Occurred on the 10th August 2009
Earlier in this year, I had experienced the most profound 'Saul on the road to Damascus' moment. I had been raising my children alone since December 2002 and had recently returned back to the city where all my family lived. I was deeply unhappy, confused, felt totally alone and had been suffering from anxiety attacks. In 2001 I lost a daughter 3 hours after birth, and even though I had been given Ketamine, I experienced something profoundly significant at the time of her death. In 2002 just after my last child was born, my husband asked for a divorce because he had fallen in love with someone else. I had to move from the place I called home for 8 years and move 1800 kilometres south with 4 children under the age of 6. I was not in a good place. After 6 years of living without family support I finally found enough strength to move my children back to the city and what I hoped would be family support. I knew on some level that I was so far away from where I should have been, but I just didn't understand how I had gotten where I was. Instead of facing my own problems, I 'transferred' my suffering and became highly disturbed by the 'state of the world' - not just politically, economically and culturally, which was enough to make me very jaded about life, but overwhelmingly distressed by what I saw going on in countries like Africa and Ethopia, India, Somalia, Palestine. I deeply grieved over the issues of hunger, disease, famine, drought, floods and earthquakes, civil war. It made life seem fundamentally hopeless and pointless and I was unable to integrate the suffering of the 3rd world nations with the materialistic culture that I lived in. I still cant reconcile it. But I knew I had reached some sort of tipping point. I just didn't know where I was going to find the strength to go on. In a last ditch attempt to find a reason to continue, I fell to my knees and begged God, who I hadn't spoken to for 30 years, to prove to me that my life, any life at all, had any value or meaning. Somewhere between my anguish, my tears, and all the unexpressed pain in my heart being verbalised for the first time, my whole world underwent some sort of fundamental 'shift'. Not my perspective, but the very air shifted. To describe it is hard, but it is like I no longer had 'skin' where my body met space, my skin sort of atomised for want of a better word. My physical body became aware of / became a part of the greater whole and I became aware of the presence of God, EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING. Wherever I looked (I was kneeling in front of a window that was open and I could see the garden outside, the sky the clouds the birds the plants and trees) and was aware of the 'God in All', and I realised that I lived IN this presence, that there was nothing that was not a part of this presence. The God in all the 'empty space between the atoms' the God in all the energy particles OF the atoms. That everything, everything was part of this. The presence was in the air, the sky, the trees, the ground, the curtains the walls the floor beneath me and I was a part of it as well.
I was on my knees crying for a very long time and I realised just how far I had gotten from God; that He had never left my presence, but I had left His, just through my lack of belief. Without belief or faith, my life really didn't have any meaning or purpose, my soul was in darkness, no light shone in my heart anymore. Please believe me, I love my children so very very much, and we have an incredibly close bond. But I had lost all my courage, all my direction, all purpose and all faith in the world. I had reached the point where I just didn't think it was fair of me to raise them because I had lost the ability to function in the world. Even though they hadnt seen their father in 6 years (his decision), I felt he was better able to raise them to live in a world that had stopped making any sense to me.
I wish I could say that - that moment was enough and that my life turned around and the light came on and the sun shone and my heart sang, but it has been over 3 and a half years now, and I am still trying to assimilate that experience with my material existence. Its been a long, hard, slow journey, but everyday, I have new realisations, understandings, epiphanies.
Anyway, 8 months later when I was still in the very early stages of my understanding, and I was still looking for a God that wasn't really, actually in the bible, the one that didn't have spiritual laws, rules, truths I had my first OBE or astral experience. I had been sleeping but when I opened my eyes I found myself up high in the air, aware of a sense of self, but not aware of a physical form and I was looking down on the rooftops and the roads around the house that I was living in. I didn't feel alarm, or surprise, but the moment I became aware of being away from my body, I was instantly, and quite violently, slammed back into my body so hard that my body sat bolt upright in bed in a fraction of second. I went from sleeping supine to rigidly upright so quickly that time didn't even seem to exist between the 2 positions.
A few weeks after this, the night before my birthday, I was talking to God as I had started to do before I went to sleep. I was still very confused and emotionally fragile and had no understanding of what direction I should be taking, what God required me to do before I could start the process of healing from my long prodigal experience. I had started using the Internet pretty much for the first time, looking for answers and all I seemed to find were more questions. I had never experienced that feeling of oneness with God since the first time and I was starting to question my sanity. The reality of the material world was as suffocating as ever and I just didn't feel a part of it, I felt very separate from it.
