Читать книгу Divine Visits - Josie Varga - Страница 17
Оглавление| My Two Light Beings |
Barbara Harris Whitfield
Georgia
Author of several titles including: Spiritual Awakenings: Insights of the Near Death Experience and The Natural Soul
I met Professor Kenneth Ring in the early 80s. I had written him after having read an article in Omni Magazine describing his research on near-death experiences at the University of Connecticut. I didn't tell him about mine in the first letter but did relay to him the ones my ER and ICU patients had told me about either as they were dying or when some of them had come back. They seemed to know I was safe or that I had had one too.
After several letters back and forth, Ken told me he was going to be speaking at a conference just a few minutes from my home in South Florida and invited me to come.
A few days before I met him at this conference, I went to the movies and saw Resurrection. I was totally overwhelmed by the story. Except for the cultural background, I was Ellen Burstyn's character.
After Ken gave his talk, he asked if anyone in the audience of about eighty people had had a near-death experience, and no one raised his hand. He asked if Barbara Harris was in the audience, and I sheepishly stood, shaking. And of course, he asked me if I could tell my experience. This was the first time I had told it other than trying to tell a psychiatrist seven years earlier (and then I was told I was depressed and handed a prescription for antidepressants that I never took.)
As I spoke, the words seemed to come from somewhere else, and I couldn't look at the people turned around staring at me. I kept gazing at Ken hoping that I wasn't embarrassing him and dreading the silence when I had finished. At the same time I was reliving my experience as it actually happened. And finally when I was finished, there was the silence I had dreaded—then there was a loud clapping noise and everyone was smiling at me.
The last thing I had talked about was having seen the film Resurrection a few nights earlier and relating how the character's energy helped others and how I felt “that” when I was working with dying people. Later, over a cup of coffee, Ken asked me to look up a word—a strange word I had barely heard before—and to write telling him what I thought. The word was “kundalini.”
A few days later, a whole new world opened up for me when I stood in front of a book case in a store right across the street from my daughter's dorm at the University of Florida. One shelf was filled with books on kundalini. I bought three books: Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence by an American psychiatrist who had also been an ophthalmologist, another book by John White, and Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov. Bentov's book resonated with me the most. He talked about the physio-kundalini syndrome, and I knew that I had most of the signs and symptoms he described.
The letters started flying between Storrs, Connecticut and Pembroke Pines, Florida. Finally, not being able to contain my enthusiasm any longer, I wrote Ken and asked him if I could come up there to talk with him again. And he called to tell me that a letter from him was on its way (mailed the day earlier) inviting me up to the “near-death hotel” as his house was called in those days. It seems that many near-death experiencers had come to visit and tell him what they knew. And now he was writing his second book stemming from our interviews.
We agreed that I would come up in a month and that's when the visits started. Late at night as I lay in bed thinking about all I was reading, two “beings” would float into the room from the doorway. (No, they did not come through any walls!) They barely had a shape that wavered and radiated a low pulsating light. So that I wouldn't become terrified over this, I told myself they were my grandmother (who had met me in the tunnel in my NDE) and my aunt whom I had adored. They stayed near the bed for several minutes, but I don't really know how long because when they were with me, it seemed as if time had stopped just as it had done during my NDE. This went on every night for the whole month.
The day I was leaving, as I was packing, I picked up a new book I had just bought by Itzhak Bentov called A Cosmic Book on Creation. As I tossed it into my suit case, I saw the back cover for the first time and jumped because there was Bentov's picture. He had died in the 70s in a plane crash. But that face was the same face I had seen over and over while meditating. He was trying to talk to me, but the “transmission” was garbled. This was when the worry about losing my mind caught up with me. Between the visits at night and meditating with a man trying to talk to me, I came face to face with my fear of this all being psychotic.
At that moment I made up my mind that I was going to tell Ken, who was a social psychologist, that I was seeing Bentov. If he told me I was crazy, I was going to turn around in the airport, get back on the next flight to Florida, and put all this behind me.
When I landed and Ken was standing there waiting for me, I stuttered and stammered, “Ken, Bentov has been trying to talk to me in meditation!” Ken's answer, rather dryly delivered was, “Bentov's been seen all over Boston!” (Boston was where Bentov lived and worked with many scientists while trying to prove his physio-kundalini hypothesis.)
Ken Ring's near-death hotel was an incredibly picturesque converted mill on a bubbling brook. It was New England at its finest and also my first visit to this area.
As I crawled into bed that first evening, there they were—my two beings of light who stayed just next to the bed until I fell asleep. And they were there all four nights. I looked forward to climbing under the covers and looking at them until I fell asleep because they gave me the kind of comfort I really needed. They settled down that voice in my head which kept asking me who I thought I was—this respiratory therapist who heard a few NDE and DE stories. Did that make me an important enough person to fly up to tell a professor what I thought I knew for a book about which I knew nothing?3
