to lie down on her bed, she noticed a bright light coming through the window and in it appeared her little first-grader, healthy, radiant, and smiling—with outstretched arms: ‘Look, Mom!’ Her daughter disappeared after a few moments, but the sight filled her with such peace and love that she was in a much better mental condition after this incident than the rest of the still frightened community!"     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"’My former husband is a scientist and a ‘left-brain’ person who does not believe in anything unless he can see, taste, feel, and examine it. At the time his mother died, they had many conflicts that went back years. He needed healing. Three days after his mother died of cancer, she just appeared in the middle of the night. She woke him and said she was sorry, and that she’d been very unfair to him. He saw her standing there. She has since come back to ask me for forgiveness. … My mother-in-law came to help herself, but I also think she gave her son a sense of spirituality. And it gave me credibility." (This woman, the wife, previously had had after-death visions of her grandfather of which her husband had been very skeptical.)      

--Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski

 

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A man in India with a liver disease "was receiving no sedation, had a light fever, and appeared confused--only able to respond to questions with difficulty, although he seemed aware of his surroundings and the people around him. He described his experience both as it took place and also afterwards. The patient told of how he felt himself to be flying or moving in the air into another world, where he saw gods sitting and calling him. He wanted to go there and asked the people around him to let him go. ‘Go away from me, I am dying,’ he said. The patient was very happy to see those gods. He had this hallucination twice, and he insisted it was not a hallucination but a true experience. He was elated after his experience, and said that was the world he wanted to live in. Before the hallucination, he had not wanted to die; he was very much concerned about his illness and that the doctors should help him. After the hallucination, he was not concerned about dying; he looked better and felt very happy about his experience. An hour or two later he went into a deep coma, never regained consciousness. He died two days later."      

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson 

Regarding what you are instructed to do "when the oxygen masks suddenly appear dangling in front of you on a flight.… Priority one is to don your own mask, even before you help the dependent child beside you put on his. This is because, deprived of oxygen at 35,000 feet, you have only a very short time before losing consciousness. Pilots in training regularly undergo acute anoxia in simulators to make sure they can get their oxygen masks on in time; those who fail to do so do not have NDEs; they either go unconscious or become so confused that they try to land their planes on clouds. Indeed, Allan Pring, whose NDE is described (earlier in the book), experienced anoxia at high altitude when he was an RAF pilot and must be one of the very few people in a position to compare the two experiences. His conclusions are clear: 

"‘I found myself floating along in a dark tunnel, peacefully and calmly but wide awake and aware. I know that the tunnel experience has been attributed to the brain being deprived of oxygen, but as an ex-pilot who has experienced lack of oxygen at altitude I can state that for me there was no similarity. On the contrary, the whole [NDE] experience from beginning to end was crystal clear and it has remained so for the past fifteen years.’"     

--Dr. Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick [1995]

"I have collected twenty-thousand cases of near-death experiences and I stopped collecting them because I had the illusion that it was my job to tell people that death does not exist. I believed that it was of utmost importance to tell people what happens at the moment of death and I discovered very soon (with just a hint of pain in her voice) – and the price wasn’t terribly low – that those who are ready to listen know it anyway, just the way my children – when they are ready for it – know that they are dying. On the other hand, those who do not believe it, those people you could give one-million examples and they would still tell you it’s only a result of oxygen deprivation. But this doesn’t really matter because after they die, they will know it anyway….If they need to rationalize those things away, that is their problem."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Through my examination of visionary experiences and death-related visions I have concluded that they are all born of the same neuronal machinery. Common threads run through them all: near-death experiences, shared near-death experiences, healing visions, post-death visitations, and visions that warn of impending death. I have come to believe that they are all cut from the same cloth. This conclusion was reached after extensive research.

"In one study at Seattle Children’s Hospital I compared a number of children who had almost died with children who were seriously ill. I wanted to know if those who were seriously ill reported the classic elements of the near-death experience. In my study the children who were seriously ill reported none of the experiences of those patients who almost died. 

"This study proved that near-death experiences are not simply caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, since many of those who were seriously ill in the study also had low levels of oxygen in their blood. Furthermore it showed that near-death experiences are not related to drugs, the perception of dying, sensory deprivation, or psychological stress—all things that some scientists have assumed cause near-death experiences.

"This study indicated that the so-called near-death experience is indeed the dying experience. It proved that it is not just the desperate antics of a brain low on oxygen. Near-death experiences also appeared to be transformative, deeply changing the people who have had them. As one patient in the study told me, "No matter how bad my life gets, I’ll always know I have a friend in that light."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse 

In a letter written in 1944 after Carl Jung had an NDE, he says, "What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imaginations and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it…. And what shall we still know of this earth after death? The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. Rather does the little finger know itself a member of the hand."      

--Dr. Carl G. Jung 

Until Dr. Moody (1975) and a few other intrepid medical experts (and the Gallup Poll in 1982 about things spiritual and near-death experiences, etc.) began publishing their findings, few people dared to talk about their visionary and other unusual experiences. For the most part, this seems to have been because their sanity and credibility would have been seriously questioned. Secondly, reports of near-death experiences factored into expression more and more only in tandem with our advances in medical technology in successful cardiac resuscitation and sustained life support of the "clinically dead" and those who otherwise would have "died" much sooner. 

There was an interim (late ‘50s into the ‘70s) when apparently many medical personnel were given firsthand accounts by their just as amazed patients, and typically the medical response to the patient was dismissive. But many of these experiences were impossible to shrug off and forget by the doctors and nurses who heard them, especially ones that occurred during obvious clinical-death situations, of which the "formerly dead" patient recounted in marvelous detail all that took place in the resuscitation efforts. And especially ones in which more than one witness was present. 

So for a while denial became rampant among the medical professionals who participated in these events. To their and our good fortune, a few medical doctors went public about this "emperor with no clothes," and since then (mid ‘70s into early ‘80s) near-death experiences have continued to be a keen public interest. 

One friend who has had a few close calls (AIDS) and was recently (1996) at Duke University Hospital, in North Carolina, "Douglas," remembers regaining consciousness from a clinical death episode. Immediately someone was at his ear and asking softly, "Did you have a near-death experience?" For Douglas in that moment it was a sort of in-your-face annoyance. But it is in a way encouraging and indicative that times are changing.

