Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms

By Mark Fox

This book is a study of unusual light phenomena, based on almost 400 unpublished accounts of modern-day encounters with strange lights collected over a period of thirty years, held at the University of Wales, Lampeter. It is an original and perennially topical book that goes beyond existing studies of unusual light phenomena - such as lights encountered during angelic experiences, near-death experiences, 'after death communications' - in a number of ways. It shows, for example, that experiences of unusual, spiritual, religious and paranormal lights are cross-cultural, trans-historical, and are reported widely in the present day: but not necessarily experienced when near to death. It also demonstrates that these experiences share to a remarkable degree a 'common core', showing by drawing on a large number of vivid, unpublished and dramatic testimonies that unusual lights typically manifest at times of crisis, and are overwhelmingly benign and loving, producing 'turning-points' in the lives of experients and typically setting them in new spiritual and creative directions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780708326343

Book preview

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 Hallé 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 experiences’, unusual episodes that have aroused much debate and controversy, and remain, for many, deeply mysterious and deserving of deeper analysis and exploration than they have so far received. In addition, however, the collection that forms the basis of this study also includes other encounters with unusual lights that are little discussed and barely known in the literature. Amongst these are people’s descriptions of being caught in beams and shafts of light, of being wrapped or filled with light, of seeing unusual flashes of light, of suddenly seeing the whole landscape alive and transfused with supernatural light, and of seeing lights that appear to them while they are wide awake and far from death; lights that sometimes communicate with and comfort them, frequently at times of great stress and crisis.

What are we to make of experiences like these? Should we just dismiss them as fraud, fabrication and/or hallucination? Such an approach may appear attractive to sceptics. It is difficult, however, to invoke it as an explanation for many or even the vast majority of accounts that form this study of lightforms because, as we shall see, most come from sane, sensible, level-headed people who have reflected upon their experiences for many years and who, in some cases, have gone to great lengths themselves to consider – and ultimately disregard – all ‘conventional’ explanations for them.

Doubly difficult for the sceptics is the fact that a significant proportion of these experiences share a number of common traits and patterns, despite the diversity of descriptions and the fact that a great many of the persons reporting their experiences were widely separated in time and space when they occurred. How best to account for such consistency, such patterning? This is a question that runs like a thread throughout this book: raising, as it does, the possibility that a common core or source may underlie the various descriptions of light that are presented in it. Talk of such a possible ‘common core’ is of more than merely academic interest. If we were to try and dismiss experiences such as those with which this chapter began as mere hallucination and fantasy we would surely expect a wide variety of descriptions, from the mundane to the outrageous. As we shall see, however, a statistically significant percentage of all of the various different ‘types’ of light episodes recounted throughout the study resemble each other in a number of crucial ways. How can this be? Is the human mind somehow constructed to hallucinate and to fantasize in a number of set ways? Or may it be the case that a common, transcendent otherworldly source is responsible for a large number of unusual encounters with light and therefore responsible for their consistency and sharing of common features?

Lightforms in context

Early chapters of this study address two further crucial questions. Readers may already be wondering where a cache of almost 400 largely unpublished and remarkable accounts of light, some over thirty years old, has come from. If they are all as dramatic as those with which we began, why have they not been seen, published and discussed before? This is a good question, and chapter 1 will be concerned to answer it.

As that chapter will show, the lightforms study needs to be set in the context of the history of the archive from which its material was taken. For this, too, is a fascinating story, revolving, as it does, around the life and vision of a brilliant and unusual man who devoted much of his life to collecting unusual spiritual, religious and paranormal experiences and to analysing them and making their existence more widely known. That this man was a marine biologist seems perverse until it is realized what he was attempting to do. His name was Alister Hardy and his vision was to reconcile the ‘worlds’ of science and the spirit in such a way that evolutionary theory and spiritual experience could be seen to complement, not contradict, each other. In the process, he amassed a diverse range of highly unusual experiences, largely as a result of appeals in newspapers, magazines and on radio and television.

