7. The Most Profound NDE ever?
November 18, 2013
Although the near-death experience (NDE) was not so named until the 1970s, by Dr. Raymond Moody, reports of the phenomenon go back many years before Moody began researching them. It would be difficult to find a more profound NDE than that reported by Cora L. V. Richmond in her 1923 book entitled My Experiences While Out of My Body. “The possibility of the spirit ‘leaving the body’ for a time and then returning to its usual activities has been demonstrated many times,” she wrote more than 50 years before Moody’s classic book Life After Life, going on to point out that the separation can be caused by accident or illness but sometimes by “voluntary absence,” referred to as simply an out-of-body experience (OBE).
“These visits to ‘heaven’,” she continued, “would be sometimes tinged with the religious bias of the subject, but this is not strange in view of the fact that spirit states are conditions of the mind and spirits experiencing them.” Nearly a century later, skeptical scientists are making this same observation as if it is something new and offering it as evidence that the experience is nothing more than a hallucination.
In addition to several NDEs, Richmond seems to have been adept at departing her body voluntarily. It is not entirely clear from her book, but the primary experience reported on appears to have come during a serious illness, when she was near death for a number of days, several years before her actual death at age 82, in 1923, However, she claimed to have had many out-of-body experiences and it is sometimes difficult to discern if everything she reports in the book resulted from that one NDE during her serious illness or whether some of it came from other experiences.
She begins the book by stating that it is impossible to adequately convey in human language what she actually experienced, especially in the higher states of the afterlife environment, and that the best she could do was make an attempt at offering some glimpses of her experience. She recalled a great sense of relief – of being set free from the limitations of the body and did not expect to return to it as she had previously done.
“There was a perception of great Light, a consciousness of Illumination, an awakening to the vastness, the unlimitation of this Realm of Spirit,” she explained. “All else was swallowed up – eclipsed by the wonderful experiences that came – the Beloved Presences – the vistas of luminous Spirits! This was a state of Super-Consciousness; the awakening of faculties and perceptions before unknown, of being aware, almost without limitation; of KNOWING! Whatever is the nature and state of the real Ego this seemed as near to the Absolute as one could well conceive! There was so much of me! There was so little of me! There were so many and such surpassing spirits! How one shrinks in the presences of the mighty ones! How one expands in the Knowledge of the Infinite: His Image!”
Deceased loved ones welcomed her. “The Best Beloved, those who had preceded me into this wondrous life, came thronging around, by degrees,” she wrote, “to welcome me: not all at once, but first those who were by tenderest ties the nearest and the dearest.” She learned that spirits of kindred thoughts, perceptions, and aspirations are attracted to each other and form groups who work together for others. “I saw them ‘moving upon’ the minds of those in Earth-forms whom they could reach, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, as the conditions might require.”
Her guide took her on a tour of the spirit world. She witnessed scenes in which spirits were attempting to minister to those humans under their guidance but failed because of earthly barriers, primarily selfishness and not being open to spirit influence due to false education, both theological and material. She saw those recently deceased and not yet fully awakened to their new state existing in the thought-forms and scenes of their recent earthly lives as they lacked the spiritual awareness to fully recognize and appreciate their new states. “As the Spirit unfolds, the thought-forms change and then disappear as perception takes the place of limitation by the senses,” it was explained to her. Many of those reproducing familiar scenes of their earth conditions seemed satisfied, some even happy, “not even knowing that this similitude was the result of their own thought-forms instead of being inherent or organic in the ‘spirit land’.” But, there were many others whose thought-forms were of the “shadowed kind” and apparently not especially pleasant.
More Awareness
Richmond went on to say that she became more and more aware that she could perceive and receive more perfectly the answer to every question, even before its formulation in thought. “Formulation is a process of limitation, sometimes of hindrance,” her spirit guide told her, explaining that prepared senses are the result of prepared minds; that is, minds prepared by the awareness of spirit while in the material life.
She prayed that she would not have to return to her physical body, but her guide informed her that she still had work to do and must return. She was taken by her guide to view her body and observed it still breathing while also seeing a “psychic cord” connecting her spirit form to it. The guide told her that although she would not immediately return to her body, that it was necessary for her to keep her spirit “en rapport” with the body. Thus, during the experience over “many days” of earth time she was required to return to the body to keep the ”vital spark” alive. She likened the idea of returning to visiting dear friends in a place of beauty and enchantment and then having to return to one’s daily routine.
She was taken by her guide to witness those “working with themselves.” One such soul she recognized as a person who had been considered “eminent” in the art world while in the material life. He was cutting, carving, and breathing upon an image of himself. She asked the guide what the man was doing. “Removing the angularities and errors of his own nature: jealously of other artists, the deepest scar; selfish love of human praise – that overweening desire for adulation; unwillingness to accord to others the appreciation of their true merits,” the guide explained.
“Spirit states are as varied as are the personal states of those composing them,” Richmond observed. “The knowledge – or lack of it – possessed by the person IS the spirit state, i.e., knowledge of spiritual principles.” In effect, the more we come to understand relative to spiritual principles in the earth life, the better off we are after transitioning to the spirit world, assuming that we live by those principles.
“Time does not seem to be a factor in the realm of spirits except as related to people and events in the human state with which spirits have connection,” she further explained. “Our human phrases, and even our usual thoughts seem superficial, weak, and puerile when endeavoring to describe the divine realities of the Spirit.”
Her tour of the higher or more celestial realms was completely beyond description. “No human language is in the smallest degree adequate to portray the ecstasy produced by the vision, contemplation of perception of this all-glorious state,” she went on. “Orb on orb of transcendent beauty, sphere on sphere of celestial splendor!.” And while spirits in those higher realms were more unified in purpose, they retained their individuality. “This Individuality is Eternal; is the Ego of which the small personality of earth and even of the spirit states is but a fragment of manifestation.”
Richmond asked her guide why knowledge of the spirit world is not made more available to humans and was told that it was a matter of growth, unfoldment, waiting and working. In other words, most people are not yet ready for it.
In concluding the book, Richmond mentioned that some eminent men of science had made headway in helping humans understand the future life. She named Hare, Mapes, Denton, Wallace, Crookes, Varley, Zollner, and Flammarion, but she placed Sir Oliver Lodge, an esteemed British physicist, at the top of the list, as one whose mind was best prepared to receive spiritual truths.
There is so much more to the story of Cora L. V. Richmond than her NDEs and OBEs. She was perhaps the most amazing medium of the nineteenth century, possibly the greatest medium in 2000 years. Beginning in 1851, at age 11, as Cora Scott, she would go into a trance state and vacate her body, permitting various advanced spirits to speak through her vocal cords, lecturing to thousands of people in the United States and England on various subjects pertaining to their spiritual welfare, including philosophical, social, political, and reform matters.