This is not to say, however, that there is no more denial and that all people willingly tell all (and always to an unskeptical audience) when such occurrences manifest. In the early ‘90s, one of my biofeedback clients related to me her near-death experience, which had happened a few years before. This was for me the event that started my own earnest examination of this subject. She had been a "failed back surgery" patient four times over, and the doctors had finally told her that problems with scar tissue precluded any more surgery and that she would have to learn to live with the pain, which was relentless and difficult. "Joanne" is a quiet, very down-to-earth, hub-of-the-family kind of woman to whom everyone else turns for comfort and support. Yet the pain was so insidious and severe that, she confided, she had even contemplated the possibility of suicide. 

Fortunately, a doctor prescribed biofeedback training for pain management, and so one day Joanne arrived, wheelchair bound, in my office. She was the model student and patiently learned and practiced daily what could be offered through this type of treatment. After several weeks, she gave me an accounting of her insights and accomplishments. She surprised both of us with her abilities to become unconscious of the pain. She had also through this effort gotten off her pain medications. But with a heavy sigh she said there was this one core pain—kind of like the water-drip torture--that just wouldn’t go away. We sat with that for a few moments, and I don’t know what compelled me—I had never thought to bring up such things with my clients before, but out of the blue I asked her if she had ever had a near-death experience.

She gave me one of those startled, sudden-memory-rush looks, and to my astonishment, she started to cry. She shared with me a recounting of her third surgery when she had "died" briefly and found herself traveling through a tunnel toward a wondrous light. She got near the very edge of the tunnel where she could see into this light, see into this stunningly resplendent "country." She was soon told that if she went any further she wouldn’t be able to go back. It was so utterly consuming—the unconditional love, the conscious freedom from the pain, the exquisitely beautiful and caring light….

She took a breath and gave me a rare heart-deep smile that showed no hint of pain; for just a moment she had forgotten it entirely! We proceeded to develop an audio tape in which, with her coaching, I took her back through in elaborate detail her NDE. With this, she began to practice learning to leave even this core pain behind her. Reliving this transformative event, going back into the light, became her primary tool to cancel out the pain. During a check-up call months later, she said that her daily reliving of this event was her "rod and staff" of comfort and was still very effective.

Bringing this incident back into the original context concerning denial and the experiencers’ willingness or lack of willingness to disclose such events, when Joanne regained consciousness from that third surgery, she wanted to tell the whole world about this glorious happening! When her grandfather, whom she dearly loved, was alone with her, she told him. His response was not supportive at all. As a consequence, Joanne apparently and promptly suppressed the NDE. She literally forgot it and did not think of it again until four years later when I asked her if she had ever had such an experience. That glorious gifting occurrence was in her all that time, and she had through fear or embarrassment suppressed it that effectively. Joanne walked into my office rather spryly on a cane perhaps a year later, looking radiant. Her face showed little trace of the pain that had pressed her even to the solemn contemplation of suicide. The irresistibly transformative impact of her NDE, now returned to her awareness, was clearly evident.

Dr. Karlis Osis, a veteran researcher in OBEs, began working with a young man (Alex Tanous) who was adept at generating out-of-body states at will. "In 1979, … Osis set up a series of tests in which the subject was required to fly some distance to view an object placed elsewhere in the building, the target in this case being a series of pictures against different colour backgrounds. To reduce the likelihood of chance predictions, the picture/background color sequence would be regularly and randomly changed. A protracted series of direct hits from … Tanous, imprisoned some distance away in a soundproof room, was impossible to account for unless one accepted the reality of astral flight (OBEs). In a total of thirty-eight trials carried out over a period of twenty sessions, Tanous achieved a sixty-five percent ratio of success. 

"…During the 1980s Alex Tanous … continued to work with Dr. Osis in New York. His most recent experiments at the American SPR (Society for Psychical Research) have been directed towards discovering whether immaterial forms (which in his own case Tanous humorously labels ‘Alex 2’) can affect instruments. Since these experiments began, Tanous has apparently been able to trigger off a number of devices such as strain-gauge sensors, thermistors, which register minute changes in temperature, and photoelectric cells. Both Alex Tanous and Dr Karlis Osis soon realized the importance of their discoveries, not only to the realm of medical science and psychology but also to the very nature of life and death itself. For, if there was a second body existing on a parallel level with the physical flesh and blood form, then it seemed entirely possible that the consciousness within that body could survive the dissolution of the physical form."     

--Geoff Viney

"The highest choice that (the Christ) had available was to be willing …even to give his life if he could help one fellow man understand that death does not exist, that death is only a transition to a different form of living. So he did that very thing. He knew that people believed in him only as long as he performed miracles. The moment he disappeared they would start wondering again. He knew the difference between knowing and believing. And so after his death he materialized for his friends and his disciples for three days and three nights. He ate with them, he talked with them, he shared with them. And then they knew.

"And it was the knowing, not the believing that gave them the courage to do what they needed to do."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1995]

Immanuel Kant, of eighteenth century philosopher fame, became highly intrigued with reports he heard of amazing paranormal incidents that concerned the legendary Emanuel Swedenborg of Sweden. So interested as a matter of fact, that he preformed a painstaking investigation of an occurrence, of which he reports, "Madame Marteville, the widow of the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm, some time after the death of her husband was called upon by Croon, a goldsmith, to pay for a silver service which her husband had purchased from him. The widow was convinced that her late husband had been much too precise and orderly not to have paid this debt, yet she was unable to find the receipt. In her sorrow, and because the amount was considerable, she requested Mr. Swedenborg to call at her house. After apologizing to him for troubling him, she said that if, as all people say, he possessed the extraordinary gift of conversing with the souls of the departed, he would perhaps have the kindness to ask her husband how it was about the silver service. Swedenborg did not at all object to comply with her request. 

