posted 11-25-2000 05:05 AM            

It happened about ten years ago. I don't know what triggered it. I left my body, felt myself being pulled upward, like when you're on a roller coaster and the chain under the car is pulling you to the top of the first hill.

When I arrived, there were so many people there - ecstatic people. It was like a place where you first had to go to get "sorted." (Harry Potter?) People communicated without talking and there was an overwhelming feeling of love in this place. Try to imagine a time when you were with one of your children and you had an overwhelming feeling of pride and love - a special moment when your heart was filled to the point of bursting. That's what it was like, only the feeling was magnified a thousand-fold - constant - all consuming.

I knew I wasn't supposed to be here.

I was sent to a special place where a wonderful black woman was supposed to "fix my heart." She was very loving and concerned about me. She hugged me and sent me back.

It was the actual "coming back" that blew my mind. I won't tell you the details. There are parts of this story I can't and won't share. But I'm different today than I was before it happened. In fact, I was different from the moment I returned. You can't be the same after something like that. Even today, ten years later, the meaning of this experience hasn't diminished.

I had been in the presence of God.

posted 11-25-2000 06:36 AM            

One happened in '71. I had come home after a day of teaching. (I was teaching 7th grade at the time.) I fixed myself a cup of tea and sat down in a chair to drink it—just to relax. My rommate at the time, Marcie, was sitting on the couch and we were chatting.

All of a sudden, I had the sense of being outside of myself looking down. I wasn't far from my body, kind of hovering above it.

There were words. At first, the experience was "I am alive," followed by "I am." Then I reached the experience of "I." It was as if everything in the universe had melded and become one. It was peaceful, and quiet, and serene, and ok. True nothingness and everything at the same time. And I understood God and enlightenment and being in a way I never had before. The experience of the words was quite different from the words themselves. But then you all know that.

Marcie told me later, after I'd re-entered my body and asked her what had just happened, that for a few minutes my body seemed to her like one of those stand-up cardboard cut-outs of a policeman. It had similarities to a real person, but it wasn't one. I wasn't in it.

Marcie and I together had a similar experience one Easter Sunday. She saw Jesus and I felt his presence. The odd part of that is that Marcie is Jewish!

The last bizarre experience happened in '94. I was teaching grad school as an adjunct professor. I also was on staff at the university. I'd finished my regular job and was standing outside the building (one where many students passed at the change of classes), having a smoke before going to teach my class.

All of a sudden, as people walked by, I could see their futures. I could just see it. It was overwhelming and incredibly intense. It was a real godsend when two people passed who were blanks—a short respite from the intensity and knowledge I didn't want to own.

I went into class and the premonitions kept happening as I looked at my students. Finally, as I started teaching, it thankfully passed.

I told another professor w/ whom I was friends. She was into new age stuff. I asked if she thought I'd had a psychotic break or something. She said, no, she didn't think so. The universe, she explained, was full of all kinds of information. Most of us were just too closed to "get" it. I had just opened myself up, she contended.

I don't know whether she was right or not, but she made me feel much better about what had happened.

The scientists tell us that we only use about 10% of our brains. My guess is that experiences such as those we've described are possible somewhere within that other 90%. If we just open ourselves up to them.

Some odd sense or intuition tells me that God is available within us. Maybe that's what Jesus meant about the Kingdom of Heaven being within.

posted 11-25-2000 08:05 AM            

I held onto that for a very long time, not telling anyone. About a year later while visiting my parents, I went into my father's office and he had a calander of constellations. I was in shock when I looked through it because what I had seen was very similar to these constellations. The beautiful pinks and blues, it was amazing.

joh, you're right, it's terribly disappointing that the words just never seem to accurately convey the experience. Seeing the words in print makes me feel a bit strange, but it was a genuine experience, and I'll never forget it.

