Chamisa, an Agnostic before her NDE, admitted her life was changed upon her rebirth into life:
I was in an accident, hemorrhaging badly, and vomiting blood. Taken to surgery, I suddenly became aware of slipping out of my body from my feet through the top of my head as if I were the inside of a Concord grape, and pancaked above the surgical site, as my spirit got out of the way of my body. I could feel this process happen. I watched everything that was going on in a completely detached mode. The tools looked like a carpenter’s shop.
I heard the music, the buzz of saws, and I could read the minds and futures of the people there including my own. I saw the reason for my life and what I needed to work out. Physically speaking, I saw through walls. My husband was home chopping wood, red roses waiting in my patient room from my sister in Alaska and my kids were in school and I knew what they were doing. I could instantly read the minds of those in the surgery room and what they would do next. I also knew one of the physicians had cancer and didn’t know it. He would die the following year (and did). The other was having a Romeo and Juliet affair that would end up badly (and did). I was in the middle of some kind of hologram. I noticed all my feelings, emotions, personality and knowledge were still with me, and that I carried a large amount of anger toward certain people, especially my parents and the religion they used against me. I’d been an agnostic for years.
Then once having this experience during surgery in an out of my body state, I suddenly observed a Being of Light instantly entering this holographic space and when He came, I was washed with a flood of love and forgiveness for everyone and everything. I even loved the Earth and all its beauty and the animals on the Earth and “felt” the spiritual process we are all in, and how we are literally tied together as brothers and sisters needing to be unified in love and care.
This experience totally changed my life and the direction of my life.10
#3: Spiritual Upgrades
Dead Saints occasionally experience an upgrade in their spiritual abilities after their NDE. One astounding experience occurred at the Fellowship’s Joy in Worship service on August 10, 2014.11 Dr. Mary Hensley was the guest speaker, visiting from Ireland for the first time. I briefly talked with her for a few minutes in the Fellowship foyer, and then she walked into the Sanctuary, took her place at the podium, and began her sermon.
Mary described her near-death experience. It occurred in 1991 when she was only 21. She was hit broadside at 75 mph, her car torn in half. She broke her neck, her spine, broke her ribs, and detached her retina. Then she died-for nearly thirty minutes. During that time, she visited Heaven and came back with some astonishing abilities. Mary disclosed she often saw “dead people” as a youth growing up, but her abilities were given a spiritual “upgrade” after her near-death experience.
During her talk, she described our meeting in the foyer:
Something happened to me when I talked to one of your pastors, David Solomon. When I entered the doorway, I noticed in a little alcove, some pictures. I remarked to my friend with me and pointed at one of the pictures, ‘Oh, I met that man yesterday.’ [Pointing to a picture of Paul Solomon]
‘No, you didn’t.’
I said, ‘Oh, yes I did!’
‘Uh, he is not with us anymore.’
I nodded, ‘Oh, yes he is!’
Mary recalled, ‘This happened to me yesterday when I spoke at Edgar Cayce’s ARE. That man walked up to me, hugged me, and said, ‘Thank you,’ and today thanked me again for Sunday Service. The man I met yesterday was the same man who is here today--Paul Solomon.’
Mary went on, ‘Before the service, David and I were talking about his cancer and death like passing over the toast I ate this morning with butter jam.’
She said, ‘His candor about death is uncommon. Nobody wants to talk about it. We have forgotten as human beings that death is so much a part of the natural process of life.’
It was then she realized, ‘Ahhhh, this is why I had that experience with Paul Solomon and why I am here.’
Mary went on, ‘But what was really interesting is when I met David, I realized why I do what I do. I have dedicated my life to this. This is why I agreed to come back after my near-death experience.’
Others have asked me, ‘Aren’t you taking all this a bit too seriously?’
‘I died. I agreed to come back and do this. Yes, I take it seriously!’
Those who have died and returned often have the experience of having the veil between Heaven and Earth permanently torn, which gives them spiritual, psychic, and prophetic abilities unavailable to the average person. In Mary’s case, often there appears to be no difference between seeing the living and the dead, giving her the ability to communicate with those in spirit.
