The deaths of
two of 21-year-olds, one of them my much younger brother,
necessarily took me through an initiatory journey that
unavoidably belongs to all of us, sooner or later.
What you find here and will ultimately experience as
wHeretwoworldsTouch.com / .org is the outcome of the
determination birthed in those first years after their passing,
to bring together in one place a richly sourced, well-organized
compendium of resources and guidance that I wish I could have
found when I and my loved ones needed it the most, in hopes it
will benefit others who traverse those excruciating straits.
Over this
intervening time, my own journey took me through a progression as if through
stages of needs and insight, even inspiration, which became the original vision
for this work. Each
aspect addressed a challenge or a bushel-full of
challenges. The
progression includes these phases:
First
the benumbed and overwhelmed feeling with all
that must be attended to concerning the physical, emotional and
psychosocial issues of dealing with the irreparable rending of
the familiar fabric of love and community when someone moves
beyond the physical consensus realm --
we all can identify with this challenge . .
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...
leading to the birth of the
Physical
Death and Dying Resource Portal / PDD
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Eventually,
often in the middle of the grieving, surfaces the need to make peace with the issue of death and
dying. For some people the loss of a loved
one is what launches them into a determined search to
find answers to this ultimate mystery of our physical
existence.
Similar
to my experience, Sandy
Goodman,
whose 18-year-old son passed unexpectedly, has
said,
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The
search I embarked upon was parallel to my
grieving, simultaneous but separate. I
often felt like two people. One mourning
and the other finding joy and comfort in the
experiences triggered by the death of her
child. At first my search was focused on
validating the reality of an afterlife .
.. I wanted to talk with others who had
traveled the same road.
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Traditionally,
most people have turned to their religion
or to the beliefs they grew up with as a means for
making sense of 'death'
and making peace with it. But there are many for whom belief is not
enough anymore; they want to know for themselves,
directly, what life holds for us beyond that one-way door we call
death. For me personally, this led
to a years-long immersion into the astonishingly vast assortment
of experience-based stories and corroborative data available,
all pointing like a compass needle to what I refer to as the larger life
reality, so wonderfully validating of the experiences of
myself and family and friends that bestowed rare
glimpses of the Other Side.
As with the issues of death and dying, I
discovered you couldn't just find
all this in one convenient location, so the creation of a
repository of [thus far] mostly books and web-based
resources became the next objective. Also
I suspected these people longed, as Sandy Goodman herself
said, to explore this material and these experiences with
others who are similarly committed to this special journey, preferably in a 'neutral' environment
in which there is a mutual respect for each person's own truth,
but sourced straight out of our direct
experiences . . .
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...
leading to the birth of the
Larger
Life Reality Portal / LLR
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What
makes these spiritual events so compelling and important is the
way most experiencers are utterly "made new" by them. Their lives are
clearly pervaded by deeply integrating, wholeness-making
meaning and purpose [see
aftereffects],
embracing a reverence for all life
that is passionately directed to the kinds of concerns that seek to
protect and heal our humanity, our Earth and its creatures.
In fact many EHEers have exclaimed that being exposed to
such experiences, even if only vicariously, is the
ultimate answer for saving us from destroying ourselves
and our Earth, because in gaining this transformed
consciousness, the ignorance that has supported the
patterns underlying the corruption and devastation can
no longer be sustained. The question arose, what
does it mean to lead to such a life? . .
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...
leading to the birth of the
Living
the Awakened Life Portal / LAL
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From
this followed the desire to support a deeply
committed community of EHEers, both for the sake of EHEers
themselves and for the entire world.
On the one hand, there is little in the way of
organized support available to help EHEers with the
sometimes extremely difficult issues they must cope
with after their experiences.
Also, typically they return from these adventures of
Awakening with untold gifts,
supersensory and heart-sourced abilities,
a fresh creative genius, an undeniable unitive
awareness and regard,
an increase in synchronicities and sense of flow in
their now deeply purposeful lives, and ETC. The
question that has come to "brood me" for years
now is, What could the unified
and purposeful consciousness of
hundreds of millions of avidly, lovingly motivated, Aware EHEers and
EHE-empaths, from all over the world,
do together with well-organized, Spirit-led clarity and
intentionality? .
. .
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...
leading to the birth of the
EHEer
Support Cooperative / ESC
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Four
points recommended to me a fifth subweb:
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1.
