ABSTRACT
Throughout human history and across cultures and faith traditions, ordinary people have claimed experiences of seeing, hearing, talking with, or sensing expansive, all-pervasive forces and disembodied entities. There is a contemporary view that the universe is an interconnected and continuous fabric of consciousness, an electromagnetic field, expressing in multi-dimensional realities. Humans and all physical life forms embody consciousness that is continuously connected. When a body dies, the consciousness remains part of the universal, multi-dimensional fabric. This chapter will explore the personal experiences of encountering the Divine or the deceased through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with several people who have lived these experiences. Using a methodological approach known as Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, we will explore contextual factors such as frequency of experiences throughout one's life course, environments in which experiences take place, mental and physical states, and world views or faith traditions that may have influenced these experiences. One specific experience will then be focused on to gain a deeper understanding as the individual walks through the experience in detail and how he or she made sense of it.
