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"ANOTHER LOOK..." is an ongoing column I write for Vital Signs Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the International Association For Near-Death Studies. Each segment will appear here from now on, as well as in the Newsletter. This new feature gives me a format with which to explore varied issues about near-death states. Should you wish to make a comment or want to suggest future topics, please feel free to contact me. I may be able to use your suggestions directly. Thank you. P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)

ANOTHER LOOK...

"THE EXPERIENCE/THE EXPERIENCER"

Column #18

P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) P. O. Box 7691 Charlottesville, VA 22906-7691

Sometime during the month of October 2001, my first book, Coming Back to Life, comes back. Kensington Books of New York City is reissuing it as a hardcover classic. Can you imagine that? After being out-of-print for years, the book is reappearing - complete with new forward, updated Resource Section/Footnotes. Chapter Two of Coming Back to Life contains a brief description of my three near-death experiences and what I went through, at least initially, in learning how to integrate them. In several chapters of Future Memory I revisited these episodes, especially the third one where I encountered "two cyclones," one inverted over the other in an hourglass shape.

Of my three episodes, this third one, the cyclones, came to have the greatest impact on me and led to my becoming a researcher. I mention this to you, not because the value of the research I have done has been questioned of late, but because the life I have known since I "died" in 1977 came to an end on May 22, 2000 (in the 22nd year of my research), when my third near-death experience reoccurred: the cyclones came back, my energy changed, and nothing has been the same for me since. This manifestation happened while I was standing in prayer facing the Holy of Holies at the back of the Basilica in St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal, Quebec. Technically, the incident would be classified as a "near-death-like" episode, for I was in perfect health at the time and nothing threatened. In the past I have talked a lot about near-death-like experiences, as a number of people have them, including children. These events can be as intensely-felt and as life-changing as the near-death phenomenon itself, and engender the same pattern of aftereffects. It is true that the closer an individual is to physical death the more apt he or she is to have a near-death experience, but it is also true that the specter of death need not be present for one to occur.

This column is devoted to presentations about both the phenomenon of near- death and the one who experiences it. Since I'm an experiencer, too, I'm doffing my researcher hat this time to share with you on a personal level. It's not so much about May 22nd that I wish to speak, but, those cyclones. To do this, I'll first describe the original event and the effect it had on me. The language I use here resulted from years of struggling for the right words to say. (A fuller version is in Chapter 13 of Future Memory.)

"During the evening hours of March 29, 1977, when I left my body in what felt to be death, I soared rapidly through the roof of the house I rented, glimpsing each molecule of material in the ceiling and rooftop as I went and noting how curious it was to possess such X-ray vision. As if flying, I rose far into the night sky until deep in heaven's darkness I spied a slit of brilliant light somewhat the shape of a 'lip.' When I neared, the lip of light opened slightly, enough to allow entry, but that entry was more an absorption, as if I had suddenly become caught in a force field. This 'field' extended some distance into space and away from the lip. Particles of twinkling brightness identified its presence. I detected the smell of ozone, increasingly 'flat' as an odor the closer I got. Once inside, the light was as over-whelming as it was brilliant, yet it had no apparent source. I spied two colossal forms in the distance, cyclonic vortexes spinning at great speed, with one inverted over the other in an hourglass shape. "The cyclone on top spun clockwise. The inverted cyclone beneath spun counterclockwise. Where the two spouts should have touched but didn't, there spewed forth in all directions piercing rays of radiant power not light, power! "Both cyclones were fat and bulgy, not at all smooth-sided as might be supposed, considering their tremendous rate of spin. Even though the direction of their movement was decidedly right to left for the one on the top and left to right for the one on the bottom, inside each was the presence of the other's motion plus a separate inner convolution. This tridirectional force seemed to create the powerful spin along with an impression of layering across the surface of the cyclones (without rows or bands to cause the layered effect).

"Inside the top cyclone (and I called them cyclones because that is what they reminded me of), I saw myself, hardly larger than a speck, yet recognizable. Superimposed over me were all my past lives and all my future lives happening at the same time in the same space as my present self. Around me were other people I knew. The same thing was happening to them. Around them were still other people, and others more, until I came to realize all life-forms were present inside the cyclone, and the same thing was happening to each and all. Yet no one and nothing made any 'real' movement except expansion and contraction, as if all life plus the environment in which it existed, was breathing.

