THE RESURRECTED

                     by P. M. H. Atwater, L.H.D.

 

Text of Easter Sunday Message I will give 4-8-07 at the Fellowship of the Inner Light Church, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
 
 
    The near-death experience is now the number one field of choice for scientists worldwide who study consciousness itself:  what it is, where does it reside, what produces it, does it exist before birth and after death?
 
    We've come a long way since the early days of the “Moody Miracle” in the mid-seventies, and all that sensationalism about “tunnels” and “lights at the end of tunnels,” and people who “float around ceilings” and “fly through the air leaving their body far behind”  and “greet the dead as if they were alive.”
 
    Today, such things as out-of-body experiences, apparitions, visitors at the deathbed, greeters in death, 360 degrees of unobstructed vision and unobstructed movement, the expansion of faculties normal to us, the presence and the reality of other worlds and other ways of living. . . all of this. . . and much more – is considered normal!
 
    The paranormal is now normal.
 
    All that we once regarded as paranormal, supernormal – can now be studied and experienced through the lens of objective evidence and third-party verification – with people of any age, even newborns.
 
    And we have discovered a consistency, a pattern, to how we as human beings can transform, expand, into a greater version of ourselves.
 
    On the edge of what we call death, we can die in the body, leave it and move into spirit, reunite in worlds we call “Home,” come back and resurrect our bodies and our lives as we return to what we call life – forever changed by what happened to us – forever different – forever partnered with our soul – as a living reality, a living truth, of the greater and the higher and the more.
 
    The world of flesh and the world of spirit have united.  We become the Resurrected, as did our brothers and sisters before us – all the great avatars who have shined their light in the presence of darkness:  as well as the continuous, constant parade of the lesser known or the unknown, who, to the best of their ability at the time, shined their light.
    
    Light!
    
    Always, there is light.  The Sun in the sky, the Sonship within our soul – both released when we arise as does the skyball, when we move from the shadows of limited vision to the splendor of unlimited illumination.
    The near-death experience, its pattern of physiological and psychological aftereffects – model for us what happens during transformative shifts in consciousness no matter how they are caused.
    Through the model the near-death experience gives us, we are unerringly led back to that spark of memory – the truth which fuels our existence – that we are One with the One.  We remember who we are.
    I am one of the Resurrected.
    Although my path to that awareness was strewn with pain and blood and desperation, perhaps yours was easier, at least I pray it was.
    In 1977 I died three times:  January 2nd because of a miscarriage and hemorrhaging; January 4th because of a large thrombosis in the right thigh vein which dislodged followed by the worst case of phlebitis the specialist had ever heard of let alone seen; and again on March 29th when I willed myself dead and my body was too exhausted to argue.  To this day, doctors are unsure of exactly what killed me.
    I was left with a non-functional body and a lost mind, adrift between earth and spirit, unable to find my bearings – anything that made sense or that I could recognize.
    You see, each time I died I had a near-death experience.  Each was different, yet each seemed somehow to lead to the next as if progressive.  My return to flesh necessitated that I relearn how to stand, how to walk, run, climb stairs, crawl, tell the difference between left and right, see properly, hear properly, and rebuild all my belief systems – all that undergirds manifestation – what we call life.
    Being alive for me became a living nightmare – a struggle so severe that the only logical sentence I could produce was:  “God is.”  And I would chant it for hours, off and on for days.  It is was kept me sane.
    A year later, when I was reasonably human again, I met Elisabeth Kubler-Ross at the O’Hare Airport, near Chicago.  Her plane to Europe was late, so the two of us huddled on a bench like a couple of girl-chums and for an hour I shared my three near-death experiences and Elisabeth shared what she knew about such things.  She called me a “near-death survivor.”  But her words gave me more questions than answers.  Four months later, I began my research of the near-death experience, doing what I was told to do during my third episode.
    Three decades have past.  My research base now numbers nearly 4,000 adults and children who have experienced the phenomenon.  My findings are contained in eight books – the ninth to be released in October of 2007 (this year) – a 450-page encyclopedia of the entire phenomenon, its aftereffects and implications.
    Some of my findings are now being verified in clinical studies, including the prospective study done in Holland and published in 2001 in The Lancet medical journal.  Yes, I made The Lancet.

    The completion of my theoretical model completes what I believe God asked me to do when I died the third time.
    What fueled my steps, what filled me with passion and purpose all the years since 1977, is God’s Presence – where I was on the Other side of death.  You don't forget that.  Neither can you turn it off.
    God.
    When you become One with the One, no matter how or when, you become The Resurrected.  Some of us died in violence as did our Brother Jesus.  Some of us slipped through the doorways of consciousness as we transformed and expanded.  All of us transmutated, for we were “marked” by what happened to us.  To whatever degree, we changed.  To whatever degree we became The Resurrected.  Like our Brother Jesus, like all the avatars of history, known and unknown, we remembered, we became who we really are – projections of God’s Thought, co-creators with the Creator.
    The Christian Bible says:  “Ye are gods in the making.”
    Yes.  
We are The Resurrected.  We remember.  We are one.