Quotations

Deity Reigns

As a researcher I can assure you that any type of near-death experience can be life-changing. But as an experiencer, I can positively affirm that being bathed in The Light on the other side of death is more than life changing. That Light is the very essence, the heart and soul, the all-consuming consummation of ecstasy. It is a million suns of compressed love dissolving everything into itself, annihilating thought and cell, vaporizing humanness and history, into the one great brilliance of all that is and all that ever was and all that ever will be.
You know it’s God. No one has to tell you. You know you no longer believe in God, for belief implies doubt. There is no more doubt. None. You now KNOW God. And you know that you know. And you’re never the same again. Ad you know who you are . . . a child of God, a cell in the Greater Body, an extension of the One Force, an expression from the One Mind. No more can you forget your identity or ignore or pretend it away. There is One, and you are The One. One. The Light does that to you. . . . a very real, totally living and powerful Presence that, while defying description, is as vital as the next breath – and just as accessible.

~~PMH Atwater [see: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Near Death Experiences]

While flying over North America in MIR and glimpsing the first snow of the season from outer space:

"Light and powdery, it blended with the contours of the land, with the veins of the rivers. I thought -- autumn, snow -- people are getting ready for winter. A few minutes later, we were flying over the Atlantic, the Europe, and then Russia. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth's children and we should treat her as our Mother.

~~Aleksandr Aleksandrov, Cosmonaut of the former USSR [IN: The Home Planet by Kevin W. Kelley]

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.

~~Carl B. Becker

.. I turned toward the Light. The Light was very similar to what many other people have described in their near-death experiences. It was so magnificent. It is tangible; you can feel it. It is alluring; you want to go to it like you would want to go to your ideal mother's or father's arms. As I began to move toward the Light, I knew intuitively that if I went to the Light, I would be dead. So as I was moving toward the Light I said, "Please wait a minute, just hold on a second here. I want to think about this; I would like to talk to you before I go."
To my surprise, the entire experience halted at that point. You are indeed in control of your near-death experience. You are not on a roller coaster ride. So my request was honored and I had some conversations with the Light.

~~Mellen Thomas Benedict [This man died from cancer that had taken its course over a period of eighteen months. His typical physical deterioration had been professionally monitored over the course of this time, and everyone, himself included, fully accepted his eminent death. He wakened at about 4.30 a.m. one morning and knew "this was it," and contacted a few loved ones, one of whom was his Hospice nurse, to say a final goodbye. Medically documented, Benedict was dead for at least one and a half hours. After he returned, over time his health improved to the point that he regained a sense of normalcy in his life. He eventually went to be examined by doctors who could find no trace of the cancer that had killed him.]

[The following incident was given merely a brief mention in Mellen-Thomas Benedict's well-known story of his "after-death" experience. It gives you a new perspective with which to consider one's daily challenges.]

I had a descent into what you might call Hell, and it was very surprising. I did not see Satan or evil. My descent into Hell was a descent into each person's customized human misery, ignorance, and darkness of not-knowing. It seemed like a miserable eternity. But each of the millions of souls around me had a little star of light always available. But no one seemed to pay attention to it. They were so consumed with their own grief, trauma and misery. But, after what seemed an eternity, I started calling out to that Light, like a child calling to a parent for help.
Then the Light opened up and formed a tunnel that came right to me and insulated me from all that fear and pain. That is what Hell really is. So what we are doing is learning to hold hands, to come together. The doors of Hell are open now. We are going to link up, hold hands, and walk out of Hell together. The Light came to me and turned into a huge golden angel. I said, "Are you the angel of death?" It expressed to me that it was my oversoul, my Higher Self matrix, a super-ancient part of ourselves. Then I was taken to the Light.

~~Mellen Thomas Benedict

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.

~~Thomas Berry

Who would decline a sacrifice

if once his soul had been accosted,

his virtue recognized

and he was assured that

the Watcher, the Holy One, followed

him ever with long, affectionate

glances of inexhaustible love?

~~William Blake

Who would decline a sacrifice

if once hir* soul had been accosted,

hir virtue recognized

and heshe was assured that

the Watcher, the Holy One, followed

hir ever with long, affectionate

glances of inexhaustible love?

~~William Blake

* As a general rule I do not alter gender words in quoted text. But this is a cherished poem of an 'old friend' who I am sure would not mind and would probably even encourage it! It is so personal, it is best 'heard' at least in gender-neutral, if not gender-specific.

