Welcome to Realm-2: Chapter 2 Part 8

Images of Heaven and Hell

Many NDE accounts talk about beautiful landscapes, filled with flowers, or green rolling meadows. The quality of the light is described variously as “warming”, “loving”, “brilliant but not harsh”, “filled with colours not on any human palette”. Overwhelmingly, Near Death Experiences are positive and uplifting. A small percentage, about 4%, are not.

Howard’s Story

“...By society’s standards I was doing very well prior to my NDE. I was a professor art at North Kentucky University, chairperson of the art department, and I had a lovely wife and a family and two cars. I had it all. Inwardly, though, I used to think about killing myself a lot because I didn’t really find joy in anything. Everything to me was an extension of my ego, and I basically liked what I could control and despised what I  couldn’t. I was really a very lonely and selfish man.

“I had no faith in anything that couldn’t be seen, touched or felt. I believed only in the material world, and I knew with certainty it was the full extent of everything there was. I considered all religions, and all belief systems, fantasies for people to deceive themselves with. But I felt that if people needed those fantasies, why, that was okay. But I didn’t. I believed in what science said, that everything was measurable and that we were in the process of finishing up our discovery of all known reality. Through our ability to control nature, science was going to create a wonderful world of abundance for everyone.”

Howard Storm

Howard Storm’s account is an incredibly honest evaluation of an educated and articulate person. It is also the account of an individual who is completely committed to Realm-1 consciousness.

 

Storm is on a European trip when he is taken suddenly ill. He is rushed to hospital and diagnosed with a perforation in the small intestine. 

Feeling nothing but agonizing pain, he senses the end:

“...I tried to relax, and closed my eyes, waiting for the big nothing of death. I mean, I was waiting for the big zero, the big blackout, the one we never wake up from, the end of existence, which I knew and felt with absolute certainty was the way it was. It never occurred to me to pray; never once during that entire afternoon. I was a grow-up, and grown-ups don’t need to pray. I never mentioned God’s name, except, perhaps, in a moment of profanity. I’d never had a problem taking the Lord’s name in vain, you know.

“I slipped off into a state of unconsciousness, and I don’t know how long it lasted. I felt real strange, so I opened my eyes, and to my surprise I was standing up next to the bed looking down at my body in the bed. My first reaction was, This is crazy! You can’t be standing here looking down at yourself. This is not possible. I was angry and upset, so I started yelling and screaming at my wife, even swearing obscenities at her, but she just sat there like a stone. She wouldn’t move. I’m yelling and screaming at her, but nothing...

“Then I hear my name: “Howard, come here.” And I wondered where this was coming from. There were different voices calling me from out of the doorway, and it was dim and hard to see. These voices said they were here to fix me up. “Come with us,” they said. And I replied, “Well, who are you? Are you doctors and nurses?” And they said, “You’ll see. Come on, quick, quick.” ...They just seemed intent on getting me to step through the doorway. When I finally did, I was in a fog, a haze, and the people were hard to see, like silhouettes. It would be hard for me to describe them, because all I saw were murky figures... so I decided to follow these people. They led me through this haze.

“...it felt like we walked and walked and walked, maybe even for days and weeks. And these people were getting increasingly more aggressive about leading me into this fog, which just kept getting thicker and thicker. And it scared me a bit. ... Then I told them I wouldn’t go any further, so they started to push and shove me, saying, “Oh, yes, you are.”

“About this time it became clear to me that I was an amusement to these figures ... that my pain was their pleasure. They weren’t trying to kill me. They were simply trying to make me hurt more. Then they began clawing at me and biting me... I had the sense that there were innumerable numbers of these people clawing at me, working to make me as miserable as possible.

Howard Storm

Storm’s description of  the dimness, the fog, and the fear are really projections of a Realm-1 consciousness. The figures who appear to him reflect his own inner pain – but also his rational decision to live in that particular consciousness.

