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	LIGHT WITH VARIATIONS Near-Death Experience Reveals Three Different Kinds of Subjective Light by P. M. H. Atwater
Index of Issue 17

As a researcher of near-death states, I can assure you that any type of near-death experience can be life changing.

But as an experiencer, I can positively affirm that being bathed in The Light on the other side of death is more than life changing. That light is the very essence, the heart and soul, the all-consuming consummation of ecstatic ecstasy. It is a million suns of compressed love dissolving everything unto itself, annihilating thought and cell, vaporizing humanness and history into the one great brilliance of all that is and all that ever was and all that ever will be.

You know it's God.

No one has to tell you.

You know.

You can no longer believe in God, for belief implies doubt. There is no more doubt. None. You now know God. And you know that you know. And you're never the same again.

And you know who you are. . . a child of God, a cell in The Greater Body, an extension of The One Force, an expression from The One Mind. No more can you forget your identity, or deny or ignore or pretend it away.

There is One, and you are of The One.

One.

The Light does this to you.

It cradles your soul in the heart of its pulsebeat and fills you with loveshine. And you melt away as the "you" you think you are, reforming as the "you" you really are, and you are reborn because at last you "remember."

Although not everyone speaks of God when they return from death's door as I have here, the majority do. And almost to a person they begin to make references to oneness, allness, isness, beingness, the directive presence behind and within and beyond all things.

Down through the ages this kind of knowledge has been termed enlightenment-literally a waking up to light, an illumination of light, a reunification with The Light. And there are groups, isms and schisms, that decree how one can reach such a state of enlightened knowingness. The rules are many, the pathways numerous, yet the goal is always the same. . . reunion with the source of your being, God.

I John 1:5 in the Christian Bible says: "This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

The July 20, 1998 issue of Newsweek Magazine-and specifically the article Science Finds God by Sharon Begley, continues this line of thought and then makes a surprising statement (found on page 51 of Newsweek): "Take the difficult Christian concept of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. It turns out that this duality has a parallel in quantum physics. In the early years of this century, physicists discovered that entities thought of as particles, like electrons, can also act as waves. And light, considered a wave, can in some experiments act like a barrage of particles. The orthodox interpretation of this strange light is, simultaneously, wave and particle. Electrons are simultaneously waves and particles. Which aspect of light one sees, which face an electron turns to a human observer, varies with the circumstances."

Light, then, as science has discovered, is both a wave and a particle. What form or type of light is seen alters relative to the situation.

I have found that subjective light (present in meditation, otherworld journeys, near-death experiences, and visions), behaves in a fashion similar to that of physical light. While cross-checking my original work with child experiencers of near-death states for the book Children of the New Millennium, I also re-examined the presence of light internal to us.

Maybe subjective experiences are not "light" experiences after all.

I've see this before with adult experiencers, but it is more pronounced with kids, and that is. . . experiencers can have dark episodes as well as bright ones. They can sometimes be bathed in "dark light" as opposed to brilliant light. And the kids who had the dark experiences spoke of "The Darkness That Knows" with the same love and affection as they talked about Home, their real Home, Homey-Home, the place where God is, where they were before they had a body and where they will return once their body falls away. Dark to these youngsters is safety; it is love.

Many of the young in my research project gave details of being cradled in a womb-like darkness so purple-black that it shimmered, so silent that it knew all things, so peaceful and wonderful and bliss-filled and perfect that we adults would have named it "heaven" -yet it was devoid of light.

And, the most compelling, evidential cases of genius that I found, those without genetic markers which could explain the phenomenon, came from child experiencers between birth and the age of fifteen months who had near-death states that involved The Darkness That Knows. Overall, of the 277 cases in my study (age range: birth to fifteen years; two-thirds of them under the age of seven), the children most apt to display high IQs afterward were the ones who either snuggled into the depths of darkness during their episode, or who were enveloped by a "dark light," rather than any degree of brightness.

Of the four kinds of near-death states I have identified (Initial, Unpleasant and/or Hell-like, Pleasant and/or Heaven-like, and Transcendent explained in Beyond The Light), seventy- six percent of the child experiencers in my study had the Initial-type of episode. Briefly, the Initial near-death experience covers only about one to three elements-things like: the loving nothingness, the living dark, a friendly voice, a short visitation of some kind, or perhaps a quick out-of-body experience. Twenty percent of the 3,000 plus adults I have interviewed also had this kind of scenario. Those who experienced "the living dark," be they child or adult, described it as "safe haven," a comfortable place that was peaceful, loving; a state of goodness and expectancy. The only experiencers, regardless of age, who reacted negatively to any darkness they faced were those who went on to describe the fearful or hellish scenarios of unpleasant, distressing near-death episodes. Thus, the majority of the ones I have investigated respond to "darkness" and "dark light" in a positive manner.