posted 11-25-2000 08:16 AM            

Thank you for your honesty.
I have felt like such a freak at times because I have seen an experinced so many spiritual things!
In 1987 I was home alone on Thanksgiving.
I wanted to fast and just hang with God.
I like being in His presense.
My daughter went with my roomate at the time to another friends house for dinner.
I was singing and praying to God.
I had gotten down on my knees and I was saying "I am not my own.
I have been bought with a price."
The more I said it the more this illuminating light filled the room
I was in the presense of God!
Trust me once you have been there there is knowing denying it!!!!
I know this will sound nuts.
I was sober, I was not on drugs!
I expereinced God's presense in a way like I had never had before.
After this I was writing in my journal and I had a dictionary open.
Words started popping up at me.
Whatever caught my eye I wrote.
It became a prophsey of somethings that would happen in my life.
I will not go into detail but I will say part of it is happening at this present time after all these years later!
Right after this wid experience I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye.
Just as I was thinking that the tv turned on by itself.
I prayed rebuked satan and then went to the park.
It scared the heck out of me!
I wonderd for years how I could be in the presense of God one moment and then the next be filled with fear.
The lesson for me was that good and evil both do exist but we can not be harmed by his siily little tactics!
Ooh he turned the tv on!
What a freaking tough guy! < LOL
Greater is He that lives in me then He that is in this world!
I have had little things happen like knowing someones name before they say it, I can sense things sometimes before they happen.
But I try to stay real balanced!
I have seen to much!
I like the simple life!
I have met and spoken to angels in human form.
I will share it all someday in a screenplay I am going to write.
I got the idea just recently right here in our PGL rooms! :-)
I will call it "Men and Angels"
I have known a few of both! < LOL
I will not share much else at this time.
But what I have ben through in these small 39 years baffles my mind sometimes!
I thank you all for sharing this very special part of yourselves.
I love God and I just want to be pleasing in His sight:-)
your friend~
Julie :-)

posted 11-25-2000 08:37 AM            

I've experienced a Satan-like experience, too. I finally realized that it was my fear that made me vulnerable to the evil I felt. I don't believe in the biblical take on Satan, so that name doesn't ring true for me. But it's the best concept I can come up with for purposes of communication.

When I became invulnerable to that negative force was when I stopped fighting it. My soul is mine and mine alone. No one can take it from me. I have to willingly turn it over. (Free will?) And I don't have to do that. Just letting it be without fear disempowered it. It went away.

I think that's much, if not all, of what's wrong with the world. People live in a mentality of scarcity and allow their fear to dominate them. They don't stand up and don't take risks to learn and grow.

I see it at work so much. Management is frozen by fear of offending a client and possibly losing business. The truth—a true confrontation—doesn't have to be angry or hurtful at all. It can just be a simple expression of the truth as in, "If you want us to do that, we certainly can, but it will take extra time and money. The choice is yours." There's nothing mean or hurtful in that. It's simply a statement of what's so.

I also think that the saying, "The truth will set you free" is what that means. The truth will keep one from getting scared and living within that fear. It's just what is so for that person. It's the fear, I believe, which make us vulnerable to evil. If others don't like hearing it, well, that's their problem, not ours. Unless we allow it to become ours.

That, I believe, is ultimately what love, acceptance, and yes, Christianity (probably also the other religions at their core), are really getting at.

posted 11-25-2000 09:24 AM            

Fear
Everthing
And
Run

OR...

Face
Eveverything
And
Recover

The choice is always ours!
I wish we could learn to use the other 90%
of our brain for good positive enjoyable things in life.
But look what mankind is capable with only 10% of the brain in use... scary!

posted 11-25-2000 09:43 AM            

The important thing for me was to figure it out alone. Take the experience and just mull it over as my maturity allowed. The meaning wasn't clear immediately after it happened...only after some time had passed, and I had studied more.

I appreciate all of the sharing happening here. It's also nice to know others understand what I'm talking about...