"What appeared to be movement, the life-forms acting out their given roles, was actually an optical and perceptual illusion, similar to a hologram but produced by pulsed wave oscillations activated by individual and collective forms of consciousness. If any life-form changed the overall pattern of a personal scenario, 'past' as well as 'future' would alter for that individual and sometimes for others.While each life-form was truly its own self, each was also connected to all others by bubbly threads of a brilliant light that formed a fabric netting or web.

"And what occurred inside the top cyclone also occurred inside the bottom cyclone. As above, so below. In other words, myself plus the other life-forms actually inhabited both cyclones in the same relation, in the same condition. The bottom cyclone, then, was but a mirror image of the one on top. The overall scene first impressed me as if a giant echo were filling the width of a massive canyon.

"The sheer force of cyclonic spin created a counteractivity along each of the cyclone's outer edges, manifesting in the process another energy construct altogether. This extra construct occupied space to the left and to the right of the cyclones and seemed somehow to originate darkness and light as by-products of its existence; thus, darkness developed to the left as light emerged from the right.

"This sight filled me with the realization that darkness and light, by-products of the spinning cyclones, were opposite 'signatures' of the same dynamic. They provided the necessary mechanism and contrast for manifestation to be experienced in a meaningful way. Darkness and light, then, were corollary reflections resulting from the act of creation continuously recreating and altering itself, for that is exactly what it felt like, as if I were witnessing Creation.

" It was my choice at that moment to go into and through the power rays in the middle. Earthlife held no interest for me, only the thought that I wanted to go back to God. As I drew closer to the rays, suddenly, not only was I possessed of knowing, but revelations of the innerworkings of creation and consciousness were given to me and of Creation's Centerpoint, where I was. Then a voice spoke. I called it The Voice Like None Other, for it was not like an angel's voice or a guide or guardian. I felt it was of God. And the voice said:

"Test revelation. You are to do the research. One book for each death."

I was shown what that meant and what was to be in each book. Books two and three were named, not book one. But I was not shown how long this would take me or what the job would entail. I revived just as I neared the middle. I began my research in 1978 with no knowledge of Raymond Moody or his book. All I knew was that I had a job to do; it was the reason I was alive. Over two decades of work came to an abrupt end May 22, 2000. When the cyclones remanifested, I was sucked up into and through the middle where the rays of power were. I felt as if I were being fried, physically fried, by the force of energy that engulfed me. Afterwards I managed to leave the Dome and negotiate the Stations of the Cross, located in an intimate garden. Shadows hung until I reached the statue of the resurrected Christ. A sunburst obliterated the scene, as I recognized that the driving energy that had once possessed me was gone. Completely gone. In it's place was peace. And I was free.

The offer to reissue Coming Back to Life greeted me on my return to Charlottesville. With the newness of what happened I rewrote a book I had been writing about death and remastered the audio cassette of "As You Die" and traveled around the world.. I didn't come to the IANDS Conference in 2000 because I couldn't. I was in the throes of "dealing with it," and I still am. Transformative experiences, no matter how wonder-filled they may be, take some getting used to. Our energy patterning alters each time we have one, and we are changed - even beyond our knowing. I don't pretend to understand the full significance of the cyclones. I just know I feel so different. I feel as if a great weight has been lifted from me, a weight that was both a burden and a gift. Floods of faces wash over me, all those years and all those people. I could never have integrated my own experiences to the degree that I did without them and the reflection they mirrored back to me of myself. It is for them that I have "held firm," especially the young boy from Oklahoma with a brain tumor who confided to me that, "The people at our church come to see me and Mom real often and they say I'm going to hell because I saw angels when I died. I know they're wrong, but they're hurting my Mom. Will you please talk to my Mom? Please tell her the truth. She'll listen to you." Heaven and hell jumble together in near-death studies. Telling the story, educating people, separating fact from fiction, was never "my job." It's the job everyone has. What happened to me is simply one more page in a record book the human family writes.
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P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) is the author of many books concerning near-death states, the latest being FUTURE MEMORY, CHILDREN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, and THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERI-ENCE. Check out her website at www.pmhatwater.com for more information about her other books, the Subtext, and her "Brain Shift/ Spirit Shift" model for exploring transformations of consciousness.

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