While some of us “average” humans demonstrate the ability to read thoughts, experience after death communications, the Dead Saints who return from the Afterlife, describe increased spiritual abilities of healing, prescient visions such as the birth of children, including their name and genders, received during their NDE.
Healing Gifts
Some Dead Saints come back with profound healing gifts. On June 24, 2014, I met Nigel Mumford,12 an Episcopalian priest living in Virginia Beach. I was there for a laying on of hands healing session. Before we began, he asked me to talk about my cancer. That’s when I told him about the Chronicles and my near-death research. His eyes popped open and his mouth dropped. He then told me about two near-death experiences, which changed his life: One from a traumatic injury on the battlefield in 1975 and the other in 2009 from a life-threatening infection. During Nigel’s last NDE, he was very close to taking his last breath. The last rites were read. Then, without warning, he began breathing, and he miraculously recovered. It was after his recovery that he discovered his healing abilities had been “upgraded.”
We couldn’t stop talking. It was as if we were long-lost friends who just had met in this life, but now out of my necessity for healing, here we were. Nigel gave me a healing cloth to apply to my medications, basing it on the ACTS of Peter, where his followers used healing cloths touched by Saint Peter for healing. It has been suggested Peter used the blood on the Sudarium of Christ (burial head cloth) from the crucifixion, as a turban wrapped around his head when he performed healings.
I believe the miracle of my long-term survival is due to his healing prayers, a gift he credits to Christ, who resurrected him from death.
Rev. Nigel Mumford and Rev. David Solomon holding a ceramic plate representing the mosaic tiled floor from the church of Loaves and Fishes from Tabgha, Israel. Photo taken January 5, 2016
at Galilee Church in Virginia Beach, VA.
~Update: Delynn and I visited Galilee Church to see Nigel for another laying on of hands healing session on December 17, 2015. Nigel and his wife Nancy had seen us a few weeks earlier on December 5 at our annual Solomon Christmas party where he discovered my brain tumor had dramatically increased in size. My prognosis was grim. We entered his quaint office in the church, filled with photos from his healing ministry travels around the world, served as a heavenly reminder of this man’s great faith in the power of God to heal anything. Before we began the healing session, he opened a small box containing a silver wine cup, wine and bread sacraments for serving Holy Eucharist.
He brought out a colorful ceramic plate of Loaves and Fishes I recognized immediately depicting the tiled mosaic floor of The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in Tabgha, near the Sea of Galilee in Israel—the same identical plate I had brought back from my tour there in 1993. By chance, today also happened to be Nigel’s tenth anniversary since the Episcopalian Church ordained him. Strange coincidences aside, from there, we proceeded with communion and he laid his hands on me, commanding the brain tumor to wither and die, just as Christ commanded the fig tree to wither when it provided the Lord with no fruit. Before we left, he suggested I begin a practice daily of p
lacing a Bible over my head in the manner used by St. Barnabas—a healing method depicted in a 1566 painting by Paolo Veronese. ~Chronicle 938
Seeing the Future
Other Saints have the ability to see the future. We briefly touched upon these prophetic gifts in chapter 6, where premonitions come through dreams. In this section, the gift of prophecy comes via a near-death experience.
There are several instances which Dead Saint visions of the future are later fulfilled. Nearly all are personal prophecies about children yet to be born or family members who will die at some time in the future. One such experience was aired on the CNN special, Anderson Cooper 360. Mary Neil, a Wyoming surgeon, drowned in a kayak accident in 1999 on a remote river in southern Chile. Trapped underwater for nearly 30 minutes, she had a remarkable NDE where she describes meeting Jesus. Sitting on a rock, they had a “chat” about returning to Earth to help her husband. During the conversation, Jesus reveals her eldest son will die young. The prophecy was sadly fulfilled ten years later when Mary’s son died unexpectedly in a hit and run roadside accident.
