Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
Now I'm curious about your birthday, my astrological antennae is twittering
Don't have birthdays any more ..... they've all worn out
I'm a bit under the weather with a cold today Sandie so I'll send you more on that I Ching reading by PM when I'm a bit clearer headed - and give you my birthday info at the same time to see what you make of it.
There is a Happy Unbirthday thread in here some where ... feel better soonDon't have birthdays any more ..... they've all worn out
I'm a bit under the weather with a cold today Sandie so I'll send you more on that I Ching reading by PM when I'm a bit clearer headed - and give you my birthday info at the same time to see what you make of it.
tty in the PM
Thank you for your own here and elsewhere!
Wow...I can totally relate if you can believe that.
Those were my same feelings as a child...I remember watching a movie called “D.A.R.Y.L.” in 1985...let’s see, I was 7-8.
It was about a robot boy who doesn’t know it...he does however, eventually figure out that he is a robot and is being studied by the government.
Ah-hah...that must be it I thought...I’m not a human...I must be a robot or something else.
And it gave me some kind of strange satisfactions that I had discovered this possibility about myself - I had figured out why I felt so out of place in every situation and with every person...must be because I am not really one of them.
lol
We INFJs seem to have certain elements to our childhood that match up quite closely sometimes.
But yes...the other bit you were speaking about - it really does seem to almost withhold itself until you have reached the proper mindset or amount of will.
That doesn’t mean that it won’t present itself again and again until you take up the yoke...and until you do it can leave one feeling like I did as a child I feel.
I have often talked about being born depressed...I can honestly say that it was worse than I thought after talking to my Mom over Thanksgiving dinner last night - I really struggled badly as a child...very horribly tortured by depression and night terrors (or were they?).
It's funny but I did things as a child that were very naturally meditative in nature...like climbing the trees around my house and literally sitting up there for hours....I really think I was intuitively self-soothing.
If my Mom couldn’t find me...she knew I was in a a tree, lol.
Of course your ego can drive you to do good natured things...the ego is not implicitly evil or anything, but it seems more and more lately like something that one needs to practice at using properly and correctly than something to be driven from one’s mind with torches and pitchforks haha.
And even reaching ego death or dissolution doesn’t mean it is gone forever - it may weaken it’s dictatorial power over a person, but it’s something we should think of as one part of the whole nonetheless imho.
Again...just as one cannot deny something like chronic pain or chronic depression...imho acceptance is therefore their best choice...the same could be said of the ego - we have to accept that it is there...but by doing so you are exerting a certain amount of control over it - which can then be deepened and can take you to some powerful places.
I’m reading a pretty good book right now called “Siddhartha’s Brain - The science of enlightenment”...not bad.
They talk quite a bit about ego dissolution and the brains of meditators - it’s quite fascinating the physical changes that occur when a regular meditative practice (including contemplative prayer) is taken up...the DMN (default mode network) I spoke of above is viewed as almost an evolutionary “quirk” if not a downright mistake that it has too much control over the system...causing negative mental loops and neurosis from it’s critiques.
The thought put forth in the book is that we are at an evolutionary crossroad where this portion of the mind is moving from one state of consciousness to another, less egotistic way of thinking as a matter of changing physiology.
That once the ego could have been heard as a separate voice - then incorporated to help our self-awareness...but now further versions of the “program” are needed and are coming into fruition via evolution and our own mental pursuits perhaps.
The notion that we can learn to properly utilize the ego as an instrument rather the director of the orchestra is the main gist I am getting thus far.
Interesting thoughts.
Thanks as always John...your insight is priceless.
Cheers!
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So, I’m sure you all may have heard about this guy -
RIP
He was killed by native tribesman on North Sentinel Island which is strictly OFF LIMITS to outside people.
The indigenous peoples who have lived there for 1000s of years do not have many of the antibodies in their immune system that wouldn’t even bother us living where we do - in other words...he could have very well been responsible for the genocide of the two dozen of so tribespeople left.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead - but this is exactly the kind of irresponsible behavior that is displayed by certain zealots wanting to “spread the word of God”...instead he could have very well spread disease and possibly exposed a group implicitly protected from just such BS and outsiders coming to their island - it is still possible even though they killed him with arrows that he has killed or will severely impact these few handfuls of people.
