( This article is taken from my book - ONE - Face to face Contact, Experiencing ET Consciousness, and Human consciousness evolution)
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We can go through life without suspecting their existence.
-William James-
Fear is an active participant for many upon meeting the visitors, a fear similar to the fear of death. Many contactees report that they realize that their fear was subjective and stemmed primarily from contact with the unknown.
One of the steps in my quest to understand the reactions of others and mine in addressing the unknown, began when I found parallels between the experience of clinical death (near-death experience/NDE) and the experience of meeting the visitors.
Studying the relationship between them may help us understand the stories of people who have experienced negative abductions, and those who have felt transcendence and pleasant experiences. Also, we may understand a little more about the contact with the entities many people report during clinical death.
The special nature of that experience was first communicated to me by my family. It turned out that my grandmother, my mother, and two sisters had all gone through clinical death[1] where they left the body, making me wonder if this could run in families?) My grandmother continued to live for many more years after the incident, and my sisters are still alive and well today.)
In many cases, the NDErs describe what they experienced while they were defined as dead, as a clear feeling of being self-conscious and very self-aware in the journey between the world of life and another world.
Many doctors claim that this strange experience of returning to life, is nothing but the result of some brain activity that creates hallucinations... or is it?
To better understand what is going on in these moments, here is an example of my grandmother's experience.
My grandmother was about 45 at the time and lived in Isfahan, Iran. She unknowingly suffered from a weakness in her heart, and one day she had a severe heart attack. Her son, who was close to her at that moment, rushed into town and ordered a doctor. When the same doctor examined her and found her condition, he gave her a shot with a medication he thought would help her, but shortly after she received the injection, her condition worsened, and she stopped breathing. There was nothing left for the doctor to do but to determine the time of her death.
The word that she had died got around very quickly, and many neighbors, close relatives, and acquaintances, flocked to her house to converge around her body. As they gathered and began mourning, the doctor covered her body with a sheet and went about his business.
Some time went by, and my uncle, my grandmother’s son, was not only mournful but also feeling guilty for calling in the doctor at whose hands she died. He blamed himself and was beyond consoling. At some point, he removed the sheet from her face, laid her head on his knees, and wept.
My uncle told my mother that while he was crying, he looked into his mother's face. His tears fell on her cheeks, and he saw her lips begin to move. He asked for a glass of water with sugar and dripped it into her mouth.
She woke up.
After a few days, she told my mother that she clearly remembered the moment she died and left her own body. From her view from above, she saw the room with her body on the bed and she continued floating up through the roof of the house. She could see around the entire neighborhood; she saw the people coming to the courtyard, she heard what they said, and she felt their feelings.
She said she felt wonderful and that she was aware of what was going on, including the sight of her son crying on her covered body.
She continued her ascent and arrived in the ‘afterlife’ or the ‘other world,’ where she was asked whether she would like to go back to her body. Driven by her sheer will to take away the pain her son felt, she strove to come back to her own body, back to life.
When my grandmother recounted this experience, it was clear to her she had indeed left her own body and returned to it. She was able to report what was going on all around her during the time she was out of her own body until she occupied it again.
There is no rational explanation that could account for the fact that my grandmother was able to see down to her physical, corporeal body, dozens of feet out of the bed she was resting on, with her grieving family gathered around her. Likewise, there is no physical way to hear and see several things or places at once, but she did; she saw the people coming out of their homes, and at the same time, she saw her immediate family inside.
However hard to fathom, the answer is quite simple; my grandmother’s consciousness experienced everything that was going on without her body’s mediation.
Most of the people who recall their near-death experience, leaving their body and returning to it, describe it in an amazingly similar way; they recount how their consciousness continued to be aware of its surroundings, how they were completely free of the body’s pains, and limitations, how they felt this existential bliss the like of which they never experienced before, and could not account for. Many of them also recalled wonderful music.
Countless people in many different places and cultures around the world describe the same situation when they see their bodies lying motionless, and also see the doctors or family members who are near the body.
They describe how they can see, hear, and even feel the world they have just separated from! Some may even provide information about people who were out of the room at that time!
Most of the people who experienced an NDE describe a tunnel they passed through on their way from our known world to some other place, the hereafter, or another world at the other end of the tunnel, from where pleasant, incredibly beautiful light was emanating, guiding them towards it.
There, on the other side of the tunnel, at the mount of “the afterlife,” as various religions refer to it, or, in Judaism, "the word of truth," AKA "the next world," those people are greeted by spirits, angels or relatives who have already passed on. They have come to greet the newcomers, help them, guiding them in the transition to the new place.
Up to a point before crossing over to the other side of the tunnel, the accounts are very similar. Nevertheless, the identity of the beings who came to help them on the other side of the tunnel is different; each person recounts a unique and different story about the identity of the beings.
Some people describe their entry into the "other side" as consisting of a welcoming party of their loved ones who had died before they did, people whom they loved and cherished in particular, like a grandparent, a spouse, a loved one, a relative or a friend. Other accounts include spiritual figures who came to greet them.
Others, like my mother, describe the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some are greeted by the prophet Elijah, some met Jesus or angels. Others saw the Buddha.
All say they were greeted lovingly. Often, they were asked whether they would like to relinquish their corporeal body once and for all and move on, or whether they would like to return to their body.
It turns out that most of the people who had this experience felt the same immense love, be it from people who were close to them in life, or spiritual figures who emanated their unconditional love.
In most cases, the figures they encountered were in line with their belief system. Jews were greeted by rabbinical or biblical figures, Christians by Jesus or one of his apostles, and so on.
