The NDE Paradigm Project

I am one of those individuals who reads accounts of near-death experiences with massive curiosity and in some cases envy. I want to experience for myself the wonders that authors of NDE books encountered in their voyages into out-of-this-world ecstasy. I want to see the bright light, the tunnel, the indescribable gardens and castles in another world, and meet the ever-so-wise light beings, the cosmic men and women who have all the answers to the questions that form in my mind.

But then, a near-death experience also means enduring pain. In some cases unimaginably intense amounts of pain. It's one thing to read a book about this stuff and think, "Wow, what a trippy adventure So-and-So had." It's another to meet some of these people in person and to fully grasp that those who have seen miraculous things paid a hefty physical price for the privilege. It has made me re-think my near-death wish!

Short of having my own NDE, I am very curious about the implications of other people's experiences. I take into account all the I have heard and read from other people's perspectives and forumulate in my mind what it all means to my reality both here and in the hereafter.

One of the best resources I have come across for this type of pondering is The NDE (near-death experience) Paradigm Project. It's a great site if you want to pursue the big picture question of "what does the NDE mean?"

Planned Deaths

Many mystics and NDErs say that one’s time and manner of death is chosen prior to incarnating. While quick to point out that free will is always a factor that can alter the plan, they say that most of us do, indeed, have such a plan.

Of all the paradigm-stretching concepts I have heard from the NDE community, this is among the most fascinating to me.

It makes physical life more and more like movie production. Our souls, the scriptwriters, concoct our lives as if they were writing a screenplay. They plan for us experiences that will teach us lessons we decide between lives that we need to learn. They create characters for us to interact with, both as good guys and bad guys. We physical humans just go along for the ride that our higher scriptwriter selves chose.

As free will agents, we physical humans take the hands our souls dealt us and respond to the milestones created in our life script. Then to make it more challenging, we are born into this life with amnesia about that whole design thing. Most of us remember nothing and question our sanity for thinking such weird thoughts.

If you have written any fiction, you probably experienced how even though you create characters for your stories, they take on lives of their own. They tell me what they think and what they want to say. I may put them in a situation of my choice, but they often choose their behaviors, a choice clearly different than I had originally intended. I think that is the same relationship we have with our souls/higher selves.

If our deaths are planned like the plot points in a movie, it would sure make a difference when that knowledge reached critical mass. And that is the philosophical raft upon which I float. I wonder about what would happen to our world view if we ever reached a place of accepting that we come and go on cue.

If we knew for sure that death meant transition, not termination, than all those people who perished in the recent earthquake and tsunami cataclysm have a much different fate than those imagined and described by the world press.

“Hundreds of Indians have scattered flower petals at sea and sacrificed chickens to pray for the safe return of those carried away in a tsunami as aftershocks hit some areas.

“Groups gathered on beaches in southern India as dawn broke on Monday to light incense and pray for thousands of missing.

“But while some held on to fading hope, others broke down as they discovered loved ones among the loads of dead ferried to hastily erected open-air morgues and authorities gouged out mass graves to bury bodies already rotting in the tropical heat.”

It also fascinates me to think that all these victims (if we wish to continue using that term) knew at some level of consciousness that it was a good day to die. They had chosen this exit point. It must have been a busy day at Afterlife Admissions Central.

Closer to home, NDE researcher PMH Atwater, who’s had three NDEs herself, describes what she saw on September 11, 2001 on the "inner planes" over New York City while she was there in spirit form as the second plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She wrote a 28-page report on her observations that you can download.

My friend Treesha, whose NDE account is included in this blog, said of her car crash, “Before my head went through the windshield of my vehicle, I was already out of my body, up above, watching the ‘accident’ down there continue.” I get comfort from that, especially in thinking of all the victims of the aforementioned disasters.

I just learned that an acquaintance of mine died from a fall at home. A fall is an accident, but NDErs say there are no accidents; they say there are plans.

The Skeptic Tank

To my way of thinking, I have not had an official near-death experience or a bona fide out-of-body experience. Just hasn’t happened yet.

I have a few personal friends or people that I met at IANDS who have had these experiences, but I can’t say with any certainty that I have. I had two surgeries with anesthesia before I was 20, but I don’t remember anything unusual about them. Some people have suggested that ether (when it was used) caused some funny business.

For me, NDE stories and their global implications for humanity are awesome. That for me is the real hook in my continuing quest to learn more about NDEs and woo-woo.

I am quite aware of the voices of skepticism that tell us to chill our enthusiasm. I must say that in many ways, I am skeptical of the skeptics. It’s not their pursuit of truth that’s objectionable. It’s their attitude. They talk as if anyone who has written a book on NDEs is either trying to cash in on the gullibility of the masses or is an inept investigator who is a victim of frauds and charlatans.

