Divine Visits. Josie Varga

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