A Glimpse of Heaven

by | Nov 22, 2019 | Dreams, Visions

It is altogether amazing how little most people reflect on numinous objects and attempt to come to terms with them, and how laborious such an undertaking is once we have embarked upon it. The numinosity of the object makes it difficult to handle intellectually, since our affectivity is always involved.

~ C.G. Jung Answer to Job Paragraph 735 Ch XVl

This experience occurred 12 years ago but remains as fresh in my mind as when I had it. I call it a dream because I had it in bed at night but it had a sharpness and clarity that is lacking in both regular dreams and waking life. I didn’t wake from it – it came back to me in a flash in the morning. Its numinous quality alone was enough to etch it into my memory but it was the questions it confronted me with that has kept the memory intact. These questions are still not fully resolved; it is one thing to accept the reality of such experiences, quite another to thoroughly explore all the implications and integrate them fully. 

I am approaching an energy field that I know is the source. It is not visible but I somehow sense it. My ‘body’ is a vortex of energy and is vibrating at a great rate. This is what has enabled me to get close to the source and as I near it, a form takes shape in front of me. It is as though my vibration has caused it to emerge. The form is the same as mine but has a masculine energy. We start vibrating in harmony and it is a wonderful feeling. 

Without making contact, we slowly turn so that we are side by side. We are now looking out over a vast space. It is an inky darkness but illuminated as if by an invisible full moon and all is utterly still and silent. Vignettes of movie-like scenes of people going about daily life are scattered about in the space and with this being I am deciding which scene I will enter into. He is my adviser and is totally trustworthy. I know it is the Christ and we are communicating telepathically. I am like an excited child, asking “Can I really choose, really?” His response is the equivalent of “Yes, of course!” 

I am radiantly happy with a feeling of complete freedom and understanding throughout the whole experience.

There were probably 12-15 scenes in the vision but I could only recall two clearly on waking. They appeared to be way off in the distance yet I saw them as clearly as if they were only a few metres away. One was of an American Indian campsite with a teepee and a campfire and a native woman in traditional clothing pottering about doing what appeared to be domestic chores. The other was the inside of a house with a stocky, grandmotherly looking woman in a long dress and apron tied around her waist attending to pots at a wood stove. My impression from the clothing was that it was around the early twentieth century but there were no specific details to indicate the location. I felt no connection with the first scene whatsoever but the second one was similar to the kind of house I grew up in. I only saw the back of the woman and didn’t recognize anything about her.

The intensity of an experience like this defies regular dream analysis but I attempted to make sense of it by doing a dialogue with the energetic being in which I asked if I had made a decision. The response was that I had but that no decision is final or irrevocable and that all life paths are fully negotiable and determined on a choice by choice basis. There was no indication as to what the decision was. The dialogue ended with this:

“It is impossible to make a wrong choice for I am with you always.”

And who are you?

“I am your fully evolved and whole Self.”

This threw me somewhat – Christ is my fully evolved and whole Self? What did that even mean? At that stage Christ was synonymous in my mind with Jesus and yet this figure was nothing like the initial vision I had in which the figure that appeared to me resembled my inner image of Jesus. Nonetheless it felt like there was a connection with that earlier vision along with a man who appeared often in various forms in my dreams. I had come to think of this man as my Jesus figure because he reminded me of the wise guide and friend that I had regarded Jesus to be before my rational mind rejected religion wholesale in my teens. 

That this figure was really myself was rather difficult to swallow, along with the implication that I had actually chosen my life. For as long as I could remember I had said that if I’d had any choice in the matter I would not have been born and as I’ve shared elsewhere in this blog, suicide as an escape from the sufferings of life had never been far from my mind. I had often felt a sense of shame and guilt about this ambivalence towards life and did my best to overcome it but never quite managed to. I suspect now that this experience was a response to a yearning to find real meaning for my life and though it didn’t change anything instantly, it marked a turning point in that quest. 

An experience a few weeks later brought both more clarity and more confusion.

I was doing an online course through a meditation teacher, which was a kind of spiritually based self-development course and was listening to an audio based on a Neuro-linguistic Programming exercise. The first part entailed determining my most important values and identifying and dissolving any fears that conflicted with them. I don’t recall a lot of the details of the exercise but the emotional impact of what ensued was deeply affecting and together with the previous experience had a significant impact on my attitude towards life.

