abreast, she stopped walking and continued holding me in her smiling gaze. It would have been rude to walk right past her, so I stopped walking too.
I have often wished that I had memorized the exact words which she said. However, it was something to the effect of “I want you to know that what you are doing is the right course. You are on the right track.” Somehow she seemed to be just radiating love and affection. Then she flashed a bright smile. I mumbled some sort of thank you, and she went on her way.
I also continued walking along. My first rationalization—Batty old lady, dresses up at twilight and goes out and gives compliments to strangers—was quickly replaced with a more rational thought. You know, that was really strange, I thought to myself. Everything about it was quite unusual. Suddenly I wheeled around. She was nowhere to be seen.
There was no place where she could have gone in that short amount of time. The buildings on the street were commercial, not retail and were closed for the day. Moreover, they were set well back from the street, too far to reach in the time that had passed. She hardly would have had time to cross the street, but there was nothing there she could have gone to. In short, she had simply disappeared. As I began to review the circumstances, it dawned on me what this really was—an angelic visitation.
First of all, her sudden appearance when I was under the impression that the street was deserted was unsettling, and her sudden disappearance was even more so. Her persistent eye contact as she approached was extremely unusual. Local people, black or white, simply do not do this. Her stopping just in front of me was unprecedented. And her initiating a conversation with a total stranger was something I have never encountered in many years of living on the islands, or for that matter, in our home on the mainland. People simply do not stop walking and start talking like that.
And the costume! It was straight out of the century before last. It is almost inconceivable that anyone would be able to preserve such a costume in its pristine condition for such a long period.
But the message she gave me was perhaps the most unusual of all. For her to be able to say what she did, she had to know quite a bit about me. I have no evidence that she wasn't referring to the way I comb my hair or brush my teeth, but I have to assume it was far more profound than that. I have to believe she was referring to what has become my life's work in recent years—writing about spiritual matters.
Before long I had to conclude that I had been visited by an otherworldly entity—one that conveyed a message which gave me renewed hope and strength for my endeavors. How I regret not having the presence of mind to recognize this when it was happening! How I would have loved to have found out more about her message and about her!
I have so often fantasized about what I could have said. “You're not from here, are you?” I could have asked. It would have been so gratifying to experience her no doubt ambiguous answer.
I still cannot think about this encounter at length nor write about it without experiencing a rush of emotion. It created an impression that has never left me, has not diminished in the slightest, and in fact, continues to be a high point of my life. Even though I have not seen her again, I like to think that my “Lady in White” still cares about me and is still with me.
 | My Two Light Beings |
Barbara Harris Whitfield
Georgia
Author of several titles including: Spiritual Awakenings: Insights of the Near Death Experience and The Natural Soul
I met Professor Kenneth Ring in the early 80s. I had written him after having read an article in Omni Magazine describing his research on near-death experiences at the University of Connecticut. I didn't tell him about mine in the first letter but did relay to him the ones my ER and ICU patients had told me about either as they were dying or when some of them had come back. They seemed to know I was safe or that I had had one too.
After several letters back and forth, Ken told me he was going to be speaking at a conference just a few minutes from my home in South Florida and invited me to come.
A few days before I met him at this conference, I went to the movies and saw Resurrection. I was totally overwhelmed by the story. Except for the cultural background, I was Ellen Burstyn's character.
After Ken gave his talk, he asked if anyone in the audience of about eighty people had had a near-death experience, and no one raised his hand. He asked if Barbara Harris was in the audience, and I sheepishly stood, shaking. And of course, he asked me if I could tell my experience. This was the first time I had told it other than trying to tell a psychiatrist seven years earlier (and then I was told I was depressed and handed a prescription for antidepressants that I never took.)
As I spoke, the words seemed to come from somewhere else, and I couldn't look at the people turned around staring at me. I kept gazing at Ken hoping that I wasn't embarrassing him and dreading the silence when I had finished. At the same time I was reliving my experience as it actually happened. And finally when I was finished, there was the silence I had dreaded—then there was a loud clapping noise and everyone was smiling at me.
The last thing I had talked about was having seen the film Resurrection a few nights earlier and relating how the character's energy helped others and how I felt “that” when I was working with dying people. Later, over a cup of coffee, Ken asked me to look up a word—a strange word I had barely heard before—and to write telling him what I thought. The word was “kundalini.”
A few days later, a whole new world opened up for me when I stood in front of a book case in a store right across the street from my daughter's dorm at the University of Florida. One shelf was filled with books on kundalini. I bought three books: Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence by an American psychiatrist who had also been an ophthalmologist, another book by John White, and Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov. Bentov's book resonated with me the most. He talked about the physio-kundalini syndrome, and I knew that I had most of the signs and symptoms he described.
The letters started flying between Storrs, Connecticut and Pembroke Pines, Florida. Finally, not being able to contain my enthusiasm any longer, I wrote Ken and asked him if I could come up there to talk with him again. And he called to tell me that a letter from him was on its way (mailed the day earlier) inviting me up to the “near-death hotel” as his house was called in those days. It seems that many near-death experiencers had come to visit and tell him what they knew. And now he was writing his second book stemming from our interviews.
We agreed that I would come up in a month and that's when the visits started. Late at night as I lay in bed thinking about all I was reading, two “beings” would float into the room from the doorway. (No, they did not come through any walls!) They barely had a shape that wavered and radiated a low pulsating light. So that I wouldn't become terrified over this, I told myself they were my grandmother (who had met me in the tunnel in my NDE) and my aunt whom I had adored. They stayed near the bed for several minutes, but I don't really know how long because when they were with me, it seemed as if time had stopped just as it had done during my NDE. This went on every night for the whole month.
The day I was leaving, as I was packing, I picked up a new book I had just bought by Itzhak Bentov called A Cosmic Book on Creation. As I tossed it into my suit case, I saw the back cover for the first time and jumped because there was Bentov's picture. He had died in the 70s in a plane crash. But that face