While rare, some Dead Saints receive visions of the future on a global scale. Dannion Brinkley in his 1994 New York Times Best Seller, Saved by the Light,13 describes receiving 114 visions of the future during his NDE, which to date, more than 95 appear to have been fulfilled.
My Research has uncovered twenty-five Dead Saint prophecies of the future on a planetary-scale. Repeatedly, the Saints describe something BIG coming soon. They hint decisions made by each of us during the near future are crucial to either a “planet-wide” destruction of our cities and populations, or a gentler transition toward a more “peaceful” planet, heralding a new era, a New Heaven and New Earth. Can we escape the birth of the New Jerusalem and new age unscathed? Will millions perish in a destructive major event? The future they describe, along with ancient prophecies found in the Bible and ancient myths, are reserved for the telling in Vol. III of The Dead Saints Chronicles, the Armageddon Stones.
#4: The Meta-Human
~Those who have had a mystical experience have dropped the scales of darkness that prevent true sight. In that moment, the Saint cries out to God, “I don’t know who you are, but I want to get to know you in this moment!” Is the mystical experience triggered by a dark night of the soul? Do we have to get THAT emotional to see the LIGHT? ~Chronicle 332
Transformation of the soul by an encounter with a Being of Light sometimes takes a dramatic leap, such as a transcendent Saul to Paul type conversion. This ‘mystical-death experience’ often eclipses the average spiritual upgrade reported by many Dead Saints, causing the greatest of spiritual transformations. Paul Solomon coined the term Meta-Human to describe this type of transformation of the physical mind and heart into the Mind and Heart of Christ.
The Old Testament describes several Meta-Humans who encounter a Light that triggered their transformation. Moses, the Lawgiver of Israel describes his mountain top encounter with a great Light and subsequent metamorphosis in the Sinai desert as if it were a near-death like experience (Exodus 3:2):
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
Hebrew scribes use words such as “light and flames” to symbolically represent God to describe Moses’ startling encounter at the summit of Mt. Horeb (a sacred mountain metaphor). Dead Saints have described this Light as a burning Light, or a great Fire they understood to be God:
Well, GOD was there. Or more accurately, a great Fire (Burning Bush) or Light that I was to understand ‘represented’ or ‘stood for’ God. (But, in a way, it WAS REALLY God—-this can’t be explained, and I sensed it as a paradox, something I just had to accept. It really wasn’t an issue, as there was no ‘intellectualizing’, just raw, naked experience of the Presence of God.14
Descriptions of Moses’ transformation include “sacredness” described in Exodus 3:2-5, “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” In Exodus 34:30—when Moses came down from the mountain there was a halo of Light around his face:
And when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone.
Following his transformation of heart and mind, Moses reached a higher level of consciousness enabling his renowned supernatural Meta-Human abilities. Forever dramatized by Cecil B. DeMille’s, The Ten Commandments, Moses became a leader of the Jewish people that changed history.
Biblical Patriarchs, Noah and Enoch, “walked with God” exemplifying this quality of Mind. Jacob dreamed of a ladder set up on the Earth, with angels ascending and descending from Heaven and with the Lord standing above it. (Genesis 28:12-13)
The Apostle Paul in Romans 12:2 also describes the Meta-Human transformation:
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is good, and acceptable, and the perfect will of God.
When the Apostle Paul exhorted us to renew our minds by learning to think with the Higher Mind, the Mind of Christ, rather than our animal brains, he was teaching us about changing our thoughts—how we think and what we say to ourselves—our self-talk. If we learn to plant new seed thoughts of love and forgiveness, rather than anger, doubt and hate, we can begin to transform our minds.
Dead Saints who have encountered the Being of Light, or Jesus Christ, sometimes exhibit qualities and wisdom that make world-changing differences to religion and philosophy in modern times. Both have one common element in their biographies: a mystical-death experience without physical death or physical injury. What makes each of these individuals unique is their initial encounter with the Light, which not only created a superior enhancement of the mind, but also continued to transform their thinking and consciousness, confidence and supernatural abilities, until their eventual physical death.
