9

TWO MAGICAL WORDS

“LOOK, DO YOU see that?” said Ramana. He pointed ahead, where Savitri could make out a wisp of smoke above the trees.

“A cooking fire?” she guessed.

“Follow it and find out. I’ll stay here until you return.” Ramana made himself comfortable on a stump.

So Savitri headed toward the smoke alone. Soon she noticed that trees had been burned down, and saw wrecked oxcarts and other signs of destruction. Eventually she found herself in a deserted village. Soldiers had invaded from a nearby kingdom and had laid waste to the countryside. In this village all the houses were reduced to smoldering ashes except for one, which was untouched.

Savitri walked up to the door where an old woman sat. “Everything all around is destroyed,” Savitri said, bowing to her. “How did your house come to be spared?”

The old woman replied, “All the men of our village were away fighting. When the soldiers came with their torches to rob me and set fire to my house, I told them, ‘Come, come, for no one else is brave enough to enter. Everyone inside has scarlet fever. Help me tend to my sick family.’ At that the soldiers were so frightened they refused to come a step closer and ran away.”

Savitri reached into her sari and found a small coin, which she gave to the old woman. She retraced her steps until she found the place where Ramana was waiting.

“Why did you send me there?” she asked.

“The old woman turned away an army with two words: scarlet fever,” he said. “The wise know that Death can also be turned away with two words: I am.”

“I don’t understand.” She was even more confused when she looked at the sky and saw that the wisp of smoke had disappeared.

“That village was just a symbol,” said Ramana.

“For trouble and sorrow?”

“No, for impermanence. Heed this, Savitri. There is no permanence in this life. Possessions come and go, as do other people. Somehow we cope with so much loss. How? By clinging to the notion that we are permanent, that our world is forever.

“But that is the wrong way. Death is greedy and wants to destroy everything as wantonly as an invading army. Just hold out your arms to him and say, I am. Death will retreat because there is nothing for him to destroy. I am has no possessions, no expectations, nothing to cling to. Yet it is everything you are and everything you will ever need, in this world or the one to come.”

Ramana spoke with calm authority, and this helped Savitri.

“The old woman lied when she said scarlet fever. You must tell the truth when you say I am. I think that you are nearly ready,” Ramana said gently.

“How can I make it the truth?” asked Savitri.

“It’s not difficult. When you are happy, go inside and feel the one who is the experiencer of happiness. When you are sad, go inside and feel the experiencer of sadness. They are the same. There is a still, small point that watches all, witnesses all. Be with that stillness whenever you can. Notice it instead of sliding past it. Familiarity is your greatest ally. I am is your being. There is nothing foreign about simply being.

“At first the still, small point will not be much of an experience, yet it can grow without limit. When you die and finally have nothing to hold on to, I am will fill the whole universe. The wise have repeated this truth over and over, in every age. But you mustn’t buy a truth secondhand. Find the I am inside yourself, and it will expand to fill you. When that happens, you are safe. Your being will be the same as your soul.”

ETERNITY

When all images have disappeared at the subtle level, the dying person arrives at eternity. Eternity is the source of the soul. The rishis say that at last illusions have ended and reality begins. The fact that we can’t see eternity while we’re alive, as it extends in all directions around us, is a limitation the rishis strove to overcome.

The more boundless your vision, the more real you are.

As inspiring as this sounds, it also makes us uneasy, for we are used to living inside boundaries. “Years ago I became interested in spirituality,” one woman told me, “but I hated all this talk about the One. I couldn’t relate to it. I knew that the way I was raised, believing in a grandfatherly God sitting in heaven, was very narrow. But at least I could understand it. I can’t understand the One.” I find this a very natural reaction. At the end of the journey there are no loved ones, no physical destination, no memories of the material plane. Even the Buddhist phrase “Clear Light” is only a metaphor, since eternity is neither light nor clear.

Imagine what this means. As you get closer to eternity, you won’t experience being dead or alive. You won’t be male or female. A moment will be the same as a century, and before will merge with after. Have we wound up in a place that is too incomprehensible to understand? If that were so, it would be too incomprehensible to matter, either.

Eternity gives you more freedom than the mind can conceive. The absence of images means you don’t need images anymore. The absence of loved ones means you don’t need relationships anymore. You are back at your source, but with a difference. You’ve experienced it all. Creation has shown you everything. The mind we possess now may recoil, thinking that this must be the ultimate nightmare. But the rishis, who called this stage Moksha, or liberation, celebrated it. Only the liberated soul can choose anything. There is no tug up or down, and the whole mechanism of pleasure and pain grinds to a halt.