My most important value boiled down to one thing at that time – knowing who I am and what I’m here for. The exercise involved identifying any impediments in the way and what I came up with is that ‘the search’ was giving me a reason to live, so therefore the fear was that if I was to realise who I am and what I’m here for, I would no longer have a reason to live. Kind of a no-win position to be in and completely irrational but as I was fast learning (still learning), the ego’s fear of its own demise is legendary and the rational mind really is pretty clueless.

The exercise involved assuming a ‘root cause event’ for the obstruction and intuitively deciding on whether the event occurred before (i.e. in utero), during, or after birth. The idea was to then picture my entire life as a timeline and view it from above, gradually increasing the distance until I was way above it and then send down a ‘double’ of myself into the situation to resolve it, while staying high up and far removed from it. I didn’t get to do this because the exercise took on a life of its own. 

I found myself as a kind of disembodied pinpoint of consciousness, floating peacefully in empty space when suddenly my attention was drawn to a scene below and I saw a woman who I felt a strong connection with in the kitchen of a house that looked very familiar. She was pregnant and I knew that no soul had yet entered her womb. I understood everything about her and her life circumstances and knew that she felt bad about herself and had hopes that the baby she was carrying would help her mental state. I felt an almost desperate yearning to be that child and had no sense of anyone else lining up for the job. It was as though I was all alone in the universe except for this very compelling connection with a woman who I knew as intimately as myself. Along with the strong desire was a feeling that I wasn’t quite ready but that was completely overridden by the sense of urgency I had.

When the vision ended I remained in a state of reverie and various scenes from my life played through my mind, including a story Mum had been fond of telling: according to her, when I was around 9 months old I was hospitalized for malnutrition because I refused to feed. When she visited me in hospital, I was covered from head to toe in food from attempts to force feed me and she was so angry she grabbed me out of the cot and went straight around to the doctor to show him. Mum was rather melodramatic and I obviously have no memory of the event but I had suspected all my life that had she left me there I would have quietly exited planet earth. I had food issues, hospital phobia and separation anxiety my whole life until fairly recently.

As it happened, I’d had hypnotherapy a few years before this vision in an attempt (not successful, unfortunately) to resolve the severe migraines I was prone to. In one session, I found myself as a baby, in a scene where my mother was feeding me. I was vomiting and she was upset about it and I decided to stop eating to save her from being distressed. In light of the vision, it made sense that if my mission was to make Mum happy and I was causing her distress by regurgitating my food, then not eating was the solution to the problem. While I am not convinced that a 9mth old baby has the capacity to make such decisions, I am convinced that matters concerning the soul are decided in a plane of reality that is beyond the physical.

Though there is no way of verifying the authenticity of either the pre-birth vision or the hypnotic regression scene, subjectively they felt as real as any physical experience I knew to be true. They also made absolute sense in terms of the deep attachment I had to my mother. I had long felt that my love for her went way beyond anything that could be explained psychologically. Her death when I was thirty four left a hole that felt like it could never be filled. When I began having visions and dreams of her 12 years later it helped fill the void but even now it is the thought of being reunited with her that is my true solace. I am open to the idea of this being a symbolic event within my lifetime, i.e. a reunion with my inner ‘divine mother.’

These events confronted me in a graphic way with questions that had been posed to me 8 years earlier in a dream which I wrote about here – “The real questions are: where have you come from, what are you doing here and where are you going?” This was not long after my husband’s death and I was just beginning to grapple with the idea of an afterlife. The idea that life might also be pre-existent was completely foreign, so the only question that really interested me was “What are you doing here?” My response was to try and recreate my old life with a new partner. It hadn’t worked and these two experiences eventually became a joint catalyst for taking all three questions seriously. That meant making a real commitment to the spiritual path that I had been halfheartedly pursuing. It wasn’t a conscious decision at the time but in responding to the inner prompts in my own haphazard way I was led ever more deeply until one day I realized that the spiritual life, in spite of my years of rejecting it, had always been of central importance in my life. It is the answer to ‘What are you doing here?’

At the time I had these experiences it was hard for me to imagine that I would have actually chosen the circumstances I was born into. Did I really choose an alcoholic abandoning father and the shame, poverty and hardship that went with it? Did I know that my mother would be in and out of mental hospitals, resulting in the family being split up and billeted out to mostly unwilling hosts? Most vexing of all, did I know that I would fall prey to a paedophile uncle resulting in emotional problems that would take most of my life to sort out? I don’t have a satisfactory answer to these questions because it is obvious to me that individual choice is limited by the complexities with which lives intersect both psychically and physically. What I do know is that as I have worked through the tsunami of unconscious contents that was unleashed 23 years ago, life is making sense in a way that I never imagined possible when I was in denial of my soul life.