At some point after I fell asleep, I entered a dream that was so physical that I still have trouble not seeing it as reality. I found myself in my car, with my children driving on a road heading to an appointment. I don't know what that appointment was, I didn't even know at the time. As I drove along the road I had this impulse that I needed to stop and buy a new dress and change clothes before I got there. As I rounded a bend (having no idea where I was going but without any fear or worry or concern) I saw up ahead a large car park - at the car park there was a service (gas) station, a diner / restaurant and a small clothing shop. When I got out of the car with my children I knew there was activity all around me, but I was completely unaware of what it was all about. I entered the shop with my children, picked a dress off the rack, and went to a bathroom that had a small lounge area. My children sat and waited for me while I entered a cubicle, took off my clothes and put on the new dress. When I walked out of the cubicle I stood in front of a mirror and I realised that I didn't look the same anymore. My physical body was lighter, taller and I felt like I was made of air. I looked out of the bathroom window at this point and realised that there was a lot of military vehicles in the carpark and a lot of men wearing uniforms, flood lights on - I didn't see anyone carrying weapons but I could hear voices over radios and everyone was busy preparing for something. I walked out to my children, we left the shop, got into the car and I pulled back out onto the road. As I entered the roadway I found myself in the right hand lane and stopped at red traffic lights. The lane I was in was forced to go straight ahead, I couldn't turn off and I suddenly realised that I didn't know where I was going. Across the traffic lights I could see a long line of cars across 2 lanes all lined up and waiting to enter what, from the back, looked like one of those ferries that take cars across water. The lights changed to green and I slowly drove up to the queue of cars and a young man in a uniform - not really military but a definite official type uniform, came up to my window with a clipboard and asked for my name. I tried to tell him that I had gotten lost because I had gone right instead of left, but I gave him my name. He looked on his list and then asked me to pull over to the right and pull up onto the boarding area. I remember looking at all the people sitting in their cars, old and young, families and couples and wondering if I was in trouble because I had to pull my car alongside all of them while they sat and waited for their turn. The man then asked us all to get out of the car and told us to follow him through a doorway into what looked like a small transportable office building. We entered in, and there were a couple of other men in uniforms and they showed my children into a room where there were chairs and sofas and my children were so relaxed and unconcerned and we all felt so comfortable and unthreatened by what was unfolding. I have to add here, that this dream was completely without words being spoken, and I didn't find that odd or strange either. Words were transmitted directly into my mind, and all my dreams since have taken place in exactly the same way. As soon as my children were happily settled and talking to a couple of the staff members, the man with the clipboard took me aside and showed me a doorway off to the right. As I opened the door and stepped through, all I could see was light shining in my eyes and I walked out onto a path and coming out of the light towards me was a group of people, 10 or 12 of them. And even though I couldn't see their faces clearly, my heart knew them all. It wouldn't have mattered what they looked like, I recognised the 'essence' of them, but only one of them was I aware of having met in my physical life. It was a man that I worked with at a mine site in the northwest of Western Australia about 20 years previously, and though I cant remember his name, and we very rarely spoke except in passing, I knew that it was him. And the moment that the thought came to my mind 'Oh wow, I knew you at Labouchere ...' the dream ended and I woke up.
The visual impression of this dream? Colours and a light clarity like I have never seen on earth. Images so sharp, acute sense of hearing, knowing, understanding. A sense of calm, of peace, of loving acceptance, a place where no harm could be imagined. A kinship with others like I have never experienced in this life. A feeling of belonging. I knew that if I was able to walk into the light with them, I would be going home. I do know that after that night, I have never been able to shake the feeling that in my life I have probably met many of the people that I was supposed to share this journey with, but because of where I was 'spiritually', I missed these opportunities to make the connections with my soul group. There were all these pre-set appointments in my life, and I feel like I forgot to turn up at every single one of them because I was so disconnected from the urgings of my soul because I was so self focused.
I had been suffering from mild sleep apnea from a thyroid problem and sometimes when I wake up I have a feeling of my airway partially closed, or not being able to take a breath like my breathing had stopped and I was unable to remember how to get it to start again. This still happens even with medication, but I have never really been scared by this. I am not a big fan of doctors and I only go when I absolutely have to.
I know I am nowhere NEAR ready to depart from the physical realm. I know that if I have one primary purpose in life, it is to finish raising my children and to find ways of sharing with them, and instilling in them, a foundation of the higher purpose for our lives. They have to grow and live life in the way that makes sense to them, but I know that over the years they will find themselves at certain crossroads and having to make a choice and that is when I hope that my words will come back to them and they will say to themselves, 'oh this is what mum was talking about, this is what she was trying to tell me'. I want them to live with their hearts open, aware of the stirrings of the messages of the soul, and understanding that this life has a depth of meaning far beyond anything that that is apparent through the 5 senses, an education, or the socially engineered reality that we are all supposed to be so ... conformed to. Dark days are coming - I know this. We are a world on the cusp of ... Well, people will believe what their hearts lead them to believe. I have a sense that at some point in our future, the entire world will experience an NDE globally at the same time. A breach in our atmosphere, removing oxygen for a period of time ? And then all hell will break loose.
In the words of Alexander Hamilton ... 'Those who stand for nothing, will fall for anything' ...
Note:
I have had other very vivid dreams with all the same elements - One culminated in a baptism, another where I was rising into the air from a field at night, another was a dream with my children sitting with a stranger waiting for a tsunami to come in and another notable one was holding my children as fire burned in every direction around us. But with absolutely NO FEAR. I am hoping that perhaps a new group could be set up for people to add spiritually significant dreams / STE's to?