What would it feel like to find yourself free? Boundless? Nameless? If you try to apply any word to the eternal soul—good, holy, loving, truthful—the rishis respond with “netti,” the Sanskrit word for “not that.” In fact, in some schools of Vedanta, the spiritual path is called “netti, netti,” by which you keep repeating “not this, not this,” until by a process of stripping away you arrive at essence. That’s also what the afterlife journey is about. The dying person realizes, step-by-step, “This used to be me, but it’s not anymore.”

As it happens, one person who reported his near-death experience in great detail came close to describing eternity. The account, now famous in near-death literature, comes from an artist named Mellen-Thomas Benedict, who died of a brain tumor in 1982. That he could be dead for an hour and a half, only to return to life, is not credible by Western standards. In Tibetan Buddhism he would be considered a delog, and Benedict’s experiences are as detailed as any given by delogs. I will recount it in detail because Benedict’s journey practically provides an encyclopedia of the afterlife.

He found himself out of body, aware that his corpse was lying in bed. His perception was greatly expanded—he could see over, around, and under his house—and he sensed that he was enveloped in darkness, but soon a brilliant light became evident. He moved toward it, aware that if he entered the light, he would be dead.

At this point Benedict made a startling decision. He asked for the experience to stop, and it did. That he found a way to control what happens after death would not surprise a rishi, but it is almost unique in NDE literature. Benedict called a halt so that he could talk to the light. As he did so, it continually changed shapes, sometimes resembling Jesus or Buddha, other times turning into a complex pattern like a mandala or archetypal images and signs, as he puts it. The light told him (or, to be precise, transferred information to his mind) that a dying person is given a “feedback loop” of images that fits their own belief system: Christian images are seen by Christians, Buddhist images by Buddhists. Being a loop, the dying person can enter into the experience and shape it, as Benedict found himself doing. (The light explained that he was a rare case: most people proceed ahead without question.)

The fact that Benedict saw so many shifting images may have to do with his immersion in world religions and spiritual traditions after he was diagnosed with cancer. Next Benedict became aware that what he was actually seeing was the Higher Self matrix, which he describes as a “mandala of human souls”; that is, a cosmic pattern of consciousness. Each person, he realized, has a Higher Self that serves as an oversoul and also as a conduit back to the source. These terms, with almost no change, sound like pure Vedanta. This gives an opening to doubt, since Benedict may have been strongly influenced by his recent reading in Indian scriptures. On the other hand, the experience unfolded, from his perspective, as entirely spontaneous and real.

Gazing at the matrix of souls, Benedict became aware they were all connected; humanity formed one being; each of us is an aspect of this wholeness. He was drawn into the matrix, which he describes as ineffably beautiful. It radiated a healing, generative love that overwhelmed him. The light conveyed to him that the soul matrix formed a subtle energy level that girded the earth and bound people together. Benedict had spent a decade involved in nuclear disarmament and ecology, disturbing issues that had made him deeply pessimistic. Now he was confronted, he says, with the pure beauty of every human soul and was dumbfounded.

He was particularly astonished that no soul contained evil, and the light informed him that souls cannot be inherently evil. Underlying all human action is the search for love, and when people are driven to evil actions, the root cause is lack of love. When he asked if this meant that humanity could be saved, there was a “trumpet blast” accompanied by spiraling light, and Benedict was told never to forget the answer: human beings were already saved, no matter how dire the current predicament looks.

Benedict was experiencing profound ecstasy as he was absorbed deeper into the light, reaching another realm that was subtler but also much more vast. He beheld an “enormous stream of light, vast and full, deep in the heart of life.” When he asked what it was, the light told him it was the river of life and that he should drink from it to his heart’s content.

Fueled by limitless curiosity, he now asked the light to reveal the entire universe to him “beyond all human illusion.” He was told to ride the stream of life, and as he did, he passed through a tunnel hearing “soft sonic booms” on the way. His speed accelerated beyond the speed of light as he left the solar system, passed through the heart of the galaxy, and became aware of many worlds and many life-forms, all in a dizzying rush. At this point Benedict made a critical discovery, that what appeared to be travel through space was in fact the expansion of his own consciousness. The appearance of galaxies and star clusters racing past was his own consciousness streaming past one boundary of spacetime after another.