One of the real gifts of taking dreamwork seriously is that every life event, whether it happens in some form on the inner planes or in outer life, can be interpreted symbolically. A universally effective way of interpreting dreams is to regard the dream characters as being aspects of one’s self and that is the way I regarded both the energetic figure and my mother initially in order to make sense of them. In Jungian terms, in general, a figure of the same sex is regarded as a shadow figure and the opposite sex is regarded as the animus (or anima in the case of a male dreamer). In that view, the vision of my mother could have been a metaphor for me loving myself and giving birth to myself and the encounter with Christ could have been a meeting with my animus in its positive aspect. I have looked at these events every which way over the years and the way I understand them has changed as I have grown and changed and may continue to do so but regardless of any symbolic interpretation, I can’t help but regard them as having an objective reality. I do believe that I chose to be with my mother and I did have a real encounter with the being I know as Christ and these experiences helped to anchor me at a time when I was really struggling with ‘the point of it all.’ At the time, as numinous as it was and as inspiring as it was, I had a lot of resistance that prevented me from being able to fully accept and therefore integrate the meeting with the energetic being I perceived as Christ. The biggest blocks were ambivalence about the reality of this figure and distrust of the religion he represented. It has taken all this time to work through these issues but all the while the dreams have been guiding me and I do feel that the figure I met is working with me through them and has been with me all along.

Dream, Vision or… What? Part Two

by | Jan 1, 2014 | Mystories

46037_1056302Some time after the meditation I wrote about in Dream, Vision or… What? Part One I was home on my own when I decided to meditate without the use of the tape. I had memorised the routine by now and was able to get into a relaxed state reasonably easily. I counted down and visualised myself walking through the expanded zero and imagined being in a parklike setting, sitting on a bench seat. Then the visualisation took on a life of its own, as if it were a dream, except that I was observing as well as participating. A figure appeared who I recognised as Jesus. As with the vision of my mother, I heard words spoken telepathically and he said ‘I am the way, the truth and the light. Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened.’ With that an image of a façade appeared. It had no boundaries, but a doorway with a door ajar and opening inwards. I saw myself go through the doorway and found myself in a place of light. There was nothing at all, just a very bright but also diffuse, light, kind of like a light fog. I watched myself dance around joyfully, like a child, then sit in a cross legged meditation position and after some time had passed, get up and walk back out through the doorway. As I did so, I saw that the light was attached to me at the back, from my neck to my ankles and it appeared that I was pulling it with me. Suddenly a very strong vibration ripped through my torso from left to right. This was something I physically felt, it wasn’t part of the vision and the impression I had was of a kind of lightning bolt of energy piercing my body from somewhere outside of me.

At this point the scene changed just as happens in dreams and I saw myself at a bus stop, a bus came along and I got on and sat down. A man sat alongside me, who as it turned out would appear many, many times in future dreams and asked where I was going. I said ‘nowhere in particular, I’m just along for the ride.’

With that the vision ended. I was still in a meditative state and aware of what I needed to do but the deep state of relaxation had been broken. I gradually counted up to bring myself out as I had learned to do, then sat somewhat stunned. There was no feeling of peace and tranquility as I had experienced with the vision of Mum. I felt very disturbed and in fact my initial reaction was acute embarrassment. My first thought, as silly as it sounds, was ‘I hope nobody saw that.’  I had the feeling of having been totally engrossed in watching a movie in a theatre and feeling disoriented when the lights come on.

I was completely bewildered, Jesus was not part of my everyday experience. I had not attended Church in 30 years, apart from the occasional wedding. I accepted the existence of the historical Jesus but I considered him an ordinary human being, not the son of a deity, certainly not the product of an immaculate conception nor living out an eternal life somewhere in the ether.

I suspect the reason I felt so disturbed was because I knew at some deep level that it had the potential to challenge the belief system that had enabled me to cope with my life experiences, especially the many losses due to deaths. Now I regard that belief system as more of a liability than an asset, a coping mechanism that was inadequate to deal with the imminent death of my husband and all the life changes that would entail. Eventually I began a spiritual journey, which continues to this day and came to terms with my antagonistic attitude towards the religion I had embraced in good faith as a child and ultimately rejected, as so many of us do and for very good reasons.

