Many people who look at this website may not remember
experiences of the exceptional variety and may wonder how they
fit into this whole idea of our rapidly changing worldview
that is now openly inclusive of consciousness as a viable
field of study in the Western sciences, and of course
increasingly accepting these Experiences as normal. It
is my belief that perhaps even the majority of people who have
had any type of exceptional experience has not been able to
gain much that is worthwhile from them, because our society as
a whole has not understood them or their implications for
transforming our lives. And therefore, we have not
known to be aware of their worth. More about this
below.
There
Is No NonExperiencer
What if Time is a convenient [and equally not so convenient]
illusion, and past, present, and future are one, just as
physicists as well as those who have come back from
near-death experiences and who have had life reviews, tell
us? They experience their lives not in our accustomed
sense of time, but all at once, as if spread out all around
them like puzzle pieces on a floor, or like a global
map. And put that together with pre-birth memories,
substantiated reincarnation memories, and after-death
communications and all the other experiences that gift us with
glimpses into the Eternal. As we look at the
larger picture of all this as a whole, these collective
realizations tell us we come in as Experiencers, a few never
lose that awareness, many are given opportunities to re-member
during their lives on this earth, and we leave this existence,
without question as Experiencers, as uncounted millions have
realized through their death-bed vision experiences, and
near-death and other experiences have revealed. Within
this understanding, we are all Experiencers. There is no
nonExperiencer.
There are many who do not remember or intuit this in the
moment. There are some who are so shut down, closed off
from their spirit life that they let nothing get through to
demonstrate otherwise. But these are just temporary
lapses. Read Howard
Storm's story. He was a professor who fully
assumed his atheist beliefs. He had a near-death
experience, and was shocked to find himself even more
conscious than in ordinary physical life. Once he
clearly knew he must be dead, he then had to deal with his
former beliefs in the dark place he found himself with other
similarly lost and confused people. He came back a
dramatically changed man, transformed by his Experience.
Repression
and Denial
Something on the order of "use it or lose it" is at
play here. Sometimes, for example, people intentionally
repress the memory of such experiences, such as James
Van Praagh, who was a very gifted psychic from his
earliest childhood. He was constantly being punished and
abused because of this ability. He finally
prayed, begged, pleaded that this be removed from him, which
it was for many years but came back when he was an adult and
was better able to handle it. If you haven't seen it
yet, you might want to read "JoAnne's"
story.
She did something similar, almost instantly
"forgetting" the extraordinary near-death experience
she had during surgery. I have, and know others who
have, including Rhea White, forgotten experiences like
these. But once I started making the effort to remember
them and record them, I was sometimes amazed at some of the
events I had forgotten -- because I never did anything with
them to bring greater meaning and understanding into my life.
Experiences:
Seedlings Requiring Our Open, Willing Attention to Grow Us
into the MORE of Our
Human Potential
Even though this is changing, still, a lot of people will be
able to identify readily with this comment by Rhea
A. White:
Although there are scholars and scientists willing to
grant that these [exceptional human] experiences merit
investigation, they have done so using the methods of Western
science and analysis. This
has led to their being treated as static events--one-time
occurrences that, once they are over, are considered done
with. For example,
an investigator might look into a dream that X had in May 1991
that corresponded in considerable detail to an event that
occurred in June 1991, thus indicating that the dream could
have been precognitive. The
investigator tries to find witnesses to both dream and event.
He or she compares the details of the dream with the details
of the event, notes the person’s age, sex, occupation,
education, etc., and when finished, adds this information to
other such statistics. It will most likely molder away in a
file somewhere. We haven’t learned anything that connects to
anything else. Instead,
we should view such experiences not as one-time events
comparable, say to one’s first tooth or car, but more to
one’s job or one’s significant relationships--in other
words, to experiences that occur within an ongoing process.
Exceptional experiences are more like seeds.
They happen to us not like events but as initiators of
a process, waiting to unfold in us even as the oak tree
unfolds from the acorn, but with a major difference--the oak
tree, as far as we know, grows spontaneously and naturally.
But the process that unfolds in a human being, at least
after a certain stage is reached, requires our conscious
cooperation and participation.
We need to pay attention to these experiences, try to
glimpse what they may be telling us, discern where they may be
leading us, trust the visions they reveal to us, and
incorporate them in our lives.
So, although
initially they occur spontaneously, they are invitations to
participate in a process of growth that requires our
cooperation. Instead,
we tend to shelve these experiences, to repress them, and not
tell others about them, because although they may be exciting,
thrilling, wonderful experiences in themselves, in the context
of the consensus worldview they are weird, strange, unreal, or
even sick. In
this view, it is natural not to look to them for insight and
guidance.
**
If you feel out of touch with any memory of Experiences of
this nature, pick a quiet time and sit down
with paper and pen and do a bit of reverie to fish for moments
that were classic exceptional experiences for you. Just
as with trying to remember dreams, this is
a process that gets easier with practice. At first you
might not remember anything, but with a little persistence,
this will change. White herself was convinced that every
one of us has had experiences of this nature, even if we don't
remember them. I'm inclined to agree, given how wide
open children are in their first years to taking in absolutely
everything without any questions or conceptions as to what is
"normal" and what is not. Also, being close to
their entry moment into this world, they still may have a kind
of psychic access that rapidly falls away for most of us by
the time we are 5-6 years old. Under hypnosis, according
to a number of researchers, adults remember experiences before
their birth, and in some cases, even before their body's
conception. See, for example Sarah
Hinze
[pre-birth memory], as well as Ian
Stevenson
and Jenny
Cockell
[reincarnation memory].
Also see: Rhea White's articles about writing
these stories down and about sharing
them with others and why
these two practices are important. Both these
activities will greatly improve your recall of these
experiences.
Something else that may help: ask those with whom you
are close if they have had such experiences or if they
remember the stories of your ancestors. This too can
prime the pump of memory, and research indicates, as for
example, Abraham Maslow discovered in his work with "peak
experiences," that your sustained interest can predispose
you to more such Experiences, as your open mindedness
and earnest interest grows.
-----
*
From "EHEers and
the Creation of a New Worldview" IN: one of the many flyers
published on behalf of EHE Network, New Bern, NC, 1997.
**
From
White's article, Exceptional
Human Experience: A
Brief Overview.
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