Benedict describes entire galaxies disappearing into a point, of all life-forms making their presence known, of a second light that contains every vibration in the universe. According to the Vedic rishis, these are the primordial vibrations from which creation emerges, which means that Benedict was actually witnessing the operation of consciousness itself. Benedict finds his own language for this stage, saying that he was interfacing with the hologram of the universe.

Passing into the second light, he experienced a profound shift into silence and utter stillness. It came to him that he could see to infinity. He was in the void, or pre-creation as he calls it, and his consciousness was limitless. He was in contact with the absolute, which wasn’t a religious experience but one of unbounded awareness. He perceived all of creation generating itself without beginning or end. Instead of one Big Bang, a singular event that created the universe, Benedict perceived millions of Big Bangs constantly generating new universes. Since he was beyond time, this was happening simultaneously in all dimensions.

After reaching this cosmic epiphany, Benedict’s journey reversed itself, step-by-step, and he woke up in his bed at home with the unshakable realization, now so familiar in the NDE literature, that death was an illusion.

Benedict assumed that his return to earth would be as a baby, in a new incarnation. When he opened his eyes, however, he still had the same body, one that had been dead for over an hour according to the hospice worker who was present (there was no monitoring machinery or doctor). The hospice worker, who had been crying over him, assured Benedict that he had shown every sign of being dead, including a growing cold stiffness in his body. An amplified stethoscope revealed no heartbeat. (In and of itself this claim is medically so outrageous that it would lead a skeptic to discount every other part of Benedict’s story.)

Although severely disoriented at first, Benedict felt better than he had in his life. It took him three months to chance a new brain scan, being understandably nervous about his tumor—but it proved to be great news. All traces of malignancy were gone, which his oncologist explained as a spontaneous remission, a rare example of a malignancy disappearing on its own. This sidesteps the issue that remissions through death are not found in medical literature, and remissions of advanced brain tumors, so far as I know, are the rarest of occurrences.

My own view is that every end point is also a starting point. For Mellen-Thomas Benedict pure consciousness became the ultimate end of a fantastic journey. For the rishis it is the starting point for living in the present. One of the most genuine things about Benedict’s experience is that he wound up finding the greatest value in the present: “People are so busy trying to become God that they ought to realize that we are already God and God is becoming us. That’s what it is really about.” His sense that the void is everywhere, that the invisible domain contains everything, that God has gifted human beings with every possible advantage, rings true spiritually.

Traveling in Three Worlds

A staunch materialist may consider it impossible to travel to nonphysical worlds, but we travel to other states of consciousness all the time, in fact. According to the rishis, we move between three levels of awareness that account for all experience:

Consciousness filled with physical objects.

Consciousness filled with subtle objects.

Consciousness filled with nothing but itself—pure consciousness.

In each state the soul looks different. In the physical world the soul is centered around emotions and idealism. It connotes warmth of heart, love, devotion to God. We look to our souls to remind ourselves that we have a divine spark inside, and yet we don’t base our lives on it. The soul flickers in and out.

In the subtle world the soul is spirit, denoting holiness, closeness to God, and freedom from the burdens of physical existence. The soul no longer offers mere comfort; it is the bliss that pain was disguising. The soul is constant now; its guidance can be clearly followed without confusion. The primary feeling is magnetic: one is being drawn inexorably toward the divine.

In the domain of pure consciousness, merging is complete. One sees that self and soul are one. Since there is no here and there, the soul has no location. It exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. One no longer seeks the soul’s goodness, holiness, or purity. It simply is.

After death a person experiences the subtle dimension automatically, yet to the rishis every dimension is enfolded into the others. The appearance of angels on earth is possible, even though they are properly consigned to the domain of subtle objects, and so is the sojourn of the prophet Mohammed to heaven on a white horse. Each involves a shift in awareness. At the same time, each state of consciousness has its own particular qualities and is perceived as its own separate reality.

THREE WORLDS: A MAP OF ETERNITY

1. Consciousness of physical objects: This is the world of concrete things that we verify through the five senses. It obeys linear time. We appear to ourselves as physical bodies separated in time and space. A life span occupies a limited number of years between two absolute events, birth and death.

The laws obeyed in this dimension are strict. Gravity, the speed of light, and the conservation of matter and energy (which can be neither created nor destroyed) form the foundation of every other natural law.

If this is your primary world, you have certain powers that allow you to explore it. These include physical strength, willpower, reason, emotional expression, sexuality, and personal authority. To the extent that you use these powers fully, you will be more and more successful. At the same time, you are more likely to become attached to this dimension of consciousness as the only reality.