At present, the collection of accounts of unusual experiences that Hardy began to establish numbers almost 6,000 items, and is housed at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Chapter 1 will give an indication of just how rich, mysterious and diverse that collection has now become. Despite sharing his work with co-researchers, the vast majority of accounts sent to Hardy and his successors have remained unpublished and largely unexamined. It is partly to alert readers and researchers to the existence of this remarkable treasure trove of the spiritual, the unusual and the uncanny that chapter 1 is written. It also serves to put this study in a focused, historical context.

Chapter 2 is concerned with context too, attempting to locate this study of unusual lights cross-culturally. To do this, it ranges widely across the world’s religions and spiritual traditions in search of experiences that include manifestations of spiritual and mystic lights. There we will encounter the experiences of shamans across various cultures, ecstatic experiences associated with kundalini yoga, the Buddhist experience of shunyata, descriptions of light from the Upanishads, dramatic conversion visions, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, appearances of Jesus and startling encounters with angels and the ‘being of light’ reported often in near-death experiences. Throughout, the chapter will seek to discern and present any patterns that underlie the diversity of experiences being examined.

Sharing the mystery

Part II of this book, the lightforms study proper, seeks to test whether or not any kind of pattern can be discerned within the nearly 400 accounts of light that form its basis. It presents a large number of these accounts under the categories that close reading revealed them to have fallen into, and analyses and comments in detail upon them. All of the chapters in part II include remarkable and fascinating examples of particular ‘types’ of light experience, of which some in particular can be given special advance mention here. Chapter 3, for example, presents and explores a small but highly significant number of shared experiences of unusual light. Students of religious, spiritual and paranormal experience will immediately recognize the significance of these, firstly because of their relative rarity (most spiritual, religious and paranormal experiences occur to single individuals, frequently when they are alone) and secondly because of the opportunities shared experiences present for verification. For these reasons, despite only containing ten cases, the ‘shared’ category is given particular attention at the beginning of part II.

Alister Hardy began collecting accounts for his archive – originally named the ‘Religious Experience Research Unit’ (RERU) – in 1969. By 1971 he had amassed around 3,000 of them. As chapter 1 will show, despite a wide variety of interests, he was sometimes unwilling or simply unable to investigate in detail every account sent to him, leaving that for others who came after him. Whilst he showed some interest in out-of-body experiences, what have come to be known as ‘near-death experiences’(NDEs) do not appear to have interested him, and he was content simply to acknowledge them and to file them when they were sent to him.

The result of this is interesting in the extreme, because in the first five or six years of Hardy’s research unit’s life a significant number of persons at or near the point of death were to undergo – and later to send to Hardy – accounts of highly unusual experiences that took place at the extremes of their illnesses and sometimes during actual episodes of temporary clinical death. These are, of course, the occasions for the occurrence of what are today known as near-death experiences. This term, however, did not exist before 1975, when it was coined by Raymond Moody in his ground-breaking and best-selling study Life after Life. Before that time such experiences were rarely discussed, and were virtually unknown. Today, by contrast, there can be few people in the West who do not know that out-of-body experiences, feelings of bliss and peace, tunnels, lights, encounters with deceased relatives and reluctant returns to life are frequently reported near the point of clinical death. Any accounts of such experiences written and sent to Alister Hardy’s unit between 1969 and 1974 therefore assume a particular importance. We can see, for example, if any pre-1975 accounts match to any significant extent the myriad accounts of NDEs reported and publicized since that time. This gives us a unique opportunity to examine a group of similar experiences that we can be reasonably assume were not influenced to any significant extent by expectation, publicity-seeking, wishful thinking or imagination fuelled by popular media coverage. The result will be of special interest to those with a particular interest in near-death experiences, for any collection of pre-1975 cases offers a virtually unparalleled ‘control’ group of NDEs that cannot have arisen from the attention that was focused on them in the last quarter of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first.

Drawing conclusions

Part III is concerned to draw conclusions, and it is here perhaps that its most controversial and thought-provoking claims are to be found. As the reader will see, the unusual experiences of light that form the basis of the book permit of no easy, straightforward explanations. Considering, and ultimately discarding, interpretations of these remarkable experiences in terms of things such as mental instability, stress, drugs, migraine, epilepsy and other abnormal mental processes, it draws the intriguing conclusion that in an age where science claims to be able to explain so much, it cannot explain what has happened to many of the persons whose testimonies we have examined. In short: we are drawn to a final recognition that these unusual experiences of light may permit us brief but tantalizing glimpses of the intrusion of another world into our own: a world from which peace, love, joy, comfort, hope and light may flow in order to illuminate our darkest hours.

