I floated at a height about midway in relation to the cyclones, while still faraway from them, suspended in total disbelief. The spectacle was enormous. As I stared at it, I came to recognize my former personality-self in the mid-upper-left section of the top cyclone. Even though my persona was hardly a speck in size, I could see quite clearly who I had once been, and superimposed over this version of me were all my past lives, all my future lives, and what had been my present life—all of it happening at the same time in the same space—simultaneously. Around me was everyone whom I had ever known and around them, everyone else; and the same thing was happening to each and all. I witnessed that the past/present/future were not separate sequences, but rather a multiple hologram interpenetrated by its own reflection (what happened in the top cyclone was duplicated in the bottom one—as above, so below).
The only physical movement anyone or anything made was contraction, or expansion. There was no up or down, right or left, forward or backward. There was only in and out, like breathing, as if the universe and all of creation were breathing—inhale/exhale, contraction/expansion, in/out, off/on, back and forth, motion and rest. Honestly I felt as if I were observing the wave pattern of a giant echo, and I began to question life and its meaning. Was existence really just a series of echoes upon itself, spiraling forever outward from some primeval explosion? A big bang?
As awesome as the sight was, I soon lost interest. I was tired of life and its living, and I was tired of searching for my role in the grander scheme of things. The middle, where the spouts should have touched but didn’t, where that powerful, piercing energy was, where those shooting rays originated—that’s where I wanted to be.
Instinctively, I knew that the middle was the centerpoint of creation, God’s portal. As I moved toward it, I was engulfed by a force that I knew, I absolutely knew, was the presence of God. I have no words to describe what happened to me in that presence, except to say that the memory of it still causes me to weep. Instantaneously, I felt as if I knew all things. Yet even more was revealed about the inner workings of creation and consciousness, until it seemed as if I would surely burst from the sheer immensity of the knowledge pouring into me.
At that moment, I heard my son, Kelly. He had returned unexpectedly from Greece three days before and was at the Black Angus Bar that night, tossing a few drinks with his friends as he regaled them with stories of sailing aboard the Captain Scott. A year later he explained what happened next. According to Kelly, he had a mug of brew halfway to his lips when he jerked the glass away, jumped from his stool, and yelled, “My mother’s in trouble! I have to go home and help my mother!” He ran from the bar and drove away. It was he who discovered my lifeless body in the living room.
To understand what he did next, you should know that John and I raised our children to question authority, search for their own truth, and always check internal guidance before seeking external aid. So, instead of scrambling for a phone, Kelly calmly centered himself within that wellspring of wisdom deep inside himself (we can all access that core truth) and sought for higher guidance as to what he should do. He said he heard a voice and that voice told him: “Sit opposite the body and start talking. It doesn’t matter what you say, just keep talking.” He did that. And I “heard” him. His voice caused me to turn from where I was—not his words, but the love in his voice, unconditional love. I knew that that kind of love existed on “the other side,” but I didn’t know it could be expressed and experienced here, in the earth plane.
You realize that there are times when our children know more than we do. I came back to my body because I wanted to love as Kelly did, unconditionally. I was also infused with a sense of mission. I now knew I had a job to do and I knew what that job was. Much later, I consulted several physicians about the advisability of Kelly’s action. They were unanimous in suspecting that had Kelly used the phone and then waited for medics, I would have been too far gone to be resuscitated. Since sound is the last faculty to leave at death, Kelly’s voice was the quickest way to reach me and the most certain.
The way back to health was difficult. I had to relearn how to stand, walk, climb stairs, run, see properly, hear properly, tell the difference between left and right, and rebuild all my belief systems. Seven months later I suffered three relapses, one of them was adrenal failure. My blood pressure reading at the time was 60 over 60. I should have been on a slab.
No one could understand why I was getting worse instead of better until friends of mine, along with a doctor devoted to natural healing, all had the same inspiration: take her to some place new that will uplift her spirit. It was early November 1977 and the place selected was the Opera House in Seattle Center. I was medicated, laid in a van, and trucked up to Seattle, Washington, to attend “The Mind Miraculous Symposium.” The first speaker “paid” for the trip. He was William Tiller, a physicist at Stanford University, and his topic was “The Eternal Now.”
I don’t remember much of what he said, except for the end of his talk. He announced that “the eternal now,” where the past/present/future existed simultaneously, was a physical reality that could be charted via physics. He then projected on a huge screen that filled the entire stage a diagram of what he thought “the eternal now” looked like. It was two massive tornadoes inverted over each other in an hourglass shape, and where the two spouts should have touched but didn’t, rays of power shot out in all directions. I jumped from my seat and rushed out of the auditorium, collapsing under a foyer light. I sobbed and sobbed. I wasn’t crazy after all. What I had seen was really, really real. From that moment on, my recovery was assured.
Today, I am no longer the same person I once was. How could I be?
6
The Will of the Soul
“The eye by which I see God is the same eye as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same—one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.”
—Meister Eckhart
Part of why it was so difficult for me to resume living in a physical body on the earth plane is because I had so completely identified myself as a soul that anything less than that lofty “perch” in the heaven-worlds of spirit not only seemed foreign, but a mere caricature, an insult, to the divinity I now knew was mine.
I had seen the soul. I was a soul. I had been in the perfection of God’s presence as a cocreator with the Creator. I had experienced the mind of God and creation as the stirring of thought in that Great Mind. As this thought stirred, I saw that an energy pulse was produced and in such a manner that its oscillating motion set up and maintained what we recognize as time and space. I was shown that the makeup of this thought was consciousness and all that resulted from its stirring bore “the mark” of its consciousness, that literally the fabric of the universe was consciousness. I knew then what the biblical injunction “We are made in the image and likeness of God” meant: we as souls are “marked” by our creation in the sense of what we consist of and are capable of doing. Creation allows the One to become the many.
It was revealed to me that each of us as a soul has free will and unlimited potential for growth and expansion. Seemingly separate and distinct, I saw the souls God created as showers of sparks, nuclei of holy fire, that spread out and expanded in waves, thought-waves, similar in movement to what happens to the wake caused by a speedboat zooming across a placid lake. The farther afield each wave projected (in a plasmalike “ocean” of etheric substance or spirit), the more the individual sparks separated from their wave, spinning off in positive and negative poles of energy charge, mimicking what caused the central pulse beat to oscillate. I observed that the nucleus