"Three days afterwards the said lady had company at her house for coffee. Swedenborg called, and in his cool way informed her that he had conversed with her husband. The debt had been paid seven months before his decease, and the receipt was in a bureau in the room upstairs. The lady replied that the bureau had been quite cleared out, and that the receipt was not found among all the papers. Swedenborg said that her husband had described to him, how after pulling out the left-hand drawer a board would appear which required to be drawn out, when a secret compartment would be disclosed, containing his private Dutch correspondence, as well as the receipt. Upon hearing this description the whole company rose and accompanied the lady into the room upstairs. The bureau was opened; they did as they were directed; the compartment was found, of which no one had ever known before; and, to the great astonishment of all, the papers were discovered there, in accordance with his description."     

--_______________ Trowbridge [1976]

Paul Perry related an incident to Dr. Melvin Morse that "made a believer of him," when he was once with Dannion Brinkley. Perry and Brinkley co-authored Saved by the Light, an account of the near-death experience Dannion had after being struck by lightning in 1975. Since the lightning had permanently damaged much of Dannion’s heart, any real exertion is literally a threat to his life. In Morse’s words, "The two were walking fast when Brinkley began to breathe heavily and to complain of chest pains. By the time they got off their feet in a fast-food restaurant, Brinkley had begun to turn blue and to gasp for air. 

"There was general panic. Patrons gathered around to offer advice, and the people behind the counter wanted to call the emergency medical team, which Perry also wanted them to do.

"The only person in the room who was not afraid was Brinkley himself. Through the pain and lack of oxygen he laughed at the thought of an ambulance showing up.

"’Just forget the doctors,’ he said. ‘I’ve died before and I liked it.’

"It is examples such as this one, people who are on the brink of death yet exhibit no fear, that show the ability of these visions to quell death anxiety."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry

"I ask all my terminally ill children whom they would love to see the most, whom they would love to have by their side always (meaning here and now, because many of them are nonbelieving people, whom I could not talk with about life after death. I do not impose that on my patients.) So I always ask my children, ‘Whom would you like to have with you always, if you could choose one person?’ Ninety-nine percent of them, except for black children, say mommy or daddy. (With black children, it is very often aunties or grandmas, because those are the ones who perhaps love them the most, or have the most time with them. But those are only cultural differences.) Most of the children say mommy or daddy, but not a single one of the children who nearly died has ever seen mommy or daddy, unless their parents had preceded them in death.

"Many people say, ‘Well, this is a projection of wishful thinking. Someone who is dying is desperate, lonely, frightened, so he imagines somebody with him whom he loves.’ If this were true, ninety-nine percent of all my dying children, many five-, six-, seven-year-olds, would have seen their mommies or daddies.

"The common denominator of who you are going to see is that he or she must have passed on before you, even if it is only one minute, and that you have genuinely loved him or her."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Here is one of the most celebrated cases of OBE (though the debate then was hot and heavy as to what to call it) from the late nineteenth century:

"Mr. S. R. Wilmot sailed from Liverpool to New York, passing through a severe storm. During the eighth night of the storm he had a dream in which he saw his wife come to the door of the stateroom. She looked about and seeing that her husband was not the only occupant of the room, hesitated a little, then advanced to his side, stooped down and kissed him, and after gently caressing him for a few moments, quietly withdrew.

"Upon awakening from this dream, Mr. Wilmot was surprised to hear his fellow passenger, Mr. William J. Tait, say to him: ‘You’re a pretty fellow to have a lady come and visit you in this way.’

"Pressed for an explanation, Mr. Tait related what he had seen while wide awake, lying in his berth. It exactly corresponded with the dream of Mr. Wilmot!

"When meeting his wife in Watertown, Conn., Mr. Wilmot was almost immediately asked by her: ‘Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?’

"Although Mr. Wilmot had been more than a thousand miles at sea on that particular night, his wife asserted: ‘It seemed to me that I visited you.’ She told her husband that on account of the severity of the weather and the reported loss of another vessel, she had been extremely anxious about him. On the night of the occurrence she had lain awake for a long time and at about four o-clock in the morning it seemed to her that she left her physical self and went out to seek her husband, crossing the stormy sea until she came to his stateroom.

"She continued: ‘A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in; but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.’"     

--Dr. Janet Lee Mitchell

"If apparitions are the forms of people perceived by another party where they are not, then OBEs are cases where people feel themselves to be where their bodies are not. Like apparitions, OBEs have been reported in many cultures from ancient times. … With the increase of drug use and meditation among American youth in the 1970s, reports of OBEs proliferated. At the same time, laboratory tests for studying OBEs and scientific criteria for verifying them have been largely perfected. In addition, training scales for the reliability of OBE evidence have demonstrated it to be ‘statistically incredible’ that all of such reports should be spurious."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker

A Truth for All Transformative Experiences

"Despite cultural bias, religious admonitions, and scientific denial of the possibility or morality of communication with the dead, people persist in claiming they have had such experiences. Why? As hundreds have told us, their personal after-death contacts were of a character and intensity that made the reality simply undeniable. The incredulous reactions of friends and families, old cultural and religious taboos, and even doubts about their own sanity were simply no match for having been in the presence of a deceased loved one, even if for just seconds."     

--Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski 

"A college-educated member of the Indian Communist party adhered to a materialistic philosophy. During cardiac arrest, he felt himself flying among clouds. He thought it was a beautiful place, but not of this earth. He felt himself very light, riding on the clouds. He heard music and also some singing in the background. When he recognized that he was alive, he was sorry that he had to leave this beautiful place. When he told about this he seemed to have enjoyed the experience. He was a jolly college graduate, joked a lot. He was not a sentimental person, not religious, very independent of his family, and liked to see a lot of movies. He said: ‘That was the bright spot of my illness, to be out of the misery and suffering of humanity.’ A strange trip for a nonbeliever."     

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

It seems that as regards OBEs and NDEs, there appears to be an unbridgeable, river-wide split between many of those who have had one and those who have not. The ones who have had one or more such experiences basically have an emphatic knowing sense of the survival of consciousness beyond bodily death. There is nothing short of such an event that will bend the just as emphatic nonbelievers—who are almost always among the ranks of those who have not enjoyed an OBE, NDE or similar "peak" or transformative experience.

With this in mind, Colin Wilson comments, "That these experiences can be deeply convincing is demonstrated by the … announcement of Professor A. J. Ayer, a well-known champion of materialistic philosophy (i.e., there is no separation between body/brain and consciousness), that such an experience has shaken his own skepticism about life after death."