By the way, does anyone recognize the poem this comes from??

Speaking of the direct experiential relationship the author actively experiences with the Christ: None of this should surprise us, for more and more today the veil between the worlds is parting. Heaven and earth, held apart for so long, seem to be coming together, and there is a new sense abroad of the nearness of the human and that which is more than human. The divine, long experienced as distant and inaccessible, is felt by many to be intimately interwoven in their lives. Many now speak of experiences in which God, encountered in many shapes and forms -- Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu and even Buddhist -- is familiar: a friend or close relation. And if not God, then angelic beings, guardian angels, saints, risen human beings -- the so-called dead.

This is largely a silent, hidden, unacknowledged revolution. You would not necessarily know it from what you read in the newspapers or see on the nightly news. Yet there are signs everywhere. ... Once one wakes up to it, one is constantly surprised coming across others who have also woken up to it. A friend says, "We recognize each other by the look of clarity in our eyes."

~~Claire Blatchford

Once we begin to really understand that we are not from Here, we are from There, that we all chose to come Here and were chosen to come Here, that we were somebody and something long before we came Here, only then do we comprehend that we are not poor, pitiful, stupid human beings. We are all great, awesome, powerful and mighty spiritual beings! What then really becomes important is realizing the true purpose of our lives.
~~Dannion Brinkley

Earth's crammed with Heaven,

And every common bush afire with God,

But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

~~Elisabeth Barrett Browning

We all live under the shadow of our many and various pasts. They are an integral part of us and can help or hinder us, depending on how we draw on our deeper feelings. One of the purposes of our different lives is to learn to interact with others, and we are presented with a variety of ways of doing so. ... And since the demarcation of our roles [over a multiplicity of physical lives] is only temporary, the only real relationship that counts is one of equality, caring, love and respect. Perhaps this is what we really come back to learn: to heal our relationships with ourselves and others so that we can express in our physical lives the oneness from which we all come and to which we return between lives.

~~Jenny Cockell

One day your death will catch you. And will you lie down and say, 'Oh, come. Take me. I've been waiting so long for you'? Or will you snivel and whimper for all the things you never were or did? Or be overcome by the terror of annihilation? I tell you, … for one who meets his death and lives again, the world changes. They know what it is to lose everything. They have felt the very nature of death, and they know that it is not annihilation but a movement.

They sense the value and uniqueness of our world and cherish it and their time within it beyond all else. Life itself becomes their beloved. They gain the ability to turn decisions into power.

~~Kay Cordell-Whitaker

[From the final chapter of the book, The Relevance of Bliss: A Contemporary Exploration of Mystic Experience] Whereas ... at the beginning of the book I mentioned that I had never had the full, unmistakable Bliss Experience but only 'mini' or 'micro' ones in a semi-permanence of awareness, potentiality, even expectation -- by the time all the material dealt with here had imprinted itself on my consciousness, I could feel the 'big one' hovering ever closer, all its overwhelming characteristics about to explode into reputed supernal radiance.

The strange discovery I made was that I could probably have the experience anytime I altered the gears of my consciousness and allowed it; or, rather, became wholehearted about inducing it, instead of anticipating it as a someday-perhaps spontaneous bombshell.

I think what I was becoming imbued with and convinced of, in a still vague way, was that while one is an incipient mystic, a lot can be done to turn the incipience into actuality. One doesn't have to hang about the edges of 'show me', give me some sign', but by immersion, absorption, interest, exposure and familiarity stir it into prominence in one's thoughts and feelings until it seems just as real as any other facet of life, as everyday as sleeping, eating, being in a body and moving about, which is mysterious enough to have engaged philosophy for thousands of years.

But this 'power of suggestion', of which I was well-aware by the time I was only partly through the book, had another, quite unexpected counter-effect. I was suddenly not sure I really wanted or could handle this kind of experience, this Bliss-Shock. What would happen to me, my plans, my way of life, the identity I am so accustomed to, with its strengths and weaknesses in obvious and therefore not-too-frightening display? Was I ready yet, prepared for this blitz of transformation? Would it shatter me beyond self-recognition?