Life was much too chaotic following the vision for me to do anything about it even if I had wanted to, but I did have a book on Near Death Experiences come my way and was astonished to read about the descriptions of light that people saw. It seemed similar to my experience although I didn’t have the other phenomena that went with an NDE.

Following Roger’s death, things seemed to accelerate and I began to have other strange experiences, including precognitive dreams and a great deal of what I can only describe as electrical activity in my body. It was becoming increasingly obvious that not only my world view but my nervous system was undergoing a considerable shake up. It all seemed to stem from the two meditation visions but my left brained approach was having a hard time making sense of it all. The visions on their own didn’t pose much of a conundrum, I could explain them to my satisfaction as dream like phenomena but the very physical nature of the vibration and its after effects was not so easy to explain.

I would eventually learn, through experience and investigation, that such phenomena are very commonplace with meditation and have been known about and actively cultivated, it seems, forever. As I write this on New Year’s Day 2014 it is seventeen years later and there is now an impressive amount of scientific research data into the effects of meditation and other methods of altering states of consciousness but as to the mechanism behind the effects, it seems like the more we know the deeper the plot thickens. How can sitting quietly and relaxing the mind trigger such an event? There was a time when I would have had the attitude that it is only a matter of time before science has it all figured out but that is no longer either a very satisfactory, or satisfying attitude for me.

As for the message that was given me, it took me a long time to understand that it was actually a response to an unconscious longing for an abiding sense of inner peace. That this experience came after the initial one where I had a palpable taste of that peace I feel was no accident. Life had seemed like a continual struggle for as long as I could remember. It just seemed that that was the way things were. Apparently I was being shown that there is another way but the package it was delivered in was not altogether welcome. Though I respected the ethical teachings of Jesus, I was very anti the religion he represented.

Eventually I would come across the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible and which was only discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi collection.  In that Gospel the ‘seek’ quotation is very different. Jesus is reported as saying ‘He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds and when he finds he will be troubled and if he is troubled, he will be amazed and will reign over the all. ‘Troubled’ I could relate to and ‘amazed’ I could aspire to.

Something that puzzled me for a long time was the scene involving the bus ride and though I haven’t yet got to the stage where I feel I can just enjoy the ride, I wonder if it was perhaps a kind of precognitive dream that is still unfolding. I can live with that.

Dream, Vision or… What? Part One

by | Dec 31, 2013 | Mystories

When my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took up meditation in an attempt to find peace with the situation and I joined him as moral support and in the hope that it would also help me cope better than I had been doing. He had brought home a tape from the Cancer Care Centre and it was basically a guided visualisation of going down in a lift, seeing the numbers of each floor in the mind’s eye and on reaching zero seeing the zero expand, imagine walking through it and visualising being in a tranquil scene. The tape would then go silent for a period of time and the voice would count up again.

At first I struggled mightily just to stay awake but after about six weeks the persistence paid off and I was able to relax and found the sessions quite enjoyable. One day I was in a relaxed state when I had a vision of my mother. Her face appeared to me as though it was above and outside of me and she looked very sad. She communicated telepathically to me ‘you don’t need to be here, Gloria. You’re needed back there.’ With that something relaxed even more deeply in me and I felt an incredible sense of peace such that when the tape finished I didn’t want to move. Roger had been on his stool in front of the lounge where I was sitting and after a while he stirred and glanced over at me. I smiled at him and he came and sat alongside me and we held hands with neither of us saying a word for a long time.

At the time I wasn’t coping very well and though I knew I wouldn’t do anything while Roger was alive, I wasn’t so sure about the future. I had always had a tenuous hold on life, even at the best of times and simply couldn’t imagine what I was going to do without him. I had no belief in anyone surviving death in any way, shape or form at the time and had no knowledge of altered states of consciousness and their effects. I presumed the vision was a kind of waking dream but the sense of peace it evoked had a profound effect on me in many ways. The suicidal thoughts abated and I eventually sought out a counsellor.

Roger’s impending death had brought up memories of my mother’s death and I realised I had never grieved for her when she died 12 years before because it had coincided with a very difficult and demanding period of our life. Eventually I was able to visit her grave for the first time and come to terms with much that had not been dealt with.

As far as what the vision meant, it didn’t change my belief that death meant anything more than peaceful oblivion and had no concept of it being anything other than an artefact of my imagination. The only explanation I needed was that it was like a waking dream and was happy to leave it at that – until the next meditation experience Dream, Vision or… What? Part Two really shook up my simplistic viewpoint.