In this world Akasha feels like physical space filled with an infinity of material things.

The soul feels personal but is seen only in short glimpses.

2. Consciousness of subtle objects: This is the world of dreams, imagination, and inspiration in all its many forms. We verify this world through intuition, detecting qualities like love and beauty, feeling a subtle presence within and without that is not available to the five senses. A life span in this dimension lasts as long as it can be imagined.

The laws of the subtle world are fluid. Events can happen forward or backward. Invisible structures may persist for a long time (for example, as myths and archetypes), but even then, time doesn’t bind them as strictly as in the physical world. Gravity and the speed of light are no longer absolutes.

If this is your primary world, you will have certain powers that allow you to explore it. These include imagination, memory, artistic ability, spiritual sensitivity, healing abilities, and intuition. The more you exercise these powers, the more successful you will be. However, you may also find yourself detached from the physical world and unable to navigate it as well as someone without intuition and spiritual sensitivity. This will worry you until you discover that the subtle world is capable of supporting you.

Akasha feels dreamlike, filled with memories and images, archetypes and gods, spirits and etheric beings.

The soul feels like a guiding force leading back to the source. It is sensed constantly.

3. Pure consciousness: This is the world of awareness being aware of itself. There are no objects, gross or subtle. We verify this world through “I am.” Existence becomes its own end, its own reward. As an experience, pure consciousness begins with a silent mind; this grows in richness and meaning the longer a person has the experience.

The laws of this world apply to creation itself. The seeds of every object and event gestate here. Here is the possibility of time, space, and physical things. There is also the possibility of mind, as yet without thought or images. Although totally free of anything visible, pure consciousness is eager to give birth; mystics tell us it is pregnant with All That Is.

If this is your primary world, you need no powers to navigate it. The flow of time and the expansion of space are neutral events to you; they come and go within your being. You witness them without attachment, although if you wish, you can call upon any quality—love, compassion, strength, truth—and experience it in fullness.

In this world Akasha feels uncreated. Concepts like birth and death, life and death, have no relevance. There is only existence. To be is an all-enveloping experience.

It must always be kept in mind that the afterlife is not as “after” as we assume. All three dimensions of consciousness are ever-present space.

Akasha enclosing the world of physical objects is three-dimensional. Our eyes can survey the landscape to tell us where we are. Up and down are fixed directions to orient us physically. Before and after are fixed points in time to orient us as to where we are in our lifetimes.

Akasha enclosing the world of subtle objects has much vaguer boundaries. These can change in an instant to freefloating dream-space. In the absence of fixed dimensions, experience is measured in terms of intensity. Emotions are heightened, dreams become more vivid, and the presence of angels and other etheric entities is felt directly. With experience this becomes a comfortable space on its own terms, as it already is for artists, intuitives, and deeply spiritual people.

Akasha enclosing itself is pure existence. It feels incredibly secure because there is unity with everything. Any experience comes from within, a single point from which creation emanates like an energy beam or a flower opening infinitely.

The soul is impersonal. It is Being, with no added qualities.

Shifting Your Allegiance

So far, we’ve used the metaphor of a journey to describe what happens in the afterlife. Most people expect to give up the physical world for a “higher” world. The Vedic rishis would point out that the real shift is one of allegiance. When we die we give up our allegiance to “consciousness filled with physical objects” and move on to “consciousness filled with subtle objects.” In Vedanta this is what going to heaven actually means.

A shift of allegiance looks easy from the perspective of the rishis. However, it proves terribly difficult for most people, East and West, because the physical world is so convincing. Doubt arises when we think about the other world, despite the fact that we inhabit it in our dreams all the time. A perfect example of such doubt and the anxiety it brings is Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” he wonders whether he should commit suicide in the face of overwhelming misery. He cannot bring himself to obey his father’s ghost and kill the usurper to the throne, his uncle Claudius. He is trapped by agony, and undone by many things—his conscience, his sense of cowardice and failure, his disgust with his mother’s sexual betrayal, and a depth of depression bordering on madness. Even though committing suicide would end his suffering, Hamlet pauses to reason out things logically, breaking down the problem as the rational mind is used to doing.