“It was essentially an atmosphere of darkness, fear, pain and utter loneliness. So at this point, I said to myself, Pray to god. But I said, Hey, I don’t pray. I don’t do that. And the voice inside once again said, Pray to god. So I went like this: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, makes me walk through the valley of the shadow of death...’ Then these creatures all around just went into a frenzy as I began to utter these things, like I’d thrown them into boiling oil. They began to scream at me, “cut that out. What do you think you are doing. You are such a coward, there is no God, nobody can help you. We have no respect for you.” They were just screaming and yelling and swearing at me, but they were also backing away from me as if I were poison. So I kept on praying and calling out to God. This went on for quite some time, until finally I realised I was sitting there alone in the darkness. The little tormentors had all gone away.

 

Sitting there in the darkness I felt this profound sense of hopelessness, loneliness. I felt crippled, broken and utterly alone... then a most unusual thing happened. I heard something in my own voice that I remembered from Sunday School. I began to sing a little song, ‘Jesus loves me, Jesus loves...’ And all of a sudden, and I don’t know why, I really wanted to believe that. I wanted to cling to that.

“Then I just screamed out into the darkness, ‘Jesus, please just save me.’ I screamed this out with everything I had, and then I saw, way off in the darkness, the tiniest little star, like a comet or a meteor, getting brighter and brighter, coming at me like a rocket. Very bright. It ...just got brighter and brighter as it was rushing toward me. Finally, it came right up to me and its radiance was all around me and all through me. Then I rose up, not with my own effort but by the force of the light. I just got lifted up off that place. And I saw this very, very plainly. I saw all my wounds, all my tears, all my brokenness just melt away, so that I became whole again in this great radiance. 

“I cried and cried and cried and cried. I was crying because I was feeling things I’d never felt before in my life. And I knew then that this radiance knew me, knew better than my mother knows me, or my father knows me, or my wife knows me. It conveyed that it loved me in a way that I can’t begin to express, so I’m not even going to try to express that. I knew that this radiant being was powerful because it was making me feel so good all over; I could feel its light all over me. It was very gentle, and I felt it hold me and carry me up and out of the darkness, faster and faster and faster. And way off in the distance I saw something like the picture of a galaxy, a great centre of brilliance. It was so powerful and so overwhelming...”

Howard Storm

Storm’s account is fascinating from a number of perspectives. Firstly, he moves to an area of consciousness that precisely reflects his waking mind set. Then, during the afternoon, when he feels death is approaching, he performs a very significant action when he tells his wife that he loves her. Love is an expression of Realm-2. Realm-1 is a consciousness of the mind, of mental processes and opinions. Realm-2, it becomes apparent, is a consciousness of the heart. Realm-2 is not irrational, it is supra-rational - beyond our normal argumentative thinking. 

Storm’s narrative now moves into a more traditional NDE. He is taken into the light where he meets a number of “light beings”. 

“...I’m an artist, and here I was seeing a primary spectrum with at least eighty new colours. ... colors, opalescence, beauty, not in any form I’d ever seen. What they were showing me was their glory. ...

“ ... then they wanted to talk about my life...”

Storm now has a past life review. 

“...What they responded to was how I’d interacted with other people. And unfortunately, most of my interactions with other people were pretty sad, pretty manipulative ...”

All quotes from Howard Storm, My Descent Into Death, Harmony, 2000

Howard Storm’s experience changed his life completely. He left the world of the academic rat race and became a Baptist Minister.

Such transformation is perhaps the ultimate purpose of the NDE. The NDE is, after all, a near death experience. It is an experience that belongs to the world of the living. Many people feel that they have achieved a new perspective on life; that new values have become important to them:

He seemed to be a changed man. Nothing that I could at first put my finger on, but eventually, after a few weeks, I spotted the difference. His bustling, heavy-handed approach had gone, and in its place there was a gentleness, quiet and calmness that had never been there before.

...next time, reflections...