.

Autobiographical 

Sketch for a Book

By Rhea A. White

          

          I majored in English because it was not difficult and went to Penn State because it had a golf course. What I wanted was to play championship golf. My junior year in college I had a near-death experience associated with an automobile accident that changed my life. I devoted my life to trying to understand "where" I was when I found myself seemingly above the earth bathed in a sense of unity and singing peace and incredible aliveness, enveloped in felt meaning while my body lay unconscious on the hood of my car. I thought I had died--and it was wonderful. I had never felt more alive. I was "told" that "nothing that ever lived could possibly die." I felt the "everlasting arms" behind me to the ends of the universe. Then I awakened on the hood of my car, unable to move, and in great pain.

          After recovering from 11 fractures, I began to read voraciously in the literature of mysticism, religion, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and literary criticism. I wanted to understand what I had experienced in those few moments and where I could have been and who could have "spoken" to me, and why it was so incredibly meaningful. In the course of my reading, I stumbled on Rhine's work at Duke University. Although I had been accepted at two liberal theology seminaries, instead I joined Rhine at Duke because I felt science was the way to find out answers in our day. After four years with Rhine as a research fellow, I went to New York as Research and Editorial Associate at the American Society for Psychical Research under the direction of the well-known psychologist, Gardner Murphy.

          After another four years I decided to find an independent means of making my living so I could be as heretical as I dared, so I obtained a Master's in Library Science from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I began work as a reference librarian at a busy public library on Long Island (where I was to spend 29 years) and began to compile reference works about parapsychology.

          I founded the Parapsychology Source of Information Center and began to publish an abstracting and indexing service, Parapsychology Abstracts International. I also became editor of one of the major parapsychology journals, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, a position I still hold. In 1984 I was elected president of the international society of professional parapsychologists, the Parapsychological Association. In 1965 while in graduate library school I won the Hans Peter Luhn Award, New York Chapter of the American Society for Information Science, for an essay on the information needs of psychology. In 1992 the Parapsychological Association honored me with its Outstanding Lifetime Research Award.

          In 1990, after nearly 40 years, I realized I wasn't going to live forever on this earth, and if I wanted to understand my near-death experience (at least now I knew what to call it), science was not going to show me, at least not the behaviorist type of science that was privileged by academic parapsychology. In 1990 I decided to go back and study the basic data of parapsychology--the experiences people report. But I soon realized that they could not be viewed properly without considering them along with all the other sorts of nonordinary and anomalous experiences people have. In a vision I saw the need to study all of them as a single class of experience, which I called "exceptional human experience." I have been pursuing this aim ever since.