… To die, to sleep;

To sleep; perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

Leaving aside the greatness of the poetry, the Prince of Denmark is caught between the physical world and the subtle, and he can’t convince himself that he trusts either one. To put the argument into modern English: Is dying the end, or is it akin to going to sleep? If it’s like going to sleep, will it mean the end of my troubles, or will I be engulfed in nightmares? Maybe these dreams are worse than being alive, even when life is at its most painful. I can’t speak with anyone who has come back from the dead, so I can’t resolve this problem. I’m left with doubt. And doubt is enough to make me cling to life.

This is what Vedanta means about shifting your allegiance; if you aren’t successful, you will be caught up in bewildering doubt. The secret is that you have to master the subtle world in order to let go of the physical. Right now you rely on rational thought. You proceed from event to event in a linear way. Your physical strength enables you to manipulate objects and feel secure that you can defend yourself. Your willpower and force of character support you in accomplishing long-range goals.

None of these powers are relevant in the subtle world and therefore provide no support in the afterlife. And the threshold between physical and subtle reality is very disorienting. We already experience this in dreams. In a dream you can lift a house as easily as a feather, leap backward in time, or feel totally helpless in a frightening situation no matter how hard you struggle to get out of it. The long saga of Carlos Castaneda’s apprenticeship with Don Juan, the Yaqui sorcerer who became his spiritual master, is basically an education in learning how to navigate the subtle world, in which Castaneda portrays himself as full of anxiety and doubt.

In one episode Don Juan takes Castaneda’s hand, and together they jump over a tall tree. When they land on solid ground again, Castaneda feels sick and disoriented, on the verge of vomiting (queasiness is the most prevalent condition the apprentice finds himself in, along with fear). Don Juan asks, What is the difference between jumping over a tree as we just did and jumping over a tree in a dream? Then he answers his own question. In a dream you can comfortably jump over a tree because it’s natural in the dream world. You know that you are going to wake up, and when you do you realize that all the events in your dream were just neural impulses in your brain. There was no “real” tree; you look back on the whole dream world as an illusion.

The reason you can’t jump over a tree in the physical world is that you don’t realize you can wake up. A sorcerer is someone who has learned to wake up completely, so to him jumping over a tree is natural. It all happens as neural impulses in the brain. There is no “real” tree. But if you buy into the tree being real, you must accept the limitations of such a world.

One suddenly realizes the immense challenge of shifting one’s allegiance away from the physical. Does it involve being able to leap over trees? That would be an extreme case (although not unheard of: Catholic and Hindu lore are filled with levitating saints, and a nun in Egypt even had to be coaxed down from her perch in the air above the tree). The fact that so few of us ever explore the mystery of life after death is testimony to our fixed allegiance. Yet there are moments when we realize that we already have the power to shift from one level of consciousness to another without the illusion of dreaming. Let me illustrate.

“Thirty years ago I found a switch inside my head that can change reality.” The man speaking is Harold; he is around sixty and a retired freelance editor. We met at a large New Age book convention two years ago. “I was born with a congenital heart defect that put me at risk for dying young,” Harold went on. “This was something I’d grown used to growing up. But after college my defective heart landed me in the hospital as a prime candidate for a pacemaker.

“Unfortunately, there were complications—an infection, all kinds of trouble. One night during the worst of it I was lying in my hospital bed. The nurse came in to take my temperature, and as she left she forgot to turn off the light. I was irritated, but I was too sleepy to get out of bed. Then the lights went off.

“At first I didn’t think this was unusual, even though I had a direct view of the light switch and hadn’t seen anybody. A few seconds later the lights went on again. Then off, then on. I didn’t freak out but just lay there, staring at them. It was obvious that no one was flicking the switch, but I could even hear the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs going off and on. Suddenly I had the strangest idea: It’s me.

“At that moment I wasn’t sleepy anymore; I felt a sense of extraordinary clarity. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Turning the lights off and on with your mind?”

I told him I’ve heard of much stranger things. Did the episode repeat itself?

“Not for a long time. Fast forward to last month. A hot summer night in New York. My plane was four hours late, and I was seething. I’d missed all my connections and was just standing there waiting impatiently for my bag to come off the carousel. All at once I had this thought: they’ve lost my bag. Sure enough, everyone grabs their luggage, but my bag never shows up.

“So I march into the lost baggage office, and I begin to grumble at the clerk, who couldn’t care less. Yawning, she phones somebody to see if any bags have been left behind, then in a bored voice she tells me to fill out a claim. Nothing unusual so far.”

On the verge of losing his temper, a faint notion entered Harold’s head. It’s just as easy to be happy as angry. You can make this a positive situation.