As spiritually-oriented and inclined as I am, and my life is, did I want to go the WHOLE WAY, as so graphically described by these people in my book? And there was another consideration: Could my system withstand the colors, the light, the immensity of this illuminated moment with the veils torn off, the selective apparatus of my transient consciousness 'damped down' or withdrawn to leave me naked to unfiltered, blazing glory (after all, I find even its intimations overwhelming!)? With that, I found a reservation in my thoughts, a guilty sense of evading my own salvation -- not only this, but of my responsibility to be all that I potentially am. . .

~~Nona Coxhead

[Re:] . . the inherent paradox of subject-matter, the seeming cul-de sac or impasse of the one main imperative echoed again and again throughout the literature of mysticism, which is: you can talk about mystic experience until words run out and language collapses; you can write about it in a million volumes packed with erudition, poetry, revelation, opinion and philosophy; you can analyse, dissect, sculpture it into quanta of probability-particles ad infinitum... But unless you have experienced it -- you cannot know it. If you know it, you can't talk about it in a way that does it justice. As Ravi Ravindra said so well -- you should not confuse the experimental with the experiential.

~~Nona Coxhead

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

~~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

RE: ... questions about the mysterious relationship between mind and body, about how consciousness shows up in a universe of physical things. The story of how these things came to be is the story of science, but it is incomplete -- incomplete in a deeply problematic way. What's missing is not a matter of more details in the great cosmological narrative from big bang to human beings. What's missing is what makes the story -- any story -- possible at all. The problem is we have a wonderful cosmology story that fails to include the storyteller -- consciousness.

~~Christian de Quincey

Why ... should we bother with philosophy of mind and exploring the basis for a science of consciousness when there are so many other pressing problems that we, along with philosophers and scientists, could be addressing? ... It is critical, it seems to me, that the scientific knowledge that shapes and limits the contours of our social reality -- our communal "paradigm" -- should be expanded to include and honor nonmeasurable phenomena such as values, meanings, purposes, and feelings. For modern science to do this will require a radical reorientation of its basic metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality. It will require a thorough reassessment of the epistemology underlying science -- of how we know anything about the world, particularly consciousness itself.

I am personally and professionally committed to this transformation of science and philosophy, an opening up to a sense of the sacred, and honoring the vast potential of humanity and of the whole living system in which we are embedded -- including the domain of consciousness.

... I am aware that research at the level of metaphysics of ontology and epistemology, is remote from what matters to most people. I have repeatedly asked myself: "How can this work be of value to the community?" [Later he gives us his answer, one all too familiar to most of us. De Quincey says,] I have seen the persistence of poverty and injustice, of pain and confusion, and the repetitive patterns of ignorance and greed in our society. I have experienced the despair of hopelessness in the face of world hunger, the ingrained sorrow and suffering of the human condition, and global destruction of our ancient and diverse ecosystems. I have asked myself: "What, most of all, needs to be done?" And my soul and cells have answered that I must use my life to help root out the deepest levels of ignorance that got us into this mess. What is the source of the fear and greed that bring us, personally and collectively, repeatedly to the threshold of disaster and extinction?

... Science has exorcised the ghost from the machine and left us with a desacralized and despirited world. And it has done this because its fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world (its ontology) and what we know about the world (its epistemology) and how we can know the world (its methodology) are based on a set of assumptions grounded in the metaphysics of matter-in-blind-motion, of reductionistic mechanism and materialism. This is what must change. Without such a profound metaphysical shift, all the good works in the world will never amount to anything more than well-intentioned Band-Aids.

~~Christian de Quincey

Most people assume that belief in an afterlife is strictly a matter of faith. A few may have heard of scientific investigations of reported contacts with deceased persons made through "mediums" at spiritualistic seances; if so, however, they have probably dismissed such reports as instances of fraud or self-delusion. Fewer still are familiar with the great mass of evidence that has been steadily accumulating since the first psychical researchers in England began their investigations into spiritualistic phenomena at the turn of this [20th] century.
Colin Wilson, the well-known British writer, is one of the few people who is thoroughly familiar with this evidence. An essay by Wilson ... describes his own introduction to the facts in the case for survival and how he was gradually converted from skepticism to belief by the sheer weight of the evidence. "A skeptic can usually find some loophole in the most well-authenticated accounts," writes Wilson. "Yet when we read perhaps a hundred accounts, all of which seem to point to the same conclusion, it becomes very hard to feel so certain that they all amount to self-deception or willful mendacity." After presenting some of the most fascinating and compelling cases encountered in his own research for several books, Wilson observes that in his estimation the overall case for survival is so strong that "it would be rather perverse to go on thinking up objections."

