I USED TO THINK I KNEW WHAT FAITH WAS. In my mind it meant the belief, the absolute knowing, that I was taken care of and that my prayers were answered. No matter the situation, I knew that it would be resolved and for the highest good of all concerned. If I did my part, God would do the rest. Doubts crept in at times but mostly and throughout my life, the type of faith that moved mountains and invited miracles blessed my days. Lately, though, I have come to realize there is another step we can take on our spiritual journey - this one beyond faith.

The story goes that when hardly more than a tot, I had tea parties with God. I would set a place for God at my tiny table, provide a chair, and then engage in long conversations, always pausing for God's reply. A visiting minister once witnessed one of my tea parties and left convinced that God really was there, and that what he had seen was far too real to have been just a child's imagination. Topics God and I discussed centered around future events and my behavior when they occurred.

My journey in faith began with those tea parties, and took on more importance during a series of health problems. With polio, they said I would never walk again and for several months I couldn't, until in utter defiance, I got up and walked just fine. With rheumatic fever, they said my heart was damaged and I would be forever slow and weak. Well, to my way of thinking I am a little slow, yet others consider me a human dynamo. With Saint Vitas Dance, they said the nerve disorder that caused me to shake would forever limit my mobility. Nuts, I replied, and promptly healed. I won back my body and my health by refusing any other outcome other than what my faith showed me.

Pearl Habor changed everything. There was so much death and rationing and air raid drills and flattening cans for the war effort and victory gardens. If you couldn't raise it, you didn't eat. And there was Hitler and his goose-steppers appearing in news reels played before each Saturday at the movies. Roy Rogers, Lash LaRue, Sunset Carson, and bombs dropping from airplanes convinced me that if we all really believed we could win this horrible war, we would. We did. My faith deepened.

I came to have five fathers and two mothers. If this confuses you, imagine what it did to me. Fortunately, the Norwegian couple who raised me from two months up to the first grade were so full of love, so patient, so understanding, that my early years patterned around the sight of them quietly reading from the Bible each night. They practiced their faith. To me, they were angels. When my biological mother stole me away in secret one night, nightmares followed. Her lovers darkened my world, until all that was left inside of me was rage. I turned into a monster. Prison would surely have been my next address had it not been for a quiet morning when no one was home. I did a double-take at the face I saw when walking past a mirror. It was so twisted that I screamed outloud: "I'm going to change you. I don't know how, but I'm going to change you." That's all it took.

The air was alive and it heard me. So did the spirits. And so did God. That one event led to a cascade of opportunities, and with each I said yes to life.

Some have said that faith is a shift in awareness to a higher knowing, that it is the conviction that an ultimate reality exists beyond our present reality. My journey in faith restarted because of that truth, and it widened to embrace life's wholeness - the good with the bad, the light with the dark. Marriage came next and three children. We never had enough money. I had no training other than secretarial skills, still, I knew in my heart that in prayer I would be shown whatever I needed to know. And that's exactly what happened. Impossible as it may seem, whatever we needed manifested.

In the sixties I discovered meditation, mysticism, psychic phenomena, and spirituality; what a time that was. While a working wife and mom, classes and workshops and books and study groups, crowded my days, along with hands-on healing instruction and tests to measure the power of prayer. My mind expanded to encompass a richness of spirit so vast it seemed beyond belief. Who needed drugs? Certainly not me. My job as I saw it was to "tune in" through prayer and meditation, and affirm what I knew to be true - the reality of God and our Divinity in God. This inspired me to initiate a non-profit organization dedicated to showing the public the difference between what was genuine and what was self-deception in the metaphysical/mystical/spiritual field. It lasted seven years and touched the lives of thousands.

In helping the many, though, I lost track of myself. A divorce followed along with a pregnancy that backfired. There is an old adage that says: "When the student is ready, the teacher will come." My teacher turned out to be death. Three times in three months, from the miscarriage and hemorhaging, a bloodclot that disloged followed by the worst case of phelbitis the specialist had ever heard of, then - who knows - the cause of my third death could never be proven. Later that year I had three relapses, one of which was adrenal failture.

