Lived experiences: Other worldly phenomena
“I was in an utterly black, dark void. It is very difficult to explain, but I felt as if I were moving in a vacuum, just through blackness. Yet, I was quite conscious. It was like being in a cylinder which had no air in it. It was a feeling of limbo, of being half-way here, and half-way somewhere else.”
“I was more conscious of my mind at the time than of the physical body. The mind was the most important part, instead of the shape of the body. And before, all my life, it had been exactly reversed. The body was my main interest and what was going on in my mind, well, it was just going on, and that’s all. But after this happened, my mind was the main point of attraction, and the body was second – it was only something to encase my mind. I didn’t care if I had a body or not. It didn’t matter because for all I cared my mind was what was important.”
“I knew I was dying and that there was nothing I could do about it, because no one could hear me … I was out of my body, there’s no doubt about it, because I could see my own body there on the operating room table. My soul was out! All this made me feel very bad at first, but then, this really bright light came … It was just a tremendous amount of light, nothing like a big bright flash-light, it was just too much light. And it gave off heat to me; I felt a warm sensation … At first, when the light came, I wasn’t sure what was happening, but then, it asked, it kind of asked me if I was ready to die. It was like talking to a person but a person wasn’t there … Yet from the moment the light spoke to me, I felt really good – secure and loved. The love which came from it is just unimaginable, indescribable …”
Thinkers of the day: Other worldly phenomena
“We have learnt that the exploration of the eternal world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.”
Sir Arthur S. Eddington, (1882-1944). Science and the unseen world. 1929 Swarthmore Lecture. University of Michigan: Macmillan
“Physicists who are trying to understand nature may work in many different fields and by many different methods; one may dig, one may sow, one may reap. But the final harvest will always be a sheaf of mathematical formulae. These will never describe nature itself, but only our observations on nature. Our studies can never put us into contact with reality; we can never penetrate beyond the impressions that reality implants in our minds.”
Sir James H. Jeans (1877-1946). Physics and Philosophy, 1981, p. 15. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
“By and large, the scientific community still holds to the mechanistic viewpoint in which consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon that mysteriously developed after billions of years of blind, mechanical, material processes. This is the way of looking at the world with which transpersonal experiences and quantum physics are both incompatible.”
Ronald L. Boyer and Saniel Bonder, (1981). ‘The Part and the Whole: Death and the Scientific World View (An Interview with Stanislav Grof, M.D.)”. The Laughing Man, 2(3), 36.
“Well, I think the most important finding is that people who come close to death tend to report very similar kinds of experiences. In other words, there is a pattern of experiencing that doesn’t seem to depend on age, circumstances, religious beliefs, and so forth. And it doesn’t seem to make a difference whether they are actually in a biological crisis or just psychologically close to death but physically unharmed. And it is very difficult to explain this experiential pattern through some kind of simple, physiological, biochemical triggering mechanism in the nervous system. It is obviously a much more complex phenomenon.”
Ronald L. Boyer and Saniel Bonder, (1981). “The Part and the Whole: Death and the Scientific World View (An Interview with Stanislav Grof, M.D.)”. The Laughing Man, 2(3), 31.
“The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.”
Ralph W. Emerson, (1803-1882). “The Oversoul”. Essays. 1845, p. 196. London: H. G. Clarke and Co.
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