by Paul Elder
Although I had no idea where these mental images originated, insights continued to fill my mind. The truth became clear. I knew about God. I had merely forgotten. God is the collective consciousness, the universal power of love and creation that gives life and meaning to everything in the universe. I found this simple revelation emotionally humbling.
How, I wondered, could I have veered so far off course? Surrounded by the beauty of creation, how could I have lost this truth? Floating in my body of energy, I also knew that this is who we really are. This pure, cosmic energy is our natural state, and the loving, powerful vibration within all of us is the vibration of God.
Returning my awareness to my floating body, I discovered that I didn't have to actually turn my head in order to see in any direction. My visual field was a full 360 degrees and was attained instantly with just a thought. As I marveled at this, the urge to test the boundaries of my new reality grew, and I began to wonder if it would be possible to float around to other parts of the house. I slowly rotated my body in midair until I faced the doorway. Setting my intention to coast out of the bedroom, and impelled by just that thought, I began moving effortlessly toward the door.
Approaching the doorway, I realized that I was too high to make it under the doorframe. But it was too late. My head and upper body were on a collision course with the wall above the doorway. Closing my eyes, I braced for the impact. And then an amazing thing happened: there was no impact. I floated through the wall like it wasn't there. The reality of this seemingly impossible act left me stunned. I had just gone through a solid wall without the slightest resistance. In disbelief, I spun around, surveying the wall as I descended to the floor in the hallway outside the bedroom, about ten feet from the door.
Coming to a gentle landing, I could feel my feet sinking into the rug. I felt the fibers of the carpet, the underlay, and finally the smoothness of the plywood below.
Motionless, I stared in wonder at the wall I had just floated through. It seemed inconceivable. If I hadn't seen and felt it, I wouldn't have believed it. But I couldn't deny the experience. It had really happened.
Standing in the hallway, I could see through the doorway into the bedroom. There, in bed, some thirty feet away, lay my physical body. I tried to rationalize how this could be possible. How could I be standing in the hallway, completely whole, thinking and feeling, while my body including my brain—the organ supposedly required for thinking—was in a different location? Pondering this dilemma, I was surprised by the sound of a soft, whispered voice.
“You are not your brain. You are not your body. You are continuous conscious energy.”
Startled, I spun around. No one was there. I had no idea where the voice had come from. It felt different than my own inner voice, yet natural and familiar. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it had to be only my own inner thoughts. “Just my imagination,” I told myself. “What else could it be?”
Putting the question out of my mind, I decided to continue the tour. I was standing in the upper hall balcony looking down a flight of stairs into the open living room below. Reaching out with my right hand, I gripped the rounded top of the railing post leading to the stairway. The hard, smooth wooden ball felt completely normal. But when I put some weight on it to adjust my stance, my hand suddenly pushed right through the post. The feeling was incredible! Astonished, I had to try it again and again. Each time, my hand swished through the “solid” column like it was made of water.
Intent on continuing my excursion, I finally pulled myself away from this mesmerizing diversion. Looking down the stairway, I paused, wondering whether I would float down the stairs or end up falling flat on my face. Bracing myself, I pushed off. A surge of energy swept through me, and ever so gently I lifted off the floor. I gawked around unsteadily as I slowly floated higher into the air. Traveling a couple of feet above the floor, I cautiously made my way down the stairway, heading for the landing below. I prepared to touch down, and then just as my toes brushed the carpet, I felt a jolt, and in an instant, I was back in my body.
The vibrations had disappeared and the paralyzing numbness in my legs was gone. Wide-awake, I sat up in bed. The clock on my nightstand showed 3:05 A.M. Less than three minutes had passed since I decided to leave my body. It didn't seem possible. So much had occurred, I thought it could have been a half hour.
Unable to contain my excitement, I shook my wife awake, blurting out every detail. I didn't care if she thought I was crazy. This was the most fantastic thing that had ever happened to me, and I had to tell someone. To my surprise, Candace believed every word. In fact she was excited about the possibilities. “That is so amazing,” she gushed. “I'm really jealous. Why couldn't it happen to me?” Candace had always been more receptive to this type of thing than I, and I was thankful for her open mind. Had our positions been reversed I doubted I would have believed the story.
Having had so little sleep, I was surprised that I was no longer tired. Pumped with energy, I jumped out of bed and got dressed. I put on a pot of coffee, and listlessly read through a couple of magazines, returning occasionally to my living room and bedroom to retrace the experience.
Although my rational mind wanted to dismiss the event as some sort of aberration or hallucination, I knew that would not be possible. This had been more real than anything I had ever experienced. My senses had been working at hyper-speed and sensitivity. I had been able to see and feel more clearly than I had ever imagined possible.
The memory of the snapping, jerking feeling I experienced upon reentering my body kept churning in my mind. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn't place it. Then it suddenly dawned on me. I had felt that jolt thousands of times. Often when I was falling asleep, especially if I had been really tired, a jolt would bring me back to consciousness. How many times had I watched my wife and children make that same jerking reaction as they were falling asleep? I wondered if it was our spirits returning to our bodies that caused the jolt. Could it be that we all leave our bodies every time we fall asleep? I had to find answers to these questions.