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Knowing
firsthand how and how powerfully spiritually
transformative experiences can change us in
particular ways, it's certainly not surprising
that one of the most frequently voiced and
emphatic insights we hear from EHEers is
this:
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The
one thing -- the one thing -- that can
save us and our world from our self-destructive
ignorance is these kinds of experiences.
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How
could they not come to this conclusion, since
this is exactly what happened to them to
whatever degree, from the inside out,
dramatically, in an instant, erasing so much of their personal
ignorance and destructive habits of thought,
feeling, behavior and relationship.
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2.
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Abraham
Maslow's observation that the more people study and
immerse themselves in all-things-EHE [aka "peak experiences"], the more
they tend to have such experiences themselves, along with
the attendant greater perspective and
giftedness.
Thus the more their lives come to reflect the
EHEerly aftereffects and life.
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3.
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Kenneth
Ring's research indicating that often people
who are simply exposed to others' NDEs [this is
true of EHEs in general] are so affected
by them, their own lives tend to take on the
familiar characteristics attributed to EHEers themselves.
Ring referred to this phenomenon as a benign but
highly contagious 'virus'.
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4.
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John
Heron's "person-centred inquiry in the
spiritual and the subtle." His
approach to the study and cultivation of an Experience-based
life is refreshingly free of the kinds of
languaging that gets us mired into adversarial identity
agendas [e.g., religion, nationality, gender,
race . . also authoritarianism, especially that
does not originate from direct experience of
this nature . . little-ego issues], all
that we feel we don't have in common that so easily derails us from
being aware of and relating from our most
gloriously common ground, our universality as spirit
beings. We all are naturally capable of
being conscious of and within the
multidimensional Reality. From the
permanently transformed lives of millions
of Experiencers, clearly, our ability to be
aware of and to experience our
multidimensionality has an explicit outcome that
is positive, healing, wholeness-making,
spirit-aware, Self-aware, joyously meaningful,
aligning to the multidimensional unity of Being
we all are, loving, and life-reverencing.
This is the state of being that is capable of
transforming the world. We Wake Up to be
the MORE of who we are as spirit beings and to
be conscious co-participants within this
Larger-Life Reality! This pursuit is
the raison d'etre of the
Death-Transcendent Cooperative Inquiry
Initiative.
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Given their incalculable
value to us, what
could best support our learning to cultivate what Elaine Pagels
describes as "modes
of consciousness susceptible to
revelation" --
i.e., EHEs? What if we systematically explored and
studied them together as experiencers and would-be
experiencers -- but in a unified way, inclusive of all
possibilities for such Awakening? Of
course throughout our recorded hirstory,
there have been people and groups of people committed to
this, but not together,
not collaboratively and across all disciplines, etc.,
which is to me the next big step . .
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...
leading to the birth of the
Death-Transcendent
Cooperative
Inquiry Initiative / DTCII
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As this
thoroughly engaging passion has continued to grow and solidify into a lifework, I only quite
recently and 'suddenly' became extremely aware of a certain
commentary suggesting over and over and over among Experiencers
themselves, there is a
revolutionary shift in consciousness coming into prevalence, we
are as a species being 'made new', ... I
was seeing this everywhere --
in our religious texts, one of my lately found treasures with
this in evidence being the Secret Gospel of Thomas [see
Stephan
Davies and Elaine Pagels],
as well as in the prophetic and visionary / mystic types of
thoughts expressed by people like Richard
Maurice Bucke, Rudolf
Steiner, and more recently
David
Spangler, and through the stories and remarks of so many
EHEers today -- e.g., John White,
PMH Atwater,
Rhea
A. White, Claire
Blatchford, Rasha.
From at least the early Gnostics until well into the 20th
century, authors / experiencers were saying futuristically, it's coming,
it's coming, this 'golden age'. To me, this evolutionary
development is defined most powerfully by a transformation
of our collective consciousness, in which love and peace would
dominate. In essence we will all be astoundingly changed,
as a biblical quote says, "... in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
... and the dead will be raised incorruptible [that's us
-- we are the dead who Awaken], and we shall be changed."
The modern-day mystic, David Spangler,
was the first person I had encountered who said
IT'S HERE.
This
was voiced in the late 1960s.
