Nothing
So Puts Life into Uncompromisingly Honest Perspective as Squarely Facing
the Death of a Loved One or Oneself.
In 1985 my
youngest brother and his best buddy, both 21 years old, died in a car
wreck. As a result I found myself for the first time needing to get
a grip on 'death'. Past EHEs had taught me that we as conscious
beings do not die. I wanted to know that they were released safely
into the loving embrace of that Larger-Life Reality, as I call it; that my brother and his friend truly were aware of their situation, having read from various sources that some
people pass over without realizing they have died and may get stuck in sort
of an in-between limbo without moving forward into the larger-life continuum as
conscious participants; that they had reconnected within the unbroken tapestry
of eternal beloveds and belovedness with their eyes open, so-to-speak.
Also, I needed to put to rest my own fears about death and dying. This
Mystery of Mysteries became a most compelling and steadfast star of my
life. So began a search that has carried me to the present and has long since taken on
a life of its own, pun intended.
A
Little Hirstory for Perspective -- This Movement Is How Big? ..
Or:
How Many Trees Does It Take to Make a Forest?
This devastating event occurred congruently
within the early stages of a kind of movement, not recognized as such
then, that had been initiated
several years earlier and is turning out to be of critical importance to all
of us. In
the USA, it seemed to start with Raymond Moody, MD, who published Life After
Life [1975] in which he
coined the term "near-death experience" /
NDE, and by the mid-80s, the NDE literature was just beginning to proliferate.
I devoured all I could find, which led me to the wider field of parapsychology,
back to its hirstorical underpinnings, and forward into the ever-broadening
research interests in what I tend to think of as Survival Studies.
There is, for example, a burgeoning number of people and organizations -- both
experiencers and people who study experiencers, most of whom were not publicly
evident even a few years prior to this,
now researching just about every imaginable type of exceptional experience. Examples:
the original "psychical research" interests of the late 1800s and the subsequent field
of parapsychology; the now multiplicity of interests under the guise of
"consciousness studies";
transpersonal psychology; the sweeping movement of 'feminist
science'; the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research; the Anthroposophical Society; Edgar
Cayce's A.R.E.; Stanford Research Institute [SRI]; the International Symposia on
Science and Consciousness; Eileen Garrett's internationally renowned Parapsychology Foundation;
PEER / Program for Extraordinary Experience Research at Harvard; some major
proponents within the so-called traditional sciences, including biology,
cosmology, quantum physics, anthropology, sociology, psychology; the
International Association of Near Death Studies; the National Institute for
Discovery Science; the Institute of Noetic Sciences; The Monroe Institute; The
Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences; many outstanding experiencers,
themselves veritable 'institutions' (Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross, P. M. H.
Atwater, Dannion
Brinkley, John
Heron, Robert
Moss, Charles
T. Tart,
Jane
Roberts, Robert
A. Monroe, Raymond
Moody, Jr., Mellen-Thomas
Benedict, and legions
more). I speak mainly from what I know about the USA, but there are
similarly plentiful organizations and pursuits in many if not all countries in
the world, which I anticipate we will together learn much more about as this
continues to develop.
From a broader view, some of the major trends that have contributed to this coalescing into
an actual Movement about to wake up to itself are these:
Beginning in the 1960s, major medical strides, such as in cardiovascular
surgery and emergency medicine, have meant that more people are being
brought back to life from what appears to be momentary death in the
sense of the measured cessation of all vital signs. People
are talking more openly about their unusual, paranormal / spiritual
experiences of all types, a popular subject for talk-show hosts, which
says just how "ordinary" this is as a part of our social
consciousness, now.
Less than 20 years ago people were
routinely medicated or even institutionalized for revealing or insisting
they had had such experiences that did not fit the specifically Western
consensus physical reality [here's
an example of
how frightening this could be for people]. But now, even in major medical
hospitals, people are routinely encouraged to talk about their
experiences. Anomalous experiences that used to be listed in the
Physician's Desk Reference [PDR] as medical concerns [described as
hallucinatory, psychotic, etc.] have been thoroughly reassessed and only
fairly recently in light of the fact that otherwise perfectly sane,
cogent people from all walks of life, including medical and scientific
professionals, are admitting to having such experiences, typically
described as "realer than real" and "the most important
thing that ever happened to me."
