logotipo

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The Union with God and with the Universe in Mysticism and Near Death Experiences
Rev. Professor Francois Brune

In his published work On Life’s Frontier, Kenneth Ring remarks on the similarities between Near Death Experiences and mystical experiences. I consider that the final stage of both these experiences consists of a vivid sense of nothing but ‘Oneness with God’, and at the same time of ‘Oneness with the Universe’, the two terms often seeming to represent the same experience, that of a sense of God filling the Universe. It is very clear that all the people undergoing these experiences are not simply repeating theories acquired from others. On every occasion they are describing an intensely personal experience, and it is precisely the final stage of these experiences that has the power completely to transform their lives.

But those who have lived these intense experiences are at pains to insist on their essentially paradoxical nature. While groping for words they always return to the same fundamental point: the experience is not really a case of ‘Oneness with’, because ‘With’ implies otherness. I am not one with myself. I am myself. I can only become one with someone other than myself. But if I am experiencing the existence of someone other than myself, even in a state of union, then that state of union has still not become true unity. Ramakrishna [the great Bengali saint] expressed the problem perfectly. ‘How to become the sugar while at the same time tasting the sugar’.

We find ourselves in fact confronted with a situation that corresponds perfectly to the relationship between Christ and his Father in the Gospels: ‘I and my Father are One’. The Church Councils of the first centuries AD proposed a conceptual solution to this dilemma by positing a distinction between the person and the being. Several persons can live in the same individual being. If it is really so, the distinction between persons no longer implies any incompleteness in the state of unity. This construct allows all these testimonies to retain all their power.

The messages received by ITC are generally short; nevertheless we have confirmation through them of the NDE. Thus a message received by Madame Simonet at Reims from an old man dead at around age sixty, and addressed to his still-living mother contained the words “Mother, the light of God is everywhere, and it is marvellous”. Subsequently, he told his daughter “My dear, love – there is nothing but love”. Essentially, these are the words used by Saint Jean to describe God.