Wilson, a well-known British writer whose special interest is parapsychology, goes on to say that, "So, as far as I am concerned the question of belief in life after death is purely a matter of the scientific evidence. I have found, to my surprise, that this evidence is remarkably strong—so strong that I feel it would be rather perverse to go on thinking up objections."     

--Colin Wilson

So, What’s Wrong with this Picture? And Can We Ever Hope to Fix It?

A man who said he must remain anonymous approached Dr. Melvin Morse and told him a most incredible and moving story of the extreme measures his "dead" daughter took to tell him from the Other Side that she was fine and everything would be all right. Dr. Morse comments, "Although this man was so intrigued by these death-related visions that he had to contact me, he feels that allowing me to use his name would hurt him politically. He emphasized that he has deliberately distanced himself from anything spiritual or religious in order to get votes and that he would alienate a great portion of the voting public if he were suddenly to acknowledge that a spiritual vision had touched him. This attitude can be found among many people in our society. Doctors, nurses, scientists, policemen, ministers, and so on all recognize that even to discuss spirituality can diminish their own credibility."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse 

Dr. George Bouklas is a clinical psychologist who sees, among others, a lot of elderly patients. He tells "about the time he phoned a widely respected psychotherapist at a major university to discuss with him some patients’ spiritual and paranormal experiences. With a chuckle, Dr. Bouklas describes what happened next: ‘He hung up on me!’

"Dr. Bouklas was not surprised, and he views the problem philosophically: ‘People grind their axes. That therapist is grinding an axe. He got spooked by this material. So his patients would never talk to him about spiritual experiences and contacts with the deceased. But it doesn’t spook me, and so my patients talk to me about their experiences all the time. If, as a therapist, you listen, people will tell you. It’s good listening. It’s how people get better: they get better by talking to somebody who is really listening and responding.’"     

--Martin and Romanowski, 1997 

"We tend all too often to trivialize these experiences, by calling them dreams and fantasies caused by some kind of mental derangement. I frequently receive phone calls at home from my fellow physicians who encounter these experiences and are puzzled by them. One physician told me a sad story in which she felt her spirit being drawn together with that of her dying son. She said they entered a heavenly place together and then she let the boy go. Now she draws tremendous comfort from this experience and feels that she has firsthand knowledge that her son is in a ‘heavenly world.’ Nevertheless she has been reluctant to go public with her story. As she put it, ‘Mel, when they start burning witches again, I want them to come for you first.’

"By this she meant that we often have irrational fear and prejudice of anything that is of a spiritual nature. Challenging such fears can be damaging to one’s career. Yet for me the very reason I became a physician seemed to be at stake. My role as a physician is to understand the complete human being, and frankly there is no deeper expression of humanity than spiritual experience."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse 

Describing the Papyrus of Ani, which he termed "the Book of the Dead," (and of which the entitling hieroglyphics mean "Coming Forth Into Day,"), Dr. Wallis Budge writes that the text presented "all-powerful guides along the road which, passing through death and the grave, led into the realms of light and life, and into the presence of the divine being, Osiris, the conqueror of death, who made men and women ‘to be born again’ … (Such are) the religious views of the wonderful people who more than five thousand years ago proclaimed the resurrection of a spiritual body and the immortality of the soul." (Some experts now claim this age to be at least 9-10,000 years old.) 

And another comment from the same text: "(T)he human physical body was considered in Ancient Egypt to hold within it the potentiality that from it would spring the … refulgent and glorious envelope in which the Spirit-soul would take up its abode." 

--E. A. Wallace Budge 

Heavens, It’s God!

"I was facing the doors of the operating theatre and I was aware that they were getting further and further away. Then I was coming out of the top of my head – it was as if my body was being rolled off me like a rubber glove, and I was coming out of my head. I was immediately in pitch darkness. To the right (I was still thinking quite logically) above me was a small pinprick of light and I was ‘flying’ towards it. At the same time I thought, my God, I’m dead. I was quite angry – I thought, it’s not fair, I’m not even in the operating theatre yet and it’s not going to be very easy for James (I was sure my baby was going to be a boy and I’d already chosen his name) if I’m dead. And anyway, I don’t want to die. I felt very annoyed about it.

"I got closer and closer to the light which was getting bigger and bigger. As I approached it I could see it showed up the walls of a tunnel. I flew towards it and emerged into it. I was surrounded by it. I can’t tell you how brilliant it was, there’s no way to describe it. It wasn’t only the light – it was a feeling, I don’t know what words to use – a feeling of exhilaration, of joy, of warmth. I wasn’t afraid. It’s nothing I’ve ever felt either before or since.

"I became aware of what I can only describe as a ‘being’ of light and I heard a voice say, ‘Gill.’ I thought, heavens, it’s God; surely I can’t come before God straight away, surely there should be a sort of reception place or something. And the voice said, ‘Gill, you know who I am.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do, but I can’t stay.’ And the voice sort of chuckled and said: ‘Well, here is someone you know,’ and it was another being of light. I didn’t see anybody, I just knew it was there. And then I heard another voice and I knew immediately it was my grandfather. We had had a very close relationship when I was a child, and he had died only two years before. I was so thrilled to be speaking to him again. And I said, ‘Grandpa, I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get back. I’ve just had a son and Hamish has just got a new job and he won’t be able to cope with a new baby. I know there’s a pile of ironing waiting to be done and Hamish can’t iron his shirts.’ And Grandpa laughed and said, ‘Gill, it doesn’t matter a damn. You’ll have to put up a better case than that.’ So I said, ‘Grandpa, I’m only thirty-four, I’ve got so much more to do with my life. I haven’t had my money’s worth. I want to go back.’

At this point Gillian McKenzie, who had been undergoing an emergency situation in which her first child was born, went through a life review process in which she "recounted all the things that had happened to her in her life which were of value to her, and which she felt could somehow be used to help other people." Suddenly she was aware of being able to see her body again still in the operating room. She continues her story, "I was very anxious to find Hamish and tell him I was coming back. So I went into the corridor and saw him sitting on a seat. I saw the doctor go out and speak to him, and tell him we had a son but that there were complications with me. Then Hamish went down the corridor to call my mother on the phone, and it was as if I could hear both sides of the conversation. She said, ‘When you see her keep talking to her, and in the meantime, pray.’

