[Lying on her bed crying and alone, she suddenly felt the touch of a hand on her arm.]
It startled me a bit but I just kept on crying. And then this voice said, “What’s the matter? Why are you crying? What is it? Tell me.”
And I just said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
And she said, “What are you sorry for?”
And I said, “I’m sorry for my reaction to my mother when I was young.”
She then said, “Is that all? Anyone in your family would have reacted in the same way.”
At that I opened my eyes to look at her. And standing there was this huge being in a brilliant white light. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
—FROM SPIRITUAL ENCOUNTERS WITH UNUSUAL LIGHT PHENOMENA BY MARK FOX
ANGELS DO NOT, of course, manifest only by sight. At Angels on Earth, I spoke regularly to people who had been nudged by angels, whispered to by angels, and presented with hints by angels. The hints, in particular, weren’t always totally convincing, though they clearly were to the people who had experienced them. Say your husband dies. For years he’d been trying to make a tree in your backyard blossom in spring, and it never has. Yet the spring after his death, lo and behold, the tree he had worked so hard to make flourish has exploded into blossom. What does this mean? It all depends on whom you ask. A daughter is visiting the grave of a grandparent who collected butterflies. Out of the blue, as she is sitting by the graveside, a butterfly lands on the gravestone. When the young woman rises to leave, the butterfly rises from the gravestone and follows her all the way back to her car. What does this mean? Once again, arguing about the answer is fruitless. To the person who has experienced it, it means volumes. To someone not disposed to the reality of angels, it means nothing. All one can say in regard to stories of this nature is: to each his own.
All five senses can play a part in angel encounters, as is witnessed by the number of saints who have had mysterious, heavenly scents associated with them, especially with their bodies after death, which the Catholic church maintains have remained incorruptible for days, weeks, or even years. Angels also heal people who are hopelessly beyond healing, at least according to their doctors. People at death’s door have been brought back to glowing health after an encounter with what they say is an angel. One can doubt the reason such people give for their miraculous recovery, but the recoveries themselves number in the thousands. Here, for example, is a story from the French investigative reporter Pierre Jovanovic’s An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels, which I have edited for length.
I remember hearing the doctors talk at my bedside, and they were saying, No hope for this one. We’ll try to stabilize him to make him comfortable and then send him home. What else can we do? They gave me a bottle of oxygen. I couldn’t take a step without that bottle. A little later, new problems came along. I became hypoglycemic as well as hyperglycemic. Then I began to fall into a coma regularly, and lose my memory, weight, and so on. I went from bad to worse.
Before that I went to mass every Sunday like everybody else, [but] God was not of primary importance. Money was the main thing, and I’d always put money before God. I loved money, but money didn’t give me back my lungs. Everything I’d saved went for medical care. At one point I even believed that we were going to lose our house. Then one day in church during a Mass, I had the feeling that it was my last. I felt I couldn’t go on. Leaving the church after Mass, a woman saw me with my bottle of oxygen and said to me “Why don’t you go to Lubbock in Texas?” I’d never heard of it. So-called apparitions of the Virgin occurred there. I answered, “Sure, why not?” I had nothing to lose at that point. Oddly enough, I had no bad spells during the trip from Kansas to Texas. I found that really remarkable. But once we reached Lubbock, my body fell apart. I was so weak from losing weight that I couldn’t climb stairs. We went to Mass in the evening and then went back to the motel. Suddenly I was hungry. Terribly hungry. A hunger like none I had ever known. I ate day and night, about every two hours. I had to eat and eat and eat. Next day we stayed in church all day to say the rosary. I still had no bad spells. It was more and more miraculous. In the chapel, towards 5:30 PM, I reached the last rosary and this time I prayed for Mary to intercede with Jesus in my favor because I wanted to live and I had four children. As I began the Crucifixion, a woman dressed in white appeared beside me. She was magnificent. I remember that I didn’t see her feet. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned, but there was no one but my wife and me in the chapel. But the hand was still there. I said to myself, “I’ve lost half my brain, and this time I’m really going crazy,” and I said to my wife, “Listen, take me on back, I think I’m not well.” In fact, I believed that I’d gone mad. As I crossed the threshold of the chapel, I passed out. Later, when I came to, this man explained that he was convinced that I was going to die on the spot, so he rushed to the front for some holy water and sprinkled me with it from head to toe. I got up without thinking, took my reservoir of oxygen and walked toward the church, and at that moment I realized that I could walk alone. Usually fatigue overcame me after a few steps, and I now could climb stairs without a problem. Gradually something told me I no longer needed oxygen, and I removed the tube. A priest saw me and rushed toward me. He forced me to put it back, saying I must do exactly as usual. I did replace the tube but cut off the oxygen. I recovered completely on October 9, 1988, the lungs as well as the brain. When I got home to Kansas, the doctor gave me a breathing test and the needle oscillated between 575 and 600 when before I never went over 350. One month later I hit 675. The doctor told me, “It’s impossible.” But I was breathing perfectly and he saw the dial. Nobody could get over it; it was as if they refused to believe their own eyes. When the doctor looked at the X-rays he had a shock: no trace of spots, problems, nothing. I was like new.