I suppose the best way to characterize my own feeling is that I love the idea that there is more to life than what we perceive with our physical senses. I love accounts of otherworldly places so much that I am afraid that they are too good to be true. So, I look for proof that satisfies me on a personal level that life goes on. I am not out to prove to the world that what I want to believe is true, but I am out to play a lot of ”what if it were true?”

I have come to the opinion that it is just as necessary for the skeptics to prove that there is no afterlife as it is for the mystics and the experiences to prove eternal living. Rather than taking the attitude that it is “obvious” that we die, because physical death is observable, I would like more in the way of proof that death is the final killing off of consciousness.

For me, the amalgam of what NDE accounts offer is juice for the evolution of humankind. The big picture view that I get is that we’re here on the planet for a reason; that the universe has meaning. Rather than the religious rhetoric that God has a plan and that’s why everything happens as it does, NDErs often bring back the vision of souls participating in the evolution of the Universe. They often say that God’s plan is for us incarnated souls to choose our own karmic evolution. I like that a lot better.

Skeptics don’t offer much nourishment for the figurative soul. About the only level I see in their rants is “don’t waste your money supporting frauds and quacks.” That puts it on the plane of consumer activism, but otherwise offers no spiritual solutions.

I do agree that many so-called spiritual leaders aren’t playing with a full Integrity deck. Celebrity psychics who charge a king’s ransom for their services, seminars, and vacation packages particularly underimpress me. I’m not too crazy about the kind of psychic reader who focuses on fortune telling. And wow, who wouldn’t want a pre-recorded digital woo-hoo woo-woo message from world famous Sylvia Browne?

On the other hand, meeting people who have had near-death experiences has provided me with a whole different view. While several of them have written books, most have not. They are not selling their experience. Many are trying to recover from their experiences.

They go to IANDS groups for support and conversation with others who have “been there.” Many of them are still annoyed at having to come back from the ethereal to the physical world, especially when it means returning to a body that was mangled in an accident or in great pain from disease.

Many of them have been mentally brutalized by friends, relatives, and sometimes medical professionals for talking about what they experienced “as if it were real.” Many become quite shy talking about it, not wanting to face snarling inquisitions.
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Of course, one of the major issues to come up for NDErs is people saying, “If you came back to life, you weren’t really dead, were you?” This implies that a near-death experience is not good enough as a preview medium for an afterlife “because near-dead ain’t real dead.”

Skeptics usually point to artificial means to have pseudo-NDEs or out-of-body experiences (OBEs), like drugs, to prove that this could be a medical, not a metaphysical phenomenon. They also lean on the theory that when the brain knows it’s facing imminent death, it stages a grand finale in the form of a wowza hallucination. My position is if that were true, we should study it and find out more about this cool brain trick, because there could be many beneficial applications for it.

I do know from personal observation that NDErs often get quite emotional when talking about their paranormal adventures. They’d have to be pretty good actors to pull this off. And it’s not just the outbursts of tears or the choppy speech. Sometimes it’s the look that crosses their faces, the “if you only knew” look.

People who come back from these journeys feel a much greater urgency to heal and improve the planet than those who write long dissertations complaining about the flimsy scientific evidence for soul survival. That could be the most telling sign of all..

Hugging Souls

Hugging to me is one of our most overlooked and misunderstood human encounters. You may wonder what hugging has to do with woo-woo; for me the connection is energy.

I think of hugging as energy exchange. I view sexuality that way, too, but in this blog entry I won’t be discussing sex per se.

I am a very sensuous being. Born and raised in Northern California, I am a card-carrying touchie-feelie teddy bear type. I have always gravitated to people who like to touch and cuddle. Touch me when you talk to me and you will make a more profound impression. That’s my bias.

Over the course of my life, my conception of embracing, which was always very sensuous, has become increasingly more spiritual. That is where “hugging as energy exchange” came from.

Spiritual to me, just so you understand, is not about religion. I do not belong to any church. Spiritual to me means recognizing the importance of mind and heart. When I hug someone, I am hugging much more than a body. I am hugging an indwelling spirit, a consciousness, a being that does not always inhabit that body.

I have felt for many years that hugging is a form of communication spoken in body language. Hugging is one great way for me to read a person’s emotional presence. I can tell with remarkable precision (checked out through voice, if need be) how someone feels about me.

When I talk about hugging, I am not referring to most of the one-second body collisions people in our culture are conditioned to produce for the occasion (“give” would be the wrong word here). You know, the A-frame, don’t blink or you’ll miss it atrocity.

For me it’s got to arrive in the ten-second range to even be considered as real, not just absent-minded habit. Especially if you think of embracing as energy exchange, you don’t get much “juice” from a hug that’s faster than touching a hot iron.

