Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena , livre ebook

Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms



Religion, Education and Culture
Series Editors: William K. Kay (Bangor University, UK) Leslie J. Francis (University of Warwick, UK) and Jeff Astley (Durham University, UK)

This series addresses issues raised by religion and education within contemporary culture. It is intended to be of benefit to those involved in professional training as ministers of religion, teachers, counsellors, psychologists, social workers or health professionals while contributing to the theoretical development of the academic fields from which this training is drawn.

Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms

MARK FOX



UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2008

Mark Fox, 2008
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2634-3
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.wales.ac.uk/press
The right of Mark Fox to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Irene Fox. She gave light to all who knew and loved her.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Author s note
Lightforms - a mystery posed
Part I
1 A sacred something : the spiritual odyssey of Sir Alister Hardy
2 Visions, awakenings and illuminations: unusual lights across cultures
Part II
3 Sharing the fire: unusual lights with multiple witnesses
4 A light when alone: solitary experiences of unusual light
5 Enfolded and infused: unusual lights that embrace and fill
6 Transformations and auras: strange illuminations of landscapes and people
7 Shining in the darkness: lights seen during near-death experiences
8 Out of this world? Visionary encounters with light
9 Beams, rays, shafts: penetrations by light
10 Brighter than the sun: flashes of light
Part III
11 Throwing light on lightforms - a mystery solved
Bibliography

Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the following people, without whom this book could not have been written: Professor Paul Badham, Dr Wendy Dossett and Peggy Morgan, past and present directors of the Religious Experience Research Centre, for access to such a large amount of archival material. I hope that this book has gone some way to repaying their trust and kindness. Val Camroux and Selina Stewart for ensuring that my college timetable always gave me the opportunity to write; Professor Leslie Francis and Canon Michael Perry, members of the steering group, for friendly and helpful advice; Tracey Kesterton, for support and encouragement; Jennifer Randell, for editing - and thereby greatly improving - the text; and Anne Watkins at the Religious Experience Research Centre for kind advice, particularly whilst I was researching the life of Sir Alister Hardy and the history of Lampeter.

Author s note
Numbers in brackets throughout the text refer to the numbers of the accounts as they are found in the archive. All accounts have been reproduced as written, including errors and/or irregularities of spelling, grammar and punctuation, unless otherwise indicated.

Lightforms - a mystery posed
Lightforms
A teacher, settling her terminally ill aunt for the night and appalled at the prospect of nursing yet another relative through a terrible illness, is suddenly startled to see a strange and wonderful light in the corner of the bedroom she and her aunt share. It grows in size and brilliance and she feels overwhelmed by a comforting presence that she associates with it. It seems to be giving her the strength she needs to go on. Many years later she will remark that she has never since that time felt such a feeling of peace and comfort as she did on that night. There is a sequel to her experience. The following night she settles her aunt down again and this time notices that she is gazing at the very corner of the room where the mysterious light appeared the night before. Questioning her aunt about what she is seeing, she receives the reply: I m not telling you, it s a secret. The aunt dies a few days later but the teacher never forgets her experience. Reading of an appeal for experiences like hers in a newspaper many years later, she writes it down and sends it in, even enclosing a diagram of the layout of the room in order to show how she could not have mistaken what she saw for any ordinary outside light on that memorable occasion.
A freshly bereaved widower begins to hear a series of voices shortly after his wife s death. One day he hears her say, Take me to him , and shortly afterwards beautiful pale blue lights begin to appear throughout his flat in whatever room he happens to be. One night a golden flame of light appears near the ceiling, then vanishes. The blue lights remain, however, and he is somewhat baffled as to what they might mean. Pondering the significance of his light experiences some years after they began he is particularly puzzled by the voices that seemed to presage them, for he is profoundly deaf and cannot hear normal conversation. He heard the voices clearly, however. Later, he too responds to a newspaper request for experiences like his by writing them down and sending them in.
A nineteen-year-old girl, standing in the beautiful garden of her parents home in Sussex, suddenly notices a silent change steal across the peaceful landscape. The grass suddenly seems to shine with an inner radiance, along with everything else in her field of vision. Not daring to move, she feels uplifted and thankful to be experiencing such an extraordinary living light. Her senses seem to have become more acute and she feels as if she can even hear the leaves growing. All the colours seem enhanced and brighter. She receives the impression that she is suddenly looking into the absolute nature of things, seeing reality as it really is. Several years later she reads a magazine interview with a man who has dedicated his life to studying experiences like hers, and she writes it down and sends it to him.
Suffering terribly from acute food poisoning, a man racked with terrible stomach pains suddenly and inexplicably awakes to what he will later describe as a spirit of well being . He finds himself standing in some kind of cave or tunnel, and ahead of him he sees a kind of disc of light, like a door or opening to the outside: wherever outside is. He looks down and realizes that he is clad in some sort of loose white robe. Incredibly, his left arm, lost in an accident many years before, now seems to be intact. He moves reluctantly towards the door of light when he suddenly hears a voice crying loudly: Go back, there is much for you to do! The power in the voice gives him the strength to stop, and he begins to back away from the door. All at once he is back on the couch again, where he had been sitting only moments before, now racked with the agonizing stomach pains once more. Later, having recovered, he will hear a radio programme about a man who is setting up a special research unit to study experiences like his and an appeal for accounts at the end of the programme includes the address to send them to. He writes up his own experience and sends it in. It is 1971 and the research unit is entering its third year and it has already amassed 3,000 accounts, many like his.
Attending a performance by the Hall Orchestra of Beethoven s Choral Symphony, an emotionally distressed and depressed woman prays to be taken out of the black pit of her own mind. Suddenly she feels surrounded by a rush of light that lifts her and both surrounds her and wells up within her. With the light comes a feeling of bliss a million times stronger than anything she has ever experienced. She feels a strange cool breeze playing over her, and experiences a whirling sensation that leaves her feeling as if she is hovering a foot or so above her body. Later she will attend a talk in her local church hall given by a man who is collecting and analysing experiences like hers as part of an ongoing series of studies of spiritual and religious experiences. She writes her incredible account down and sends it to him.
A mystery posed
What are we to make of experiences like these? What is their nature? Where do they come from? What do they mean? Different as they at first appear, might they actually share a common source? If so, can we explain that source scientifically and rationally? Or should we reject such conventional explanations, and look instead to a higher, stranger, supernatural source: a spiritual world, perhaps, coexisting alongside our own but capable of breaking through to it on certain special occasions? These are just some of the questions raised by each of the unusual experiences of light that I have just presented - experiences that form the basis of this book and which I have termed Lightforms .
This book grew out of a discovery of almost 400 accounts of unusual experiences of light, nearly all unpublished, and gathered over a period of more than thirty years. These accounts include descriptions of experiences that today we might describe as angelic experiences and near-death expe