~~Gary Doore

The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religion.

~~Albert Einstein [most recently rediscovered on www.Panhala.net/Archive/Sensation_of_the_Mystical.html; original source?]

The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific work.

~~Albert Einstein [found this on www.projectmind.org; what's the source?]

All too often, a docile public has been easily dominated by a religious or scholarly hierarchy claiming to know or to have seen more. In religious matters, given the place of scholarly elites in upholding religious ones, this has been the case more often than not. ... Only a knowledgeable and enlightened public can change this state of affairs. I have done my best to make the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have come along as if miraculously to redress the balance or haunt those who would adopt an ahistorical approach, available across the board to a wider populace. It is now time to move to the next level and a wider subject matter. The matters before us are not for those who docilely accept biblical writ or scholarly consensus as the final word. The criticism we are doing is historical and literary criticism, looking at the way a given author actually put his materials together and to what end. It is the weight of the gradual accumulation of detail and textual analyses of this kind that ultimately renders the presentation credible.

~~Robert Eisenman [speaking of the Dead Sea Scrolls and all that has evolved into the Christian [and also Jewish] beliefs of today]

Speaking of instantly immortal phrases, here's one to enjoy: '"inoculation of immortality" of the Light Experience' -- a high-end cosmic tool for consciousness-shifting that tends to become permanent as a result.

~~Anya Foos-Graber

Here is a classic case of what happens with a lot of people. They have usually from early in life certain anomalous experiences that they often simply take for granted others are familiar with as well. Edgar Cayce, for example, did not realize others generally did not see auras as he did until he was eight years old.

As a very young child, and on into adulthood, the woman quoted below used to see people deep in the night who just looked like white outlines against the darkness. If any of them noticed she was awake, one would come give her a pat on the head or back, and she would soon drift back to sleep. She says, "Looking back now, it is as though this particular experience served as almost a kind of flexor for my consciousness. Whatever those white figures were, it was a result of their spectral companionship, and the fact that I grew up with them as such a normal part of my childhood that I developed a totally unique set of parameters for the expectations of life's extraordinary possibilities." Extraordinary is certainly apt. Her first two children, daughters, learned at 9 and 8 years old they could read and speak, chant and understand Sanskrit with no prior training; it's like they came in with these innate gifts. They eventually used their amazing abilities as the basis for their singing / chanting performances as a musical ensemble with their father.

~~Linda Forman

Most experiences are subtle. Taken singly, they are easily dismissed as coincidences or random anomalies. Taken together, they have great power.

~~Joseph Gallenberger

[T]raditional science is capable of behaving as a religion when confronting new thought: it suppresses data that doesn't agree with its current belief system, chiefly by ignoring it.

True story: I am aware of a prestigious university laboratory that completed an exhaustive, fully-controlled study that showed that humans can affect physical matter through thought alone. When the researchers sought publication in a peer review journal, they were told, "When you can send us the data by telepathy we will look at it." Inability to publish equals inability to get major funding.

~~Joseph Gallenberger

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.

~~Gautama Buddha ['discovered' on a website -- alas, I do not remember which one! Whatever this source, it is a site with much in common with Ahhh-theLight.com.   I hope the one/s who created it will tell me so I can give them proper credit and they will also become active collaborators in our common interests!]

Whatever sets the human spirit free without giving us mastery over ourselves is harmful.

~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Clarity:

Like traveling through a fog filled valley

My senses struggle to make sense of the blurred landmarks

I have grown used to.

Searching for a familiar turn,

the swirling mist gives way to clarity,

assaulting me with what I had feared most . . .

An unfamiliar landscape.

Fear replaces the blandness of not knowing

as ominous terrain beckons me forth.

Turning back to the luxury of ignorance

I find no fog behind me,

and realize that what I had felt familiar

was really only more of the black unknown.

Lost and alone,

I sink to the ground in surrender,

Mourning the loss of all I have known,

And seeing my first glint of light

in the tear

that falls

from my eye . . .

~~Sandy Goodman

We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn't the end.

~~Andrew Greeley [source?]

I believe the NDE is one of those puzzles that just might force scientists to develop a new scientific method, one that will incorporate all sources of knowledge, not only logical dedications of the intellect, and empirical observations of the physical, but a direct experience of the mystical as well.