I discovered in my 30s how much better I felt about myself, other people, and the world at large after receiving a long, affectionate hug from someone. A hug like that cheered me up better and faster than words. Indeed, a hug was enlightening in a tangible sense. It felt more real than rhetoric.

Of course, embracing someone, especially for ten seconds or longer, almost automatically dropkicks it into the briar patch of sex. Obviously, that’s because hugging is an onramp to foreplay. Many people stalwartly keep hugs short to sidestep any chance of becoming sexually stimulated. People who think like that will be among the first to look at other people hugging and think “foreplay” or “lust” instead of “love.”

Want to put terror into many hearts? Suggest hugging for a whole minute. Sixty eternal seconds. That might not seem so daunting if you’re talking about embracing someone you’re crazy about, but what about a stranger or someone you wouldn’t want to sleep with.

A few years ago I attended Unity of Corvallis, Oregon. Part of the Sunday service was an event called Greet Your Neighbor. As music played, congregants were encouraged to mill about greeting others with words, a handshake, or a hug. We touchie-feelie devotees loved it. Over the year I was there, I happily hugged women and men alike(gays and straights of both genders, I might add.) Every now and then someone would (mis)interpret my behavior as sexually invasive (I can quickly tell) but much more often than not I felt welcoming and welcomed, and often got positive comments..

Because, you see, hugging is not about sex. It can be, but not automatically. For me I noticed that consciousness has everything to do with it. Intent. Often when I embrace I visualize something of nature like bright sunrays or flowing water or beautiful colors. When I hug someone and that stuff is going on in my mind, it sends a warming and wholesome feeling (or at least that’s what I tell myself.)

With that in mind I was intrigued to hear about the so-called hugging guru, Mata Amritanandamayi. She hugs to heal and empower and share the love of the Universe. The estimates of how many people she has hugged over thirty years are staggering. One account says 30 million in 30 years. Pretty impressive if you do the math. That would be hugging 2740 people a day. Another account drops the 30 to 21 million. I’d settle for 93 hugs a day for thirty years just to join the Million Hug Club.

I wonder how many hugs Leo Buscaglia logged in his lifetime. (No, it’s really not about numbers. It’s about quality. )

By referencing the Hugging Guru and the Hug Doctor, I suspect that I am attempting to legitimize my fascination for this method of connecting with people. Hugging feels so good, so right, so enlightening to me that I am struck dumb when someone suggests that it is just a lecherous libido in action. I avoid embracing people like that. I don’t want their energy!

If I were designing a perfect world, I would love to see hugging elevated in stature. I would like hugs to be ceremonies where I let my love of life and humanity flow through me and into someone else. I would like it to be a sensually pleasing expression of sacred and welcoming joy.

If I were designing a perfect world, I would gather a group of kindred spirits together for weekly hug-a-thons where we could embrace the night away while sharing our stories, our feelings, our quests. (Don’t I live dangerously, though?) As we opened our arms to each other, we would open our hearts to each other, too. By regularly staying in touch, literally and metaphorically, we would brighten our lives with love.

I think there would be more to this than sensual pleasure. I am not a neuro-linguistic programming expert by any stretch, but it has occurred to me that by combining pleasing physical sensations with affirmations and positive thinking, one could be sending an awesome force of empowerment to the brain. When our bodies feel wonderful, we’re more open to assimilating positive messages.

Anybody want to join in on my reality?

Separation of Religion and NDEs

One of the rules of IANDS meetings is no proselytizing. It is not okay to preach a religious (or anti-religious) viewpoint.

That’s one reason why I like these meetings so much. It is not like going to church where someone tells you what to believe or how to interpret the Bible to conform to the organizational party line.

At IANDS meetings people share their stories. Research around the globe is showing that people who suffer near-death experiences are encountering a very wide range of otherworldly events.

Not everybody gets tunnels and interviews with light beings. Some get hellish experiences. Some get out-of-body journeys into voids. Some get instant insights. Some get meetings with beings perceived to be religious icons.

But what’s definitely clear is that there is not a standardized experience for everyone. And that brings me to today’s theme: the separation of religion and near-death experiences.

I suspect that many people would say that studying what happens to people who have near-death experiences shows a strong interest in religion. To me, it is more like studying nature, or supernature, as it were.

I started thinking about this as fallout from all the talk these days about the shrinking separation of church and state. If it were ever scientifically proven that there is no death, only transition to another reality, it would create a most fascinating situation.

If we knew that people did not die but that they moved in consciousness to another world, would we so cavalierly execute criminals?

If we knew that people did not die but that they moved in consciousness to another world, would we as a country be so inclined to declare war on other countries?

If we knew that people did not die but that they moved in consciousness to another world, would we as a country characterize death as tragic and be so governed in our media culture by fear of death?

