P. M. H. Atwater - Near-Death Experiences, The Rest of the Story: What They Teach Us About Living and Dying and Our True Purpose

Copyright 2011

by P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Barb Fisher

Interior design by Dutton & Sherman Design

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Charlottesville, VA 22906

www.hrpub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request.

ISBN 978-1-57174-651-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America

TS

I dedicate this book to the powers of darkness and light. Without both, Creation's story would not exist, nor would we. The swings of Creation's pendulum between these two great polarities enable growth to occur. I witnessed this truth when I died. Researching that edgethe one between life and deathclarified what I had witnessed.

The bigness of forever lies in the eyes of near-death experiencers. I've had the privilege of looking through thousands of them, including my own. Now, it's your turn.

took off. I mean like a rocket ship. And it has yet to stop turning heads worldwide. Imagine it: a medical doctor discussing patients stories of entering another realm, an afterlife, at the point of death or when they nearly died, and then describing a pattern to the stories that seemed to indicate that what they spoke of might really be true. The hoopla that resulted was, well, off the charts.

Scientists in other countries objected strenuously. They couldn't match Moody's claims. Ignoring prior work, some of it dating back to the seventeen hundreds and featuring essentially the same patterning as modern cases, their objections held that there were too many variables for comparisons between what they found and what Moody claimed. Kenneth Ring changed that when he published Life at Death, a scientific study that verified Moody's work, five years later.

I entered the scene in 1978, quietly researching near-death states and amassing a great deal of data. I would have never known about others had it not been for a phone call from Kenneth Ring. Quite by accident he had run across a small, self-published book of mine entitled I Died Three Times in 1977 in Hartford, Connecticut. How it got there nobody knows. At his invitation, I journeyed to his neck of the woods to meet my peer group. The year was 1981.

My peers turned out to be physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and scientists who spoke a language I was unfamiliar with. They practiced a type of research that seemed inappropriate for the work at hand. Experience had long taught me that transformational shifts in consciousness and the wide sweep of exceptions that can occur because of them were outside the range of double-blind studies with a control group (the scientific method). I felt that my work was just as valid as anyone else's90 to 95 percent of what is learned in medicine comes from personnel listening to patients, and over 70 percent of the medical procedures used, even today, resulted from trained observers such as myself who cross-checked and tested what they found. Never once did I just ask questions of peopleI observed, watched, and studied themas behaviors and body language often say more than words do.

My previous experience spanned the sixties and most of the seventies, when I was experimenting with and studying altered states of consciousness, mysticism, psychic phenomena, and the transformational process. Nearly three thousand people were involved in the various talks, classes, experiments, and all manner of projects I sponsoredeventually through Inner Forum, a nonprofit metaphysical corporation I created in Boise, Idaho. I couldn't learn enough, fast enough.

Those were heady days, and then I died. Not once, but three times in three months. What I went through is another story. What I did about it is this story. During my third episode, what I came to call The Voice Like None Other spoke. It said: Test revelation. You are to do the research. One book for each death. I was shown what that meant and what was to be in each book. Books two and three were named, but not book one. When I could breathe again, every cell and bone filled with the Presence of that Voice, and a passion and fierce determination began to grow inside me. I knew at that moment that somehow I had to put what happened to me on a shelf in my mind. I needed to become totally objective. After my body reasonably healed, I moved to Virginia and got a job that had me living out of a suitcase and working on-site during large computerized telephone installations. I traveled half the United States and found experiencers at every turn. I have penned many books on what I discovered, many more than the original three I was asked to write.

So what is this book?

Call it my last hurrah, as I retire from active fieldwork in 2010.

Counting my previous work back in Idaho, this book contains the summation of forty-three years of research involving nearly seven thousand adults and children.

center on near-death states, and are solidly grounded in actual stories. Some of it may sound familiar to you if you've read any of my previous work, but most of it will not. That's because I finally say things I never dared to say before. (Researchers have to be careful, you know.)

Everything pivots with . It is there that we jump from the familiar into the unfamiliar, the type of material that recognizes that neardeath states are not some type of anomaly, but rather, part of the larger genre of transformations of consciousness.

Consistently over the years I have noticed something else going on with transformative states besides an expansion of faculties and consciousnesswhat some might call a spiritual awakening or breakthrough. I first described this in a paper I wrote called Brain Shift: A Theoretical Model Using Research on Near-Death States to Explore the Transformation of Consciousness (Phases I and II). In essence, this book is Phase III of what became the Brain Shift/Spirit Shift model.

Why a Phase III? Because what I noticed is this: transformations of consciousness are a biological imperative for the advancement and evolution of the human species. You can actually track the Brain Shift part through sensitivity/synchronicity, the limbic system, temporal lobes, and deep structures. You can do the same thing with the Spirit Shift that occurs through evidence of a second birth, the biological imperative, a new model of existence, and a new Christology.

It's all here, what I believe to be proof that near-death research needs to step up to the next level, and the next level after that. The transformative process guarantees that we as humans fulfill our destiny... but the way this works is far more surprising than what any guru, master teacher, or scientist could ever say.

None of this works quite like it seems, as you will soon see.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once decreed that a new science is needed to explore the objective side of human consciousness and the subjective side of matter. Not mysticism, but a science willing to incorporate objective and subjective avenues to discovery while recognizing the legitimacy of personal experience. This new science is now emerging, despite the objections of those who have forgotten how to question and search from fields afar.