These correlations between one's beliefs and the beings on the other side of the tunnel have given rise to the claim that the whole ‘out-of-body experience’ and ‘clinical death’ are but the product of that person’s own subjective tastes, affiliations, and perceptions in life, or worldview. They conclude that the whole story is merely the figment of one’s imagination contrived by the hallucinating mind.
But does this skeptical view of "explaining everything away" make any sense?
Could it be a mere “coincidence” that so many people of different eras, cultures, and locations experience the same "hallucination" of leaving their body and looking into a room from the outside? They talk about the same tunnel, the same light, the same greeting by loving, caring beings.
Could it not be that at some point, something is taking place of which we do not have a sufficient understanding?
From my point of view today, this appears to be the case.
Those same spiritual beings who greet people on the other side of the tunnel are free from the definitions of the world we know. Like anything else that is connected with the spiritual plane, they are set very much apart from our known world. They are very different from our reality. They do not have a set, pre-determined shape, or any fixed configuration, complete with a definite time and place. Such fixed things are part and parcel of our world, for they are but the only forms of expression with which we can communicate and understand.
The experience of the beings from this other place or spiritual world lingers only as a memory once those people return to their bodies. Then the body is a functioning system again, complete with a heart that pumps blood and oxygen to a fully conscious brain.
That brain is translating what the unconscious mind had experienced, and it is doing that by forming it into something familiar and logical, something which is recognizable to the known physical world. We do this subconsciously when we attempt to define our abstract recollection in terms of familiar characters, whom we deem similar or close enough to that abstract experience.
Our mind views the surrounding world by learning to associate and extrapolate only from the known and familiar reality.
This follows us around and builds up from the moment we are born, so when someone has a near-death experience, the lingering memory of the whole experience is indeed still tied to the physical reality that he knows.
After people cross through the tunnel and get further away from their corporeal body and the terms of the physical world, things do change. The hereafter, or the afterlife, does indeed follow a different set of rules. Our perception of time and place fades. Instead, a new consciousness unfolds, free of the constraints we have known from our everyday lives, forcing a shape and a tangible configuration onto anything and everything. The dimension we refer to as the afterlife comprises loving beings.
After the return to the material body, it is difficult to grasp and recall those loving beings from our abstract memory, so we attach them to our known world and describe them to ourselves in those terms. We cannot define something that has but a formless essence. That which is not dual in nature – we can only experience, but not fully comprehend by our normal, dual, rational thinking.
Therefore, the way these entities are defined varies from person to person. To one person, the same sense of love and confidence he experiences from that being, now translated and defined into a certain character, perhaps as a loving relative he knew in his life; for another person, it is a loving, spiritual figure in whom he has believed all his life.
In conclusion:
It is hard for us to logically accept such a different reality, to grasp a reality where our familiar definitions and boundaries do not exist.
However, the very fact that at least some of us remember the experience on the other side of the tunnel indicates that we have the ability to experience and tap into that dimension.
Just because each of us remembers and translates an indefinite entity in a particular and different way from one another, does not negate the very essence of that being as he saw it.
This is something we can understand only by experiencing it.
In the space beyond the other side of the tunnel, all the various possibilities exist together as ONE.
People who have encounters with visitors encounter the same phenomenon as the tunnel experience. In this instance too, the ET’s appearance, as part of the meeting with a human being, cannot escape being translated by the person who meets them into the form his or her mind assigns. This is the way the mind grasps, processes, and stores the information.
When it comes to my encounter with the visitors, they looked like this:
Nevertheless, they did help me realize that the image I gave them, their actual appearance to me, is also related to me personally, to the way I perceive.
On another occasion when I made contact, I asked them for an explanation of their appearance.
I received the answer through automatic writing:
We know your way of seeing us. But you can't see us the same way you see your world. You're still trying to see us through your normal vision possibility of the physical dimension. Now you see our unclear flashes, these are the flashes of starting a new vision, and that is still incomprehensible to you.
We look to you now in the way you choose and able to see.
The way you see us is defined by you. We look the way you see us as a result of sharing your perception of our existence, but we have no definite form.
Over time, you will be able to understand that an invisible essence for you can also be defined in terms of your perception. That essence can show to you definite, only when your physical perception participates in some form of that essence and binds it with your own choice.
When we visit your world, we are also temporarily defined in a certain physical body, but that is not the only form or our original essence. In our dimension, there is no need for a physical body defined in a certain way as you do. A body with such boundaries guarantees the legality of existence and consciousness in the reality of your world.
You participate in the definitions of reality that you are given, but you are not yet aware of it.
In the next chapter, I present how modern science also seems to reveal the same dilemma in interpreting reality. The behavior of the subatomic particles reveals a distinct reality in which the laws of nature are completely different. It is the same process by which our consciousness intervenes and translates our reality.
Here is a related quote from David Bohm, who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology, and the philosophy of mind.
The quote is about the nature of the quantum particles that are the invisible basis of the substance on our world:
Both faces always hide in the texture of the quantum, but the way the viewer meets the texture determines which face will appear and which will remain hidden.
--David Bohm
“Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
[1] Clinical death is a temporary condition where the heart stops beating and supplying blood and oxygen to the brain, yet brain tissue cells are still alive, but no brainwave activity is recorded in the measuring instruments. In some cases, which are not sufficiently understood, after a while, the dead person comes back to life, his heart begins to beat, and he returns to breathing. Thus, the previous state of death is redefined as "temporary death" - clinical.