In the early 2000’s I had a massive heart attack. I can relate to this post and how this event changed me profoundly. Not at first but has time went on from my eating habits to my mental and spiritual analyzing of what I had gone through. Along with other events in my life.
by Barbara H Whitfield RT, February 16th, 2021
Love, God and Consciousness
For six years, I (Barbara) had the privilege of studying the after effects of the near-death experience (NDE) with the people who have had them (NDErs) including myself.
“By their fruits you shall know them” became the obvious statement about our after effects. We near-death experiencer’s are idealistic and looking for ways to help – anyone and everyone including some animals and people we don’t know. From the NDE, we have experienced and discovered a new innocence that melds into being naive. We make plenty of mistakes in the beginning if we don’t have healthy boundaries ─ and that became one of our areas of expertise, speaking, lecturing, writing and helping our sisters and brothers learn about how to extend ourselves without getting run over or at the least, taken advantage of.
It is as though a person is “born again,” but not from the conventional religious perspective. It comes from our direct experiences as we awaken.
Support Groups for Awakening
My (Barbara’s) colleague and supervisor at the University of Connecticut Medical School, Bruce Greyson, MD and I formed a support group for NDErs at the University where we were doing our research. We met and shared our stories, questions and other ideas about our NDEs in the Psych classroom every month with 20 to 30 people who either had an NDE or wanted to learn more about them. Some who came were dying and open to hearing what NDEs were all about. We even had documentary film crews come from other countries to interview and film us.
When we get to the “bottom” of what this is all about. It’s always the same –
It’s about Love. It’s about God and that God is Love.
What does that mean?
The Music of the 60’s and 70s Foreshadowed What We are Experiencing Now
Our book Timeless Troubadours: The Moody Blues Music and Message (Whitfield C and B, Muse House Press, 2013 Atlanta, GA) was about the music and message of the 60’s and 70s from The Moody Blues because we could actually appreciate their ideas about love – and living on this planet. They captured the raising of consciousness, the beginning of The Great Awakening.
The musical group, Foreigner summed it up beautifully with their song “I want to know what love is.” Who were they talking to? Who were they pleading with?
We now can look back decades later and realize that much of those questions were addressed in our support group mentioned above. I think back on all those wonderful people trying to answer the deepest questions a human being can ask, reflect on and finally feel like we’ve gotten somewhere because we did it together.
Nearly dying is not the only trigger to the Great Awakening.
This is the Great Awakening: It’s Happening Right Now
We have listed many other triggers including the one that we think is the most prevalent now with all the controversy we are going though publicly and politically. This is the trigger some observers and scholars have called “The Trauma/Transcendence interface.”
Every time we turn on the TV or the Internet we can identify with traumas we are witnessing from violence to lying to trying to cancel us. We are trying to see through all the deception and distractions. The planned and paid for violence going on in our country is traumatizing us to the point where many are being diagnosed with Acute Trauma Disorder and if it doesn’t get released – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This in turn can help “trigger” us to transcend this painful reality by prayer, meditation and the need to look at our own inner life – to release and heal from past old traumas whose memories are coming up again because we feel like “the other side” is victimizing us. This releasing we are going through in turn opens our hearts to ourselves, eventually others and the Universe. (See our Dragon Energy” Myth and Reality. (Whitfield C and B, Muse House Press. Atlanta GA 2019)
Books by Barbara H Whitfield RT and Charles L Whitfield MD
Unconditional Love
First, we cried. Many of us cried. Because we didn’t want to be here – in our then pre-NDE reality. We wanted to be back there in our NDE with God’s powerful unconditionally loving and intelligent Energy which we called “home.” And in our NDE support group meetings we all understood.
We wanted our friends and family and close others to understand our experiences. But most of them didn’t ─ so we felt alone and often lonely. And most importantly, (to us) we touched something, or merged with “Something” that enveloped us with… the only way to describe It – “God’s Unconditional Love.” During our NDE, It held and comforted us. It even merged with us so we were One. And some of us were privileged enough to see through God’s eyes and feel through God’s heart.
We expressed confusion over the fact that this phenomenal Intelligent Energy wasn’t judging us. We hadn’t done anything “wrong.” We had made some mistakes ─ but we weren’t “bad” or sinful. We were spiritual beings exploring our being human. And at our core, we were made out of the same “stuff” as this Being who we felt was unconditionally loving us.
And at the end of our NDE support group meetings, if it was still daylight, we could tell who we were as we all left the building together because we all usually wearing sunglasses. Some of that was because we had cried ─ but most of it was because we were NDErs who had come back into this reality with all of our senses heightened, therefore, the sunglasses.
And we also feel deeply.
We believe and have written extensively that what we are missing and grieving for is not the place we were in, in our NDEs and that Being that some of us call God. We are grieving for how we felt and who we were in that relationship we had with God during our NDEs.
