Visits to Heaven. Josie Varga
on Call for Better Health: Metaphysics and Medicine for Mind, Body and Spirit, says light implies a beneficent divine presence and believes the process of photosynthesis, the conversion of light energy to chemical energy and the storage of sugar in plants, is life’s true miracle. “Forget about the Shroud, bleeding stigmata, crying statues, or parting Red Seas,” he states. “Just ponder what truly happens when a tiny organelle (a subunit within a cell that has its own function) soaks up water through the stems and mixes light energy from the sun. It then builds these invisible carbon atoms into its own skeleton, into sugars, into the food that allows animals to live. No animal can do this. No animal can extract the energy of life from a star 93 million miles away.” 4
Plants need this light energy (CO2 and H2O) to make sugar. This then becomes food allowing animals to live, and it is also the source of the O2 (oxygen) we breathe. Obviously, without oxygen there would be no life.
Every day from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, we take this light for granted. Everything that we see, we see because of light. We go about our day watching the sunrise, the television, the flowers in the garden, our children, the road, computer screens, mirrors which show our reflections, and so on. While our minds may perceive the objects before us, the only thing we are really seeing is light as this is the only thing our eyes are capable of seeing. We are capable of seeing the world as we know it because everything either gives off or reflects light rays which then connect to our eyes and are processed by our brains. In other words, light has to leave what we are looking at and travel back to our eyes for us to see it. This happens so fast that we don’t even realize what is happening.
Scientists have been studying the nature of light for centuries, and there is still so much left to be argued. But one of the most popular theories in physics today defines light as electromagnetic radiation, a form of energy made up of electric and magnetic fields that has a twofold nature of both particles and waves. Light radiates like the waves in a pool from its source in all directions at a speed of 186,000 miles per second which makes it the fastest phenomenon in the universe. To put things into perspective, if you were able to travel at the speed of light, you would have traveled 11,160,000 miles in one minute (known as a light minute).
Albert Einstein determined that light was made up of photons, which are the fundamental particles of electromagnetic energy that are constantly moving at the speed of light.
The study of light has proven to be quite complicated and will more than likely go on for centuries more. Could it be that scientists or physicists are just looking in the wrong place? Perhaps they need to explore the metaphysical in order to understand light fully.
Time ceases to exist at the speed of light. Why is this so? And is it coincidental that the majority of NDErs says that time ceases to exist on the Other Side? They describe an all-encompassing light filled with unyielding love, void of time and space as we know it.
As in the NDE I mentioned earlier, those who have crossed over and come back frequently talk about speaking to a Supreme Being or Light. So it’s interesting to note that physicists have actually found that light particles communicate with each other. According to quantum mechanics, a pair of subatomic particles can become “entangled” and the fate of one subatomic particle instantly affects the other. Einstein actually referred to this idea as “spooky action at a distance.”
In 1982 a physicist at the University of Paris named Alain Aspect discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles can communicate immediately with each other no matter how long or how far the distance is between them. They could be two inches apart or one million miles apart; it doesn’t matter. Somehow each particle always knows what the other one is doing.
Another interesting point is the fact that many who have had an NDE describe being in a different dimension. Earth, they say, is but one dimension. Edgar Cayce, known as the world’s greatest American psychic, performed over four thousand readings in a forty-year span. One of the things that he continually mentioned was the fact that this earth plane is just one of many dimensions. Many physicists have noted that entanglement is strange only if the universe is limited to three dimensions. If there are more, it is possible for particles to be much closer than they appear.
God is infinite. He always was and always will be. Energy is also infinite; a photon travels at the speed light and therefore, it is believed, must have an infinite amount of energy. I could go on further, but I believe this is enough to make one wonder if the light described in many NDEs and God are, indeed, one and the same.
NDErs also describe a feeling or a knowing of Oneness. We are all, many say, one with God and the feeling of no longer being entrapped by the heavy body we once wore on earth is wonderful beyond words. Recently I had the privilege of chatting with Charles Thomas Cayce, the grandson of Edgar Cayce. He spoke candidly about love, life, his famous grandfather, and the hereafter.
“We think we have many possibilities while on this earth plane, but the truth is our soul is actually in prison,” he explained. “We don’t realize it now, but while we are in our physical bodies, we are very limited in the choices available to us. To continue with this prison analogy, we can do only certain things while we are in prison. We can read, we can think, etc. But we can’t eat when we want, we can’t go outside the prison. Truthfully, there is so much we can’t do.
“Likewise, there is so much we can’t do here, we just don’t realize it. As a soul, we have the freedom to experience whatever we want. This, incidentally, is the reason we incarnate. We have a multitude of experiences that allow our souls to grow. We all have free will. We all originated from Oneness and then God made us separate. We made a choice to be separate in order to make choices and have life experiences.”
These experiences, according to Cayce, help us to evolve and move again toward Oneness with God. There are, he notes, three parts to our soul:
1. Our Will
2. Our Spirit
3. Our Mind
Since the above are parts of the soul and not the body, they continue to exist when the body dies.
In addition to NDEs, many other mystical experiences are considered proof of an afterlife. These include electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), apparition appearances, deathbed visions, ghostly encounters, out-of-body experiences, angel visitations, hypnotic regression, after death communication (ADC), visits from heaven, and more.
I intentionally classified an ADC and a visit from heaven separately. They are truthfully two different things. An ADC, according to Bill and Judy Guggenheim, the well-known authors of Hello from Heaven, is a spiritual experience that occurs when someone is contacted directly and spontaneously by a deceased family member or friend. A visit from heaven is a metaphysical experience that takes place when a person is contacted either directly or indirectly through the use of a third party by someone who is deceased. It does not matter whether or not the experience occurred spontaneously or directly. Also, a visit from heaven contains an element of proof.
This book is the sequel to Visits from Heaven which highlights evidential afterlife communication accounts from around the world. After Visits from Heaven had already been completed, I had the privilege of speaking to Lance Beem who told me about the death of his daughter Kari Lynn Beem and subsequently one of the most incredible visits from heaven I have ever heard.
Kari was born as what appeared to be a very normal, healthy child. However, by one year of age she started having seizures. After consulting with physicians and geneticists, it was determined she had a genetic disorder called tuberous sclerosis—a rare, multisystem genetic disease that causes benign tumors to grow in the brain and on other vital organs. Symptoms include seizures, developmental delay, behavioral problems, skin abnormalities as well as lung and kidney disease. Sadly, she eventually lost her ability to speak and for the next twenty-four years was autistic and considered mentally at a two-year-old level.
Raising Kari presented the Beems with many challenges, and their daughter was eventually placed in a day program for mentally delayed adults. On June 9, 2008, Kari was having her regular lunch break with her vocational group in Sacramento,