Members of my church have experienced many miraculous healings and paranormal encounters.  3 of their paranormal experiences seem particularly relevant to the capacity of loved ones in Heaven to help us.  In my previous posting of Leah’s rescue, someone asked me how she knew that the snow did not obliterate her car’s tracks.  I have raised this question with Leah and my summary of her experience incorporates her reply. 
 
(1) In a snowstorm a couple of hours from home, Leah’s car slipped on an ice patch and slid into a ditch.  She and her passenger were trapped in an unpopulated wilderness area in northeastern Washington state.  Suddenly a van with a tow hook-up appeared out of nowhere and the driver cheerfully pulled Leah’s car out of the ditch.   The driver then abruptly drove off.  His van left no tracks.  This shocked Leah and her friend because the tracks of her own car were clearly visible on the road!  One of my angel books recounts almost the same experience during a Chicago blizzard. 

(2) Mary Ellen was awakened from a deep sleep by the caress of a hand on her cheek.  The touch shocked her into immediate waking alertness.  Before her deceased sister Sally, shimmering brightly in the darkness.  The two sisters reminisced and reaffirmed their love for one another.  Sally assured Mary Ellen that she was thoroughly enjoying her new life in Heaven.  Then she vanished. 

(3) During a recent visit with Glenda, she shared with me the pattern of her ADC contacts from her late husband Glen.  During a period of depression, Glenda would be cooking dinner or performing household chores when suddenly her attention was mysteriously directed to her kitchen clock.  The time would be the same number in triplicate (e. g. 2:22; 4:44; 5:55).  Glenda would then become suddenly aware of Glen’s reassuring presence and experience a deep peace.  She has experienced this pattern several times.   I recall someone else experiencing an ADC through the same pattern.

Don

Don-

This is off your topic, but I figured this way you would be sure to see it.

Anyway, sounds like Howard Storm is going to be on tv Sunday, 9pm on FNC.  The tease just said a person who died and experienced hell, so I presume it's HS.

R

This thread seems Christian in nature; shouldn't it be posted in the "Religions & their beliefs" forum and not in the Afterlife Knowledge forum?

To post this topic in this forum implies that our Afterlife is  predominately Christian in it's nature.

Their are many different beliefs about the nature of Reality.

The Afterlife Knowledge forum seems more a place of questions and exploration than any specific religious belief.

Love to us all, Tim

EXPERIENCING PARADISE AS A TIMELESS REALM:

John the seer of the Book of Revelation is transported to Heaven and experiences the roaring of a large waterfall.  But then what he hears instead is orchestral music:  “I heard a sound from heaven like the roaring of A GREAT WATERFALL…It was like the sound of many harpists playing together (14:2-3).”  The limited number of musical instruments in the first century forces John to identify the instruments as harps.  Independent verification of this experience is provided by Betty Eadie’s NDE in which she listens to a waterfall in Paradise and then hears the roaring sound turn into beautiful music.

Both John and Betty Eadie experience the waters of Paradise as fully alive:
[Betty:] “A beautiful river ran through the garden…The river was fed by a large cascading waterfall of…water that dazzled with clarity and life.  EACH DROP FROM THE WATERFALL HAD ITS OWN INTELLIGENCE AND PURPOSE.”

[John:] “He [Christ] will lead them to springs of LIVING WATER (7:17).”  “The angel showed me a pure river with THE WATER OF LIFE flowing from the throne of God…down the center of the main street (22:1-2).”

During their NDEs, both Betty Eadie and Don Piper experience both individual melodies from “the outdoors” in Paradise and the overall blended harmonies of the totality:

[Eadie:] “A melody of majestic beauty carried from THE WATERFALL and filled the garden, eventually merging with other melodies…The music came from the water itself, FROM ITS INTELLIGENCE, and each drop produced its own tone and melody which mingled and interacted with every other sound and strain around it.  The water was praising God for its life and joy.”

[Piper:] “The music was the most beautiful and pleasant sound I’ve ever heard…I didn’t just hear the music.  It seemed as if I were part of the music—and it played in and through my body…I couldn’t calculate the number of songs—perhaps thousands—offered up simultaneously, and yet, there was no chaos, because I had the capacity to hear each one and discern the lyrics and melody.  I would have expected the most memorable experience to be something I had seen or the physical embrace of a loved one.  Yet above everything else, I cherish those sounds (29-30, 32).”

Don Piper’s description and reaction provide perhaps the most impressive NDE snapshot of Paradise I’ve ever read.  Being in a timeless realm, souls can simultaneously tune in to countless individual melodies and the overall orchestral harmony.

Don

Don,

As I considered each of your questions, I began to think about healthy/unhealthy relationships and how these may give us clues to what attributes might draw us into a particular heavenly community and into relationships with other beings. The questions of a hierarchy of values, and also people with differences attracting in order to bring about balance seem relevant to the “state” ES indicates as facilitating movement from one locale/relationship to another.

To me the spiritual sense of the word balance means to “bring into harmony”. I do not subscribe to new age rhetoric that states one must have equalized amounts of active/passive negative/positive energies/aspects of self-expression in order to be “balanced” in relationships. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Jesus’ actions and emotional responses indicated he was fully human, and not that he was teaching people to balance these energies in order to progress toward spiritual growth.

I think ES talks about two states of love, one that draws beings toward God, and the other draws beings away from God, and presumably each other, which he describes as selfishness. The word selfishness is another one of my vocabulary pet peeves because too often the meaning obscures what is needed for true healing. For example the only one we can heal is our self and to do this we must gain self-understanding by focusing on the self. To the degree that we are able to love and understand our self, it is to that same degree that we love and understand others. I believe this includes our love for God so perhaps that is relevant to answering the question of why there are so many societies/communities within the heavens.