And that relationship can be summed up in one word, LOVE.
So how can we interpret to you the reader, what we believe God and Love are?
Book Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience
What Love Isn’t
It’s easier to start with what Love is not. Love is not conveyed to ourselves, others and God (and this relationship goes back and forth, not just one way) with what could be called “Old Baggage.” This is what we love about helping people in group and individual psychotherapy. We are helping them “dump” their old baggage that came from trauma from the past. Once that’s cleared away, or at least identified, we can give and receive love the way it was meant to be.
What Love Is
When God held me (Barbara) in my life review, and I saw through God’s eyes and could feel through God’s heart, it was crystal clear. There was NOTHING clouding my realizations of what had happened. It showed me how human everyone else was from their own human mistakes and behind the “baggage” there was a struggle to learn what love is all about. And when I cringed over something, this God Energy held me tighter and with even more love. This made me feel totally accepted, it helped me accept everyone else with their hurts and traumas and It helped me to begin to love me the way I deserve to be loved – and that has to start with me.
And then I was back in this reality trying to incorporate all that here.
When I was finally recovered from my back surgery, the only place I could find where I could begin to touch what I had encountered was in the hospital where I had been. I volunteered one day a week, then two. Sometimes I was asked to come a third if they had no volunteers show up. I was in the emergency room and I could comfort the people who were brought in on gurneys, especially the old ones who I knew were dying. We had a connection instantly that I didn’t understand. This became my touch stone for my heart. I went on to become a respiratory therapist so I could work every day with people who were dying. And finally I became a psych researcher so I could find out more about what makes us tick after an NDE or Spiritually Transformative Experience (STE.) I could get answers to all those long held questions about going to another reality and then coming back here.
When I left the University, and the wonderful people in our support group, they gave me a beautiful book filled with letters, telling me how much I meant to these dear people. One man, Steve Price, over 6 feet tall, heavy and covered with tattoos (who I still dearly love and haven’t seen in 22 years but truly miss) contained the words to a song I have adored ever since. Written in the 60s, and perhaps purposely sung by Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World.
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day,
dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces, of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, sayin’,
“How do you do?”
They’re really sayin’, “I love you”
I hear babies cryin’, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more, than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself – What a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself– What a wonderful world
Oh yeah !
What made our support group so special?
We all loved each other. We all understood each other. And most importantly, we had no baggage between each other. When the baggage is gone, we can love the way God loves because nothing is in the way. We can see through God’s crystal clear eyes and feel through God’s crystal clear heart.
So, how do we see God in this reality?
God, here, right now is the relationships we have that are “baggage free.” When we say “God is Love!” that is It! Love is the action and essence of God and we can feel God, even see God in ourselves and our relationships with others when we heal enough to be clear.
We find that clarity sometimes in the music of the 60s. We know deep in our hearts that when we take away the clutter of the dark side of the recent times, we find a search that went deep into the soul of our generation. For some of us the psychedelic drugs we may have used, revealed something that NDEs and STEs reveal – underneath the clutter and baggage of our lifetime – we are Love and that’s the stuff that God/Spirit/Universe is made of.
We hope and pray that as part of this “Great Awakening” we are experiencing together during this “dark winter” is a shared experience that is helping us together to understand more about this Intelligent Super Energy we call “God.”
We hope and pray that this relationship with this Energy is expanding our consciousness by our perceptions expanding. As we watch the Cabal slowly begin to expose itself and fall, we can realize that this all needed to happen so our humanity can evolve into all we were meant to be.
Community Gathers to Address “Jew Hate”
Love as the Creative Principle
In The Law of One—it’s humble messenger RA, calls anything that moves away from the perfect Undistorted Unity of God/The Creator, as a “distortion,” which we could also call an extension, alteration or concealment. Thus by It’s choice God knows ItSelf better experientially by living as and through each one of us – one life at a time. So we are each a Child/Son/Daughter of God. As humans we have inborn into our body/mind/Spirit psycho-spiritual “DNA” all that we summarize from The Law of One describe in our book Dragon Energy—Myth and Reality. (page 176)
Of the three “Primary distortions,” the ancient astronauts called RA says that we as humans have as our first “distortion” as Free Will, the 2nd love/logos, and the 3rd is Light.
Here love is the creative principle of the Universe and thrives throughout it and within each of us humans. RA also calls love by the equivalent term Logos, which they say is the focus of God the Creator. This “kinetic and dynamic focus” also may be one and the same with consciousness, for the logos is the consciousness or mind of the manifest Creator. (See The RA Contact vols I and II and A Concept Guide by Bean and Roy, which are all free on PDF from LLResearch.org and study it more at Thelawofonesociety.com