Arthur Ford's NDE and His Commentary about "The Two Bodies of Man"

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The expression 'near-death experience' (NDE) was popularized by the Raymond Moody book Life After Life (1975) and numerous reports of these occurrences have been shared by people throughout recent decades.  A "psychic experience" described by trance medium Arthur Ford in his autobiography Nothing So Strange (1958) presents some of the aspects that have come to be associated with NDEs.  This passage is presented in this article.  The incident took place in 1949 while Arthur was hospitalized in Florida because of a complete physical breakdown (as mentioned in the preceding blog article).  Arthur recalled that the following months were a time of introspection for him.  He remembered: "Often my mind went back to a psychic experience I had had when I lay desperately ill in a veteran's hospital in Coral Gables.  At that time it had impressed but not changed me, but now it began to take hold."

What precipitated my acute illness I have forgotten, but I was in a critical condition and my friends were told that I would probably not live through the night.  I did not know the verdict, of course, but when I heard a doctor say to a nurse, "Give him the needle, he might as well be comfortable," I surmised that this was it and I wondered how long it would take to die, but my only emotion was one of hazy curiosity.

Then I realized that I was floating in the air above my bed.  I saw my body but it did not interest me.  I felt at peace; indeed, peace is too hackneyed a term for my deep feeling that everything was as it should be.  Then I was unconscious.  Or rather, after a time which had no feeling of time at all, I knew that I had been unconscious, but now that I was floating through space with no sense of a body and yet as my full and complete self.  I saw that in some way I had reached a green valley with mountains on every side, and everywhere a brilliance of light and color such as I had never experienced before.  Coming toward me were people and I realized that they were all friends and acquaintances I had thought of as dead.  Yet here they were.  I seemed to be recognizing them by their personality traits rather than by their customary "looks" for I was aware that some who had died in decrepit old age now gave the impression of vigorous youth.  Two cousins who had died in early childhood were now mature; that is, they were complete personalities.  I did not question the absence of the marks of former physical identity because I knew each one satisfactorily for just what he was; there was no veil of flesh between us.

Seeing one old friend I would be reminded of another and note that he was not present.  Finally I asked about a few whom I missed.  No one answered, but a blur seemed to come over my eyes.  I knew I was in the same spot but the light grew dim and the colors lost their brilliance; those to whom I had been speaking faded out while those of whom I had inquired appeared in hazy shapes.  I grew heavy; my thoughts shot out to former earthly pursuits and I realized without knowing why, that I was being allowed to a view a lower sphere.  I cried out to the friends for whom I had asked and I felt they heard but they did not answer.  Then everything cleared again and a gentle radiant personality stood beside me, smiling, "Do not worry about them.  They can come here any time they want to, if they desire it more than anything else."  My concern for them gave way to an unanxious state.

Everyone around me seemed busy.  Without knowing what they were doing, I knew that their activity was good and right, and I saw that they were very happy.  Some to whom I had been bound by close ties in the past did not now pay much attention to me, but I did not resent their inattention.  Others whom I had known slightly—and some I had not known at all—seemed attracted to me.  I knew without explanation that some law of affinity was at work.

At one point—all this went on without any sense of time—I found myself standing before a beautiful building of gleaming, dazzling white such as I had never before imagined.  I knew without being told that this was the Judgment Hall; I knew, too, that I was to wait in a huge anteroom.  I heard voices and through the wide doorway I glimpsed two long tables with people sitting at them.  They were talking about me.  So this was the judgement!  Words came back to me, "The day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night."

As I waited I began to review my life.  It was not a happy process.  Then I sensed that the people at the long tables were also taking inventory of my life.  However, the incidents that gave me concern did not seem to worry them.  Their categories of sin were not those of the Baptist Church of my youth: alcoholism, sex, and what are called worldly pursuits.  Rather, they spoke over and over of selfishness, egotism, stupidity, and frequently used the word dissipation of energy, gifts, opportunities.  They brought to light selfish stupid acts of my youth which I had long since pushed out of consciousness and at the same time they smiled over some of the simple kindly acts as any man does for others and promptly forgets.  Obviously, they were trying to establish the main trend of my life.

Indicating me, one spoke of my having failed to accomplish "what he knew he had to finish."  I gathered that I had been born into the world with some well-defined plan or purpose, and that I had somehow either failed to accept my destiny or had not matured to the point of knowing what it was that I had to do.

The word "record" was used many times.  I felt as if I must have been equipped with a built-in tape recorder upon which every experience and attitude had made an indelible impression.  I wanted to hear the whole record and yet I seemed to know that they were not going to let me sense more than the life immediately past, lest my attention be drawn from the task at hand.  As I stood alone—very much alone—before the open door of this Judgment Hall, I was not then analyzing what I was experiencing; I was only experiencing.

Then all at once I sensed that they were deliberating sending me back to earth to finish my assignment, and I rebelled completely.  Definitely I did not relish the thought of taking on the beaten diseased body I had left in the hospital.  However, they were not asking my permission; they were not consulting me.   I saw another door before me and some way I knew that if I passed through that door I would be back in my bed.  My earth nature reasserted itself.  Like a spoiled child having a tantrum, I pushed my feet against that door and fought against its being opened.  I can remember using rather violent language.  Then I had a sudden sense of hurtling through space.  I opened my eyes — and looked into the face of the nurse.

Afterwards the nurse told me that during the time I had been in coma I had not moved nor given any trouble at all, but for half an hour or so before I regained consciousness I struggled and shouted invectives, insisting to someone that I did not want to wake up.  Knowing the nurse, I did not explain.  What could I say that would persuade her or anyone else that I had experienced a reality beyond any I had known in all my previous years?

