The Larger Life Reality Portal is dedicated to

Rhea A. White 

Who Is Rhea A. White?

          Rhea A. White is a phenomenon, a singularity.   I think of her as a world treasure, though relatively few are aware of this fact yet -- least of all, this fascinating and dear woman.   She and her inspired life’s work are the abiding "North Star" by which wHeretwoworldsTouch.com is guided and continues to develop, and you will notice her influence on virtually every page.   Ms. White has a gifted, experiential grasp of the inherent human need for meaning and purpose and the direction this naturally must take sooner or later toward the transcendent by way of direct, personal experience.   This understanding is the basis for her "Exceptional Human Experience Paradigm" (EHE Paradigm, also called the "Experiential Paradigm"), which is described below.   

          From the most tentative beginnings of my own chosen work, the product of which is this website, Rhea has been a sun-warming, ever-steady wind in my sails.   She has sustained me and this vision with love, faith and  unflagging encouragement and support, and I've often thought of her as one of the defining miracles in my life.   

Who IS Rhea A. White??

Metamorphosis:   The Dramatic Emergence of a Rare Human Being

          The search for clarity about the issues of death and dying and in relation to our daily lives is each person's unique and ultimately unavoidable journey; it's never a matter of 'if' and always a question of 'when' and 'how'.   For those of us who are more fortunate, I believe, this becomes a compelling concern fairly early in our lives.   Because only as we confront our profound and apparent vulnerability, creatured within this physical consensus reality, do we have the possibility of becoming aware of what we truly are, which is not these bodies at all, and of how we truly are, which can never be what we call 'dead'.   Only when we know that we know these things from our own personal, direct experience can we begin to catch a glimmer of the implications of this knowledge within our workaday worlds.   Only when we in fact know these things can we truly live!

          For Rhea White, these matters took overwhelming precedence in her life when she was 20 years old, circa 1951.   On a snow-blanketed night she and her college date were trying to get to a dance.   Rhea was driving and they were struggling up a hill cluttered with other cars, mired to the fenders this way and that, but the couple appeared to be making fairly steady progress.   As they neared the top of the hill, however, it looked as though the snow might finally get the best of them, too.    Her  boyfriend suggested she let him try, so they switched places.   Just before they crested the hill, a big, lumbering coal truck came barreling over the top form the opposite direction and hit their car head-on.   Rhea's date, who was then in the driver's seat, was killed instantly, and she ended up plastered onto the hood of her car with thirteen broken bones.    

          How impossibly strange to experience such a terrifying, tragic moment as  simultaneously the most wondrous thrill of one's life.   Yet it was just these excruciating circumstances that precipitated her into a magnificent near-death experience in which she felt herself to be "held blissfully in the everlasting arms of eternity."   This was more than two decades before Dr. Raymond Moody, Jr. gave such events a name and some credibility and in the process brought a great healing epiphany to many folks who had had them (and many who hadn't).   

          In the meantime, her near-death experience drove Rhea into a determined  quest to make sense of what had happened to her at a time when such events were not even recognized as other than pathological phenomena or figments of the imagination.   As so often occurs with people who have these deep, anomalous experiences, Ms. White dramatically altered her life plans from a promising career as a professional golfer to pursue the field of parapsychology, hoping to find her answers there, which must have been a tremendous shock to her family.   (Even today, whoever heard of becoming a parapsychologist?)

The Parapsychology Stage

          Parapsychology, in order to acquire some respectability as a discipline, had bound its 'soul' to the largely inappropriate materialistic and reductionistic constraints of Western science.   It didn’t take long for Ms. White to realize that as things were, it was highly unlikely she would discover any liberating insights here.   Nevertheless, she stuck it out and became over the course of four-plus decades, one of parapsychology’s outstanding contributors, most notably as the editor of the prestigious Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research [JASPR].   If you wanted to know about anything to do with parapsychology, at least in the United States, the person people inevitably suggested you talk to was its primary chronicler, Rhea A. White.

          Ms. White sensed that in their resolute search for proof, for quantitative substance and laboratory repeatability, parapsychologists pointedly ignored the most priceless and telling treasure available to them.   She made an astute observation to this effect to her cohorts as President of the Parapsychology Foundation in the 1980s to express her concerns about this field of study:  "(R)eputable pollsters, such as Gallup and the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, were indicating that almost half of the population reports having had at least one psychic or mystical experience, yet parapsychologists had nothing to do with or to say to these people."   They were blindsided to the value of the experiencer hirself and hir experiences, charged with transformative meaning and an incomparable knowledge that had the potential to powerfully and positively impact on human values and priorities, and by inference on the plight of the Earth as well.   