Paul Solomon (1939-1994)
The son of a Southern Baptist minister, Paul Solomon (born William Bilo Dove), grew up into a family where the ministry was the assumed career. Growing up, he watched his parents seek guidance daily and noted they based decisions on the silent replies they received. God was accessible; the Holy Spirit was an active participant in their everyday lives.
In his childhood, Paul exhibited uncommon abilities that set him apart from the rest of the kids in school. He saw colors around people. He called them “good lights” and “bad lights,” depending on how he perceived the individual. He knew what people were thinking and learned early on that most people think one thing and say the opposite. He also knew about events beforehand: He could predict the future, which frustrated and undermined his attempt to be “like everyone else.” He could read books just by placing them over his solar plexus.
When he was 12, Paul had a born-again experience during an emotional church prayer meeting at his house. As he recalls:
The prayer meeting was going on in our living room and these prayer meetings were something the likes of which you’ve never encountered. These were all Southern Baptist seminary students, all of them were fiery preacher types who were very serious about what they were doing. They would gather together in our living room and as they would pray, they would get louder and they would get more emotional. They began crying and shouting, laughing and crying at the same time. And the atmosphere became so electric that even in my room, in the dark, without any lights on, I could see, just as clear as day, which terrified me because I was feeling out of sorts with this Presence they were praying to.
So this one night it got so intense, I couldn’t stand it. I was crying and I was saying to God, ‘I don’t want to be alienated from YOU. I want to have a right relationship. I want to be the right kind of person. I don’t know what I want, but something’s got to happen.’ And while I was doing that crying out, it was as if I went to sleep. I know now I didn’t
fall asleep, but there was a bridge in consciousness where suddenly my bedroom wasn’t there. I was out in an open field walking along a road. The field looked as if it had just rained. Everything was fresh and there was this enormous Light that came on the horizon. Then a BEING bigger than the world itself was on that horizon and reaching out to me…and suddenly something inside of me clicked and I ran toward that Being saying, ‘You’re mine!
I recognized God belonged to me from that moment.
‘YOU’RE MY GOD! I shouted screaming at the top of my lungs.’
Suddenly I woke up. I wasn’t in the field anymore. I was in my bedroom and I realized I had been screaming at the top of my lungs and I wondered how I was going to explain this to everybody in the house who I thought would rush into the bedroom.
Except that didn’t happen. My brother was asleep in the next bed and he didn’t even hear it, so it didn’t affect anybody but me. I sort of sat there going through the experience for a little while until I fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up with an awareness that there was a different relationship between me and my Source and the Universe, and there has never been a time from that moment until this one that I have felt unacceptable or separated from my Source, from God.
At 14, Paul was ordained. He began his pastoral tasks by ministering to the incarcerated and their families as the youngest Baptist Minister in the Arkansas Prison system. 21 years later in 1972, Paul Solomon had another near-death experience triggered by a hypnosis experiment. His only recollection of the hypnosis session upon awaking was a dream, containing many classic Death Elements:
I am approaching the entrance to a tunnel. It is similar to the mouth of a cornucopia because it seems to spiral inward and upward. I can see two figures at the opening. They seem to be waiting for me. One is Merle who was my girlfriend in high school until she died in our senior year. The other is my young friend, Jaida, who remained my secret companion for years following his death when we were seven. They each take me by the hand and lead me through the tunnel. We come out the other side onto a grassy hill. As we begin to climb, I see that we are approaching a temple at the top of the hill…The two figures are waiting to take me through the tunnel. As I come out the other side, I find myself in a meadow of wild flowers where a soft breeze blows, and I can hear the sound of a brook. Ahead of me is a mountain. As I climb, I pass through seven-terraced gardens of glorious color. At the top, I enter a temple. The air is rich with music, though I see no one. I see rows and rows of books with names on the bindings. I am in an enormous library.15
The Dead Saints Chronicles: A Zen Journey Through the Christian Afterlife Page 24