Angels are great—if typically quite terse—dispensers of advice. People paralyzed by a particular life situation will hear a sentence or two, delivered by no one that they can see, that suddenly makes them view their situation in an entirely new light. Likewise, as in the Cokeville siege, people in extremis can receive quick, no-nonsense directives that end up saving their lives.
How can one hear a voice that isn’t there? Paranoid schizophrenics sometimes spend decades listening to inner voices, often very negative ones. For the people experiencing such a voice, it is as real as one they might hear from a flesh-and-blood person. The brain has the ability to create such illusions, and this is a fact that no one argues about. The questions arise when these voices don’t speak random gibberish or trivial insults, but deliver true and valuable information that ends up benefiting the hearer.
Such advice, spoken by invisible beings, was extremely common in the ancient world. No one questioned it. Ever since Julian Jaynes published his revolutionary book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in 1976, the idea that ancient people lived in a genuinely different world than ours and how it changes—or doesn’t change—over the centuries have been topics of heated discussion by students of consciousness. What kind of world did the ancients live in, according to Jaynes? In brief, a world in which the gods—via statues, or visibly, or by means of apparitions—spoke to the ancients, not metaphorically but actually. How could this be? Jaynes, who never left the materialist model of the universe completely behind, suggested that it had to do with a bifurcation between the left and right brains, which allowed people to actually hear voices coming from their right brain and experience those voices as coming from outside of them.
However sharply they were heard, most modern psychologists would say that these voices and visions emerged from the “unconscious” of these ancient peoples. But what is the unconscious? Is it just some spot located in the brain, or is it the key to a new vision of the brain in which it acts not as the producer of consciousness, but as a kind of antenna and condenser, taking our real, true, full consciousness, which we experience completely only when out of the body, and crushing it down so that it is able to focus on the day-to-day demands of life in the material world? All too often, the word unconscious shows up as a blanket term to cover any phenomenon that contemporary science/psychology has no explanation for. But it’s not up to the task. Like it or not, things are simply more complicated than that.
Is it possible that actual intelligences could exist beyond the boundaries of the physical brain, in a world beyond the boundaries of the physical world?
When an individual hears voices with perfect clarity (whether that individual is a saint like Joan of Arc or the unfortunate inmate of a mental institution), it is by no means always easy to dismiss the phenomenon as “mental illness,” even though many contemporary scientists would like to do so. If the unconscious is located solely in the brain of the individual, how can it be that these voices often deliver information that the individual in question could not possibly otherwise have known? It’s an established, but little commented-on, fact that telepathy has been proved. Countless statistical tests, many of them conducted at the Rhine Research Center at Duke University, have demonstrated that the faculty exists to the satisfaction of most scientists—the ones who don’t accept it usually being die-hard materialists who refuse it on what are essentially dogmatic rather than scientific grounds. When scientists who don’t believe that consciousness can exist beyond the body want to debunk an instance of communication from “beyond,” a common strategy is to “explain” the event by saying that telepathy was involved. Say an individual dies before he or she has been allowed to deliver a crucial piece of information. The classic examples of this often involve wills that have been rewritten. Somehow or other, information appears that allows people still living to uncover the rewritten will from whatever drawer or cabinet it has been placed in. There are dozens of such stories, and they are quite simply impossible to explain from a completely empirical standpoint. So it is that the solution for individuals who refuse to believe that information can come from beyond the brain is to invoke telepathy. Obviously, the debunker will say, someone living was aware of the whereabouts of the will, and the person who learned of it simply picked this information up telepathically. There is no need to fall into such traps as the illusion that life continues beyond the body. Chalk it up to telepathy, and the problem is solved.
Yet how much does such an explanation really solve? For if telepathy is an established fact, doesn’t this knock the foundations out from underneath all strictly materialist explanations of unusual phenomena? Far from being a tool that helps discount the reality of the invisible world, the fact of telepathy is instead just one more suggestion that that world really exists.
Sometimes seemingly telepathic communications—communications that result from some function of the brain that transcends its physicality—come not via audible voices, but simple feelings: feelings whose origin cannot be explained but which end up providing crucial and often lifesaving instructions to the individual who experiences them.