If we knew that people did not die but that they moved in consciousness to another world, would we characterize abortion and assisted suicide for medical reasons as murder?

If we knew that people did not die but that they moved in consciousness to another world, would we as a culture be so focused on collecting material empires and inventing monuments to ourselves?

Religion is primarily about belief in something. When I read or listen to people’s NDE stories, I am not required to believe anything. They’re sharing their perception of what happened to them. It’s not much different from hearing someone describe a vacation they just returned from, and you haven’t been to that place yet. You’re interested in what they have to say and know that personal experiences do vary.

But as more and more people publicly report their NDEs, and as research gets more sophisticated, it’s going to become increasingly more difficult to ignore all this input. If it holds up that death doesn’t truly kill us—the big if—then it could (and I believe should) affect national policymaking.

It just makes sense to me that if masses of people are saying from their personal experiences that we don’t die, that our material world view is wrong, that the media keeps churning out a distorted view of reality, that medical science doesn’t have it all right, then maybe we should check it out.

In the meantime, in the absence of so-called scientific proof that we don’t die, I play a lot of “what if?” I ponder what the world would be like if all these NDErs are right (and especially after attending IANDS meetings, I have no reason to disbelieve them as a whole). I ponder the implications of all these people having out-of-body encounters and reporting a wide range of alternatives to the CNN view of the world.

To me, the afterlife (or the next life) is not a religious issue. I believe that learning about it is just as crucial as any other pursuit dedicated to human survival.

Pondering The Big Cosmic Surprise

If reincarnation exists, and growing anecdotal evidence suggests that it does, it changes everything.

Author Carol Bowman didn’t believe in reincarnation until her five year-old son began panicking at loud noises. Eventually under hypnosis he described his past life as a Civil War soldier where loud noises were terrifying.

Bowman’s two books on the subject (Children’s Past Lives and Return from Heaven) chronicle her investigations, which include startling accounts of reincarnation within family lines. According to her research, you could wind up becoming your own relative, like a grandchild!

My interest in reincarnation is that it’s so deliciously creative. It fills up a lot of loopholes in the justice of love.

People who believe that physical life is a one-way trip (whether to heaven or to hell or to eternal nothingness) don’t necessarily have an investment in how they leave the planet. They feel that they can use up natural resources and devote their lifetime to acquisition of wealth and play unfairly with other people’s lives, because when life is done, that’s it.

But what if it turns out that we come back? If this were known fact, I believe that we would have a different society. More of us would want to pay it forward.

We might not be so eager to let neighborhoods fall into disrepair, turning into ghettos, if we thought we could end up being born back into one. Maybe we would look at educating and inspiring our young people differently if we realized that somewhere down the road we would have to be educated and inspired again.

We might not be so interested in ravaging the land for natural resources if we thought somehow, somewhere we could be reborn in a place ravaged and depleted. We might be more interested in planning for the future if we knew we were the future.

Maybe we would look at criminals in a different way if we thought we might be reborn within the circumstances that drive people to crime. Maybe we would care more about victims of all kinds if we thought destiny might fit us inside their shoes next time.

Maybe we would look at our mate in a different way if we thought we might come back in that gender’s body forced to deal with somebody like us.

Maybe if present-life heterosexuals considered a future-life drill as a gay person, we’d see some attitude changes.

Maybe we would be more compassionate to problems suffered by other racial and ethnic groups if we thought that we might spend our next life fighting those same problems.

Maybe we would not be so quick to condemn somebody’s religion or spiritual practice if we considered a future life of being born into that world.

Karma is not about punishment; it is about the big cosmic surprise of reaping what you sow.

Treesha's NDE

For me, one of the joys of the Internet is a newfound ability to locate interesting people who I might otherwise not be able to meet. Before the Web, I could read about NDEs in books but have very little chance of contacting an experiencer or an NDE book author. It makes a world of difference for me to talk with experiencers in person--to ask questions, observe body language, and hear in an unprocessed, unedited way their words.

It was through the Internet that I first heard about IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies. And it was through IANDS that I found Treesha Richie. She is an experiencer who facilitates the Portland Oregon Friends of IANDS meetings.

Treesha graciously agreed to share the account of her near-death experience with readers of my blog:

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE OF GOD AS
HOLOGRAPHIC PRESENCE OF LIGHT AND SOUND

On black ice, at 35 mph, crashing into the tow-truck in front of me was imminent! Those last split seconds passed dreamlike. In a deafening silence, all time stood still as I knowingly and calmly surrendered the outcome of what was to be to the God I wanted to believe in; at age 27, I was existentially-agnostic. Before my head went through the windshield of my vehicle, I was already out of my body, up above, watching the “accident” down below continue... Three cars from behind rammed into each other and on top of my vehicle--which was now mashed and mingled into the red corvette being towed by the tow truck, at dusk, in the heavy snowfall...