An Experience-Centered Approach

          After years of trying to articulate this intractable problem and observing little-to-no change in parapsychology's philosophy and methods, she chose to take a radically different direction  based on what she calls an "experience- centered approach" that  soon developed into her Exceptional Human Experience [EHE] paradigm.   In the first publication of her own journal, Exceptional Human Experience, she describes this transition:

The concepts of exceptional human experience  … initially grew out of my lifelong engagement with parapsychology.   Initially the papers were primarily concerned with breaking away from parapsychology in the way the chick breaks away from the egg.   If anything I am more convinced than ever that psi (ESP and PK – the basic forms studied by parapsychology) is genuinely active in people’s lives, but in developing the concept of exceptional human experiences I have taken an experiential rather than an evidential approach.   I have chosen meaning instead of proof.   I think they are like the waves and particles of quantum mechanics – you can’t have both at the same time.

Transpersonal Psychology and Feminist Science Affinities:  A Digression

          As her views have evolved over particularly the last decade-plus, focused on meaning rather than proof, Ms. White’s EHE paradigm demonstrates an unambiguous affinity with the discipline of transpersonal psychology and also a feminist science point of view.   A brief explanation should help clarify this attraction.  

          According to one of its notable proponents of the Naropa Institute, John Davis,  transpersonal psychology is "the overlap and integration of psychology and the world wisdom traditions (spiritual systems).   Thus, spiritual views and practices are incorporated into psychology, and psychological concepts and methods are applied to spirituality.   I count nonduality as its most central insight. ...   From this come two other central insights:  the intrinsic health and basic goodness of the whole and its parts, and the validity of development and experiences ‘beyond the mask’ of the conditional and conditioned personality."   This very much reflects the heart of Ms. White's approach to the experiential paradigm, as I hope will become clearer below,  and resolves beautifully in its way her old argument with parapsychology.   Experience is finally getting some respect!

          An additional dimension integral to the EHE model mirrors the conceptual framework of what is popularly termed "feminist science." Regina Becker-Schmidt [with the University of Hanover, Psychological Institute] offers a slightly historicized description:   "The word "feminist" was shaped in the last century [nineteenth?] to characterize the emancipatory impulse in political and scientific currents which were set by women. ...   It follows that the deconstruction of scientific myths is just as much an issue of feminism as is the discussion concerning socio-cultural and societal developments, which cause or solidify social inequality, lack of freedom and discrimination [in this case] along the dividing line of "gender."  

          More descriptively, and to paraphrase author, Nancy Hartsock, the feminist science perspective maintains that reality is relational, contextual, integrative, life-affirming, communal, inclusive, synergistic, committed to plurality and the interplay of differences, respects self-reflection as an ethical necessity, and is very 'we' focused.   It's premise is that reality to a great extent is socially and culturally constructed [consider the ideas of meaning and context-derived], that no base holds for all cultures, although many cultures may share what appears to be the same base.   Think of this in contrast to traditional Western science, which strives to be detached, abstract, manipulative, adversarial ('us against nature'), exclusive, authoritarian-based and driven by authoritarian impulses of the will to unchallengeable, exclusivistic truths, and is very 'I-Thou' focused.

          It could be reasonably argued that Ms. White offers a transpersonal, feminized, more socially relevant and accessible alternative to the whole field of parapsychology, and a most welcome one in any case!   Her efforts are unusually collaborative; her 'subjects' are in essence her co-researchers.  Unlike parapsychology, the EHE point of view has 'everything to do with and to say to [all] people'.   The primary objective indeed is to nurture a valuing of the meaning EHEs can have, not only for the individuals who have them, but for all of us and ultimately for the very saving of our planet.   Never one to shy away from telling it like she sees it, in her Exceptional Human Experience Background Papers, Ms. White remarks, "The reality we live is a phenomenological one, and within those terms, these experiences are real.  They can change lives.   I don't know of any p value of the parapsychologists that has changed a life, not even one of their own."

Digressions Aside, What Is the ' Exceptional Human Experience Paradigm'?

