My friend Dan (known online as Dan Mitchell) is a family man who grew up in the American heartland and still lives there; his biggest change of habitat was moving from an urban to a rural area. His whole life, however, has had a dimension beyond these earthbound trappings: he has a history of anomalous experiences, UFO sightings and encounters, and is occasionally still haunted by a preternatural being called the Harlequin.

About five years ago it all intensified into an inner vision of bleak, empty loneliness, a dark night of the soul that stretched out for most of a year. Dan weathered this crisis while steadfastly carrying on in daily life, supporting his wife and children. After it finally passed, a huge cache of repressed memories of strange experiences began to emerge. He started blogging about them and attracted a lot of interest, including disturbing reports that some of his stories of encountering negative entities triggered similar phenomena for readers. Eventually he stopped writing about the dark side of his experiences and deleted these posts.

Like most psychically sensitive people, Dan is affected by the energies of full and new moons. In 2011 a supermoon (full moon at closest approach to Earth) came on the spring equinox. Dan was doing some work in his back yard in the evening, when he became aware that a presence was communicating with him through the light from the sky. Suddenly he was no longer on the ground, and he wasn’t sure whether he was still in his body. He found himself in a room in a state of expanded consciousness ~ he felt incredibly well, and could perceive everything with his total being, not just his sense organs. In the room with him were two entities who appeared to be human but were much taller, wearing red and green robes. They radiated divine benevolence, and Dan recognized them as the source of all his past mysterious experiences. In pure psychic communication, they showed him that his own fear had been the cause of all the negative elements ~ specifically his fear of death.

A third being appeared and beckoned him to “go up and speak to the voice”. He ascended through a tunnel surrounded by a void, with a sense that everything was utterly familiar. He emerged into light, which he understood to be the “voice”. The light was a vast awareness, in fact infinite ~ and “it was all me”. He grasped that he had merged with the darkness that had so tormented him a couple of years before, and the fruit of the union was discovery of his true identity as this divine living space beyond time, death, and limitation. Dan was a changed man after this experience, and retained the sense of his real self as the “vast empty space” filled with divinity. He would only lose hold of it in situations that evoked a residual fear of death, like worrying about the welfare of his children if something happened to him. But a few months later this last blot on his enlightenment was resolved.

It happened on the 4^th of July. He was lying in bed; he was already awake, but then he awoke to a higher reality: an ethereal meadow where each blade of grass was like a shard of light, with a brook of healing waters flowing through it, and in the sky a Sun that was God himself. Daniel felt overwhelmed by a state of being which he called “Nostalgic Consciousness”, because it seemed as if “I had arrived at a place I never actually left ~ and I was deathless. There was no division between me, the world I was inhabiting, and God. I remember looking at my hands and simultaneously laughing and crying with joy because I was beyond the grasp of death.”

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:12

Quirk du Soleil ~ dawp.tumblr.com

Daniel’s next adventure:

An Amazing Case of White Enlightenment