It hasn't hurt, either, that numerous documented examples began showing
up regularly in surgical suites of people, supposedly and soundly and
technologically recorded as 'dead', who nonetheless came back to
consciousness eventually, describing details of the physical events they
had witnessed during these dramatic moments. The participants most
often watched by 'the dead' in question concerned the room-full of
medical and technical professionals usually desperately trying to bring
the 'witness' back into this life, and this type of situation began
happening fairly regularly [less than one out of 20 people who 'died'
for a few moments]. It must have been quite an act of courage
during those first years for medical personnel to admit of such
happenings outside Those Double Doors. (On the one hand I want to
say, brave people, thank you! And on the other and with all due
respect, I can't help but remember Jackie Gleason's famous line:
"How sweeet it is!"
;-D What a stupendous difference this
understanding has made for countless Experiencers, no longer to be
considered possibly crazy, but also eye-opening for nonExperiencers, and
ultimately for the whole world.)
People who had had such
experiences -- years and even several decades before this more open-minded
interest made it safer to talk about them -- began to come forward to
share their own unusual experiences, often for the very first time in
their lives. Not only all this, but these stories and those who
share them often so affect others whom I call "EHE Empaths," who
themselves do not remember having such experiences, that their own
values, behavior and worldview are similarly transformed to reflect
those of the Experiencers. Or others' experiences simply provide
the validating "final vote" in conjunction with their own
experiences yet to be fully potentiated as EHEs.
It is true that some types of
exceptional experiences generally seem to have stronger and more lasting
impact than others. For example, an out-of-body experience or
afterdeath communication will typically have much more influence than a déjà
vu moment or precognitive dream, though not necessarily.
Although it is not usual, even the most profound near-death experience
may leave its recipient unfazed [see example]. So it's really up to the
individual what value and meaning heshe may derive from it. For
the people who allow themselves to be positively changed by them, there
are profound
benefits not
only for themselves but for all of us and for the Earth itself.
The popular interest in near-death experiences and also concurrently
[1970s] the work and writings of people like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
[psychiatrist, thanatologist], Robert A. Monroe [out-of-body experiencer
and researcher], Stanislav Grof [one of the original and few
medical researchers who worked with LSD in surprisingly healing, helpful
ways], David
Spangler [contemporary mystic]. Such works were and still are in great demand, and people began to open up about
an ever-widening range of similarly life-transforming experiences.
At
Last -- a 'Forest Perspective'!
Rhea
A. White took
all this a giant step further by choosing
to study all these kinds of experiences together.
Up to that point, people tended to specialize in what most fascinated
them, such as near-death or out-of-body or mystical
experiences; most still do. She eventually identified over 500 types
of what she called "potential exceptional human
experiences."
Decades of research by her and others made it quite clear that any of
these nonordinary, nonphysical events can be the agents of this
remarkable, transformative process.
Our
World Is Visibly Beginning to Reflect a Sea Change ...
Parapsychology, by the way, is still alive and well, but it has never gotten the
credibility nor funding it deserved and that could allow it to thrive the way other sciences have.
This in spite of the fact, it's been shown time and again
that the research methods of parapsychologists have as a rule been, if
possible, even more stringent than those which would be considered
respectable in any other field of science.
But in the last roughly
dozen years, there's been a sea change, you could say, about that no-no
word, Consciousness. Not only is it no longer the white elephant
everyone tries to tip-toe around or ignore [the mind-body
"problem"], it has become one of the
darlings of the scientific world! It's hard not to imagine this
has something to do with two avenues of broad interest: formal
research, which has not been otherwise well known, and the unflagging
public interest in altered states of consciousness / consciousness in
general and in these types of experience in particular. This has
been happening on so many levels and in so many contexts, from martial
arts to how to run a business, from proprietary military interests to
pop-psychology and yoga, not to mention the ever-popular books, movies,
etc. about Experiencers and their Experiences and what has emerged in
EHEers' lives as a result. Whatever hirstory accords as the
official A-B-Cs of this development, research
under the auspices of "consciousness studies"
as an amalgam of an enormous array of mind-body and even mind-spirit
disciplines and fields of interest has exploded into being like an overnight flourishing of a vast tracery of
mushrooms across the entire global consciousness, not even visible the
day before.
And there's more. Over the interim of the last several decades,
religious leadership more often than not has taken the point of view toward
these experiences, reported in some cases by their members, that they
are a threat to the religious beliefs of the community and therefore are to be
discouraged in various ways. But more recently, some
religious institutions have become increasingly tolerant and
appreciative of their value, seeing in them a kind of respiritualization
of our
world. This is especially the case among ecumenical and
progressive faiths.