          An anomalous experience, according to Ms. White, is an "experience that cannot be explained in terms of physics, psychology, sociology or other accepted discipline.   Often it is dismissed by recourse to various applications of the law of parsimony.   Failing that, it is passed off as likely due to chance or possibly as a delusion of the experiencer's or even as a hoax. ...   There is usually no interest evidenced in the potential meaning of the experience because until it is proven that it actually happened, there is no point in looking for meaning.   Our view is that if the experiencer is left with a feeling that there is meaning hidden somewhere in the experience, it is worth taking the time and trouble to try to draw out that meaning and see where it leads, even if it is not possible to rule out all counterhypotheses."

          The following comment is the jewel in the crown of thought that so fascinates and excites virtually everyone who is drawn to understand the implications of these experiences and their potential to make a shattering and extraordinary difference in this world and in every person; it is also the single reason this website was built.   Continuing from above, Rhea White says,

 "We think it is likely that the basic meanings revealed by these experiences, once they become potentiated into EHEs [i.e., once they become active agents for transforming the experiencers' identity, life and worldview], is the key to the evolution of consciousness and also to saving planet Earth because of the types of changed consciousness that are associated with EHEs."

In other words, these  'exceptional experiences' [EEs], which Ms. White  describes as "all kinds of unusual, nonordinary, anomalous, supernatural, transpersonal, metanormal, transcendent experiences ...  are instrumental in transforming the identity, life, and worldview of experiencers in the direction of realizing their full human potential. ... [I.e., in generating this transformative process, they become full-blown 'exceptional human experiences' or EHEs, and as such] they play a catalytic role in humanizing the experiencer. ... enabl[ing] a person to contact what William James called the MORE in human experience....   As James wrote, the More is both inside and outside the individual and it provides a sense of life direction that comes both from within and without, often in the form of additional EHEs, especially intuition and synchronicity. ...   [This] EHE process integrates both one's outer and inner worldview."   

          These changes have been remarked by everyone who studies them and appear to be almost universal among EHErs, although the degree and expression of them are unique to the individual.   Quoting from her article, "The Aftereffects of My NDE," she further explains the critical importance of this EHE process:

... I have isolated 10 qualities of exceptional human experiences of any type, from apparitions to UFO encounters, including the experience of falling in love and creative inspiration.   Of the 10, the major characteristics are that they promote self-integration; they engender a sense of connection to other people, life forms, and the sacred; and they can serve as a  seed or nucleus around which one can weave and sometimes even rewrite one's personal story so that it is much more meaningful than before.  By remembering, cherishing, and fostering their exceptional experiences, people ... [can] live more fully and responsibly because they are more integrally connected to the past, to the future, and to life as a whole, including death.   Heeding one's exceptional experiences can lead the person to become more helpful and accepting of others and to experience a fuller life. 

The EHE Autobiography

          Yet, there appear to be ever-greater levels of revelatory advantage we may derive from these experiences.   Beyond taking to heart our experiences, sharing them with others, and letting them transform us as the singular events they are in our personal lives, we can also write what Ms. White calls an "EHE autobiography," a life chronicle based specifically on our exceptional encounters with the larger life reality.

According to her commentary, again from her EHE background papers, she explains, 

I also feel that the act [of writing an EHE autobiography] has value for society, and even for the planet as a whole.   This is because we need a new story to make sense of who we are as human beings and why we are here.  The story of mechanistic, behavioristic science has resulted in anomie, loss of meaning and connection, boredom, and the need for ever more violent "kicks" and dangerous "highs," as in drug abuse.   In our society today there is a dangerous lack of reverence towards other humans, other life forms, and life itself.   Perhaps the most practical thing we can do is write a better story.   What better place is there to begin than with ourselves?  ....   The big surprise in all of this is that in writing about our most secret, intimate, personal EHEs -- those that are uniquely our own -- we come to experience ourselves as rooted in our common humanity and as connected to all life.  ...   People who are centered in this experience are bound to live vastly different lives than those who are bent and twisted by anger, doubt, fear, and pain, such that their best hope is ...  at worst, to seek kicks in killing or maiming other humans or animals or to get lost in drugs or pornography or crime.  

The seeds of transcendental and connective experiences, that is, EHEs, are scattered throughout our lives.   What we need to do is find them and then cultivate them.   A good way to begin is to start your EHE autobiography.

