Many of us have them, and I could tell you many stories that I have heard of extraordinary experiences from people who seem perfectly ordinary on the outside. Yet most of us don’t talk about them. We should, because these kinds of experiences can provide much-needed ‘proof’ that we are more than we seem, and that there is much more to reality than our five physical senses or science can tell us.
To start this conversation, I will share some of my own exceptional experiences. Hopefully, it will motivate some of you to start talking about your own, not to show how exceptional you or I are - for we are not - but to help awaken ourselves to the greater - the mystical or sacred, if you will - reality in which we exist.
When I was five or six years old, a girl and I were sitting on the ground playing with dandelion heads when looking left across a stretch of grass, I saw a deep grassy slope (not really there), and beyond that, a shallow valley (not there) where two armies were in battle, shooting from trenches that were quite close to each other. Overhead, clouds formed, similar to storm clouds and roiling madly, and I saw that they were being stirred up by several angels, not sweet white things but vigorous, muscled, fierce-eyed angels calling out to the armies (not with actual voices) to stop.
Some soldiers on both sides noticed the angels and began pointing to them and for a while the shooting stopped. Some men sang, some prayed, and I could see from their faces (even at that great distance) that they just wanted to go home, but were commanded to continue fighting. The angels disappeared, despairing. While I watched this scenario play out, I was quite conscious of my real surroundings, and even asked the girl if she saw the armies, which she did not.
I had had other experiences of this kind, not so dramatic but seeing things that were not physically there, so it did not seem so extraordinary and I was not unduly surprised by it. I knew that time and space were not as real as everyone seemed to think they were, and that different times or different places could be experienced simultaneously. Of course, that is not how I explained it to myself as a child, but that is how I understood reality.
I also experienced visitations: appearances by other beings who observed or just stayed around me. I do not remember ever being spoken to by these beings, but sometimes, they ‘thought’ to me. One scary, recurring experience was being peered at by big faces in the sky. It was as though the sky lowered itself almost within reach, and out of it peeked these faces – fully three dimensional and all quite different. They terrified me. They appeared suddenly one time when a boy shoved a pencil into my ear (really happened), their faces scowling and sympathetic.
Another time, I was visited by an angel or being that stood at the foot of my bed for three nights in a row, saying nothing but looking ready to speak. It was tall, dressed in a plain white robe that shone a little, as did the long-haired being itself. That visitation also terrified me – a visceral terror that I could not shake even after I realised that the being intended no harm. Holding my sheet tight under my chin, I asked another girl in the dormitory if she saw it, but she saw nothing except, perhaps, a little light. I told the being to go away, which it eventually did. I was ashamed of my reaction because the being looked so kind, but I could not control my fear.
Some of my most dramatic and powerful exceptional experiences took place in dreams, which during my childhood up to late adolescence, were very clear and compelling. One touched me deeply, and still does.
I was Indian, with my sister at a train station densely packed with people, some frantically trying to reach the train and others trying to get out. The yelling and weeping was intense. We had almost reached the train when my sister and I were separated. She kept pushing her way to the train, and I was carried by the great mass of desperate people in the opposite direction, calling to her to get onto the train and that I would find her. I last saw her hanging from the train, crying. We both knew we would never see each other again. Years later in a documentary on the partition of India and Pakistan, I watched that same scene in a station with tears pouring down my face. I felt as though my heart were breaking, and knew beyond doubt that this was when I had lost my sister. It was three years before I was born into this life.
As a child, I had assumed that most people had these kinds of experiences, not with the same content as mine, of course, but similar in kind. To me, they seemed completely natural. By my mid teens, I realised that they were considered weird, and dismissed them.
Then, in my forties, concerned about my teenage son who was going to an unsafe part of town, I white-lighted him, as I always did when I thought my children needed protecting, visualising a shield of white light around him. Usually, this requires mental effort, and I have to actively concentrate on the visualisation to maintain it. This time, though, instead of the usual gentle projection of light, I saw – felt, actually – an intense beam of light shoot out from me, so intense that it felt almost solid. Surprised, I nevertheless mentally directed it to my son. When I mentally switched off, however, the beam remained, and I could not turn it off. So I directed it to my two girls, and out shot two more beams, as solid and focused as the first.
Now I had three beams that I could not switch off. Wondering where this energy was coming from (because it certainly did not come from me), I looked up and ‘saw’ (or vividly sensed) a great beam made up of shards of light, crystalline in appearance with a crystalline face, impassive, not human and looking outward, not at me. I was somehow inside this being, a tiny part of it as a little cell is a part of me, and I felt the great energy flowing through and around me. It remained so for almost an hour, and I have never experienced it again.
When people ask if such things really happen, I answer: Yes, they do, and I now accept them as valid experiences, and apply whatever insights or encouragement they bring.