In An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels, Jovanovic retells this story of a professional photographer:
One night in October 1991 in Los Angeles, I was following a friend’s car, and we stopped for a red light at the intersection of Robertson on Burton. The light turns green, the car in front of me starts up and turns left. I had taken my foot off the brake and my car started forward, but—and I don’t know why—I stopped when I had absolutely no reason to. One second later a car came barreling up from my right like a rocket, doing maybe sixty, carried off my bumper in a screech of torn metal, did a 180, rolled over, smashed into a parked car to its right and came to rest upside-down. If I’d made the turn I was about to make, with that car coming on at that speed, I’d unquestionably have been gravely injured or killed. I have no idea why my foot hit the brake, as if by instinct, when I had no reason to stop, none at all, and I was already in the intersection. And I hadn’t seen or heard anything.
The ancient world spoke of the daimon or genius—a personal spirit that guided individuals through their lives, dispensing advice at pivotal moments. In early Christianity, this “daimonic” voice became one of two things. It could be the individual’s good or guardian angel, who, like a producer behind the scenes at a live TV show, whispered just the right information in an individual’s ear when it was needed. Or the daimon could become a “demon,” a not-so-trustworthy voice that spoke to the individual as well, but not to help him or her, but instead lead him or her into trouble. All the cartoons I grew up with in which Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck suddenly faced a conundrum and a little angel appeared on one shoulder and a little devil on the other, each offering conflicting advice, trace back to these ancient ways of thinking about angels and demons.
But cartoons are not the only legacy of those ancient times. These experiences, and the beings behind them, are still with us. Angels are manifestations, unquestionably real to those who encounter them, of a world larger, better, and infinitely more beautiful, intelligent, and anchored in the reality of God than ours is. The existence of angels drives home the fact that we are not lost and alone in this modern flatland of materialism, but come from, and will return to, another, better place. That is the most important message that the angel brings in our time—or any time—and limiting all the evidence of this to the brain is a popular, but ultimately losing, proposition.
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” This famous line, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—the single most celebrated poem of the twentieth century—is loosely based on an actual event that occurred when the explorer Ernest Shackleton was crossing Elephant Island in Antarctica with a few of the remaining survivors of his crew after a disastrous attempt to conquer the South Pole. During this long, brutal, final leg of the explorer’s journey back to civilization, he could not shake the feeling that there was an additional member of his group trekking across the ice with them: a member he could keenly sense, but which, when he turned to look for it, he could not see.
This event is, of course, also eerily reminiscent of the episode in the New Testament in which the disciples, walking to the town of Emmaus following the crucifixion, find themselves in the company of a mysterious stranger: a stranger whom they eventually recognize, not as an angel, but as the risen Christ.
During his historic 1927 one-man crossing of the Atlantic from the United States to Europe, aviator Charles Lindbergh had a similar experience. “Darkness set in about 8:15,” wrote Lindbergh in his memoir The Spirit of St. Louis, “and a thin, low fog formed over the sea. . . . This fog became thicker and increased in height until within two hours I was just skimming the top of storm clouds at about ten thousand feet. Even at this altitude there was a thick haze through which only the stars directly overhead could be seen. There was no moon and it was very dark.”
Deep into his trip and high above the empty Atlantic, Lindbergh began to grow groggy. In the age before automatic pilots, Lindbergh struggled to keep focused on his instrument panel and to keep his hands on the controls. To doze off even for a moment would mean death in the Atlantic below.
The isolation and weariness made Lindbergh meditate on the intimate closeness of death. But as the miles of open sea passed by beneath him, Lindbergh increasingly felt that he was not alone. Behind him, in the fuselage of the plane, he sensed the presence of human forms, transparent and weightless.
“While I’m staring at the instruments,” he wrote, “the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences—vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane.”
Lindbergh felt no fear at the appearance of these “friendly, vaporlike shapes,” who spoke with “human voices.” In fact, he sensed they were there to help.
In words that echo Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines about becoming a “transparent eye-ball” during a moment of heightened insight he experienced, Lindbergh writes: “I see them [the angelic figures] as clearly as though in my normal field of vision. There’s no limit to my sight—my skull is one great eye, seeing everywhere at once.
“First one and then another presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s noise, and then draws back among the group behind. They’re neither intruders nor strangers. It’s more like a gathering of family and friends after years of separation.”
When we travel to the edge of the known world (a project increasingly difficult these days), we seem to key our psyches to leave behind their ordinary prejudices, their ordinary filters for reality. We become open to seeing, hearing, and feeling realities that the all-too-familiar comforts (and disappointments) of our ordinary lives tend to block out. The same goes for tragic accidents. They knock us out of our ordinary mental framework. They shake us up, and in that moment of vulnerability, perceptions of the world beyond can occur. And these perceptions are frequently wonderful—so much so that the individual who has experienced them, once he or she has returned to conventional reality with all its sleepy-making familiarity, remembers them for years to come with a clarity that makes it seem as if they happened yesterday.