Wherever I moved my out-of-body attention, I knew everything about the many people involved. I knew their names, their thoughts, their feelings, and the consequences that would result for each from the “accident” we'd all (together, before time) agreed to be part of for each other's spiritual growth.

I watched men removing a bloodied body from one car. They were having difficulty getting it out of the mangled wreckage. Bystanders were shaking their heads, feeling sadness, reflecting on their own lives, on the meanings of their own loved ones to them... One of the Paramedics said, “She's gone...” and I noted with no emotion of any kind, that the body he was referring to and helping place on the gurney was my own. With no grief, no fear, no anxiety, I simply watched as the gurney was placed in an ambulance which sirened away into the snowy night...

With the slightest shift of attention, I knew myself to be taken up into an indescribably warm, Loving, Holographic Presence of Light and Sound, neither male nor female. The serenity and unconditional Love emanating from IT through me, was/is ineffable.... Direct, unimpeded transference of thought and knowing--a shared knowingness--was washing through every cell of my own holographic BEing....IT was me and IT was not me; I was IT and I was not IT; I was in IT, of IT, yet still/simultaneously, my individual, unique Holographic-BEing Self...I knew myself to be indispensably loved and needed by IT. "Like" a drop of the ocean is the essence of the ocean, though not thee ocean; "like" the ocean is not complete except for the existence of every single drop of which it is composed....

As NDEr, Author, P.M.H. Atwater categorically writes: "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...all that ever was...all that ever will be. You know It's God. No one has to tell you. You know. You can no longer believe in God, for belief implies doubt. You have no doubt. You now know God. And you know that you know."

I did not see this Holographic Presence of Light and Sound so much as I simply, totally knew and loved IT within and about me as IT knew and unconditionally loved me within and about IT. There was no space, no time, no duality of anything, as every cell of my being was flooded through and through with Spiritual Principles, Universal Laws, knowings one out of necessity forgets while in body on planet earth: Knowing how all that is, just IS. Of how it all makes Divine sense, is IN Divine order... How every religion on earth is a piece of an earthworld religious-pie experience possible. How lifetime after lifetime, Souls make different earthworld religion-choices, so as to exercise different spiritual muscles; one eventual goal being to have experienced and exercised to fullest potential, all spiritual muscles.... How the attitude with which I pour cat food into the cat's dish, or put my kitchen dustpan away, is done with more love or less love... And that with conscious choice, I can become more or less spiritually awake, Soulfully-REmembering while back in body--just by the repetitious practicing; earth is a school for Soul....The smallest acts count the most on the other side...Loving one another IS loving self and loving God...

Simultaneously with all of the above, my entire existence (past, present, and future lives which contribute to the whole of who and what I AM) passed through my knowingness... Each thought, word and deed, each choice made and/or liable to be made--the seemingly significant and the seemingly menial. As I re-experienced and simultaneously observed all at once, every happenstance was colorfully vivid. The life-review--as it does for millions polled by Gallop--served to give me total understanding of the relevance of every second to my endless, boundless UNfoldment as an individual, somehow-needed-by-God-BEing. It served to waken me to a REmembrance that "God" is having dual-world experiences of BEing human, through me...From my place in the non-judgmental Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Holographic Presence of Light and Sound, I knew only ITS appreciative, unconditional and boundless Love...I am not a human having Soul within itself; I AM Soul using a human body so as to have human experiences.

In that moment and for all time, I knew that I AM and always have been a unique atom-aspect of this Light and Sound Presence. In a quickening of awareness, I felt illuminated with REmembrance of how every single one and thing in existence is the same. How Life itself is "all for One and One for all."

The Spiritual Principles flooding through my BEing were all about REmembering the countless, multi-faceted diamond aspects of Love each of us IS, while here, while playing/experimenting in human embodiment. Amidst the illusions of matter, energy, space and time--what humans call the worlds of duality--materialistic bombardment challenges spiritual remembrance. I.e., "It's hard to remember your goal is to drain the swamp when you're up to your behind in alligators." My NDE deeply and permanently "branded" me with such REmembrances, which are since impossible to forget....

By the Presence of Light and Sound, I was reminded that it was up to me, then and there, to choose: To choose to go on into another realm/direction of growth opportunity I could see, or back into the human body and growth-direction chosen by me prior to birth... Which choice made, was of no importance. What was imperative, however, was that I, not the Presence dictate/make the choice.

Though I now have no recall of making the choice, I vividly remember re-entering my pain-wracked human body, "like" a Genie swooshing back into an old-fashioned, used-to-be-five-cents coke bottle...