The more I think about it the more I wonder if the communities and relationships we have in heaven are much different from those we see here in the physical. Take boundaries for example. We can clearly and easily understand physical boundaries such as my house and the neighbor’s house or the “outer”. What is not always easily seen are the boundaries that exist in the psyche “inner” that govern our desires and actions “our love” as ES would say? The boundaries of heavenly communities could be directly related to the degrees of boundaries we set up between God, others and our self.

In our relationships everything is relative and connected. Nothing is isolated or done in isolation. Not even our thoughts are isolated because we are holographically connected to everything including all events. Everything we think, feel and do is in relationship to each other and when we become clearer in our own self-awareness we can begin to apply what we’ve learned in our relationships. Perhaps this is at least one of the means by which we progress spiritually not only here on earth, but also in the heavenly realms. Or in other words we go to the heavenly community in which we feel most comfortable according to the patterns developed and the boundaries that exist within the psyche.

I’m out of time and rambling anyway so I’ll stop here. You ask very thought provoking questions. Thanks also for posting the NDEs. They have a lot of meaning to me personally.

Kathy

It was the overly christian slant of this specific forum that was the reason I left the last time. I'm just wondering if y'all have any desire to welcome people that don't want to talk about specific religious belief. Sure, you can say "ignore the threads' if you don't want to respond.

But why have THIS thread here... a lecture about christianity?

Shouldn't this be a forum for people with heartfelt questions about our afterlife?

Not for christian lectures and polls?

NEW COLORS AND COLOR HARMONIES:
ANOTHER ASPECT OF VISITS TO HEAVEN NOT EASILY DISMISSED AS SHEER IMAGINATION:

John the seer agrees with NDEers that Paradise lacks a sun; rather, the light of an intelligent presence replaces the sun and makes Nature shine all the more brilliantly.  In John's words, 
"The city had no need of a sun...For the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb [Jesus] is its light (Revelation 21:23)." 

Note how these 2 NDEs independently corroborate each other's insights:
[Betty Eadie's NDE:] Light in the spirit world doesn't reflect off anything.  It comes from within [the garden] and appears to be a living essence.  A MILLION, A BILLION COLORS ARE POSSIBLE.  It is obvious that each part of the plant...is made up of its own intelligence."

[Don Piper's NDE:] "I walked on the grass for a time.  It was crisp and cool and brilliantly green, and it felt alive under my feet.  But what filled me with awe in the garden more than anything else were the intense colors.  We have nothing like them...I saw colors I would never have believed existed."

In Revelation 21:19-20 John describes the colors of the "foundation" of heaven in terms of 12 rare gems.  Read a distinguished artist's observations  at his studio with an open Bible in front of him, while he was arranging squares of colored glass that mimicked these gems:

"I made a singular discovery.  These are the precious stones in the foundation of the New Jerusalem, and when placed in the order prescribed in the vision, they form a perfect  harmony of color.  Were a convention of artists called to produce a perfect color scheme, they could not improve upon it."

Don

CONTROVERIAL SPECULATIONS SPARKED BY A HEAVEN AS A REALM BEYOND THE TIME AND SPACE WITH WHICH WE ARE FAMILIAR:

The notion of a "soul disk" is not only false; it is incoherent and therefore meaningless.  Both ES and classical channeling experience the phenomena of a group soul, but recognize it as several distinct souls bound together by the principle of like attracts like, not as one over-soul attracting reincarnational lives or combining soul fragments. In my view the "soul disk" notion is a New Age preconception imposed on an misunderstood astral experience.  

A few years ago, Ginny posted her resolve to explore life in the soul disk.  I waited in vain for her reports.  Literally conceived, the very notion of a soul disk sound ghastly; it sounds like multiple selves spliced together into a suffocating union that prevents movement, dialogue, and personal growth.  In other words, the notion seems incoherent.  The attempt to evade this incoherence bu postulating soul fragments having friendly conversations with each other begs the question of whether one oversoul needs to be postulated.    

So what elusive truth leads to this misconception?  A failure to take seriously the fact that the heavens are realms with no space!  No space separates distinct souls.  When the astral explorer lacks a targeted focus, a virtual kaleidascope of faces can be superimposed on each other until unknown principles bring the explorer to a specific contact.  Discarnate spirits routinely allow guests to experience a mind-meld that permits them to experience a slice of reality from that spirit's perspective. Conversely, discarnate spirits can mind-meld with us without our knowledge.  This meld creates the illusion that we are experiencing past lives when in fact we are experiencing the memories of the spirit merging with ours unrecognized.  

ES once thought such experiences proved reincarnation.  But once ES ascended to higher planes the basis of this misperception was demonstrated to him.  Those spirits descended with ES to lower BST planes "stuck" in a reincarnational belief system, but predictably, the denizens of those planes were not open to having their error exposed through a demonstration.      

Also incoherent is the notion of heavens in timeless realms.  We cannot conceive of realms in which events are not experienced in sequence.  If there is a sequence, then by definition there is a form of time, though perhaps a form that progresses at a different rate than normal earth consciousness.  So we must speak of a different type of time rather than timelessness.  

I can detect 3 possible hints about how this new type of time might affect experience.  (1) NDErs often feel like they are been "away" for hours, when in fact they have only been "gone" for a few minutes.  (2) ES finds that astral time seems to flow slower if one tries to visit a reluctant target down a particular route and faster if the target is open and eager for the contact traveling the same route.   (3) NDErs can experience not only the music and harmonies emanating from the object on which they are focusing, but also the music from nearby plants.  NDErs can hear both the total integrated harmony and its component melodies experienced in isolation.  Clearly, some sort of time makes this sequential musical experience possible, but time of a totally different type than earth time.

Don