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The
Healing Power of Spiritual Visions
MELVIN
L MORSE MD FAAP
SPIRITUALSCIENTIFIC.COM HARBESON ,
DELAWARE 19951
How Premonitions of Death, Shared Dying
Experiences and After-Death Communications Can Help to Heal Grief
I am a
Pediatrician who has studied near death experiences for 15 years. I have
learned that they teach us that there are an entire range of visions associated
with death and dying which can help to heal grief.
A woman
once came to visit me from
I asked
her to tell me more about her son and she gave me his picture. Suddenly, I was
called to the hospital, which is next door to my office to resuscitate a
critically ill newborn. I excused myself, and ran to the hospital. When I got
there, the baby was already better and I actually had little to do.
While
charting my notes, one of the nurses came up to me and asked, "who was
that who came over with you? Is he a student?" I asked "what are you
talking about". I was trying to find a pen, and took the picture out of my
pocket. The nurse said: "that' him. He kept trying to get your attention".
SEEDS OF
HEALING AT THE FOOT OF THE BED
I
returned to my office and asked the mother if she had ever been contacted by
her son. She said, "oh yes, after he died, for several nights he would
stand at the foot of my bed and tell me he was alright, and that I should stop crying.
But that was only a crazy dream, it was just something I wanted to believe. It
seemed real, but it couldn't have been real".
I felt
too embarrassed to share with this mother what happened to me at the hospital. Instead,
I told her that before she went to bed, she should do some simple relaxation
techniques and turn off her internal narrator, that constantly chattering
internal voice that can often drown out other communications. I gave her a
technique of tensing and relaxing one's muscles, starting at the top of the
head, working down to the toes, and then returning to the head. There are many
such techniques, and all equally effective.
She
should then ask her son for help in healing her grief. I asked her to get a
journal and write down everything she dreamed about each night, and her first
thoughts on awakening. I asked her to take her journal to a grief counselor in
her hometown.
The
mother wrote to me later, and told me that that night was the first night she
had slept well since her son died. After years of going to various grief
workshops and psychics and mediums, she learned that the seeds of her own
healing right were at the foot of her bed.
NORMAL TO
TALK TO THE DEAD
This
Mom had an after-death communication from her son. It is one of the most common
spiritual experiences that we have. Medical research shows that 25-50% of
grieving spouses or parents have some sort of visitation. Unfortunately, like
the Mother who visited me, most people trivialize or dismiss the experiences as
grief induced hallucinations, and cut themselves off from their potential to
heal.
There
are three broad categories of healing spiritual visions surrounding death and
dying; premonitions of death, shared dying experiences, and after death
visitations. Recent new evidence in near death research strongly suggests that
such experiences are real and an important part of understanding death.
SCIENTIFIC
STUDY OF PREMONITIONS
It is
common to have intense feelings or even visions that someone you love will die.
With one of the nation's largest organizations devoted to Sudden Infant Death
research, we studied parents who had premonitions that their infant would die.
We used two control groups of parents who did not have infants die, to understand
what normal fears and premonitions about death were.
We
learned that nearly 25% of the time, parents had distinct and vivid perceptions
which were not seen in our control patients. Often they would write these in a
journal, or tell their doctor about them.
A
patient in my practice told me: When I was seven months pregnant, I was resting
in bed. Suddenly, I found myself floating out of my body, looking down at
myself. A lady was next to me. She glowed with a white light. "You
know", she said with great care and compassion, "she can't keep the
baby".
VISIONS
EXPLAIN DEATH, DO NOT PREVENT IT
"I
mourn terribly for my baby, but I am not angry. I felt great love and
compassion from when she told me that, as if my baby's death was a part of a
greater purpose and plan."
It is
clear that the purpose of these premonitions is to explain death and to help
parents cope. They do not, in my experience, result in any way of preventing
the event. Many parents took their infants to doctors or emergency rooms, and
the SIDS event not prevented.
One of
my patients had a vivid dream that her son would be horribly injured in a car
accident. No details which could have led to her preventing the accident were
given. Indeed, she was ultimately the driver in the wreck, and it was her
fault.
She
told me that the meaning of her dream to her was that her mother, who had given
her the news in her dream, was her guardian angel and watched over her. She
said: "Without that dream, I could never have kept my family together,
been a wife, and a mother to my other children, because I felt so guilty and
depressed over what I did. Yet I always knew that even though it was my fault,
somehow it was meant to be, and my mother would always be there for me.
WALKING
WITH THE DYING
Another
type of death related vision are shared dying experiences. For example, a
mother in my practice told me about sitting with her sister, at their dying
mother's bedside. They both fell asleep. She dreamed that she was walking down
a path towards a brightly lit garden path with her sister and mother. Her
mother paused at the light, and turned and said, "I must go now." She
had incredible love for both of them, and seemed to indicate that she was
sorry, but only she could go further.
When
she woke up, her mother had died. Her sister had had the same dream, with the
exception that she thought they were walking along a sandy path., towards a
gate and a light behind it.
Finally,
there are after death visions. These often come as simple messages that someone
has died and everything is alright. The night that my father died, I had turned
off all the phones in my house as I had been working hard and needed rest. This
was very irresponsible of me, as I was on call for the Infant Intensive Care
Unit. I cannot explain why I did it, I just remember telling my wife that I was
so tired, I couldn't possible take any phone calls, that I had to sleep. My
father came to me in a dream. I dreamed I was awake, and he was standing at the
foot of my bed. He said: "Melvin, call your answering service". I
woke up, did so, and learned my father died.