Relatedly, there has also been a lively interest, even excited
anticipation of a bridging of the gap between spirituality and
science/medicine. Of course this is a bit of a touchy subject for
some for a fist-full of reasons I won't dare broach here, but if you
look into the Consciousness arena, both inside and outside formal
academia and medicine, you will also see this bearing a whole new
generation of seedlings to our 'forest' analogy! For a few hints,
if you would like to know more, you might start with Amit
Goswami, Charles
T. Tart, Thomas
Berry, John
Heron, Rudolf
Steiner, William
A. Tiller, Carl
G. Jung, Russell
Targ, Brugh
Joy, the
often-quoted David
Bohm [Wholeness
and the Implicate Order] who had a long and mutually fruitful friendship
with Krishnamurti; William
James, Brian
Swimme, Jacob
Lieberman, Fred
Alan Wolf, Bruce
H. Lipton, Valerie
Hunt, Herbert
Benson, Daniel Goleman and Joel Gurin, Rachel Naomi Ramen, Arthur
Guirdham, O.
Carl Simonton,
Carolyn Myss, Arnold
and Amy Mindell.
Google the Institute of Noetic Sciences, The Academy of Religion and
Psychical Research, Dr. Raymond Moody's "Theater of the Mind,"
the Fetzer Foundation, the Spiritual Emergence Research and Referral
Clinic [Yvonne Kason], also John Templeton and the Templeton Foundation
whose whole passion is funding this abridgement in a big way. This
doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this multi-arena
development.
One last important factor contributing to their common acknowledgement and
acceptance has been the research itself, defining the clear, nearly universal pattern of aftereffects attributed to these
special moments. People really do change remarkably and in
distinct and often lasting ways that have been recognized to be hallmarks of these types
of life-transforming experiences. If it wasn't for this, we would
have nothing to talk about here. All
of this has contributed greatly to the acknowledgement and general
acceptance of the viability of these exceptional experiences and their
significance to us as a fragile world and as the family of humanity.
Thus far, this movement has been comprised of all these individual
interests,
institutions, types of experiences, specialties or special-studies and concerns,
not to mention the how-many-millions of Experiencers who quietly live out of
their consequent inner-directedness, having rarely if every admitted this to
anyone else. Also, exceptional experiences may be the impetus behind probably a sizeable portion
of community / activism interests, but
this fact is not usually openly disclosed. Although the
idea of people telling their [EHE] experiences and of their meaning and motivating
force in their lives has slowly begun to demonstrate its value to people, still, up to now, we continue to suffer from a kind of pervasive, felt isolationism.
We
need to talk to each other; we need to share our mutually affirming stories and see how these tie
us all together into a meaningful and vibrant mega-web of Community --
and on levels we rarely imagined before, except theoretically, such as
for example, Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and
superconscious, to which we all contribute and by which we are in turn
constantly influenced. [We will begin to utilize this
much-in-evidence, unconscious phenomenon consciously and with
studied intent -- but that's another story!]
Interestingly, and I suspect integrally related to the EHE development, Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson,
who devoted years to their preparation of the thoroughly researched book, The
Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World,
make a clear distinction about what
they call "Core" Cultural
Creatives, who are by far the more
activist-oriented of the Cultural Creatives as a whole. This movement
began to emerge, by the way, exactly in tandem with what I had perceived as the EHE-based movement, starting roughly in the 1960s. What most defines
the Core CCs is that they combine a serious concern for their inner lives with a strong
penchant for social activism, including a commitment to the healing of our Earth
and a sustainable
future. All Cultural Creatives have 'green' values -- concerns for the
ecology and the well-being of the whole planet -- but the Core group is far more
passionately committed, educated and activist about them. In addition, the Core group has strong
values of personal growth and spirituality that are much less important to the
so-called "Green Cultural Creatives," who tend to
have more conventional religious interests. The authors note as well that the worldviews
of the Greens are less thought out than those of the Core CCs.
This has suggested to me that the Core CCs and EHEers must overlap
tremendously. The
EHEers, the
Core Cultural Creatives,
and including the EHE
Empaths and the Green
Cultural Creatives
together form
the collective Movement that is the subject of Ahhh-TheLight and
wHeretwoworldsTouch. It would be most interesting to create a survey to clarify
the relationship between these two groups that share a passion for both guiding spiritual
[reverence for all life] and
passionate ethical ["moral consciousness"] principles in the
all-embracing way they do.
We are about to grasp just how huge, how extant throughout the world this
phenomenon really is. .... which brings us finally to 'the Consciousness
rEvolution' [no, that's not a typo] ...
*[Lyrics
by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, from "A Piece of Sky" in the movie
Yentl.]
* *
* * *
* *
See
rEvolution,
Part 3
* *
* * *
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