The choice making, and the changes brought about in my human self due to the Light and Sound immersion are entire other stories in themselves. Briefly: Rather than the prior 90% introvert, my personality is now 50% introvert and 50% extrovert. I have absolutely no fear of death. I'm much more compassionate with self and with all of life. Mental confusions have disappeared. Religious morality no longer appeals to me whatsoever; spiritual integrity, my own, rules. I came back knowing that all answers to all life's questions are within. I take myself and life in general a lot less seriously; humor has become a lifeline to Self- and God-REalization.

I no longer believe, but know I am Soul using a body, culture, personality and brain, rather than the other way around. That "God" is Love. That "God" as Source of all that exists here and elsewhere, in ITS ever-expandingness needs each one of us as much as we need IT. That the main purpose of earth world Spiritual Olympics participation is primarily to expand one's ability to give and receive Love. That although yes, our bodies die, you and I--as the mighty, powerful, spiritual BEings/Atoms of God we are--we never die. As Atoms of God, in our fullest essence, WE ARE LOVEd. --Treesha Richie

The next meeting of the Portland Oregon Friends of IANDS is Saturday, December 11. Please click the link for more information.

How Can I Love God If I Don’t Like Jesus?

That question could be enough to send many of you fleeing, but it’s a serious inquiry of mine. In one way or another, I have been asking it all my life.

I am asking the question again after having met a few people who say that they had a much more up close and personal meeting with Jesus and/or God during their near-death experiences. They say he is awesome.

I can’t say that I have any big wedge issues with God. I haven’t had any major injuries. I haven’t lost anyone prematurely in any violent way. I wasn’t born in a ghetto. I’ve had a pretty smooth ride this life. So my issues with God and Jesus are more abstract.

My parents were unadventurous Presbyterians. I was just a little kid when God first pissed me off by separating me and my dear friend Priscilla into different Sunday School classes. Not only that, but He (through my mother) forced me to endure Sunday school wearing a bowtie. Gag me.

Church never improved. I always found it boring. So when I heard stuff like “Jesus loves you,” I just wasn’t very impressed. He loves me—so what? Why doesn’t he do something to thrill me? Other people who loved me gave me candy.

When I was 13 and circling in on puberty, I fell madly in love with Marilee. She was a Jehovah’s Witness (I didn’t have a clue what that meant) and introduced me to the concept of eternal life. Whoa! Cool idea! The notion of spending forever with Marilee motivated me to accept her invitation to Bible study. The thrilling mental picture I remember even 40 years later is bobsledding through eternity holding Marilee in my arms. Woo-hoo!

That was a much more interesting picture than anything Marilee’s mother said about the Bible. Egypt? Isreal? What does this have to do with anything? Then came this whole Armageddon thing. I was happy to hear about the new world, the promised paradise, but why did God feel it necessary to attack the whole world with fire and earthquakes and plagues and a bunch of mean and nasty stuff. Was God psycho?

As I was pondering Armageddon, President John Kennedy announced the naval blockade around Cuba. I recall telling Marilee on the school bus, “Looks like Armageddon has arrived.”

Alas, there was no thermonuclear holocaust, but then one set of grandparents, who were Baptists, apparently became alarmed that I was seeing a Jehovah’s Witness mother and daughter propaganda team. I don’t really know the backstory. My parents tried drawing a fine line between supporting my religious freedom and placating the relatives. My mom hinted even before I really knew what this meant that she thought that Marilee’s mother was using her lovely daughter to lure me into religious study. Commies had spies and now religions had spies.

Ultimately, I grew so bored with God and his dry as dust Bible that I quit on my own. Meanwhile, God found a much more formidable rival for my attention: sex. My first exposure to Playboy in a drug store produced such a bodily rush that the law of natural selection won out. Curiosity about the mysteries of sex was wildly more compelling than anything God’s earthly representatives were selling about lambs and flocks and dead prophets who couldn't speak understandable English.

It kept getting worse. When the Vietnam War blossomed in my face, threatening me with military service for a war I didn’t understand, I could not comprehend how and why religious leaders actually favored our military action. Was God nuts? How could Jesus say to love thy neighbor and then want us to go blow Commies up? Furthermore, a whole bunch of Christians called anti-war protestors various permutations of gutless, unpatriotic scumbags. What happened to “thou shalt not kill?”

In a previous blog entry (December 3) I mentioned that while Richard Nixon was being chased out of office, a radio psychic Betty Bethards captured my attention with woo-woo. Reincarnation thrilled me. Since many Christians decry reincarnation and other metaphysical studies as a form of devil worshipping, I drifted even farther from becoming what was being branded at the time as a Jesus freak. The savior in sandals seemed to be doing nothing to attract my attention but tell me, via his outspoken religious press corps, that the things that were capturing my heart or my intrigue were anti-God. Sex was anti-God. Nirvana was anti-God. Hippies were anti-God. Metaphysical thinking was anti-God.