In 1933, mountain climber Francis Sydney Smythe was high on Mount Everest when he felt himself joined by a “strong and friendly” invisible companion. “In its company,” Smythe wrote, “I could not feel lonely, neither could I come to any harm. It was always there to sustain me on my solitary climb up the snow-covered slabs. Now, as I halted and extracted some mint cake from my pocket, it was so near and so strong that instinctively I divided the mint into two halves and turned around with one half in my hand to offer it to my ‘companion.’ ”
Theodora Ward, who includes this story in her book Men & Angels, also tells of a Scottish couple who was trailed by an “unseen presence” while crossing the Greenland ice cap. Ward makes the point that in the overwhelming majority of these encounters, the presence is specifically described as being friendly.
In a world where we are not permitted to take the supernatural seriously, the most common way for supernatural agencies to manifest is in our minds. When they do so, they translate themselves into feelings and impulses. As the pioneering contemporary psychologist and student of world mystical traditions Wilson Van Dusen has shown, the best place to find someone in contact with an angel or a devil currently is not a church, but a mental hospital. There, one may see people in active conversation with invisible agencies that anyone who has worked with such people knows are hard to dismiss as simple figments of the patient’s imagination. As suggested earlier, some of these invisible entities are fantastically cruel. Like the beings that made Howard Storm miserable during his walk down the hospital hall, they often seem to take tremendous pleasure in tormenting their human victims. Other such beings, meanwhile, have better intentions but can cause damage as well when they show their subjects explosively vivid visions of the universe: visions so sweeping, so gorgeous, so vastly and terribly real, that the patient comes back from them either charged with vitality (that is, “mania” or “grandiosity” or “inflation” in today’s psychological language) or with their circuits so thoroughly blown that when they talk they make no sense, and they are even less capable of interacting with, and getting along in, our ordinary, humdrum, angels-don’t-exist world outside their barred windows than they were before. The examples of “outsider art” that have recently been receiving attention from the art community are, at their best, wonderfully persuasive of just how real these alternate universes, and the beings inhabiting them, can be for the individuals experiencing them.
Some of the greatest artists have been adamant about the “help” they have received from outside agencies in creating their works. Charles Dickens famously said that he sometimes felt less like a novelist than a stenographer, as he struggled to write as fast as he could in order to keep up with what his characters said and did. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dickens’s most beloved story, A Christmas Carol, features an angel: one who arrives at the last minute to educate a man of supreme selfishness on the benefits of being interested in others.
Where does artistic inspiration, especially of the kind artists like Dickens had, come from? If you are on the “intellectual” side of the schism between the “dumb” believers and the “smart” unbelievers that seems to divide our world ever more each day, your reaction is practically automatic. If you are on the other side of that schism—the of-course-God’s-heavenly-angels-exist side—then you may accept the reality of angelic beings and their effect on us with a quickness, ease, and lack of surprise that is, in its way, just as insulting to the genuine truth of these beings as its dismissal by close-minded materialists. Neither of these two responses, it seems to me, is the right one. The spiritual world is huge, shocking, terrifying, and inspiring. To deny it is a mistake. To take it too much for granted is one as well.
To take the celebrated phrase attributed to Saint Paul, each of us lives and moves and has our being in the spiritual dimension, and people who claim no connection to this dimension are (to use a very old Arab analogy) like fish that claim no knowledge of water.
It may be that we live in a world where supernatural beings swarm around us at all times, just as Saint Paul very clearly thought we do. As writer Mark Booth has suggested in his books The Secret History of the World and its sequel The Sacred History, the great figures of history have always been in contact with invisible beings that affected their actions, charging them with tremendous force at one moment, weakening them hopelessly at others. History itself is in large part the story of the invisible world and its effects on this visible one that we stumble through every day, hopelessly thinking that we are fully in charge.
Does the invisible world exist? Do angels exist? Do you hate the word angel because it sounds stupid? Then use the word devil instead. Though I have no desire to get too close to them, I have come to see the use of devils. Though in far from the best way, they wake people up. They show us that the world we live in—the world of shopping malls and rental cars—hides another supernatural world behind it. Life, as Blake famously put it, is “twofold.” The mundane world is actually but one part of a much fuller and more complete world, which contains far more within it than we can imagine. In a sense, the mundane is the outer layer or “crust” of reality. To see both the crust and the larger realm lying behind it is to see with twofold vision. When we shift to this kind of vision, we are right where we were before. But the world around us has suddenly become a much more rich and crowded place. Like Evie that day down in the Bahamas by that lonely outcropping of rock, we have put our face beneath the surface, and discovered that we are far from alone after all.