Light (B)

A Canadian woman told the Guggenheims about seeing her two daughters, ten days after their death in a farm accident:

Noelle and Christie were standing there, hand-in-hand, sort of looking up.  They were bathed in a very bright, clear white light.  The light was indescribable!  It was brighter than anything I’ve ever seen, and it should have hurt my eyes, but it didn’t.[1]

As one experiencer described it, it is a “white, lovely, iridescent light. . . .  Just a beautiful, white light.  Warm.  Very comforting, like reconciliation.”[2]  Another speaks of “a glorious, living light that was more felt than seen since no eye could absorb its splendor.”[3]  An experiencer called Gina recalls “a beautiful, beautiful golden white light.”[4]  Witnesses clearly struggle to convey their sense of what they saw. “Oh, what a Light it was!” says Bob Helm.  “It was gold and silver and green and full of love.”[5] “Bright, white light, yet soft and easy to look at,” says yet another witness.  “It was like the light was alive.”[6]  “The light,” says Pat Clark, “was the brightest and most brilliant I had ever seen both before my NDE and since.  The light was more brilliant than a diamond.  In fact, it was a whitish-blue color. . . .  The light was sharper than the light of any star (for astronomy is my hobby).”[7]”  The Bardo Thödol, or, as it is generally known in English, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text designed to guide the newly dead into the next life, says that, when the spirit of the deceased leaves the body, it is surrounded by the “Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality.”[8]  In the first or second century Hindu classic known as the Bhagavadgita, Krishna tells Arjuna that those who die, “who part the bonds constraining them to flesh,” enter “the eternal world”:

Another Sun gleams there! Another Moon!

Another Light,–not Dusk, nor Dawn, nor Noon—

Which they who once behold return no more;

They have attained My rest, life’s Utmost boon![9]

[1] Guggenheim and Guggenheim, Hello from Heaven!, 109.

[2] $Sabom, Light and Death, 80.

[3] Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 16.

[4] William J. Serdahely, “Loving Help from the Other Side: A Mosaic of Some Near-Death, and Near-Death-Like, Experiences,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 10/3 (Spring 1992): 174.

[5] Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 29.

[6] Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 21.

[7] Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 26.

[8] See W. Y. Evans-Wentz, ed., The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi-Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering [1927] (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 95.  [See original.]

[9] Edwin Arnold, trans., Bhagavadgita (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 78 (chapter 15).  I argue, of course, that some have returned.  Indeed, I suspect that passages such as this may derive from testimonials of those who caught a glimpse and were able to communicate it.  The association of brightness with the divine is a very ancient one.  The Greek adjective dios, for example, related to the name Zeus and to such modern words as divine and deity, means both “noble” and “godlike,” but goes back ultimately to an Indo-European root connected with luminosity, shining, and the daytime sky.