Even now that I have written out the happening as simply as I can, I feel something of Paul's sense of futility.  For his experience of life beyond this earth he used the word "unutterable" — and I guess that is as good as any word.  I was like a man once blind who miraculously regained his sight and then tried to explain an El Greco painting to those still blind.  As Sydney Lanier wrote in "The Marshes of Glynn" when he was dying of tuberculosis —

. . . belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know. . . . And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within.

The annals of transcendental communication provide descriptions of the afterlife that one may compare with this account.  Some examples are provided in previous blog articles.  (including 1, 2, 3, 4)  Arthur Ford's "psychic experience" is also a source of reflection for him in his second autobiographical book Unknown But Known (1968) as he considered a variety of knowledge concerning the human 'soul body.'  Some excerpts from the book follow.

Psychical research in recent years has taken a new turn that holds most exciting promise — the study of the aura and of the astral body.

 
One of man's oldest assertions concerning his own basic nature, stated in prehistory and verified by the psychically informed of our own day, is that he has two highly energized bodies.  One is of tissue, bone, and blood, the other of pure psychic energy.

 
Is there a family in the land without some member, in injury, coma, or serious illness, who had not stood at death’s threshold — and come back to report a dimension, beyond the world of the five senses, where one is still very much alive?  I know of a man, young at the time (now a member of Congress) desperately ill and in coma, whose mother formed a prayer group and prayed for his recovery.  He got well — and made his mother promise never to do such a thing again.  The land he had seen in spirit, he said, was far more splendid than the one he returned to!

Every war produces out-of-body experiences.  C. K. Jenkins, then a British soldier, was hit during the fighting at Ypres in 1917.  "My body," he later related, "was blasted from me so quickly I was not aware of its falling.  I went on without it, feeling vitally alive and free.  Then I realized I'd have to go back."  After his recovery he said the experience made him realize "my body is not really me, but only a cloak or skin I wear."

 
A kind of luminous silver cord, connecting the physical with the spirit body, is often reported in association with these experiences.  The understanding usually reported is that if this cord were severed it would be impossible to return to the flesh-and-blood state.  A native of Australia, Mrs. E. Herrock, found herself out of the body and passing through a closed door.  She tried, but failed, to move an electric light switch.  Looking back she saw, trailing behind her, "a long silver cord or streamer of light" connecting her with her physical body.  (source: Intimations of Immortality by Robert Crookall 1965)

 
One of the most vividly real experiences of my own life was just such an out-of-body excursion.  It forever lifted the problem of survival—for me—out of the realm of faith and brought it clearly down to the plane of realism.  All the objective evidence of survival I had accumulated in thirty years—I had traveled round the world and had sittings with the great mediums of our day—became by comparison unimportant.

 
Spiritual journeys of this kind have been made by people, sick and well, ever since there were people.  "I know a man," wrote St. Paul, one of history's great sophisticates in psychic matters, "who fourteen years ago were caught up into the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2) . . . there are celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies . . . it is sown a physical body and raised a spiritual body."  (1 Cor. 15:44)

 
Out-of-body experiences routinely have certain features which do not routinely occur in dreams.  There is the beginning reality of floating in an actual place—not a dream-place—and seeing, in detail, actual objects, including one's own physical body.  There is the frequent mention of a luminous cord connecting body and spirit, and the feeling ("or e'er the silver cord be loosed"—Ecclesiastes) that if this cord were to be severed the two bodies would be permanently parted and the physical body would die.

 
Since we on this earth are—right now—spirits as well as bodies, observations of the second body do not always wait upon a death's door experience.  Many psychical researchers are convinced that the "aura" so often observed—and sometimes even registered on instruments—is an emanation of the second or spiritual body, which in normal, healthy earth-life interpenetrates and coincides with the physical body.

 
That the human body gives off radiation has been known scientifically since 1923, when it was measured by the Leningrad scientist Alexander Gurwitsch.

 
The physicist-engineer turned psychical researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell, a leader of world thought in psychic matters until his death in 1952, has restated, in terms of twentieth-century science, St. Paul's classical postulate of man's two bodies.  Tyrrell felt that the physical and spirit bodies belonged, from the very beginning, in two distinctly separate categories of existence.

The material organism [Tyrrell wrote] is the aspect of something belonging first and last to the finite level we now occupy, while the real human being—the personality—is by nature a stranger to that level.  The strictly physical body is no more to be identified with the person when it is alive than when it is dead. . . . Our physical universe is not unique in the scheme of things.  If, when we see it, we are indeed looking at the house of reality, then we are looking at one facade of that house only.  Matter is not the despotic sovereign for which we have mistaken it; the brain is not the physical correlative of consciousness, but merely a link connecting the personality with the finite level."  (source: Grades of Significance by G. N. M. Tyrrell 1931)

One can conclude that NDEs and OBEs are terms expressing a condition of 'psychic phenomena' and could happen to anyone.  Making possible all psychic interactions is what Arthur expressed in Unknown But Known as "the ultimate Power from whom all things emanate."
  
Other articles at this blog about NDE's and related topics include "Bryce Bond's NDE", "Eaten By The Tiger by Emile Allen, M.D.", "Passings: Death, Dying, and Unexplained Phenomena by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff", "The Brain and Psychic Phenomena", "Channeled Perspectives of the Brain" (Part 1) and (Part 2), "Dawn of the New Age: 'Leader' Writes", "Channeling 'Silver Birch' (In Comparison with Other Cases)" and "Metaphysical Instruction from 'Yada Di Shi'ite' - 'The Inner Circle' Q&A Transcript Mystic Magazine 1955".