When I reconsidered all of the work I have done since 1978 as concerns near-death studies, I came to this conclusion: there are clearly three very different types of subjective light near-death experiencers described regardless of how old they were when their episode occurred.

The life of Walter Russell, a famous artist, genius, and mystic, was radically altered by numerous transcendental states, the first a near-death episode at seven. This prepared him in advance for the financial disaster his family would soon suffer. By 1881, when only ten, Russell was pulled from school and sent to work. Within a few years he was entirely self-supporting and self-educated, earning his own way through five years of art school. He experienced near-death a second time when he succumbed to "black diphtheria" at the age of fourteen, and claimed to have discovered the secret of healing as a result. He described what happened to him as having entered into "at-one-ment" with God. These two experiences while still a youngster set the stage for dramatic periods of illumination that would occur every seven years throughout the rest of his life.

Russell excelled in whatever he turned a hand to, and won lasting friendships and lucrative art commissions. He had a studio in Carnegie Hall in New York City, became a commissioned sculptor for President and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a long-time friend of Mark Twain, and painted and sculpted Thomas Edison. His motto was "Mediocrity is self-inflicted. Genius is self-bestowed."

When forty-nine, he suddenly was enveloped within the fullness of what he called "Cosmic Consciousness." This state lasted for thirty-nine days and nights without abating. Afterward, Russell recorded that: "My personal reaction to this great happening left me wholly Mind, with but slight awareness of my electric body. During practically all of the time, I felt that my body was not a part of me but attached to my Consciousness by electric threads of light. When I had to use my body in such acts as writing in words the essence of God's Message, it was extremely difficult to bring my body back under control." (His family seriously considered committing him to a psychiatric institution because of this, as they feared he had had a mental breakdown; his wife divorced him.)

Once he regained use of his faculties, however, Russell penned The Divine Iliad, the story of his illumination and the source for his book The Secret of Light. He then spent the next six years producing The Universal One, a text containing the drawings and revelations given to him during his lengthy experience-about the universe and how it worked, and covering such subjects as chemistry, physics, and electromagnetics. A correspondence with Albert Einstein advanced his own theory that this is a "thought-wave" universe created for the transmission of thought.

Russell had experienced the substance of the universe as mind and consciousness as mind aware of itself. His illumination revealed light as primary intelligence, all-knowing and all-powerful, and what is termed "light" as but a mere reflection of what is primary. He saw dark light as the manifestation of electricity's negative charge, functioning in the creative role of "mother-light;" and bright light as the presence of the positive charge that to him was directive in the sense of a "father-light." He came to know that all things proceed from The Primary Light's reflection of Itself in dark and bright waves of motion (manifestation's duo-nature).

What Walter Russell described so many years ago corresponds with present-day offerings from near-death experiencers about their own encounters on The Other Side of Death's Curtain, especially in regards to the type of light that either engulfed them or that they witnessed-a light that to them was totally and physically real and varied by degree of "charge."

Of intrigue are these observations I was able to make about the effect of the three very different types of subjective light: Primary Light fostered exceptionally deep mystical knowings in people afterward and seemed to engender more radical changes in their sense of reality and life's purpose than with others. Dark Light gently reassured those it touched and left them with a sense of being nurtured and supported while at the same time linked to larger evolutionary processes. Those who reported Bright Light, though, displayed a broad range of visibly heightened abilities and an unusual sensitivity to sound, sunshine, pharmaceuticals, and anything electrically based.

My research findings indicate that we can no longer assume that dark experiences and the presence of darkness are always a sign of evil or unpleasantness, and that the imagery found in transformational states is actually secondary in importance to the intensity of the episode.

P.M.H. Atwater has been researching near-death states since 1978, and is the author of six mainstream and five self-published books. For details of her work, access her website at www.cinemind.com/ atwater or ask for a free brochure (enclose stamped, self-addressed envelope). Write: You Can Change Your Life, P. O. Box 7691, Charlottesville, VA 22906- 7691.