I was never anti-God. I was more pro-something else. I put God and Jesus on the back shelf in the philosophical cupboard while I searched for the light elsewhere. I was pretty quick to catch onto the idea that there are many different branches of Christianity, but none of them spoke to me on an ooh-wow level. Many spiritual spokesgurus said that all paths lead to God eventually, and I liked hearing that.

The best stuff was my own creative essence—my own consciousness. I began to form my own picture of God. My visions of unconditional love were a lot different than those preached by conservatives. Listening to the bile pouring out of the mouths of televangelists turned my stomach. To me some of it is a no brainer. If Jesus loves everybody, for example, then he loves gay people, too. I am only human and I accept gay people. If I, a human, can conclude that loving, same sex couples should be allowed to create a family, then I think that an enlightened being who loves everybody could reach the same conclusion.

When I try to envision what Godlike or Christlike unconditional love is like, I get a far different picture than what I get from any church I have attended. So many of our cultural institutions are set up to discriminate, isolate, and prioritize in very unloving ways. “We’re right—you’re wrong” thinking does this. Often the name Jesus is used to brand these movements.

It’s only been recently that I have become aware of the possibility that the Jesus I have come to know and dislike is not the real Jesus Christ. I have come to this awakening primarily through reading about or hearing about near-death experiences that featured visitations with light beings, including whom the perceiver believes is Jesus. These visitations present light beings who are all about unconditional love much more in harmony with visions I resonate to. I say thank God for that.

The most recent of these experiences came last Saturday when I attended Seattle IANDS and heard Howard Storm talk. Howard was a tenured art professor at Northern Kentucky University and an avowed atheist. At age 38, he was admitted to a Paris hospital with a perforated duodenal ulcer that was killing him. His subsequent NDE led to a trip to a hellish place where he eventually, out of sheer desperation, called out for Jesus to rescue him. That’s when the ride got wild.

I am not through this arc yet. I am at the point where I realize that I dislike the behavior of many religious entities. It is their portrayal of a stuffy Jesus that I dislike. I am opening my mind to reconsider my position and see more clearly.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I am a flip-flopper.

Vietnam and Iraq

I became interested in psychic phenomena when I was a college student at San Francisco State University. I used to listen to psychic Betty Bethards when she would appear on Bay Area radio shows.

It was through her radio programs that I was introduced to reincarnation, karma, and spirit guides. I was immediately drawn to the subject. It sounded so cool, a much better reality than the one portrayed through the current events of the time.

Nixon was the leader of the so-called free world at the time. He was losing it to Watergate. I was in my last semester of school. My student deferment was almost up, and I was looking at a very uncertain future with possible military service looming out there. Most of my cultural surroundings from Betty Bethards to the Smothers Brothers and the whole San Francisco peace movement were very anti-war, and none of my leaders in the US government had explained in any convincing way why it was necessary for us teenagers to go kill people half a world away.

Betty Bethards was asserting that Vietnam was essentially karmic payback for when the whites stole land from the American Indians. I found that to be a fascinating assertion, even if it was not something someone could prove. To that end, the concept of karma boosted my spirits. I liked how what it really meant to me--that governments didn't decide things in the bigger picture. There was that higher authority. And I loved thinking that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were not really where the buck stopped. (Yeah, okay it was Truman who said that, but we presumed that to be a presidential policy!)

When I listened to Betty Bethards, woo-woo was new to me. I let it all wash over me in a delicious flow of creativity-on thinking. The only truly bothersome thing to me at the time was that I had to trust in a psychic's say-so. And some of them, like Sylvia Browne, took advantage of that one-up relationship. Cha-ching. "You want a reading? $300 please." (That was in 1970s dollars, mind you.)

It wasn't until all the near-death experience research started piling up that I saw that I didn't have to rely on psychics. Other people were telling their stories about the wonders beyond mortal consciousness. Today, with the World Wide Web, there's a grand cache of info available for anyone interested in life after death.

In some ways, the world scene today with the prolonged war in Iraq mirrors what I experienced as a student in the Vietnam war era. Unlike that war, though, we have substantially more communication options today. We are seeing and hearing much more about the personal lives of the soldiers, many of them still in their teens. Especially since so much of our rationale for going to war has turned out to be smoke and mirrors, hearing these people's intimate stories about war casualties is all the more touching and gripping.

And I go back to some of that early pondering--is there more to the Iraq war than what we see in physical terms? What kind of involvement in it do spirits have? Was this war actually a planned event, speaking in spiritual or karmic terms, or is it a free will choice the participants are making?

As I watch news stories about the war in Iraq, I overlay it onto what I read and hear from NDErs. If death is a transition and not a termination, it changes everything. It essentially makes a whole new war. It still bothers me that we don't check this out more thoroughly. We're spending around $200 billion to fight this war. I'd like to spend a few million more to see if it's really smoke and mirrors.