Sachet, I agree with you one-hundred percent about having God available to us. I do believe that God is an accessible energy that resides within each of us and that we are, literally, children of God. Our ability to access that relationship is determined by each of us alone.

posted 11-25-2000 10:27 AM            

I know we all come into our own!
I embrace all!

I really do try to walk in love.
NO EASY TASK!!!!!
I like being alive!
I like having gratitude for just another day!
I guess I shall go join the real world for the rest of the hours remaining today!

Have a great weekend! :-)

posted 11-25-2000 11:29 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Isabel:
Has anyone read/written about spiritual or outer body experiences?

Thanx, Isabel

---

posted 11-25-2000 11:48 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by JulieMallen:
Of all places for me to meet like minds!
I am so humbled as I read your words my friends.
Sachet,richbo,joh!!!!!

Thank you for your honesty.
I have felt like such a freak at times because I have seen an experinced so many spiritual things!
In 1987 I was home alone on Thanksgiving.
I wanted to fast and just hang with God.
I like being in His presense.
My daughter went with my roomate at the time to another friends house for dinner.
I was singing and praying to God.
I had gotten down on my knees and I was saying "I am not my own.
I have been bought with a price."
The more I said it the more this illuminating light filled the room
I was in the presense of God!
Trust me once you have been there there is knowing denying it!!!!
I know this will sound nuts.
I was sober, I was not on drugs!
I expereinced God's presense in a way like I had never had before.
After this I was writing in my journal and I had a dictionary open.
Words started popping up at me.
Whatever caught my eye I wrote.
It became a prophsey of somethings that would happen in my life.
I will not go into detail but I will say part of it is happening at this present time after all these years later!
Right after this wid experience I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye.
Just as I was thinking that the tv turned on by itself.
I prayed rebuked satan and then went to the park.
It scared the heck out of me!
I wonderd for years how I could be in the presense of God one moment and then the next be filled with fear.
The lesson for me was that good and evil both do exist but we can not be harmed by his siily little tactics!
Ooh he turned the tv on!
What a freaking tough guy! < LOL
Greater is He that lives in me then He that is in this world!
I have had little things happen like knowing someones name before they say it, I can sense things sometimes before they happen.
But I try to stay real balanced!
I have seen to much!
I like the simple life!
I have met and spoken to angels in human form.
I will share it all someday in a screenplay I am going to write.
I got the idea just recently right here in our PGL rooms! :-)
I will call it "Men and Angels"
I have known a few of both! < LOL
I will not share much else at this time.
But what I have ben through in these small 39 years baffles my mind sometimes!
I thank you all for sharing this very special part of yourselves.
I love God and I just want to be pleasing in His sight:-)
your friend~
Julie :-)

NOTE!!
For anyone who feels offended by my words I am sorry.
I know it can sound scary and flaky if you have lived a different kind of life.
I do not think I am better then anyone else!
I share from my heart!
I hope I offend know one!

---

posted 11-25-2000 06:37 PM            

quote:

---

Don't you think that the DejaVú phenomenon is part of a spiritual/ outerbody experience??

---

Yes, I think it comes from the same general place inside the brain/mind. To me it points toward the idea of reincarnation—that we've been here before.

There was a fascinating TV movie on a few weeks ago starring Jane Seymour. It was about an American woman who relived memories of an Irish woman who dies in the 30s. In time, the American woman came to realize that she had been that Irish woman and had the same experiences and memories. She was determined to do what the woman wanted had she lived—gotten all her children together.

The village priest explained it as one spirit communicating with another since the church doesn't cotton to the idea of reincarnation. Close enough for me!

What astounded me was that the movie was based on a true story. I can't tell you how reassured that made me feel. It almost seemed like some sort of proof that there is some sort of existance after death. I knew that intuitively, (since I can "commune wit da dead!") but this seemed much more "scientific."

posted 11-25-2000 07:18 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sachet:

I think that's much, if not all, of what's wrong with the world. People live in a mentality of scarcity and allow their fear to dominate them. They don't stand up and don't take risks to learn and grow.