Part biography, part history, part investigation, part discovery, the ground that I cover has determined that the subject-matter is diverse enough to be all-encompassing, yet focused enough to enable certain, highly specific conclusions to be drawn. Both academics and general readers should find much here to interest them. The age of many of the accounts – which describe experiences stretching from the early years of the twenty-first century back to the early years of the twentieth – the shared accounts, and the pre-Moody NDEs, might be expected to have a particular appeal to specialists working in the field. This is not, however, a book written solely for them. The pleasure of simply sitting and reading the remarkable experiences that are reproduced in these pages may well be deemed to have repaid the price of admission, for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Part I

1

A sacred ‘something’: the spiritual odyssey of Sir Alister Hardy

*

A secret in the heart of Wales

Lampeter – or, to give the town its Welsh name, Llanbedr Pont Stefan – nestles in the hills in the middle of lush, green west Wales, north of the Forest of Brechfa, west of the Cambrian mountains, on the very edge of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘green desert’. This small, Welsh-speaking market town seems to the casual visitor to be far away from civilization. Yet the popular coastal holiday resort of Aberaeron is only 12 miles away, and less than an hour’s drive leads to the impressive National Library of Wales.

People have lived around Lampeter for thousands of years, the earliest evidence being the prehistoric stone circle at Altgoch and a scattering of Bronze Age and Roman remains. There is something enchanting, almost mystical about the town and its surroundings. There are reports of strangely coloured lights in the surrounding hills, particularly around Tregaron bog. Some locals acknowledge this while others remain tight-lipped, choosing perhaps to keep the area’s secrets close.

Lampeter escaped the 1904-5 Welsh Religious Revival but is nevertheless crammed with chapels and churches. By far the largest institution in the town, however, is its university. Founded as St David’s College in 1822 and known today as the University of Wales, Lampeter, it is the oldest university institution in England and Wales apart from Oxford and Cambridge. Its original building, next to the remains of an old motte and bailey castle, was modelled on the older Oxford colleges, with an enclosed, grassed quadrangle embraced by the founding institution of St David’s. Today the University of Wales, Lampeter is the smallest university in Britain, but its size belies its excellent academic reputation. Unsurprisingly, given the rich religious and spiritual heritage of the surrounding area, subjects such as philosophy and theology have also gained a growing and acknowledged academic respect in recent years.

Perhaps this is why in the summer of 2000 it became the home of the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC). Originally housed at Manchester College, Oxford, by the time it arrived in Lampeter the centre held almost 6,000 accounts of spiritual, religious and paranormal experiences, many unexamined and most entirely unpublished. Amongst these 6,000 accounts are a large number of accounts of unusual light, and these are the subject-matter and central focus of this book. As will become clear as this chapter unfolds, these cannot be properly explored or understood without first pausing to consider the history of the RERC and its founder, Sir Alister Hardy.

A sacred ‘something’

Who was Hardy? In many ways he was a man ahead of his time: a charismatic, unusual, original and fascinating character whom history seems to have almost entirely overlooked. Yet his achievements were many and varied. Almost a hundred years ago, for example, when many people were arguing that scientific discoveries spelled the end of anything spiritual or ‘supernatural’, Hardy disagreed. Instead – and he was to argue this throughout his life – he sought a reconciliation between the worlds of science and spirit. Far from disproving a spiritual ‘something’ to life, he argued, evolution actually required it, for it has enabled us to adapt and survive in ways that would have been impossible without it. It was religion itself, he argued, that often stopped people from appreciating the spiritual dimension to life. It is tempting see Hardy as an early twenty-first-century thinker and writer rather than what he was: a man who was born in the nineteenth century and whose feet were planted firmly in the twentieth.

Born in 1896, from a very early age Hardy was clearly aware of a spiritual ‘presence’ in his life, but he gives repeated indications in his writings that this was not something he saw as the exclusive preserve of any one religion, and not even as something that needed to be looked for in religion at all. His own unpublished autobiography records how he loved to walk in the countryside as a boy, wandering along river banks near his