When morning arrived, my decision was made. I telephoned the party president to inform him that I would be withdrawing my name from the candidacy. This was not the path I should be following. There was new meaning and direction in my life, and it had nothing to do with politics.
The library was the first stop on my morning agenda. Candace and I were sitting in the parking lot waiting when the doors finally opened. We borrowed every book we could find on paranormal and spiritual subjects. Fortunately, they had a copy of Robert Monroe's book Journeys Out of the Body, which we snapped up. I wanted to learn everything possible about the experience. I needed to know why it happened, but more importantly, I needed to know if I could make it happen again.
Monroe's book was even more intriguing the second time around. This time, it didn't seem so far-fetched. My own experience had opened my mind to the possibilities and power of the human spirit. This was something I could learn to do.
Although I hadn't yet realized the impact of my out-of-body experience, my world was changed. I was no longer sure about who I was or who I should be, but I knew one thing: I was on a mission, and I couldn't wait to see where it would lead me.
2
Where Was God?
Though evidence in abundance shouts
Thoughts of creation are lined with doubt
Life's grand design in darkness robed
Hints of spirit left unprobed
I was born and raised on a farm in the west-central plains of Canada. My parents, along with everyone we knew in a forty-mile radius, were German Catholics. They worked hard all week and went to church on Sundays. That was the only day that we kids got a break from the never-ending cycle of farm chores.
Our mother, Anne, was a creature of habit. She liked the security of a routine, but mastering the rhythm method of birth control was apparently not her forte. She had eight baby girls in a row and then, when she
figured out what was causing it, promptly gave birth to three baby boys. I was the tenth of 11 children.
Growing up in such a large family wasn't easy. These were the '50s. The world was recovering from the Great Depression and war. It was a time when large families were common. For many, there wasn't a lot of money to go around, but with 13 people in our house we seemed just a bit poorer than everyone else.
In the years of hand-me-down shoes, clothes, and schoolbooks, we often took life on the chin, sometimes bearing the brunt of cruel, hurtful remarks by our schoolmates. Nevertheless, probably the one thing that seemed to keep us going was our humor. When you don't have much, it helps if you can find a way to laugh at everything.
I'll never forget a schoolyard incident that happened when I was ten or eleven. A small convent of Catholic nuns operated our rural school. Classes were over for the day and, as my little brother, Dale, and I were walking across the playground, one of the nuns made a derogatory comment about how we looked like ragamuffins. Although embarrassed, I'd be damned if I was going to let it show.
“That's because we're poor, Sister,” I sarcastically quipped. “Hell, it's a good thing we're boys or we'd have nothing to play with.”
I couldn't believe what had just come out of my mouth. The silence was deafening. My ears and face burned as blood rushed to my head. The words echoed in my mind.
For a moment the good sister just stood there. I didn't think she had grasped what I had said, but my little brother couldn't contain himself. His hand shot up over his mouth to squelch an eruption of laughter. But it was too late.
The old nun didn't budge an inch. She just stood there in the schoolyard glaring at me for what seemed an eternity. Nervously, I glanced at my brother. Frozen in place, his hand was glued to his mouth. Tears were now running down his cheeks. It was all too surreal and funny. I couldn't believe the stunned look on the nun's face or the pathetic, muffled whimpering coming out of my brother. It was just too much. Dropping to my knees, I rolled, howling with laughter.
As expected, the rest of the afternoon did not go well for me. Unfortunately, the uptight nun didn't see the humor in my little stand-up routine. That wee bit of insolence earned me nine whacks with a leather belt across my backside—one for each remaining day of lent, wouldn't you know. Why couldn't I have waited with my smart mouth until it was a lot closer to Easter weekend?
We grew up, I suspect, like many other kids during the fifties and sixties, without any closeness to our parents. Our father was not the kind of person who could show a lot of love, or even much kindness for that matter. He probably would have considered that to be some kind of weakness.
For the most part, we grew up as a bunch of tough little realists. If we couldn't see it, hear it, or feel it, we couldn't believe it. So, although religion played a big part in our lives, and we were forced to go to church every Sunday, I wasn't really convinced there was a God. The lyrics of that old Blood, Sweat, and Tears song, “I swear there ain't no heaven, but I pray there ain't no hell,” probably described my beliefs all too well.
My younger brother and I were forced by our parents to serve as altar boys until we were almost 16. That's when we finally rebelled, refusing to buy into the mind control of “hell fire and damnation.” Although we would never dare talk about these things with our parents, we began to fervently resist the pressure of going to church to be preached at.
In those early years, the Catholic Church, and I suppose just about every other Christian denomination, preached “fear of the Lord” as a main plank in their religious dogma. If you did this or that, a merciless and vengeful God could fry your butt in Hell for the rest of eternity. My brother and I always had trouble with this concept. We were not about to believe that God—if there actually was a God—could possibly be so mean.
We had great difficulty believing what the nuns and the priests of the day were trying to teach us. They professed that there were basically two kinds of people in the world. There were the Catholics who would be going to Heaven, and then there were all those other people who weren't! These other people would undoubtedly be spending eternity in Hell or Purgatory, or maybe even a place called Limbo.