My journey in faith switched back to my earliest models. I relearned how to crawl, stand, walk, run, climb stairs, tell the difference between left and right, see properly, hear properly, and rebuild all of my belief systems. Exercises were constant. I put myself back in beginning cooking, beginning homemaking, beginner's meditation - everything all over again, from scratch - including how to breathe and move and think and feel. What kept me on course was repeating the phrase "God is" by the hour. Step by step I remodeled this old house (my body) and accepted what "The Voice Like None Other" told me during my third near-death experience: "Test revelation. You are to do the research. One book for each death." I was shown what this meant, but not how to do the job.

It is enough to affirm here that without faith I could have never moved a toe or climbed a staircase after "dying," much less make sense out of the mission I was given. For the past thirty-plus years I have held forth. After having sessions with nearly 4,000 adult and child experiencers of near-death states, I now busy myself writing my tenth and last book on my research, a wrap-up which completes my work. I remarried long ago to an "angel" who demonstrates that miracles are indeed everyday occurrences and that life itself is a communion with the Divine.

Faith, what has undergirded my every breath and underscored the reason I am alive, just threw me a curve-ball.

Dad died last month. In a tribute to him, I wrote about his knowingness of death, his ease with what was coming and why. My sister and brother forgot I had shared his insights with them several years before, and in their grief accused me of the unthinkable. This happened at the same time that I discovered the name change I put through the courts 29 years ago, didn't go through. In order to claim my name, I had to repetition the court. When I did the judge denied my request. In the space of two weeks I lost the right to my own voice and the right to my own name. The nightmares of my life with my mother came rushing back as if a deeper aspect to them awaited healing. My desire for only one name, the name I believe God gave me during a wondrous vision, crashed.

A state of nothingness ensued. In that cessation of thought and feeling, I came to recognize the incredible strength it took my brother and sister to oppose me. Gratitude for who they are and what they have become filled my soul. The mistake was mine for not contacting them first, to see how they felt about the tribute I was writing. My thoughtlessness had invited their attack. Silence then hushed me, and my consciousness slipped away.

I slipped into a sense of Presence, the unity of things, an essence. In that Presence all exists - beyond any need for faith, or knowing, or forgiveness, or miracles. Presence is what God is. And it is like unto a spell, Godspell. Being there is being present to Presence, alive in the spell of Godspell.

I don't pretend to know if this state I am in will remain throughout the rest of my years, or if it's temporary, or once in a while. I only know the judge suddenly reversed her decision and my name is really my name once again, and my brother and sister unexpectedly claimed me as their own and apologized for any misunderstanding.

None of this changes a thing, however. The Presence I found feels full, and I feel full in it... a fullness of knowing that everything simply is. This truth does not require either my faith or my belief. It lies beyond what I thought I knew, and cradles the consciousness that grows within me.

Life's curve-balls unerringly bring us back to the center of our being, our font of truth and wisdom, so we can reaccess who we already are and always were. It is a place where all journeys disappear and only Light remains.

© 2009, P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D. is one of the original researchers in the field of near-death studies, having begun her work in 1978. Today, her contribution to the field is considered one of the best. She has written seven books on her findings: Coming Back to Life, Beyond the Light, Future Memory, Children of the New Millennium, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Near-Death Experiences, The New Children and Near-Death Experiences, and We Live Forever. Some of her findings have now been clinically verified (the Dutch Study published in "Lancet" medical journal 12-15-01, and the Bonenfant Study done in Medical Centers in Florida, published in the "Journal of Near-Death Studies," among others). She has recently been presented the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Transpersonal Hypnotists, and the Outstanding Service Award and achievement tribute from the International Association For Near-Death Studies. Her newest book, Beyond the Indigo Children, is the first major study of the new children to synthesize a broad range of objective research with mystical revelation. Visit her website at www.cinemind.com.