"The next thing I knew I was back in the ward, but still on the ceiling, and Grandpa was still with me. Hamish was sitting beside the bed. I didn’t know how to get through to him to tell him I was all right. Then….I heard Hamish saying, ‘Hello, hello,’ – and then I came round. Hamish said, ‘We’ve got a son.’ And I said, ‘yes, I know all about that.’

"One more thing happened which was very peculiar. My mother told me later that after Hamish had telephoned her, she had phoned her godmother, my great aunt, and told her she was worried about me. And my great aunt had said, ‘You don’t have to worry about that, Gladys. Harry (Harry was my grandfather’s name) is looking after her.’"     

--Gillian McKenzie [See Fenwick and Fenwick, 1995]

"The Hartford Case demonstrates intention some years after the death of the agent. John Hartford was a Wesleyan lay preacher; on his deathbed, he asked his good friend C. Happerfield to care for his wife. Happerfield readily agreed, and saw that Hartford’s widow was cared for, first by friends, and then by her grandson. After that, he lost touch with both of them for sometime. But then, he said, ‘One night as I lay in bed wakeful, towards morning … I suddenly became conscious that someone was in the room. Then the curtain of my bed was drawn, and there stood my departed friend, gazing upon me with a sorrowful and troubled look. I felt no fear, but surprise and astonishment kept me silent. He spoke to me distinctly and audibly in his own familiar voice, and said, ‘Friend Happerfield, I have come to you because you have not kept your promise to see my wife. She is in trouble and in want.’"

"Happerfield promised to look into the matter, the apparition vanished, and he roused his wife. They learned that the grandson had lost his job and the grandmother (widow Hartford) was about to be sent away. Promptly they sent them money, asked the widow to visit them, and provided her again with a comfortable home. This particular apparition is noteworthy not only for its conveyance of information to which Happerfield had no normal access, but also for its drawing aside his bed curtain and speaking audibly."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker

A witness described a man in his mid-sixties with stomach cancer, who appeared to be quite lucid. It was reported that while looking "into the distance these things would appear to him and seemed real to him. He would look up to a wall, eyes and face would brighten up as if he saw a person. He’d speak of the light, brightness, saw people who seemed real to him. He would say ‘Hello,’ and ‘There’s my mother.’ After it was over he closed his eyes and seemed very peaceful. He gestured with outstretched hands. Before the hallucination he was very ill and nauseous; afterwards he was serene and peaceful."     

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

"It would be very nice for the scientists if (paranormal) abilities lent themselves to the type of investigations that are easily reduced to mathematical expressions and statistical scoring. Unfortunately, nature is seldom so kind. She does not adapt herself to the preconceived notions of man. It is for man to adapt the techniques of investigation to discover the truth about nature."     

--Edgar D. Mitchell [See Harold Sherman, 1981]

"…Ingo Swann, an artist … had first experienced the ecosomatic (meaning "out-of-body") state at the tender age of three and thereafter on many subsequent occasions. ...Swann claimed the ability to project at will and travel wherever he chose. To try to prove this Osis (Dr. Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research) devised a series of tests in which the psychic was invited to sit in a sealed chamber and identify a series of everyday objects placed beyond the reach of normal vision. All through the experiments, he was wired up to equipment measuring fluctuations in brain wave activity, respiration and blood pressure….Swann’s results were uniformly impressive. In his most successful series of tests he scored a total of 114 hits out of 147 attempts. Statistically, the American team of investigators calculated that the chances of achieving a similar result through guesswork would be around 40,000 to one.     

--Geoff Viney

"…Arthur Guirdham collected detailed records on an Englishwoman sent to his hospital who was plagued by recurrent neurotic nightmares of battles and massacres. Investigation revealed that the patient had the memories since her youth that corresponded closely to the history of the Cathars (Albigenses), heretic puritans in thirteenth-century France. It is particularly noteworthy that the language recorded in some of the patient’s diaries is early French, unknown to her in normal life. Guirdham writes: ‘In 1967, I decided to visit the south of France and investigate. I read the manuscripts of the 13th century. These old manuscripts—available only to scholars who have special permission—showed she was accurate to the last detail. There was no way she could have known about them. Even of the songs she wrote as a child, we found four in the archives. They were correct word for word …. When I first wrote to Prof. DuVernow at Toulouse, he said, "get in touch with me about anything you want. I’m astonished at your detailed knowledge of Catharism." I couldn’t say, "I’ve got this by copying down the dreams of a woman of 36…’

"This case not only roused Dr. Guirdham to extensive travel and study of Catharism, but ultimately convinced him of the truth of reincarnation of at least some people."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker  [Also see Arthur Guirdham, MD]

If Only It Were a Joke!—Well, It Is Funny…

Regarding the example just cited above and regarding "precognition" as a refutation of the case for reincarnation, the following demonstrates Dr. Carl B. Becker at his analytical sleuthdom’s best: "Precognition is the ability to accurately foresee events in the future. It is one of the least understood of paranormal abilities, as it seems either to violate commonsense notions of the unidirectional passage of time or else to suggest a large measure of predeterminism in the universe. Applied to the cases of our inquiry, the ‘superprecognition’ theory would assert that the subjects obtained knowledge of other people’s previous lives, abilities in foreign languages, etc., by precognition of the very facts that the investigator was later to reveal.

"For example, it would suggest that Guirdham’s subject did not really remember that Cathar priests’ robes were blue ( a fact not public until some time later), but rather that she precognized that her psychiatrist would someday uncover the fact that Cathar priests’ robes were blue, and that she misinterpreted the precognition as a memory. This is analogous to saying that I answered as I did on the examination not because I recalled the answers from previous study but because I foresaw the way I would answer, through precognition of my completed test in the future.

"The appalling circularity of this argument renders it difficult to discuss and impossible to falsify. As long as a case is uninvestigated, believers in this theory can also claim that the subject’s memories have not been shown to be correct, and therefore that the subject does not remember any past life. As soon as the case is investigated and the subject’s statements are shown to be in accord with historic fact, ‘superprecognition’ theorists can claim that the subject does not remember any past life because it is a case of precognition of the findings of the investigation.

