International Association for Near Death Research - A great first stop resource for experiencers and those interested in NDEs. Most usefully it includes contacts for NDE support groups worldwide and a huge record of personal accounts. They also maintain another website for various spiritual experiences, where my account is categorized as a "Spiritually Transformative Event".
NDE Web - A warm and personal site by an experiencer, sharing his own thoughts on love, purpose and growth. Includes over 150 individual NDE accounts.
A Mystical Experience Registry - A unique site (as far as I know) posting a collection of mystical experiences, including those of a few famous personages of the past and today. There is also a registry where anyone can post their own experience for others to read in a simple format.

Books - non fiction

Over the years since my experience I have been fortunate to find validation and extension of my own experiences, ideas, and direction in a some beautiful texts that have come my way. I offer some of my own favorites here for those interested in exploring more of this way of thinking.

Of course, it's all about learning to trust (and act on) our own wisdom. In all your reading, each of us must decide what is 'right' according to our own unique experience and the quietness of the good heart's knowing.

First I wish to draw the reader's attention to two books that came my way in 2006. Both have served me better than any others in placing the experience I had in a broader human context. I only wish I had discovered them in 1992. Both books document the mystical experiences of a great variety of people from many different cultures and centuries, many largely unknown today. If you wish to read articulate, first hand and dogma-free accounts of the most profound mystical experience/s, you are unlikely to be disappointed in these two books..

- An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions by John Ferguson
- History of Mysticism - The Unchanging Testament, by S.Abhayananda.

Neither of these are in print any longer, but they are both still available in good condition via second-hand booksellers, including Amazon.

Books - fiction

The following book was written early last century. Being now in the public domain, I can present the full version online here. The Velveteen Rabbit remains a popular children's fable even today. It contains many beautiful messages. I only very recently rediscovered it, remembering it as my favorite book from childhood, hardly surprising given its message of the power of love and the majesty of its symbolism.

Books - other

My favorites below have been written in a fashion quite unconventional to the modern western mind. The 'method' is sometimes referred to as 'channeling', although it must be noted the quality and variety of material claiming to be 'channeled' does vary enormously. The final 'proof' of anything can only be in its usefulness to the growth of the individual. I can only vouch for all the following channeled materials having helped place my 'experience' (and life) into a more meaningful context. Part of the beauty of the best channeled messages (to me) is that the source of the wisdom is typically a mystery for each reader to decide. This gives a special power for the message to work in concert with the reader's own intuition. Anyone who can appreciate that might find some of their own magic reawakened in these selections.

Typically these 'spiritual guides' - if we can call them that - place emphasis on the material delivered and the potential of its usefulness to the reader, not on the source. As the source of The Pathwork said "Do not be concerned with the phenomenon of this communication as such. Furthermore, take into consideration that every human personality has a depth of which he or she may as yet be unaware. At this depth, everybody possesses the means to transcend the narrow confines of his or her own personality and receive access to other realms and to entities endowed with a wider and deeper knowing."

If any readers feel my ideas and experiences compliment any other writer, please .

Emmanuel's Book. (Also Emmanuel's Book II,III)

Ever since my experience I have never found a more beautiful source of spiritual wisdom than Emmanuel's Books. The first book is particularly striking to me in its comprehensive clarity, insight, and compassion for the human condition. The words speak directly to my humanity from the knowing light I 'knew'. Emmanuel presents 'himself' as a 'spiritual entity', a being of light who has completed a whole round of incarnations on earth. He has an extraordinary depth of compassion and appreciation for the duality of human condition. One example: 'He' has a distinctly human appreciation of irony and humor, something other spiritual entities may lack if they have not spent (valuable) time in the human realm.

Emmanuel's Books are presented in a question and answer format. There are few exercises as such, other than inspirations to question suffering, darkness, fear and guilt, and constant reminders of the eternal validity of love - of Self - of truth.

I have been deeply grateful for Emmanuel's wisdom in my life. Very highly recommended.

Included below are Emmanuel's thoughts on 'Enlightenment' - the best earthly words I have ever read 'describing the experience'.

'What is enlightenment?'

Everything and nothing.
Let me see if I can find another way to put this.
If I say to you: "enlightenment is all-knowing,"
then I limit enlightenment.
If I say "enlightenment is all-loving,"
I limit love.
There can be no beginning and no end
and the human vocabulary is rife with limitation.

So let us say that enlightenment
is being in the moment through eternity
without the intellect
but with the consciousness of all things.
It is absolute peace
without the awareness of non-peace.

It is absolute love
without the awareness of hate.

It is all things without end
having forgotten the illusion of ending.

It is bliss
without the memory of non-bliss.

It is simply 'is-ness'.
It is you
without your physicality
without your personality
without your clothes on
without your obstructions
without your fears,
without your limitations and boundaries
without even the consciousness of self
except as the boundless perceiver
of infinite Light.