~~Bruce Greyson [Greyson, C. B., "Editorial: Can science explain the near-death experience?" Journal of Near-Death Studies, v. 8]

[Note: Arthur Guirdham was a psychiatrist in England, having first published the book from which this quote derives in 1970. The "twenty-six years before" he refers to is circa 1944 and concern the disturbing dreams and visions of one of his patients, whose nightmares ceased from the very first time she was able to talk to this man as her therapist.]    The major proportion of her revelation s occurred twenty-six years ago, in an intensive uprush of memory in her early teens. It gave her a detailed knowledge of Catharism, though until she met me she was even unaware of the name of this heresy. She also acquired a vivid realization of life in the Languedoc in the thirteenth century. Neither mediaeval history nor literature were taught in her school. Twenty-five years ago the history and ritual of Catharism were not imparted to girls of thirteen in English grammar schools. The same applies today. At the present time little enough is known of Catharism in this country. Its ritual and practice are known to a few savants and sympathisers. The number of these was still smaller a quarter of century ago. Nor is it, nor has it even been, a practice for English girls of thirteen to transcribe their thoughts, visions and feelings in mediaeval French or in the quite distinct language of the Langue d'Oc.

But I have still more important proof of the reality of the experience I intend to describe. Twenty-six years ago this girl knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on this subject in any language, in the seen centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they wore dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernow revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. The truth was known to my patient as far back as 1944. She expressed it in writing more than a year before the publication of Duvernoy's book.

~~Arthur Guirdham

One quiet evening while I was visiting with friends and listening to music, a slow heat began rising from my heart. It burned its way up through my spine and on out of the top of my head, melting everything into a great ocean of light. ... [T]here were no boundaries or borders. it was as if my mind had once long ago made up a story about separate objects with boundaries but the story wasn't true. The true story is that there is a luminous, spacious energy that flows through everything all the time. It's within matter, within things as well as within space, and you can tune in to it at any time, just like changing the frequency on the radio. There is no distance between this essence and ourselves. It is not otherworldly. It is right here closer than our own flesh.

[And later she was to say:] I feel a kind of current from my heart that goes out into the universe and then it pauses and comes back into me, and goes out again. There are streams, matrices, lattices of light that must be some universal pattern. Sometimes you see it and sometimes you don't. But when you relax, it's there like a great web connecting with everything. It feels like it has always been there.

~~Vijali Hamilton

The Gospel of Thomas really is, I believe, the clearest guide we have to the vision of the world's supreme mystical revolutionary, the teacher known as Jesus. To those who learn to unpack its sometimes cryptic sayings, the Gospel of Thomas offers a naked and dazzlingly subversive representation of Jesus' defining and most radical discovery: that the living Kingdom of God burns in us and surrounds us in the glory at all moments and the vast and passionate love-consciousness -- what you might call "Kingdom consciousness" -- can help birth it into reality ...   [The] Jesus we see in the Gospel of Thomas saw and knew this world as the constant epiphany of the divine Kingdom and knew too that a wholly new world could be created by divine beings, once they had seen this and allowed themselves to be transformed and empowered as he was, by divine wisdom, ecstasy, and energy. What Jesus woke up to and proceeded to enact with the fiercest and most gloriously imaginable intensity was this new life of "Kingdom-consciousness," not as a savior and not as a guru claiming unique status and truth -- the Gospel of Thomas makes this very clear -- but as a sign of what is possible for all human beings who dare to awaken to the potential splendor of their inner truth and the responsibilities for total transformation of the world that it then inspires within them.

~~Andrew Harvey [IN Foreward to: The Gospel of Thomas Annotated & Explained, by Stevan Davies]

The more awakened you are, the more alert you become to the purpose of challenges and all you have to gain from them. When you trust that the most difficult experiences offer the greatest growth potential, you start to identify them as opportunities and the people involved in them as your greatest teachers.

... So when you step back and look at the bigger picture (or pull the camera back, as I like to say) to estimate the nature of the lesson and what new perception it presents to you, you increase your ability to move through old barriers that have held you back for lifetimes.

~~Louise P. Haucker

The Cry of the heart for God is the cry that reaches heaven and brings down blessings from that high source.

~~A woman folk artist of North Carolina, who lived in the last half of the 20th century, whose name has escaped me but her last name, I am fairly certain her last name is Herndon [Elizabeth? -- can anyone help me with this one??]