Sometimes
after death communications are quite complex. I know a young man whose mother's
fiance was killed in a car accident. The step-father to be often contacts the
young man and they talk, usually about woodworking projects.
SCIENCE
TELLS US THAT THERE ARE OTHER REALITIES TO PERCEIVE
I
recognize that our society often trivializes and dismisses these experiences as
not being "real" but figments of a grieving mind. It could be argued
that everyone has vague fears about their baby dying, and then when it actually
happens, parents embellish or invent soothing premonitions to explain the
event. That is why we had two control groups on our study, to learn what normal
premonitions are like. They were nothing like the vividly real premonitions
that came true. For example, frequently the parents who had the premonitions
that came true, brought their child to the doctor or emergency rooms on the
strength of them or wrote them down in a journal. None of the control patients
did that after their vague premonitions.
Furthermore,
recent scientific advances strongly suggest that these experiences in fact are
real, based on my analysis of their similarities with near death experiences.
Near death research has documented that when we die, we are conscious and aware
of our surroundings, even if we seem to be comatose. We often perceive other
realities, and meet the same sort of "glowing ladies" that we heard
about in our SIDS study.
Theoretical
physics and recent advances in mathematics describe at least two other
realities, at least in theory. Mathematician Michio Kaku, in his book
Hyperspace, states that it is not hard to scientifically describe other
realities. He feels the problem is in understanding how we access or
communicate with them. Physicists at Princeton University are currently working
on proving the existence of as many as 10 dimensions.
ALL HUMAN
BEINGS BORN WITH THE ABILITY TO ACCESS OTHER REALITIES
Recent
medical research indicates that we are all born with a "sixth sense",
localized in our right temporal lobe, which allows us to perceive spiritual
realities. Furthermore, electromagnetic sensing organs of unknown use have also
been discovered in our brains. Our temporal lobe might even be able to access
universal memories stored in nature, not the brain.
I am
not suggesting that mainstream medicine currently accepts all of this. These
are my own speculations based on my own analysis of the scientific literature.
I am stating that our ability to understand and study the human ability to have
spiritual visions has rapidly progressed from pseudoscience to science in the
past ten years. Studies from such seemingly unrelated areas as the National
Warfare Institute, and the Brain Surgery Research Group at the
EXPLAINS
SCIENCE, DOES NOT CONTRADICT IT
My
theory that the spiritual visions surrounding death represent nothing less than
the normal function of our right temporal lobe is backed up by 100 years of
research on brain function, including studies of the effects of damage to the
temporal lobes, electrical stimulation studies, studies of temporal lobe
epileptics, and clinical case reports I have presented in the medical
literature.
It is
essential to understand that there is no modern theory of how memory functions
in the brain. There is also no modern theory of how brain activity accounts for
consciousness.
If you
think my ideas are speculative, read what Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick
wrote in the Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for a Soul:
"The speculations (his theory that consciousness is the result of neuronal
networks) contained in this book are not a fully worked out coherent set of
ideas. Rather, they constitute work in progress. I believe that the correct way
to conceptualize consciousness has not yet been discovered."
Ultimately,
spiritual visions contain their own truths, and do not need validation by
science. Yet again and again, I encounter people who have powerful visions and
intuitions, and they ignore or dismiss them as being unreal. I was the same
way, I could hardly believe my father came to me when I died, and I didn't even
tell my family about the experience for many years.
TRUSTING
VISIONS CAN HELP WITH THE TASKS OF MOURNING
There
are four tasks of mourning: 1)Accepting the reality of the loss. 2) Adapting to
a new environment without whoever has died. 3)Reinvesting emotional energy in
new areas, and 4)Rediscovering meaning in life. I find, in my work with
grieving parents, that spiritual visions play an important role in every step
of healthy grieving.
For
example, premonitions can give insight that there is a pattern and meaning to
life, even if that pattern is excruciatingly painful. A parent's life is
destroyed when a child dies. The universe suddenly seems unfair and irrational.
This often triggers a pathological search of meaning rooted in our own fears
and guilty secrets. Premonitions of death remind us that there is a hope that
there is a pattern to life beyond our comprehension. This can help to
reestablish meaning to life.
DON'T
WAIT FOR AN ANGEL IN WHITE: LIFE IS FILLED WITH ORDINARY MIRACLES
One of
my professors at Johns Hopkins Medical School, Frank Oski, wrote of a spiritual
vision he had as a medical student. He was deeply troubled that one of his
young patients had died of a congenital heart defect, and he felt it was unfair
that she died so young. That night, he suddenly woke up, as his room was lit
with a bright light. A woman stood at the foot of his bed.
She
told him that children who die at an early age know secrets about living that
we will never know. She said that every life is important, and that it
stretches our sense of humanity to care for such children who are less than
perfect. She told him that every life has meaning and purpose.
Dr.
Oski did not ask us to believe his story. He said that he would not believe
such a story if he heard it from someone else. Instead, he asked that we simply
keep our mind open to the everyday miracles in ordinary life. I was quite
puzzled at this, as a woman in white at the foot of the bed didn't seem like an
ordinary miracle to me.
After
years of studying and listening the visions surrounding death and dying, I have
finally learned what he meant. I have found that the seeds of healing grief are
often overlooked, trivialized, or dismissed as being too ordinary. Things
happen to us all that seem too trivial or coincidental to be important, or too
fantastic to be real.These are the miracles that Dr. Oski was speaking of. It
is nice that science is getting around to proving their worth, but they do not
need the validation of science. They contain their own truths. If such
experiences have happened to you, please contact me.
Melvin Morse MD