          And Even Beyond the EHE Autobiography,  Offers Our EHE Mentor,  What We Need Is a Story for Each of Us, [and ultimately and to the point,] for All of Us

... What we need is a story that will unite science and spirituality, self and world.  But first it must occur at the individual level. ...   Each of us needs a story that charges our daily lives with meaning and puts us personally in touch with the sacred.   There are many books about writing or better yet, living one's own story, one's own myth.   But the myths of old contained an element that is missing from most stories told today, and that is a link with the sacred.    Exceptional human experiences [and specifically, recording one's EHE-based story] can serve as those links; they are those happenings in our lives that can pull us out of boredom and disconnection into a world of meaning and connection.  We have to learn how to honor these experiences and let them into our lives.

          Again, from "The Aftereffects of My NDE," Ms. White continues to broaden our perspective of what is sublimely possible within a continuum from individual single experiences to the recollection and revaluing of a lifetime of such events from which we derive new, transcendent meaning within the wholeness of a tapestried life.   But once more, she expands our sense of  possible repercussions of this process within the context of society.   She invites us to contemplate the value of a collective sense of story garnered from the amassing in our social awareness of many EHE autobiographies and the fresh new washes of meaning and empowerment as a culture, perhaps as a world culture, we may experience.   It is very conceivable to envision this process evolving into the realization of a whole new collective or unified understanding, a world-size 'new paradigm' in play:

When a sufficient number of people [undertake the writing of their EHE autobiography], the larger story [our cultural or world story, at least the human part of it] will emerge.  Exceptional human experiences catapult us into the new paradigm [beyond our present disenchantment and lack of meaningful connection with each other, with the world, and with the sacred, i.e., the 'new paradigm'].   We become a part of it and we discover it is a part of us.  We are no longer apart from it.   The scientific method cannot take us there.   But once we ourselves are there, and when we are willing to take the further leap of sharing our experiences with others, we will not only be inside the new view that is needed to join physical and spiritual, mind and matter, body and mind, but we will be playing a significant part in bringing it to birth.   Once more, as in ages past, the story of each human will be the story of humankind, and vice versa.   We and our times will be in step and will move forward as one.   Science can do nothing but follow, as it is right that it should.

... Creating one's story is not simply something one can do alone.  Part of the act of creating one's story and working out the meaning of one's life involves living it out in some way (i.e., acting on it).   So only does it really become real to oneself.   One of the first ways to do this is to tell others about it, in a context where it seems relevant, even though it may be embarrassing or difficult.   By sharing our EHEs, the other person validates the experience, even if he or she reacts negatively.   But often the response is positive, and when it is, the other person may be moved by the first person's story to share his or her EHEs as well.   This heightens the sense of meaning and reality for both in ways that go beyond simply describing one's EHEs.   A process seems to be initiated by such interchanges that operates independently of both persons and that leads to connectedness and interconnections.   One has entered into the process of spinning the web of the new paradigm.   We don't think it out; we live out of it and into a new way of being in the world.  

 

A Recapitulation from Higher Ground

          Think of the old adage, the sum is worth more than the parts.   It's one thing to remember a few specially meaningful exceptional or exceptional human experiences.   It's quite another to stick with this process so that as we continue to dig in the gold mines of our lives for more such experiences and their ever-fructifying individual significance to us, they collectively begin to have a life, a presence of their own, a singular impact as a whole!    At some point we really begin to glimpse an added dimension of the unimaginable magnificence of Life, a living, conscious, spiritual wholeness of which we, each and every one of us, in a verymost personal way, are a precious part and at-one within this Living Life Web that is living us!   But it's a whole other thing to get this from our experiences rather than our beliefs.   Whole and other.

          We could call this a potential EHE in its own right, for starters, an "EHE autobiography experience" or even the "new paradigm" experience in the way Ms. White intends this.   I wouldn't be surprised if Rhea White doesn't already include this in some fashion in her list of [did I tell you?] now well over 500 varieties of potential EHEs.   The possible impact is no less profound, evocative, shattering, enlightening, and in fact none other than what Kenneth Ring ascribes to the near-death experience.   The bottom line in either case is, it's the ultimate Wake-Up Call, it's the touch of the magic wand that transforms the ancient stone figure into the living eternal youth!

          Imagine, as this begins to have a collective impact, what it will be like as this world  begins to come alive in a whole new way with a population of such Aware people ...  !!    Ah, but listen!  Rustling hints abound, and look!   There in the ancient mausoleum by the great, sheltering tree -- a slight shifting of the head --  the stone god stirs into Wakefulness!!