Every boundary, every finite limit to the seeing and hearing of my perceptual field, declares its latent infinity. Each limit in containing the known declares there is an unknown beyond it. It announces a series of limits that is unlimited, boundless. In one horizon we have tacit acquaintance with infinite horizons. The circumscription of our perceiving is fraught with the boundlessness of the given. Likewise, my finite centre of reference has no ultimate centre, it is an infinitude within, and unlimited potential filling a space of no volume, the emptiness of any point. It is a pregnant void. Where the infinitude within the void, first breaks into the manifest it appears as a finite locus, the centre of reference that is the distinct person.

~~John Heron (1998)

What is so far unknown is a form of sacred science in which human beings co-operate together to inquire in a rigorous manner into the nature of their own spiritual and subtle experience, without prior allegiance to any existing school.    An increasing number of spiritually minded people are currently busy with their own lived inquiry, and are seeking open and constructive dialogue about it.   I call this social phenomenon a newly emerging and self-generating spiritual culture. It is a loose, informal network of individuals and groups who are creating their own spiritual path from a diversity of ancient and modern sources. It involves a growing and significant minority of people across the planet.

This culture is born from the post-war [WWII] boom of adult and continuing education, of people-centred and peer self-help movements of all kinds, of the democratization and laicization of knowledge-acquisition, of health care, of psychological and soul growth. There has been in the second half of the twentieth century, a growing deprofessionalization of the skills of taking care of body, mind and spirit. At the same time a vast proliferation of methods of self-care has mushroomed, from innumerable diets to every kind of spiritual practice. The human race stirs itself to fulfill the legacy of the Renaissance: the idea of the free and self-determining human person, active in all spheres of human endeavor.

What this means is a doctrine of universal political rights. This is an advance on the widely accepted right of any person to political membership of their community, that is, to participate in the framing and working of political institutions. The universal version expands such participation so that every social situation of persons to participate in any decision-making that affects the fulfillment of their needs and interests, the expression of their preferences, values, and above all, the inner life of their spirit. This right to political participation in the universal sense is on an unidentified march throughout the world, claiming attention not only in political institutions, but, in piecemeal fashion, in the family, in education, in medicine, in industry, in research, and, finally, in religion. It is the emergence of personhood as the imago dei: each human a responsible co-creator of their domain within the universal estate, in relation with others similarly engaged.

Religious authority has for centuries been the lynch-pin which has kept in place the whole wheel of authoritarianism in society. Traditional religious institutions, East and West, are still today major bastions of the restriction of rights, for example, the spiritual rights of women. Religious authoritarianism ... makes its continuing bid for control, even in modern transpersonal theory and practice. Yet people on every hand are bursting out of this ancient containing chrysalis of the free human spirit.

Emerging self-determination in the religious sphere is, in my worldview, the sign of immanent spiritual life at work at a breakthrough level, not as in the past when this or that religious innovator started a modified version of Christianity or Buddhism or some other traditional creed, but in large numbers of ordinary people generating their own lived inquiry into religious practice and deep inner transformation. My sense of it is that there are three interrelated criteria which, applying in varying degrees to any one individual, identify people in this self-generating spiritual culture:

They affirm their own original relation to the presence of creation, find spiritual authority within and do not project it outward onto teachers, traditions or texts.

They are alert to the hazards of defensive and offensive spirituality, in which unprocessed emotional distress distorts spiritual development, either by denying parts of one's nature, or by making inflated claims in order to manipulate others.

These are open to genuine dialogue about spiritual beliefs and to collaborative decision-making about spiritual practices undertaken together.

~~John Heron (1998)

If the structure of the spiritual path were really based on transcendental inquiry involving consensual validation in a community of peers, then we should expect to see this at work among those who claim to be spiritually accomplished, the so-called spiritual masters. Current masters of the same and different schools would meet regularly and engage in ecumenical dialogue and experiential inquiry. This would parallel what goes on in ordinary science, where leaders in any field are in regular peer exchange to review the validity of each other's work and try it out experimentally. But of course spiritual masters are notorious for each becoming a law unto himself. They sedulously avoid acknowledging the existence of other masters. The authority each master claims for himself -- as a basis for eliciting spiritual projection in devotees -- precludes any kind of peer relationship with any other. There are important exceptions to this tendency, such as the Dalai Lama, who need to be honoured [whom Heron quotes here]:

