Through
the decades as a parapsychologist, as editor of the Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research, and as founder of the
Exceptional Human Experience Network, Rhea A. White must have collected
many thousands of exceptional experiences [EEs] and exceptional human
experiences [EHEs]. In her essay, The Act of
Sharing EHEs as a Catalyst, she describes how, whenever she went to
conferences and so forth, she would take several
examples of each of many kinds and would use them to encourage people to
share their own stories. This was from the very early 1990s and
back, so she was one of the original researchers instrumental in coaxing
people to come out of the closet with their exceptional experiences.
Although I have been studying these stories and their implications for
many years now, only with the creation of this still quite new website
[2007] and another web project yet to fully materialize, has it become
possible to collect these in an organized way from others. So for
the moment, most of what I can offer you by way of example is some of my
experiences and the few that have come to me through family and
friends. That can be useful, because I have a very strong feeling
I'm quite average or normal as such things go. In fact the results
of a 2001 Gallup Poll indicated that better than one in two people
answered they have had some sort of psychic [I read that as 'or
spiritual'] experience. So I'm one
out of two, and chances are better than 50% that so are you!
That means that what you
find here is representative of what most people will recognize as
familiar, which is cause for hope, because until not
that many years ago, no one talked about these, admitted to these.
Until very recently, even out-of-body and near-death experiences and
various stripes of other spiritual experiences could be identified in
some form or other in the PDR [Physician's Desk Reference] as indicative
of psychological illness! So we are all just barely crawling out
from the ol' rock together to discover LOTS of us share these very
normal and nurturing types of experiences that can help us not go
crazy in spite of all the other stuff that is part of the destructive
weirdness we do find in the world and that for some peculiar reason is
not listed in the PDR! Go figure.
Quick, back to the
Mocha-Cream-Lattes that keep us in touch with what feeds our souls and
allows us to share a very REAL sense of what life is meant to be about,
such as love and laughter and celebration despite the nightly-news drama
and hand-wringing. Who doesn't enjoy hearing people's stories, especially of a
spiritual or paranormal nature? Okay there are a few, but
deep-deep down, out of a mutual recognition of that Something More that
is innate to what it means to be Human, by far most of us find something
quite positive and hopeful and nurturing in the give and take of the
story telling.
But if you think about it,
the one person specific stories have any real relevance for is the
experiencer. I picked ones easy to share with others on the basis
of how truly "ordinary" they are, meaning, these are examples
many of you will recognize or identify with, because you have yourselves
had such experiences or you are aware of others' similar
occurrences.
The kinds of questions you may find helpful to ask yourself about your experiences or to look into
regarding others' EEs/EHEs
have to do with what if any significant differences they have made in
the life of the experiencer. Looking back over my life and these
incidents, which were always deeply meaningful but rarely dramatic, I
can tell you their cumulative effect has been like the process of a
slow-to-boil pot. At first I simply marveled at them; they were
few and far between, and at one point, I pondered the possibility I was
experiencing something like a Whitman's sampler of chocolates, but only
one at a time and god-knows-how-long between these always
out-of-the-blue gifts.
This started in my memory
with a recurring nightmare that eventually resulted in a lucid dream
that broke the nightmare pattern, then an out-of-body experience that
certainly got my attention and left me with the clear awareness we are
not these bodies, then it was a series of quite other things over
decades, and each one was unique to me, except for a few more forays
into OBEs or near-OBEs. It felt kind of like a surprise lollipop
or a friendly nudge now and then that life is MORE than the earthbound
dramas of angst and worse that seemed to press like a thick cloud over
my growing-up years and on into adulthood, a familiar litany to many of
my contemporaries -- not that it's so different [maybe worse!], now -- the ever looming threat of nuclear annihilation,
the fact that people who mostly didn't even know each other could harbor
hatred and violent animosity over something like skin color, the Viet
Nam War, .. you get the idea. Not to mention environmental
concerns that really began to hold their own center stage from the '60s
forward. Nearly everyone has a pet list like this to remind them
why life here can be so pathetic.
One of the most empowering, stabilizing, helpful things we can learn
from these spiritual experiences, contrary to the overwhelming and
relentless message of public opinion, is that life is really GOOD,
speaking of one of the best kept secrets! In A Book of Angels,
Sophy Burnham tells a provocative yet universal
story, quite an adventure, in which she nearly lost her life in a skiing
mishap. She says,
... I fell, and found myself sliding on my back head first,
downhill. When you fall skiing, you're supposed to twist
your skis around to the downhill side, dig into the snow, and
brake to a stop. No matter how I tried, I could not make
that twist. The ground was hard and somewhat pebbly.
It acted like a billion ball bearings, carrying me along.
I remember thinking it was ludicrous, sledding on my back,
headfirst, battered against small stones. I was not
afraid, though I knew I was off the piste [ski tracks in
Europe]. After two or three attempts, however, to flip my
skis, I decided it didn't matter, that soon I would hit a tree
-- no, I meant a rock -- and stop.
For my attention was captured by the sky. The sky!
It wasn't just blue sky. It radiated blue, green, yellow,
pink; and my heart was wrenched out of my body with rapture as
if it recognized something -- Home! I was barreling
downhill at thirty or forth miles an hour, bumping over stones,
yet filled with joy. I saw the perfection of all things,
including this mad, headfirst slide. What did it matter if
I died right then? I thought irrationally. That,
too, was welcome. Wondrous.
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