"If the prima facie absurdity of this suggestion does not immediately rule the theory out of court, then certainly the logical illegitimacy of switching interpretations (as above) to fit the particular case should rule it out; for thousands of children make true but uninvestigated statements. According to the superprecognition theory, all such statements are groundless and probably false. But then a curious thing happens: as soon as someone demonstrates a correspondence between previous events and the child’s statements, the statement is reinterpreted. It becomes not only true (which it was not held to be before), but precognitive of the discovery of its truth, which it could not be if not investigated."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker 

"A dying sixteen-year-old American girl had just come out of her coma. Her consciousness was very clear when she said to the respondent (the nurse or doctor who reported the incident): ‘I can’t get up,’ and she opened her eyes. I raised her up a little bit and she said, ‘I see him, I see him. I am coming.’ She died immediately afterwards with a radiant face, exultant, elated. What could possibly make a sixteen-year-old girl ‘exultant’ and ‘radiant’ when giving up a life still unfulfilled?"     

--Drs. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

Here’s one from a then fourteen-year-old boy that rings a similar bell—and actually is indicative of a very common experience among deathbed and near-death experients of all ages: 

"… (S)omething happened. It was so immense, so powerful that I gave up on my life to see what it was. I wanted to venture into this experience which started as a drifting into what I could only describe as a long tunnel of light…which I wanted to look into, to touch. There were no sounds of any earthly thing. Only the sounds of serenity, of a strange music like I had never heard. A soothing symphony of indescribable beauty blended with the light I was approaching. I gave up on life. I left it behind for this new wonderful thing. I did not want to go back to life."     

--Dr. Kenneth Ring

"On rare occasions, people have called me and said they wanted to die because they heard how wonderful life is on the Other Side. Their lives feel so hopeless, they say, that killing themselves will relieve their pain. This attitude always saddens me, as do questions such as, ‘By sharing how wonderful death is, might that not make someone want to die?’

"Of course, near-death experiencers may look forward to dying again someday, but they also understand that all of us have a specific purpose here on Earth, and we must complete it before we die. I explain that God has given us the gift of Life, and we should respect it and treasure the opportunities awaiting us on This Side. I always encourage those contemplating suicide to get medical and/or spiritual help. Furthermore, I suggest that when they are dreaming, they can learn to see the Light. Once they do, they will be convinced of the importance of their lives.

"Interestingly, those who attempt suicide and have a near-death experience do not attempt to take their lives again. Once you enter the Light, you realize how important your life really is to you—as well as to God."     

--Dr. Dianne Morrissey 

"On the evening of 15 January 1983, a remarkable show broadcast by Radio Luxembourg, Europe’s leading English language speaking station, caused a sensation across the continent. Hosted by Rainer Holbe, Luxembourg’s senior presenter, the programme’s subject matter was to be a live, on-air experiment to test the possibility of contacting the dead. Most listeners expected to hear an eccentric clairvoyant, but to their surprise the main guest was a quietly spoken German electronics engineer named Hans Otto Konig. For many years a private consultant to German industry, Konig had long been convinced that it might be possible to achieve, scientifically, a dialogue with those departed from the mortal plane. Believing, like occultists, that the spirit world vibrated to a different level to visible matter, Konig’s chosen technique was to use ultrasound frequencies beyond the range of the human ear. To begin with, he had sent out a series of random messages into the ether, waiting months for a response. Eventually, when he began to receive signals back, he set himself the goal of building a machine which would act as a direct communication channel to the afterlife. By 1983, after eight years of largely empirical research, he claimed to have achieved his goal.

"Naturally, many people were reluctant to believe the claims of the German engineer. When approached with the idea for a transmission, Radio Luxembourg’s programme controllers accepted, but only provided Konig agreed to a series of very stringent conditions. First of all studio bosses insisted on inspecting Konig’s communication equipment (or ‘generator’) as he preferred to call it) and he was told that during the broadcast only the station’s own technicians would be allowed to operate the machinery. Radio Luxembourg warned their guest that they would not tolerate attempts at fraud or deception. Only their usual presenter would be able to ask questions once the programme had begun; Konig himself must remain silent throughout. Furthermore, the broadcast was to be a one-off – there would be no opportunity for rehearsal or retesting. If a conversation with the dead were really possible, then it must happen first time, live on-air, or not at all. To their surprise, Konig readily accepted all these preconditions without argument.

"As the transmission began on the evening of 15 January, Rainer Holbe announced to millions of bemused listeners across a dozen countries how the programme for that night was to contain a live experiment attempting electronic communication with another world. There had been no trial run, he said, and no one knew whether it would be successful. He then introduced Hans Otto Konig who gave some background to the development of his research. Inside the broadcasting studio, tension mounted as a member of the technical staff switched on the machine and began with a single straightforward question, ‘Is anyone there?’ Within a few seconds a disembodied voice answered from Konig’s generator, clearly in the affirmative, ‘We hear your voice,’ it replied, in English, impassively. Then, ‘Otto Konig makes wireless with the dead.’ The tone of the disembodied contact was matter-of-fact, its brief message scarcely profound. But the fact that it had been heard at all was earth shattering. And heard it certainly was, by all present in the studio, as well as by millions across Europe. It had not come from anyone in the room, nor could it have been received conventionally from outside. Presenter Holbe trembled with emotion as he broke in to reassure listeners that the broadcast they were hearing was not a hoax, '‘ I tell you ... I swear by my children's lives, nothing has been manipulated ... there are no tricks.'’ The exchange lasted several more minutes, punctuated by long, eerie pauses. There was much interference and a lot of static, yet the voices from beyond the grave were otherwise perfectly audible and afterwards all those present at the experiment attested to a belief that they had witnessed a genuinely paranormal manifestation. The highly charged atmosphere inside the studio was described by a witness as being ‘electric’, with some technicians actually moved to tears. Only Hans Otto Konig, who had heard the voices many times before in his own private laboratory, remained unmoved. Remarkable though the broadcast undoubtedly seemed, it was in fact but a single incident, in a much longer story. This was not the first time that such scientific approach to spirit communication had been attempted. Nor was the existence of disembodied voices Konig’s discovery. Though the German engineer had spent a large part of the previous decade working on the construction of his generator, the so-called ‘electronic voice phenomenon’ (EVP) had been recognized for more than twenty years, after being first identified by a Swedish film producer, Freidrich Jurgenson, who stumbled upon the voices by accident." (Another story!)     