I suggest that we encourage meetings between people from different religious traditions who have had some deeper spiritual experiences ... genuine practitioners who come together and share insights as a result of religious practice. According to my own experience, this is a powerful and effective means of enlightening each other in a more profound and direct way. (Dalai Lama, 1996)

~~John Heron (1998)

Jean Houston is talking about the work of "English biologist Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of 'morphic resonance.' Sheldrake states the very basis of paradigm shift: things are as they are because they were as they were. The laws of nature are not absolutes; rather, they are accumulations of habits. The law of gravity, for example, is a pretty well-fixed habit, probably owing to the trillions of beings throughout the universe who give it general assent. Yet yogis, swamis, and more than a few Catholic saints report that, in deep meditation or spiritual rapture, they have been known to bump their heads on the ceiling. Rapture is nothing if not a paradigm shift."

~~Jean Houston [in: Russell Targ's Limitless Mind]

Today, unfortunately, there is a tendency either to mythologize altered states of consciousness or to discredit them. Both tendencies are equally harmful.

~~Holger Kalweit

Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

~~Robert F. Kennedy [IN: Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley.]

If you are not ready for [NDEs] you will not believe what I tell you. But on the other hand, if you know already [through experiences], 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.

~~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

My overarching sense of religious purpose rests on two cornerstones. From the Bible and my Jewish tradition, I learn that people are not born as human beings. They are only potentially human. The great challenge of our lives, and the one to which religion addresses itself, is to realize that potential, to become authentically human, to take a man (or woman) and make a mensch [[J. Houston: "A Mensch is a full person ... the human possibility in all of us. A Mensch is not a hero. A Hero is a one-shot deal while a Mensch is forever. ... When a Mensch walks down the sidewalk even the sidewalk feels good."]] of him. (Konrad Lorenz made this point beautifully when he announced that science has discovered the missing link between higher apes and human beings. It's us.)

~~ Harold Kushner [IN: The Courage of Conviction, edited by Phillip L. Berman]

This is the setting out.

The leaving of everything behind.

Leaving the social milieu. The preconceptions. the definitions. the language. The narrowed field of vision. The expectations.

No longer expecting relationships, memories, words, or letters to mean what they used to mean. To be, in a word: Open.

~~Rabbi Lawrence Kushner [IN: Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley.]

We have split up life into two parts far too drastically. We have drawn a line, and we must gradually erase that line. We have talked about the spiritual life, and the earth life or the physical life. The two are one and we must make them one again. There is no line, there is no line at all. Man has drawn a line and it must be erased, and it will take some time to erase it completely, but we must work towards that. We must do that in the same way that we must erase -- shall we call it? National boundaries, national boundaries and limitations, racial ones.

All these must go, and [especially] the boundary that we have, quite unnecessarily, erected between what we now call our two worlds, which are one. It is only one world. There is only one world. There is only one world and we must take down these … barriers of illusion that compelled us to think there must be two, because through our limitations and ignorance we are unable to look over the self-erected barrier, or to look through it. It must come down. It is your work, it is our work.

~~Attributed to Sir Oliver Lodge [after his passing -- given to the medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard in: Journal of the Society for Psychical Research]

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

Our greatest need at the present time is perhaps for a global ethic -- transcending all other systems of allegiance and belief -- rooted in a consciousness of the interrelatedness and sanctity of all life. Such an ethic would temper humanity's acquired knowledge and power with wisdom of the kind found at the heart of the most ancient human traditions and cultures -- in Taoism and Zen, in the understandings of the Hopi and the Maya Indians, in the Vedas and the Psalms, in the very origins of human culture itself.

~~Federico Mayor ["Crucible for a Common Ethic" in Our Planet 8:2, Aug 1996]

My mother tells me I came into this world screaming -- not crying in pain or confusion, not yelping with fear, but screaming in fury and indignation. this wasn't a difficult birth (I was her fourth child), and Mom never used drugs during labor or delivery, so there was no extraordinary pain or injury. but still I raged, with a lung power that astonished everyone in the delivery room. As I look back, I can see my fury as the perfect herald of my coming into this life. Anger in any form is a boundary-building tool, and I would definitely need strong boundaries in the months and years to come. I have always felt that I dropped into this world, not accompanied by a lilting song of angels, but with a fierce shout to God: "Cover me, I'm going in!"