---

I agree with you entirely, Sachet. A good friend of mine said that we have two choices: Love or Fear. I have had countless spiritual experiences, though others might not see them that way. Kind of along the lines of the plastic bag scene in "American Beauty". And I believe part of the reason I'm here is to try to impart that sense of wonder and beauty that is all around us all the time through the medium of film, which is part of why I entered this contest.

Did anyone else incorporate their spiritual experiences into their screenplays?

posted 11-25-2000 08:35 PM            

The first of these experiences came to me when I was nineteen, two years ago. It's going to sound frovlous, but I assure you that it was the most terrifying, meaningful experience of my life. I was lying in bed trying to sleep, and something was preying heavily on my mind that was causing insomnia. I tried everything from counting sheep to reciting the alphabet backwards. Nothing was working. I opened my eyes and stared up at my ceiling. And there, hovering perhaps five feet above my bed, was a white balloon. Both doors to my bedroom were closed. There was no balloon there when I turned the light off. To my knowledge, there was no balloon even in the house. I sat up and stared at it, wondering casually where it had come from. Then it began. There was this incredible, paralyzing, terrifying fear that shot through my body and began to - I don't even know how to explain this - it began to expand. It felt like it was filling my veins, spreading through my body, and I could feel it rushing through my body. I wanted to scream, but I just couldn't. It mounted and mounted and mounted, growing to a climax as a searing pain shot across my forehead. I closed my eyes, trying to hide them from the balloon. I wanted it to go away, I had this feeling that whatever it was that had hit me was coming from the balloon. I opened my eyes and it was gone, and so was the fear. The paralyzing, deep fear anyway. Obviously I was scared by what had happened, but at least I could move.

I got up and turned the light on and looked all over the house for the balloon. I never saw it again.

Even before that, I've had bizarre experiences in this house. I've often felt something shaking me or touching me in the night, and I've woken up and batted it away, only to feel nothing there. I'd always chalked that up to dreaming, but my brother has told me he's had the same experiences in that house. Then there was the time I saw a floating, disembodied head screaming in front of my closet. Like the fear in my body with the balloon, it mounted to a climax, and then I shut my eyes and opened them, and it was gone. That, too, may well have been a dream.

Flashes of light, weird noises, all part and parcel of living where I live. But the balloon was the scariest thing, and it's the only one that I know for an absolute fact happened.

posted 11-25-2000 09:49 PM            

Blondelza I got alot out of the end scene in " American Beauty" as well.

posted 11-26-2000 07:39 AM            

You might remember two years ago last summer when several of our embassies in Africa were bombed. In Nigeria, a Father and his son were working inside the embassy and killed when the bomb went off. I live in the same house they did before moving there. I've felt their presence (always positively) ever since I moved in this house.

When I asked the previous tenants if the appliances all worked, they said, yes, everything except the washer which occassionally got stuck and wouldn't fill properly. They said I had to watch it. I replaced the washer and dryer with my own since I'd never had that problem with them.

Soon after I moved in, my washer began doing the same thing. I had the water guy come and check and he said that it had to be the washer. If not that, he thought ghosts were the next most likely explanation!

Now, there are any number of explanations as to why two washing machines, one of which had never done this previously, behaved in the same fashion. It is, however, interesting to note that every time I politely ask the deceased man and his son to please let me do my laundry, that the washer works just fine. Coincidence? Possibly. Or maybe something else.

There is simply too much that can't see, touch, smell, hear, or taste, or even wrap our minds around. Just because we can't, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Do remember, though, that no evil can take you over without your implicit agreement. Sometimes, you just have to accept the fear that can come as unexpetantly as a misbehaving washing machine. Accept it and know that you're always in control, even though you don't feel it. Your soul is yours. No one or thing can take it away from you. You have to freely give it.