--Geoff Viney

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross remembers "a twelve-year-old child who did not want to share with her mother that it was such a beautiful experience when she died, because no mommy likes to hear that her child has found a place that is nicer than home, and that is very understandable. But she had such a unique experience that she needed desperately to share it with somebody. One day she confided in her father. She told him that it was such a beautiful experience when she died that she did not want to come back. What made it very special, besides the whole atmosphere and the fantastic love and light that most of them convey, was that her brother was there with her, and held her with great tenderness, love and compassion. After sharing this she said to her father, ‘The only problem is that I don’t have a brother.’

"Then the father confessed that she indeed did have a brother who had died, I think, three months before she was born. They had never told her of him.

"Do you understand why I am bringing up examples like these? Because many people say, ‘Well you know, they were not dead, and at the moment of their dying they naturally think of their loved ones, and so they naturally visualize them.'’ But nobody could visualize a brother that she did not know of."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Dr. Carl B. Becker is the author of one of the most powerful studies in its field produced to date (Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death, 1993) in which he remarks, "Apparitions often seem to want to announce their deaths to loved ones, particularly in wartime. A typical and well-corroborated case is that of Capt. Eldred Bower-Boyer, who was shot down over France early on 19 March 1917. At that same time, his sister-in-law (who did not know that he was in combat) saw his apparition approach her in her room at the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, India. At first he appeared so real that she thought he had come to visit. Then, when he suddenly disappeared, she felt something must have happened to him, and a terrible fear came over her. At the time he was shot down, his sister was still in bed at home in England. Her daughter (his niece) came upstairs and announced that uncle (sic) Eldred was downstairs! Both sisters were so struck by the occurrence that they wrote to their mother of it, who confirmed the time and date of his fatal flight."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker

Ah, So Humor Isn’t Just an Earth-Human Thing…

Jack Ausman had always prided himself on being a solid materialist, a practitioner of pure science. Until his near-death experience, he said bluntly, he would not have approached a book that discussed spiritual matters ‘…with the proverbial ten-foot pole.’ (There was an explosion at the chemical laboratory where he worked which was his doorway into an NDE.)

…According to Jack, he remembered nothing after one of his coworkers in the laboratory managed to shout a brief exclamation of warning before the explosion shattered the building.

"I was astonished when I saw what appeared to be the traditional representation of an angel flying off with what looked as though it might be Peter, my lab partner.

"And then I was even more astonished when I saw that I—or some part of me—was also being borne aloft by someone or something in what appeared to be a gown of shimmering white. 'Absurd!' I thought. 'I don’t even believe in such things!'

"It didn’t seem to matter. And it certainly didn’t seem to matter what my thoughts were to the silent entity that was bearing me toward a dark tunnel.

"I remember seeing a bright light, feeling a kind of almost sensual, ecstatic sensation—and then I was seated near a lovely forest stream on what appeared to be a marble bench. The tall, imposing angelic figure was seating (sic) beside me."

Jack asked if he might inquire exactly what was going on.

The angel shrugged, then smiled warmly, "Don’t you think it is rather evident, Jack? Look around you. As you might say, 'This isn’t Kansas.'

"Oh, yeah," Jack snapped back. "Well, if you’re supposed to be an angel, where are your wings?"

"If you want wings, you’ll get wings. I didn’t think such traditional trappings would appeal to a disciple of science such as yourself," the angel replied.

"Forget the wings. The white robe is enough."

"If you prefer a business suite, I can arrange it with but a moment’s thought."

"Let’s stay with the robe."

Jack wrote in his report of the experience that he was surprised to find that his angel had a rather sharp wit. He was not at all pompous or overly holy.

"Well, in some sense, I am the nonphysical aspect of yourself," the angel told him. "But it is now my task to expand your consciousness and to help you attain a better balance before you return to your body."

"You mean," Jack wanted to know at once, "that I am not dead?"

"Well, you are going to have to cut down on contact sports for a while," the angel replied, "but you will live. We’ve more or less taken advantage of the accident to get you apart so that we can set you back on the path with greater equilibrium."

Jack pointed out that the angel continued to make references to his being "out of balance."

Just what was it, he wanted to know, that he was doing that was so wrong?

The angel sighed, as if he were a teacher who had just realized that he was stuck with a pupil who is not especially bright. "You’ve emphasized your intellect to the exclusion of your emotions and your spiritual growth. If you are to fulfill your true mission on Earth, you must recognize the importance of the nonphysical aspects of existence."

(Much of the encounter as depicted by Jack was a teaching experience, and much was shared by the light being that this man brought back with him, such as some of the following remarks:)

"For centuries now, …it seems that not many humans are given to know the truth of things. So it has been down through the ages of Earth. Yet we look forward and foresee a world of humans living in a greater vibration of the light than exists on Earth today.

"In that glorious day to come Earth men and women will see and understand how near we of the heavenly kingdom are to them. Meanwhile, we do our part, ever watchful, ever hopeful—and if our heavenly joy is often mixed with sadness, it is because we cannot yet walk hand-in-hand with you on Earth. Still again, we know that we are coming closer and closer together—and all is working according to the great Divine Plan."

The angel’s smile caused Jack to wonder if he had seen him before, and the angel’s reply was, "Perhaps in dreams, …(a)nd certainly when you were a small body. You are my ward, you see….

"While we are pleased that you work with Earth sciences, we want to instruct you to explore deeper into those fundamentals that are of a spiritual origin. Worldly science is only beginning to acknowledge the unseen realms. If your science would put more emphasis on the nonmaterial aspects of existence, then our two worlds would be able to draw together.

"…Do not become discouraged. From our perspective, we see far more than you human entities of the effects of evil—war, murder, rape, poverty, so-called 'genetic cleansings,' exploitation of the weak. And yet we do not despair because we are able to see more clearly the meaning and the purpose of all these things. And thus seeing, we know that humankind will one day ascend to the higher spheres of service and from this point of higher elevation continue its evolution as spiritual beings."

