The face of Jesus has been spotted in another mundane everyday object - this time in a paper towel.These days the face of the Messiah seems to be popping up all over the place from pieces of grilled cheese to the sides of buildings. 46-year-old Martin Cotterill is the latest to claim such a sighting - he believes the face of Christ can be seen quite clearly in a paper towel thatwas placed on his foot after undergoing treatment at a health clinic.
"My first thought was it"s Jesus, he"s come to look over me! " he said, but added that "it"s all very tongue-in-cheek." It must have been holy water that made the face of Jesus appear miraculously on a paper towel. Martin Cotterill, 46, was stunned to see an image of the Messiah emerge before his eyes during a visit toa health clinic.
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined. I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the ideaof light seemed inconceivable. Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them.
Others tried to terrorize me. "You will never leave here," they said. "Never. Never." I found myself laughing at them. "I'm not scared of you," I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak—everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows.
I reached
the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber.
Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took
to be the devil himself.
"The darkness will never end," he said. "It will never end. Youcan never escape this place."
"I can," I replied.
All at once, I willed
myself to rise. I sailed up through the tunnel of fire, higher and
higher until I broke through to a white light. All darkness immediately
vanished. My body felt light, at peace. I floated among a beautiful
spread of colors and patterns. Slowly my ayahuasca vision faded. I
returned to my body, to where I lay in the hut, insects calling from
the jungle.
"Welcome back," the shaman said.
The next morning, I
discovered the impossible: The severe depression that had ruled my life
since childhood had miraculously vanished.
Giant blue butterflies
flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee higher into treetops. The
deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the more I realize I can't turn
back. It hasb......
Volcanoes fascinate us, such towering symbols of man's helplessness in the face of nature's destructive power. Every year around the world, 60 volcanoes erupt, including Mount Merapi in Indonesia, which is currently in the throes of an eruption. Some do little more than remind us of their potential force should they choose to use it, others kill and change the global temperature for years.Mount Hekla, standing at nearly 5,000 feet high is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes. It was known to islanders as the "Gateway to Hell" - with good reason. When it erupted in 1159BC theeffects were felt hundreds of miles away.
In Scotland the whole of the west coast was devastated.A sulphuric cloud of ash and acid rain fell on the land, a tsunami raced across the sea and the sun was hidden for years. Such an event immediately changed the lives of the inhabitants of what we now call Scotland and may well have permanently changed their way of life.
When
Krakatau, in Indonesia, erupted in 1883 – possibly one of the most
destructive eruptions in recorded history - the noise was heard
hundreds of miles away. Alistair Moffat, author of Before Scotland, has
no doubt that when Hekla blew, the west coast inhabitants must have
heard the boom and panicked.
"The rumble and roar of the
tsunami, the black cloud … it must have been an appalling time. The old
and young dying first. Prehistoric people must havethought that the
world was ending."
After the terror came the
fear. Moffat thinks they would have been in no doubt that the god's
were angry. The eruption would have been heralded with ferocious
electrical storms and the weather would have changed. These people, who
we think lived by gathering food from the sea, would have seen their
livelihood disappear. The sea changed, crops would have failed and
afterwards, for a generation, there was no summer.
"We know it happened
because of dendochronology," says Moffat, referring to a method of
dating which involves examining and counting the rings of trees. "By
measuring tree rings in ancient trees you can see that it was a
climate-changing event. It shows that for 18 to 20 years there were no
summers."
Faced with this, Moffat
maintains that the people would have had little choice. Theymus......
ABSTRACT: The percentage of
hell-like near-death experiences (NDEs) is probably much larger than has been
previously claimed. In this article, I discuss current research into what are
now termed "distressing" or "unpleasant" NDEs, and my own findings from
interviews of over a hundred such cases. I compare this information with earlier
reports from Maurice Rawlings (1978, 1980), mythological traditions about the
concept of hell, and renderings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz,
1957). Finally, I detail four types of NDEs -- initial, hell-like, heaven-like,
and transcendental -- and what seems to be an attitudinal profile characteristic
of each type.
My plane was late. That meant I
had to run lengthy corridors at Dulles International Airport near Washington,
D.C., to catch my next flight. As I ran, another woman scurrying in the opposite
direction yelled, "I know who you are; you're the woman I just saw on
television. You're the gutsy one who talks about negative near-death
experiences. Keep doing it. Don't stop." I was so startled by her comment, I
momentarily slowed my pace and yelled back, "Who are you? What do you mean by
that?" Her answer surprised me. "I'm a surgical nurse at a hospital in Phoenix,
Arizona. We have lots of near-death cases there, and almost all of them are the
negative kind. You know what I mean --people who wind up in hell!" Before I
could respond further, she was out of sight. I wanted to go after her and ask
more questions-- What hospital? How many cases? How long has this been
happening? Why haven't you reported it? but my pressing need to hurry convinced
me otherwise. I barely made my connection. This incident happened in 1989, a
year when I was nearly overwhelmed by reports from people who experienced a
hellish environment at the brink of death, rather than a heavenly one.
Most researchers of the
near-death experience (NDE) report that unpleasant cases are quite rare,
numbering less than one percent of the thousands thus far investigated and of
the eight million tallied by a Gallup Poll during a survey on the subject
published in 1982 (Gallup and Proctor, 1982). Yet my experiences interviewing
near-death survivors since 1978 have consistently shown me otherwise, suggesting
an abundance of such cases: 105 out of the more than 700 I have queried.
At the 1990 Washington, D.C.,
conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS),
Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist noted for his long-term commitment to near-death
research, admitted that people like himself had not been asking the right
questions to identify those who might have undergone "dark" or distressing
episodes . He confessed: "We didn't try to find them because we didn't want to
know." His comment underscored the fact that, for the most part, published
reports of near-death studies have side-stepped "negative" accounts. Greyson and
Nancy Evans Bush, President of IANDS, have recently completed a descriptive
study of 50 terrifying cases they have collected over the past 9 years (Greyson
and Bush, 1992). Others whose work has acknowledged the existence of such
experiences include British researcher Margot Grey (1985) and sociologist
Charles Flynn (1986). Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings and myself, however, have
actively pursued near-death reports of a hellish nature since the very beginning
of our involvement in the field.
All our articles are sorted under categories and topics, making it easier to cross reference different subjects. Below are all the different categories the articles are sorted under alphabetically.
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Source: Daily Mail
(from the Spring '92
Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol.10, No.3)