This is the kind of stuff that just irks the shit out of me - you want to save their souls?
They don’t even speak a language you can understand - how you gonna do that first of all?
Second of all they don’t want you there enough that they will shoot you full of arrows - probably best that you stay the fuck away.
It seems when religion gets involved that certain folks become incredibly presumptuous and feel that they are only beholden to the laws of their religion.
All common sense flies out the window.
It’s very sad that he was killed, I feel for his family and his loved ones - but he just may be responsible even still for the genocide of the final remaining tribesman....not cool or very “loving”.
Way to go spreading the word....*sigh*.
RIP
He was killed by native tribesman on North Sentinel Island which is strictly OFF LIMITS to outside people.
The indigenous peoples who have lived there for 1000s of years do not have many of the antibodies in their immune system that wouldn’t even bother us living where we do - in other words...he could have very well been responsible for the genocide of the two dozen of so tribespeople left.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead - but this is exactly the kind of irresponsible behavior that is displayed by certain zealots wanting to “spread the word of God”...instead he could have very well spread disease and possibly exposed a group implicitly protected from just such BS and outsiders coming to their island - it is still possible even though they killed him with arrows that he has killed or will severely impact these few handfuls of people.
This is the kind of stuff that just irks the shit out of me - you want to save their souls?
They don’t even speak a language you can understand - how you gonna do that first of all?
Second of all they don’t want you there enough that they will shoot you full of arrows - probably best that you stay the fuck away.
It seems when religion gets involved that certain folks become incredibly presumptuous and feel that they are only beholden to the laws of their religion.
All common sense flies out the window.
It’s very sad that he was killed, I feel for his family and his loved ones - but he just may be responsible even still for the genocide of the final remaining tribesman....not cool or very “loving”.
Way to go spreading the word....*sigh*.
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Thankyou for sharing this Skare - the thing I value most about the forum is the number of people I have met now who share some of these experiences and are willing to talk about them, as much as it is possible and comfortable. I've hardly met anyone before like this. I can relate very much to your experience as a child and I think that these sort of childhood experiences are good to recall because they can get us off the railtracks of preconceived ideas and the vocabulary that goes with them. I suppose that when I look back and think of waking up one morning when I was 8 and finding the world didn't look real, or sensing Presence, or suddenly finding myself intensely aware and one with everything, or completely lost in the horror of timeless nothingness, then I could call these meditation experiences. I wasn't meditating at the time though - they were simply things that happened to me that I perceived and experienced and drew me in to an inner world that seemed different to what other people talked about, other than in books. There is a green freshness in those experiences that is primal.Thank you for your own here and elsewhere!
Wow...I can totally relate if you can believe that.
Those were my same feelings as a child...I remember watching a movie called “D.A.R.Y.L.” in 1985...let’s see, I was 7-8.
It was about a robot boy who doesn’t know it...he does however, eventually figure out that he is a robot and is being studied by the government.
Ah-hah...that must be it I thought...I’m not a human...I must be a robot or something else.
And it gave me some kind of strange satisfactions that I had discovered this possibility about myself - I had figured out why I felt so out of place in every situation and with every person...must be because I am not really one of them.
lol
We INFJs seem to have certain elements to our childhood that match up quite closely sometimes.
But yes...the other bit you were speaking about - it really does seem to almost withhold itself until you have reached the proper mindset or amount of will.
That doesn’t mean that it won’t present itself again and again until you take up the yoke...and until you do it can leave one feeling like I did as a child I feel.
I have often talked about being born depressed...I can honestly say that it was worse than I thought after talking to my Mom over Thanksgiving dinner last night - I really struggled badly as a child...very horribly tortured by depression and night terrors (or were they?).
It's funny but I did things as a child that were very naturally meditative in nature...like climbing the trees around my house and literally sitting up there for hours....I really think I was intuitively self-soothing.
If my Mom couldn’t find me...she knew I was in a a tree, lol.