…Jack concluded his account by stating that he had been badly burned and injured in the laboratory fire. He had been unconscious for two days, and for several hours, the attending physicians did not expect him to live. His laboratory partner, Peter, had been killed outright in the blast.

"I am now a very different person," he said. "My wife and my children take delight in this, for I now take much more time to 'smell the roses.' I am less of a workaholic.

"I like to think, as my angel advised me, that I have become a much more balanced individual acknowledging both the physical and nonphysical aspects of reality—and I see no conflict in serving both facets of the universe."     

--Brad Steiger

Dr. Melvin Morse comments, "My own life has been transformed by my research. I try to spend a lot more time with my family. I have taken to heart what one little girl told me she learned from her near-death experience: ‘It’s nice to be nice, Dr. Morse.’ The knowledge that when we die we perceive another reality that quite literally sheds light on this one somehow motivates me to be a better person."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse

"Physicist Max Planck summed it up in his autobiography: ‘(Observing a major scientific debate) gave me also an opportunity to learn a fact—a remarkable one in my opinion: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die off, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’

"Coming from a scientist who rubbed shoulders with the leaders of twentieth-century physics and philosophy, this statement is a scathing denial of the widely touted ‘objectivity’ of scientists. Planck confirms that the reasons for theory rejection are more psychological and educational than theoretical or scientific.

"To put the case a little strongly, many of the logical positivists and Skinnerian behaviorists of the 1950s and 1960s neither converted to nor consented to the new waves of psychology. But they are now becoming supplanted by a new breed of scientists who have themselves experimented with meditation and mind-altering drugs, and who can no longer accept the mechanistic philosophy of the nineteenth century and are hence much more open to the possibilities of survival research. The next century may see an increasing liberalism in this area, coinciding with an increasing interest of ‘legitimate’ young scientists in alternative paradigms which allow for the survival or reincarnation hypotheses."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker 

Dr. Melvin Morse tells of a young man, "Paul," (not his real name) who, apparently as a result of severe head injuries, acquired the ability to slip into a state in which he experienced pre-cognitive visions on a fairly frequent basis. (A not-uncommon product of NDEs is acquired or increased paranormal abilities.) In Morse’s words, "The most interesting of these was the one that took place at the home of his future in-laws. He was sitting alone in the living room when he suddenly went into a dreamlike state in which he saw an accident involving a car. The vision was not entirely clear, but it looked like a car covered with bricks and other debris.

"When he came out of his trance, his girlfriend and her parents were standing at the entrance to the room, just staring at him. The father said that the room was so cold, they had been unable to come in.

"Paul told his in-laws about his vision. Since they were leaving on vacation the next day, they took it as a sign that they should not leave until at least another day had passed.

"The next night, as they lay sleeping in their bed, a drunk driver came down the street and lost control of his car. The car drove through the brick wall of the house and stopped at the foot of the surprised parents’ bed."     

--Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry

 

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The Little Matter of Consciousness

 

Most scientists would claim that there is no satisfactory scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of the continuation of personhood through the transition called death. That objection would be based largely on the presumption that discarnate intelligence is simply impossible; consciousness and memory cannot be imagined to exist in the absence of a physical brain. It is essential to recognize that science in its present form is not in a position to deny the possibility. That is because the present epistemology (way of knowing, "rules of evidence") of Western science rules out any consideration of consciousness as a causal reality. Thus, it does not find in its understanding of causality anything resembling a self or personality, endowed with reason, will, and a valid sense of value -- either before or after death.
--Dr. Willis Harmon, cofounder amd past president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences

There is hard evidence from over a thousand scientific experiments that supports the view that there is something more than the materialistic model of the universe. This is important for every educated person to know, especially scientists.
--Dr. Charles T. Tart, First holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

From One Who Has Been There, Done That!

"Often, the dying patient wants to hold onto life only for the sake of the survivors. I assure you, a dying person will be overjoyed once on the Other Side. Remember, none of us dies; we only change form."      

--Dr. Dianne Morrissey

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The reality we live is a phenomenological one, and within those terms, these experiences are real. They can change lives. I don't know of any p value of the parapsychologists that has changed a life, not even one of their own.     

--Rhea A. White [Hon.] Ph.D.

"If you are not ready for (NDEs) you will not believe what I tell you. But on the other hand, if you know already, then they could hang you by your toe nails and still you would know. Do you see the difference between knowing something and believing something? Once you know, no matter what they do to you, you will know that death does not exist."     

--Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 

"(I)t has been calculated that over 40 percent of apparitions appear in daylight hours, and another 10-20 percent in good artificial illumination. Thus darkness does not seem to be a pre-requisite for apparitions, despite popular superstitions."     

--Dr. Carl B. Becker

"(P)eople are largely unaware of their natural ability to leave the body because their belief systems do not allow for the existence of such experience."
--Rick Stack, OBE adept

For more than 40 years EVP recordings have been amassing in many countries and by the thousands. They have frequently attracted the scrutiny of top-notch engineers and scientists who have come to respect that it is indeed "a phenomenon" to be reckoned with, even if they have no scientifically certifiable explanation to offer for the anomalous events. With all this in mind, Mary Jo Uphoff, a remarkably gifted American psychic well known to 'lab-lubber’ parapsychologists, says, "The paranormal voices on magnetic tape provide some of the strongest evidence for survival. Voices which should not be there, voices saying something of important personal relevance to the person doing the recording have been found or deliberately captured on tape by tape recorders. The patient research and hours of recording such voices by Friedrich Juergenson, Dr. Konstantin Raudive (two of the first pioneers) …have amassed tapes bearing so many references, names and personal comments that the (continued) explanation that these are ‘stray radio signals’ borders on the ludicrous."     

--Mary Jo Uphoff [See Macy and Kubis, 1995]

"The NDE is essentially a spiritual experience that serves as a catalyst for spiritual awakening and development. Moreover, the spiritual development that unfolds following an NDE tends to take a particular form. Finally, as a by-product of this spiritual development, NDEers tend to manifest a variety of psychic abilities afterward that are an inherent part of their transformation."     

--Dr. Kenneth Ring