~~Karla McLaren

When you know you are ETERNAL, you can play your true role in time.

When you know you are DIVINE, you can become completely human.

~~Mother Meera

To Walt Whitman everything was awesome and wondrous. To most of us miracles are events that force us to stop and take notice. Our usual way of seeing the world is jostled and its inadequacies exposed. We realize that our usual worldview just might not account for everything we encounter.

... Alcoholics Anonymous says, "Expect a miracle," modern medicine says, "Expect the worst." Do we get what we expect?

A miracle, then, is an event that lies outside our usual medical predictions and understanding. These are the anomalies that show us the limitations of our concepts. We will know medical research has changed when we study the exceptions rather then the rules.

~~Lewis Mehl-Madrona [MD, PhD, and Experiencer]

[A psychologist and his client are in the middle of processing a dream with someone who is expected to die any day now:] ...Assuming that dreams are processes trying to happen in consciousness ...

Peter: Who was that woman on the floor? [in his dream]

Arny: Do you feel "dropped" like she does in some way?

Peter: It seems that she is someone who has just become hopeless and who needs to be reawakened. I have been hopeless and have almost given up on life.

Arny: What would awakening her mean?

Peter: God only knows. What do you think?

Arny: For me there is no life or death anymore, there is only the process of becoming yourself.

Peter (laughter): You are unbelievable. That would be a real awakening!

[Arny's written comments, looking back to that conversation:]   ...There are many ways of looking at dreams. Rather than enter into a theoretical discussion about them, I prefer to stay close to what happened. It is useful to understand dreams as descriptions of processes that are only partially in our awareness, processes that are trying to happen with more consciousness. In other words, Peter's dreams implied that a part of him had "dropped out" of the outer situation. Indeed, he was about to enter a coma, drop out of consensus reality, and awaken to a new life.

At the time, however, I assumed that the sleeping woman was a part of him needing to e awakened, perhaps a feeling part that he had "dropped" in some way. I realize only now as I write his story down that the sleeping woman was a symbolic formulation of a powerful experience that was about to happen. He was about to sleep. He needed to drop everything, to enter a coma before he would wake up.

~~Arnold Mindell

[Arnold Mindell was listening to a woman who was pouring out her feelings about her loved spouse who was dying and her anxieties and grief about the uncertain future]

I told her that if she felt like dying, she should do it now in a fantasy. Dying in a fantasy is a way of regenerating.

... Because of my having seen so many people die, life and death have a new meaning for me. They are relative concepts. Death is frightening only as long as we identify ourselves with who we have been in life. That is why I recommend to people who worry about death to go through the death fantasy in detail. The fantasy of dying is often the need to drop an attitude or identity that has run out of time. When people imagine that they are dying, they frequently close their eyes, take a pause from their momentary identity, and enter a new phase of life.

~~Arnold Mindell

Imagine: Your whole life for months, years, perhaps decades has been largely an immersion in numbers-crunching and the various mechanical and related disciplines of a scientist and engineer. The journey has been to push- push- "push the outside of the envelope" as a test pilot and finally as a member of the first team of USA astronauts to venture well beyond the limitations of the most advanced jets. And one day you find yourself suspended within a tiny capsule so far above the Earth that you can see the whole orb beyond your tiny window, and beyond that, the pitch of the mostly empty universe. For the very first time you SEE ... really SEE ... the whole living planet cradling not only the billions of human beings but all living physical beings we have ever known. If you could but reach out, you could embrace the whole of it in the span of your arms. That is where astronaut Edgar Mitchell found himself one life-beginning day, when for him, briefly, Tic-Toc stopped.

Whether suddenly or gradually, (when) one has an epiphany (an EHE), which allows one to perceive a previously unseen order and meaning in the universe -- a recognition that gives significance to life by merging the boundaries of the self with the cosmos, … the deepest aspect of himself is one with all creation. …It is a state in which there is constant awareness of unity with the universe pervading all the aspects of one's life. Every activity, every relationship, every thought is guided by the knowledge of oneness between the self and the world. Inner and outer space are unified, and the inhumanities that people perpetrate on one another and the stupidities that people mount against nature become impossible to commit. This internal self-regulation is the surest safeguard against the destruction of our world.
~~Edgar D. Mitchell [Apollo Astronaut]

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

Those who have out-of-body expe