Tying Rhea White's Life Work in with wHeretwoworldsTouch.com

          The aftereffects of EHEs fall within a well-studied pattern of behavior, which is certainly a main attraction for those who study EHErs and their momentous experiences.   Ms. White has observed that these aftereffects, popularly associated with near-death and out-of-body experiences, are just as clearly evident in any-to-all of the possible types of potential EHEs, and importantly, not just in what I call 'death-transcendent' types of EHEs, those exceptional, anomalous events that leave us first and last with the unequivocal awareness that, regardless of the body's ultimate fate, there is no death of one's conscious self.   And specifically this speaks to something at the deepest levels of the human condition pointing to one of our most fundamental of all needs -- to know what and who we are as living beings.   How can we begin waking up to all the implications of this innate beingness if we are bereft of the knowledge in the first place that we are something quite other and more than our physical bodies?   

          Rhea A. White's  ideas, as expressed through her life-long work, what she calls the "experiential paradigm," are a rare and great work, a formative contribution toward our development as a species, as evolving spiritual beings and also as responsible caretakers of each other, all creatures, and this beloved Earth.    William James and Rhea White thrill to the idea of the potential MORE of being human.   It is exactly this MORE and how to gain an awareness of it directly and what this gives us access to in terms of knowledge that brought wHeretwoworldsTouch.com into being.   This web community is a special 'place' where people may come just to get information about this ever-enthralling subject, perhaps to find comfort and renew hope.   Most of all I think wtwT serves those who are sprouting strange and unexpected wings and who grow restless for unknown heights ...   Adventures abound, there is SO VERY MUCH to learn!    And I want a LOT of friends with whom to co-create this avenue toward greater understanding, implicit in the exploration of specifically death-transcendent exceptional human experiences.   

Visit Rhea A. White's Website!

          Spend some quality time in a fascinating hot-house environment and see many exotic and beautiful creations -- in a word, potential epiphanies and other exaltations -- by visiting her website, http://www.ehe.org.   Support her work however you can so it spills over into every nook and cranny of our daily lives and values.    By raising your consciousness in this way, you contribute toward raising everyone's consciousness, and perhaps even saving our troubled Earth.   Wouldn't you agree that becoming more aware of our choices is the key to healing the  ignorance and protracted abuse that is sadly exemplified in the Earth's growing distress, not to mention in the ways great and small, intentionally and not, we still cause harm to each other?  

          Rhea White certainly lights one glorious path toward a far more positive and hopeful future, a very practical one.   What she has learned we all can learn personally, directly, experientially, beginning with this:  "[T]he basic meanings revealed by these experiences, once they become potentiated into EHEs, is the key to the evolution of consciousness and also to saving planet Earth because of the types of changed consciousness that are associated with EHEs."

In Conclusion, a Personal Note

          For the last decade and some, Rhea A. White, almost single-handedly, has generated an encyclopedic compendium of papers and other materials about the EHE Paradigm.   Much of this is now present on her website, www.ehe.org.   I have not one doubt that over the course of this next century, if we don’t finally do ourselves in as a species and destroy this blessed Earth, Rhea  White and her EHE model will be lauded as one of the all-time great human achievements and contributions toward our betterment individually and as a Human race.

This dedication is my way of acknowledging Rhea A. White as the singular Human being she is, as well as her critically important pathfinder work.   On a more personal note, Rhea has a rare talent for nurturing other fledgling pathfinders, of whom there have been a sizeable number over the course of her life.   No matter how busy she is, she always seems to have room for 'one more' and has encouraged my own such pursuits with delight, love and wisdom, helping me across the hinterlands of the long, often uncertain road toward the cultivation of a personal life's work which Rhea would aptly call a "lifeway" or a "project of transcendence."   

          During those tenuous moments when it's so easy to imagine that maybe you really haven't much of worth to offer, to have someone as wise and accomplished as Rhea White on the sidelines, whose love and unfailing encouragement and belief in you and your vision is there 'no matter what', is a confidence-building gift like no other.   Rhea has been a sustaining psychological and ideological blessing to me and to this vocation that owns me.

          Thank you, Rhea.   You radiantly epitomize the MORE in what it means to be human in your terms, and in my world, you are one of the most Humane, kindest and wisest people I have ever known.   Thank you.   

          China is said to have a uniquely beautiful tradition; they recognize those people who are truly gifted and who serve their culture in some very extraordinary way, and these celebrated people are called China's Living Treasures.   For all the world that doesn't know yet to recognize and cherish you for the Living Treasure you are to all of us, thank you.   I dare say, one day you will be celebrated by the whole world as one of its greatest Treasures of all time.

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