For Christ's Sake: pressing the refresh button on the life of Jesus by Glenville Whittaker

Author:Glenville Whittaker [Whittaker, Glenville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Into the Light

Inner visualizations of light are phenomena beyond the realm of most people’s experience. This is why Morton Smith, Elaine Pagels, and other students of the Gnostic tradition who mention such experiences, consider some form of powerful hypnosis might have been at work. Yet the relatively recent ability of modern medicine to resuscitate people who are clinically dead has opened up a line of speculation demonstrating that the inner light theory might have some grounding in reality.

We are all familiar with the stories that have emerged over recent decades of people having what are called ‘near death experiences’. These people had been clinically dead for a period of time before being brought back by resuscitation or some other process, to report that during their ‘dead’ time they had a strong and vivid experience of a light, usually in the form of a tunnel, along which they seemed to travel toward what they felt was a benign or welcoming destination. They were then pulled back, as it were, into their physical bodies to find themselves once again on the operating table, or wherever they were positioned. Sometimes a variant of this experience would take place, where the patients find themselves ‘out of their body’ and see themselves as if from a higher point – as if on the ceiling for example – on the bed while a medical crew try their best to bring them back to life. Again, if their attempts are successful, the patient suddenly finds him or herself once again ‘in the body’, no longer ‘up there’ but back in the real world. A recent advance in scientific research into this phenomenon is that totally brain dead patients report such experiences on their ‘return’, challenging the prevailing theory that consciousness exists as a result of brain activity. Consequently, what is now being considered is that consciousness is pre-existent, is ‘everywhere’, and is ‘filtered’ though the brain to become life as we know and experience it. It is a coincidence that in Eastern mystical traditions, the term ‘supreme consciousness’ is often used for the divine, leaving us to question whether at the foundation of existence is an infinite consciousness of which a small sliver makes its way into the individual human being.

The religious interpretation of near death experiences – that in some way this is a heavenly light beckoning people to a heavenly destination – is understandably treated with great skepticism. It could well be that if the patient actually does die the light will disappear immediately and all consciousness lost. The light is not necessarily the gateway to some kind of eternal heaven. The point is, however, that whatever the reason for the experiences, and whether they were real or illusory, the patients who had them are convinced they were real. To them they were certainly genuine. In the same way, the people to whom Jesus might have been giving some kind of inner experience of light were convinced they had received it, and that Jesus was indeed the master of the light.

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