And that doesn't even begin to describe it
but it is the best I can do at the moment.

There is a small Emmanuel website, which contains some further (unpublished) messages from Emmanuel, and tour schedules of the lady who channels Emmanuel.

Emmanuel's Books are available from various New Age bookstores worldwide. Amazon.com also has it, along with 30 pages of samples.

Testimony of Light

This exceptional book throws open a window to a number of beautiful dimensions of the "after-life". A lady who was committed to her spiritual life (love, inner peace, honesty with self and others) 'dies' and manages to contact her best friend on earth with the story of the many wondrous experiences after her 'death'. Her vivid account goes into great detail about her arrival in one of the beautiful astral realms. It begins with with her initial rest there, unfolding into her orientation to the freer and fuller life. Due to her well developed spiritual nature, her open heart and mind, and the help of old friends she finds there, she adjusts very quickly. She soon helps a great variety of other souls themselves recently "crossed over". Her words vividly portray the dimensions of wonder, insight, joy, peace, love, and learning she experiences. Later in the book she grows/learns/remembers sufficiently to begin traveling on to even higher dimensions of love and light, realms where earthly language begin to fail completely.

This book offers great clarity into several dimensions of ('after') life. Her story tells of becoming progressively more aware of the light and grace in everything. At her own perfect and beautiful pace she moves onwards, upwards (& inwards) through very beautiful, very real dimensions of eternal being.

This rare account of one 'after-life' is deeply moving in its authenticity. Her own experiences and insights compliment my own understanding of these beautiful dimensions. I highly recommend this book.

Testimony of Light. By Helen Greaves. 145 pages. First published 1969, since reprinted many times. Still available in some bookstores or through amazon.com (where the samples are only the 'dull' intro)

A Course In Miracles

From the text:

'The curriculum the Course proposes emphasizes application rather than theory, and experience rather than theology. It specifically states that "a universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary." Although Christian in statement, the Course deals with universal spiritual themes. It emphasizes that it is but one version of the universal curriculum; that there are many others, this one differing from them only in form. They all lead to God in the end.'

The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

The Course is quite profound, but some can find it a little heavy. Gifts from A Course In Miracles, however, may be then just right. It has much of the essence of the Course in a condensed, easier to digest form. I would recommend it for those who find the full text of the Course too much to take on.

A small piece on love from Gifts from A Course In Miracles :

Love will enter immediately
into any mind that truly wants it,
but it must want it truly.

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

When you want only love
you will see nothing else.

It is the nature of love to look upon only the truth,
for there it sees itself.

Love without trust is impossible.

Love would ask you
to lay down all defense
as merely foolish.

No course whose purpose is to teach
you to remember what you really are
could fail to emphasize that there can never be
a difference in what you really are and what love is.

"Gifts from A Course In Miracles" is a condensed version of "A Course In Miracles". The full course in Miracles consists of three books and 1200 pages of texts.

Gifts From A Course In Miracles. First published 1995. Available in many new age bookstores or through amazon.com

Since A Course in Miracles was deemed to be in the public domain recently by U.S. courts, I am happy to be able to mirror the full version online here. You are welcome to download the The Hugh Lynn Cayce Version here. (MS Word format). The Hugh Lynn Cayce Version is a largely unedited version of the original transcription, providing greater clarity than the widely available second printed edition, at least in my opinion.

The Pathwork

Firstly I must emphasize I myself have not read all the Pathwork lectures. So far I have only been drawn to read a few dozen of the two hundred and sixty available. What I have read has impressed me with its understanding of some deep and very subtle aspects of human nature.

Whilst deeply insightful, I find the Pathwork material doesn't always demonstrate complete compassion for the extraordinary challenges involved simply being human. (In fact I would question if this guide has been human himself/herself!) The material can also come across as a bit dry in my opinion.

If you are doing serious inner work, the Pathwork is certainly comprehensive in coverage of all the hidden human limitations, fears and self-deceptions masking our true identity - our divinity. It's worth a look for that reason alone, and no doubt much more can be found in it. I have never seen anything quite like it. The entirety is also freely and conveniently available on the internet.

The Pathwork uses a bit of Christian terminology, which may appeal more to some than others. The following description of the Pathwork is from their own website:

'The Pathwork' is concerned with self-responsibility, self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Hundreds of lectures cover a wide spectrum of the human experience from the individual personality to our relationship to others, to work, to love, to the inner connection with what we may know as 'God'. The lectures teach that vital life energy, feelings and insight are often buried under misconceptions about the nature of reality.

"Every human being senses an inner longing that goes deeper than the longings for emotional and creative fulfillment. This longing comes from sensing that another, more fulfilling state of consciousness and a larger capacity to experience life must exist."

The lectures offer specific tools for dissolving misconceptions, for making the unconscious conscious, and for activating the greater consciousness dwelling within every human soul.

All 258 lectures are available for free download at the Pathwork website.

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