As young, impressionable boys, this was more than a bit unsettling to us. We had two young Presbyterian cousins who happened to be from the only non-Catholic family in the community. They were our good friends, and it made us very sad to think they were going to have to spend eternity in Limbo just because their parents weren't Catholic. We couldn't understand or accept the apparent injustices of our religion. At the very least, we desperately hoped that these things weren't true.
During our later teenage years my brother and I would occasionally go to church to please our mother, but after leaving home we rarely attended. We had seen far too much hypocritical behavior by the holier-than-thou “pillars of our community” to believe that going to church made you a good person. It seemed to me that most, if not all, of these rules were man-made. They couldn't be God's rules because every now and then the church would actually change them.
For example, back in the early 1960s, it was a “big-time sin” to eat meat on Fridays. If you did and were unlucky enough to die before you made it to confession, yours would be a most horrible fate. God would surely send you to Hell for eternity. What was equally amazing, though, was that many years later, they changed the rules and it was no longer a sin to eat meat on Fridays. One of my favorite comedians, George Carlin, had similar thoughts about this: “I always wondered,” George would say, “what ever happened to all of those dudes doing time in Hell on a meat rap?”
Beyond one significant event, I think most of my childhood wasn't much different than that of a lot of other kids growing up in this era. This unusual incident took place on a warm Saturday in July of 1963, when I was 12 years old. It was an exciting day for my little brother and me. Our two cousins from the city had arrived for a weekend visit, and we had a lot of plans. My cousin Brian and I were best friends. We were the same age, we liked the same things, and we shared the same fantasies. Unfortunately we weren't able to spend a lot of time together, so whenever we had a chance to visit we tried to make the best of it. It was bound to be a fun weekend.
About a half mile from our farmhouse was a water reservoir the department of highways had dug beside a road. The purpose of these little ponds was twofold: they provided the contractors with the dirt they needed to build the road, and the remaining hole provided valuable storage for runoff water from the summer rains and melting spring snow.
Dale and I had been warned to stay away from the dugouts. We couldn't swim a stroke and had no one to teach us. Our cousins, however, had taken lots of swimming lessons in big swimming pools, and as a result were very good swimmers.
We hadn't planned on going near the overflowing dugout; we were just crossing a pasture looking for prairie dogs when one of the cousins noticed the pool of water. Tied to a stake at one end of the dugout was a small wooden raft our neighbor's kids had obviously abandoned. Well, it was just too tempting to pass up. Before long we were all aboard the raft, bobbing precariously, paddling around in the middle of the twelve-foot-deep pond.
We were having a great time until the older of the cousins discovered that my brother and I couldn't swim. Realizing we were afraid of water, he thought it would be good fun to violently rock the raft while the rest of us hung on for dear life.
On the wet, slippery planks, I lost my balance, and the next thing I knew I was toppling backwards into the water. Terrified, I didn't have the presence of mind to even try to swim. With numbing quickness, shock overcame me; my head slipped below the surface and, before I knew it, I was on my way to the bottom. In my panicked state, it wasn't long before the last bubbles of air had escaped me and my lungs filled with water.
I had always imagined that drowning would be a horrible way to die—the mental terror while one's lungs desperately screamed for air—but it wasn't like that at all. In fact, as soon as my lungs filled with wate
r, the struggle ended. There was no more suffocating or fighting for air. Instead, an absolute peace came over me.
With my eyes wide open, I continued a slow descent. The water grew darker and darker, and soon I was up to my ankles in mud. After pausing there for a few seconds, I'm not sure why, but ever so slowly I began to float upwards. Within a few moments I was nearing the surface. I could see and feel the warm sunlight radiating-into the water. My head briefly broke through, and then in a dreamlike state, without fear or panic, I began to sink again.
My senses numbing, I felt no particular discomfort, just the greatest urge to fall asleep. Soon I could feel my feet sinking again into the mud, and then everything seemed to grind to a halt. Time stood still as I hung suspended in the water, my surroundings fading. Too tired and sleepy to be concerned, I simply let go and drifted into the blackness.
The next thing I knew, I snapped back into consciousness, opening my eyes to an astonishing sight. I was being bathed in a shimmering kaleidoscope of soft, warm colors. Swirling and gyrating, they seemed to pass through my body into the core of my being. I knew I was still surrounded by water, but somehow I had gotten into a beautiful, comfortable bubble. It felt like I was inside a rainbow. Mysteriously, the colors seemed to be causing a wonderful vibrating sensation throughout my body, each shade carrying its own distinct frequency. Fanning my hands in front of me, I watched, in childish delight, the multicolored energy swirling through my fingers and hands, electrifying my senses.
I had never felt more alive and energized. In awe of the warmth and beauty of my surroundings, I sensed something important was happening—that I had somehow changed. It occurred to me that perhaps I had died. And for some unknown reason, I recalled the story of Tom Sawyer—the part when he was believed to have drowned in the Mississippi, but arrived home just in time to witness his own funeral.