And do find out about your house. That might help immensely. I think that sometimes when people aren't prepared for death, they may get stuck and not be able to move on—without help, anyway. Some even seem able to manifest their pain, fear, and anger in odd ways, that the living can experience. Maybe if one of these events occurs again, you can try reassuring the trapped spirit that it's ok to move on. It can't hurt and might help. At least help you not feel so terrified.

posted 11-26-2000 10:22 AM            

What happened was I passed out at the top of two flights of concrete stairs, and people who were there said when I fell it sounded like a bomb echoing through the gym.

I had a hallucination when I was passed out where I was at the edge of a beach and this tiny religious guy was far, far in the distance and heading toward me. I had this understanding that when the man reached me at the shore he would hold my hand and take me back into the ocean to "heaven" or whatever else you want to call it. But he never got very close, because I came to in the ambulence.

Then in college I had a disturbing death experience when I was rafting on the Snake River on a tiny 4-man boat which capsized going over an eddy. We were all being sucked under the eddy and drowning and I again died. But the death hallucination (would you believe I again went to heaven?)was suddenly pierced by a vivid image of a leg. I knew that I would have to pull up on the leg to get to the surface and breath. All of my racing thoughts were scurrying through my head with perfect cohesion, but without words.

So I knew that leg was my rafting partner's, and I knew he would go down as I lifted myself up. An id-like instinct in me grabbed the leg and pulled up as I was desparate for breath. I got to the surface and grabbed a branch, and pulled to the side. Another partner had got out to the side. Basically we ended up aiming and thrusting a thick branch into the other partners' torsos so they would grab the log and we could pull them to the side. We all made it, pulcked out the raft that was bobbing on a stick in the water and made it to the end a few days later.

Think of the implications if one certain person in this episode hadn't made it. When I mentioned this to him the only thing he said was "You know I wasn't the last to get out." Basically, while underwater he had pushed down the fourth partner's head to reach the stick we were shoving at him. Yeah, we were all glad no one died.

Ever since, I have cherished EVERY aspect of civilized society because I have this notion that in one of these "war-zone" situations, who knows what selfish evil lurks within our souls.

posted 11-26-2000 10:52 AM            

When I was sixteen, my family and I had just moved to Louisiana. One night I woke up in the paralysis. I was fearful that somebody was in the room, so I closed my eyes and told myself "I'm just going to go back asleep". Impossible! My body felt like it was floating and ascending to another plateau.

So, I opened my eyes. I noticed a figure dressed fully in black walking to the side of my bed. Fear struck through me, knowing that my parents bedroom was so far away and I can't move or scream 'cause I'm in paralysis. So, I watched him.

He climbed up on my bed and sat upon my stomach and arms. I refused to look up at his face, 'cause I was experiencing the most intense fear I've ever felt. Feeling the pressure on my body, I decided to look up and see what my fate may be. I looked at the face of a man who was wearing a jokers mask, staring down at me with his arms crossed. I knew then that he wasn't there to harm me. I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked at him again. Then I blinked my eyes, and within the blink of an eye... he was gone. It wasn't like waking from a nightmare, he was just gone.

I talk to people all the time about my paralysis experiences. I was told that there is a Louisiana legend, myth, etc. about a man that sits on your chest while you sleep. He is called the "Kushma". I've been told that he is the devil. So, if that was the devil that I saw, I know now that I don't fear him, and I will never let him harm me.

Much like the others on this board, I was drugfree at the time, and I am not a tall-teller. I am simply a human describing an experience that seems to be beyond our understanding.

posted 11-26-2000 03:23 PM            

I had these events for several years, until the "prediction" came true. I never told anyone because I was embarrassed about the tickling part. I thought people would think I was a nut.

After I had my first son, we moved to a new home and his room was upstairs. He wouldn't sleep up in his room, and he wouldn't tell me why. Finally, one day I asked him again, and he told me his dresser was tickling him at night. I freaked.