At that moment within the consensus timeline, it seemed
there was indeed a 'shift' that was even globally felt with the
then young "baby boomer" generation making waves all
over the at least Western world in a way that was unprecedented. Many
people felt this aliveness, as if we were in the midst of an
energetic, sometimes palpable change.
Suddenly meditation and other Eastern spiritual practices
and also street drugs and even near-death experiences and an
explosion of UFO sightings and other such experiences and
mind-altering "psychedelic music" seemed to take over
the Western world. In
the face of the
Viet Nam
war and the assassinations of "John and Bobby and
Martin" and the bulldog bluster of nuclear threat that
seemed to hang over the world, there was this intense
restlessness and hunger for
meaning and spirituality that was like a runaway wildfire;
nothing could contain it or shape it.
But one thing was for sure:
this Shift, even then, was felt to be within many of us
and all about us. Collectively,
we did not have the maturity then to handle this world-rippling
energetic. But at
least we recognized it and we certainly celebrated it!
I think many of us, maybe nearly everyone genuinely felt
something of that then, although I doubt that any but a handful
had the scope of inner vision to realize it was not
sourced in the physical domain at all.
My feeling is,
only [and maybe not even] now are growing numbers of people
recognizing this Shift as a global phenomenon encompassing all
of humanity; it didn't die at all; it has matured over the span
of these last several decades. Only
about now are we realizing how all the isolated pieces and
similar commentary begin to add up to a composite
explanation. We /
all of humanity are participating in this consciousness
transformation like no other in our recorded hirstory that seems
to have been occurring one person and one experience at a time,
but all over the planet. They
all add up to the same thing, and our greatest hint as to its
nature is what we have been learning about the aftereffects of
spiritually transformative experiences.
Just as with
the swing into a new season, the signs are everywhere!
Examples include ..
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The
deeper-than-deep altruistic characteristics of the
usually remarkably driven EHEers
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David
Spangler's description of incarnational
spirituality, the experience of
"God-Immanent," reflects a congruent trend
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As
does [R.] White's often transcendent-focused EHEs
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The
increasing acceptance of NDEs and other such experiences
[and sometimes even their purported significance] within
the medical and scientific establishment and within
society in general
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Among
scientists, the increasingly open recognition and
exploration of convergence between spirituality and
Western science
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The
substantial and growing numbers of people professing to
have had spiritual experiences and privately and
publicly sharing their experiences
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The
birthing of whole new, even multiple fields of science
acknowledging the primacy of consciousness within the
Western science purview, and quite a few scientists in
the more traditional sciences seeking ways to reconcile
within their various disciplines this once scorned beast
of a challenge
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Public
opinion, values, behavior, laws, whole movements afoot progressively
changing to reflect views more in line with the
transformed perspective of EHEer aftereffects,
particularly in reference to social and environmental
concerns, and even including the perception that the
whole Earth is itself a living being
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In the early 1980s, many of
these conceptions were considered renegade at best, if they even
existed in our collective awareness.
As recently as 1992, I witnessed a situation where one
of my biofeedback clients remembered an incident in which a
very loving relative shushed her recall of a near-death
experience when she was just coming out from under sedation from
a major operation [circa 1989], for fear she may be thought to
be a mental case. In
1981 a Gallup Poll revealed that as many as 25% of Americans
confessed to having had some form of "spiritual
experience." Just
20 years later, a stunning 50% admitted to such experiences!
[I have not researched this, but since the 911 incident
took place the same year as this more recent Gallup Poll, I
would not be surprised if this figure is even markedly higher
today.]
In short,
this apparent "Consciousness rEvolution" appears to be
gaining momentum dramatically in the world and has become a
resonant tone that pervades or is evident through all you find
on wHeretwoworldsTouch.com and on Ahhh-TheLight.com. I can only
see great, great good resulting from this understanding growing
to global proportions, and my life is dedicated to that purpose.
This is the Vision that calls me, one that has already
been remarked by some of the forerunners, those who were the
first of us to SEE, to KNOW, and to dare to SPEAK it, which I
reiterate here:
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What
could the unified consciousness and directedness of
hundreds of millions of passionately motivated, Aware
EHEers and EHE-empaths, from all over the world, who
have these [Aftereffect] characteristics in common, do
together with well organized, planned, Spirit-led
intentionality? The
primary reason for the existence of this site and
wHeretwoworldsTouch.com / .org is to chronicle, nurture
and help facilitate this global awareness and its
supreme importance to each and all of us.
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