I Am Not Gay. I’m Irate.

It’s upsetting enough to me to hear that gay people are routinely barred from taking on roles of leadership in many churches. That doesn’t seem right. I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that any unconditionally loving God or Christ would be in favor of the kind of self-righteous hostility so often dished out to gay folks.

But now CBS and NBC are showing by their denying advertising access to the United Church of Christ that it’s harder and harder to consider America either the Land of the Free or the Home of the Brave.

I made an initial check online to see what kind of input I might find on gays and near-death experiences. Here is one of those.

Manufacturing Conflict for Fun and Profit

I am an aspiring novelist. I have been reading my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose and overwhelm the planet with the breakout novel. Time and again writing instructors say that if you want to write that seething, sizzling best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.

Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a novelist, you need to riddle your protagonists with bullets of pain. Make ‘em suffer. Embarrass them. Torture them. Rile them. Make ‘em miserable. As in:

Real conflict means taking the hero’s (or heroine’s) worst fear, twisting it around and making it particularly nasty, then throwing it back at him (or her) at the worst possible moment and saying, “Here, baby, think fast!”

The end result is that you have a contingent of pro and wannabe writers who are all working furiously to manufacture conflict for fun and profit. The producers of media content are in the conflict delivery business.

Think about this for a moment.

Just about everything you as an entertainment consumer see and hear in the mass media is designed to provoke conflict for characters. The media that you ingest has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer.

Yet do we as a society ever question what this success formula may be doing to the world psyche? What is the psychological impact of all that manufactured conflict on readers, radio listeners, moviegoers, and TV viewers? Are we in danger of being hypnotized by this passive absorption?

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to be living their lives as if they’re locked inside a soap opera? They always seem to be walking underneath a black cloud of impending doom. They talk in the clichés of angst, just like soap opera characters.

Have you ever wondered about people, often self-confessed news junkies, who get so distraught and frightened by the outside world they isolate themselves in front of Fox or CNN? Wasn’t the official Iraq war great television?

Have you ever had the experience of receiving some great news about your personal life, and then been overwhelmed by fear that something bad was going to happen to spoil it? (And how many times in the movies or books is something really, really good followed by something really, really bad?)

I wonder if there is a connection.

If everything in our media is designed to promote conflict, and we see it over and over and over again in a variety of different ways, aren’t we being hypnotized to believe in conflict as our reality?

Does life imitate art?

And it really just isn’t about art, per se. Do you ever watch the news objectively, as if you know you’re being manipulated and you want to see how? Pay attention to the language. Reverse engineer the prose. The more that news becomes entertainment, especially on cable, the more news organizations fight for viewers by using dramatic storytelling techniques.

And how about that last presidential election? Wasn’t that the most awesome display of pandering to fear that you’ve ever seen? You can bet that the spinmeisters running those campaigns used dramatic storytelling techniques to scare up some votes.

But here’s some conflict for you: the more you study your media diet, the angrier you might get. You might start thinking you live on the wrong planet because you see a much more positive vision of life.

I believe that this is what happens to many people who have had near-death experiences. Suddenly their whole world is shaken up, not only by almost dying, but by the perceptual jolt they experienced when they peered into different realities. They are taken so far out of the norm (with their experiences with the light and life reviews and the lessons learned) that they no longer respond to the ordinary conflict mentality.

How could you respond the same way to a news story about someone dying in a car wreck if when you had your own near-fatal car wreck, you saw the light?

It all makes me wonder what our world would be like if instead of so much artificial conflict, our dramatic entertainment were filled to the brim with creative solutions. What if we had a higher level of conflict, perhaps as exemplified in near-death experiences?

Part of the conflict for me—ahem—is that as a writer I like to push the envelope on envisioning good stuff.

Just after Steven Spielberg brought out Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I thought why not have a movie where space aliens land on the White House lawn in the beginning—not the end—of the film? What would happen to the destiny of the planet if some highly advanced civilization blew the lid off our current conception of the universe?

Suddenly we would know without a shadow of a doubt that we weren’t alone in space. And we would have that all-important cleansing of many of our current ills. The star trekkers from a distant world would share with us solutions to key scientific enigmas.

When I chatted with a writer buddy about this plot, he asked, “Where’s the conflict? All drama needs conflict. If the space visitors solve everything, there’s no conflict.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be exciting to explore what would happen to our planet if the space guys removed many of our current complications?”

“That might be interesting in real life, but it doesn’t make for good drama.”

I guess that’s why we get movies like Independence Day. Space aliens can’t resist trying to conquer Earth. If they were too good to us, we would all be bored. Well, everybody but me. (I often think I come from another planet as it is!)