“What I saw in my mind’s eye was an invisible switch. And I knew if I flipped the switch, everything would change. So I did. The clerk smiled at me and said she’d phone to find out about my bags. I mean, she acted as if she hadn’t already done that. She phoned, and then she told me that my bag had been located. I felt a strange sense of accomplishment. Then a pretty girl standing in line behind me said that her bag was lost on the same flight. Inside I had the idea, You should get your luggage, too. And the next instant the clerk said that they’d found another bag besides mine. It was the girl’s, of course.”

“And you connect this incident to what happened in the hospital thirty years ago?” I said.

“Wouldn’t you? After the airport incident I used the switch a couple more times. Once to get a seat on a completely full flight, another time to get my room changed in a hotel when they said I couldn’t.”

“Don’t things like that happen all the time without the involvement of special powers?” I asked. Harold looked bemused. This was different. He could tell that he was causing it.

Several things are striking about his experience. It involved a deliberate change of awareness. It felt special, even eerie. It made Harold see himself in a new light. It expanded the possibility of what the mind can do, yet somehow “flicking the switch” felt normal at the time. Finally, once the experience was over, it faded away and was basically forgotten. Can we say, then, that Harold took a trip into the Akashic field? Vedanta would say that Harold experienced a shift in consciousness, and when that happened, the world “out there” shifted with it. This is also how moving into the afterlife works, via an internal shift that creates a different external environment.

It’s important to grasp that the domains of physical objects, subtle objects, and pure consciousness are actually one domain—Akasha—seen in three aspects. This becomes evident in a phenomenon like faith healing, which brings together pure consciousness (God), a subtle event (prayer), and the physical body. The light so often seen by those who are healed is a subtle energy, which can also be perceived as an electrical or nervous charge in the body, a seizure, rapture, or dizziness. In her book, The Healing Touch of Mary, Cheri Lomonte recounts the following story:

Dawn J. was a devout Catholic who as a young woman had prayed for a vision of the Virgin Mary. Soon after she left her parents’ house, she experienced an actual visitation. This created a sense of awe and humility; she hardly felt worthy to behold the Mother of God in the flesh. But Dawn came to feel that she had been chosen as a messenger.

Soon thereafter she was asked by a coworker to help with a personal matter. The coworker was worried about his wife, who had begun to visit a house in the Bronx where a statue of Mary had begun to spontaneously exude scented oil. Dawn agreed to intervene and paid a visit to the house. When she walked in, however, she was greeted by the powerful scent of roses, and when she was shown the small statue, exuding a continual stream of oil, she became convinced that this was a genuine miracle.

Subsequently she paid several visits to the house, each time experiencing a divine presence in the scented oil. On one visit the woman of the house told her that the walls and furniture had now begun to exude oil, which she wiped up with cotton balls. Dawn was given a bag of these to take home. Sometime later she heard that a friend’s three-month-old baby was gravely ill with spinal meningitis and had been hospitalized in intensive care. Dawn felt a strong impulse to use the holy oil as a healing. With the parents’ permission she entered the hospital room and found the baby listless and nearly unconscious, its body incubated for feeding and medication. It was a piteous sight.

Dawn took an oil-soaked cotton ball and gently stroked the baby’s spine with it. She left, and the next day was informed that the infant was out of danger. Within two days it was sleeping and nursing normally and had been sent home with its parents. The doctor in charge of the case considered this recovery miraculous. Dawn attributed it to the healing touch of Mary.

Of course, Catholic lore is filled with thousands of similar tales, but what are we to think of this one in particular? To me, it shows that the three domains of consciousness don’t merely overlap; they are actively involved with one another. The physical plane is represented by the statue, the oil, and the baby’s body. The subtle domain is represented by the vision of Mary, Dawn’s faith, and the divine presence felt in the oil. The domain of pure consciousness is represented by the divine itself. I’m not offering this story as established fact; the author who repeats it went through no process of investigation to prove its truth. She relied on the sincerity of people who came forward, with nothing to gain, describing their own experiences. My only purpose here is to open the possibility that there is a unifying principle, the Akashic field, that embraces a wide range of phenomena.

Somewhere in Akasha angels might look around and say, “This is real.” The same might be perceived by departed spirits, great spiritual beings, and souls “crossing over.” The landscape of the afterlife can be as complex as anyone might desire, so long as we remember that ultimately gods, goddesses, spirits, and souls become only one thing: consciousness creating within itself.