Of course your ego can drive you to do good natured things...the ego is not implicitly evil or anything, but it seems more and more lately like something that one needs to practice at using properly and correctly than something to be driven from one’s mind with torches and pitchforks haha.
And even reaching ego death or dissolution doesn’t mean it is gone forever - it may weaken it’s dictatorial power over a person, but it’s something we should think of as one part of the whole nonetheless imho.
Again...just as one cannot deny something like chronic pain or chronic depression...imho acceptance is therefore their best choice...the same could be said of the ego - we have to accept that it is there...but by doing so you are exerting a certain amount of control over it - which can then be deepened and can take you to some powerful places.
I’m reading a pretty good book right now called “Siddhartha’s Brain - The science of enlightenment”...not bad.
They talk quite a bit about ego dissolution and the brains of meditators - it’s quite fascinating the physical changes that occur when a regular meditative practice (including contemplative prayer) is taken up...the DMN (default mode network) I spoke of above is viewed as almost an evolutionary “quirk” if not a downright mistake that it has too much control over the system...causing negative mental loops and neurosis from it’s critiques.
The thought put forth in the book is that we are at an evolutionary crossroad where this portion of the mind is moving from one state of consciousness to another, less egotistic way of thinking as a matter of changing physiology.
That once the ego could have been heard as a separate voice - then incorporated to help our self-awareness...but now further versions of the “program” are needed and are coming into fruition via evolution and our own mental pursuits perhaps.
The notion that we can learn to properly utilize the ego as an instrument rather the director of the orchestra is the main gist I am getting thus far.
Interesting thoughts.
Thanks as always John...your insight is priceless.
Cheers!
On the other hand the wisdom that comes from understanding how others over thousands of years have developed techniques to manage this sort of thing successfully is vital - I could easily have fallen into a trap of forever trying to get back into Fairie, or remained terrified of experiencing Void.
Yes, maybe the idea of ego death should be kept as a metaphor not a hard aspiration. Perhaps it's better to think of getting the ego to step out of the driving seat sometimes and let control pass to that within us that knows instinctively what we need spiritually. There is stuff the ego needs to let go of and that must die, but perhaps to literally kill the ego completely would be to destroy our humanity - transformation is what we need so that the ego only acts in harmony with the spiritual world and isn't always in conflict with it, or pretending it doesn't exist. I'm not very good at doing this - but maybe spinning between the inner and outer worlds like that is destiny for some of us.
Thankyou for sharing this Skare - the thing I value most about the forum is the number of people I have met now who share some of these experiences and are willing to talk about them, as much as it is possible and comfortable. I've hardly met anyone before like this. I can relate very much to your experience as a child and I think that these sort of childhood experiences are good to recall because they can get us off the railtracks of preconceived ideas and the vocabulary that goes with them. I suppose that when I look back and think of waking up one morning when I was 8 and finding the world didn't look real, or sensing Presence, or suddenly finding myself intensely aware and one with everything, or completely lost in the horror of timeless nothingness, then I could call these meditation experiences. I wasn't meditating at the time though - they were simply things that happened to me that I perceived and experienced and drew me in to an inner world that seemed different to what other people talked about, other than in books. There is a green freshness in those experiences that is primal.
On the other hand the wisdom that comes from understanding how others over thousands of years have developed techniques to manage this sort of thing successfully is vital - I could easily have fallen into a trap of forever trying to get back into Fairie, or remained terrified of experiencing Void.
Yes, maybe the idea of ego death should be kept as a metaphor not a hard aspiration. Perhaps it's better to think of getting the ego to step out of the driving seat sometimes and let control pass to that within us that knows instinctively what we need spiritually. There is stuff the ego needs to let go of and that must die, but perhaps to literally kill the ego completely would be to destroy our humanity - transformation is what we need so that the ego only acts in harmony with the spiritual world and isn't always in conflict with it, or pretending it doesn't exist. I'm not very good at doing this - but maybe spinning between the inner and outer worlds like that is destiny for some of us.
Wow...very powerful words John!
When I said meditating I didn’t mean those types of experiences - I meant my self-soothing behavior of sitting in a tree for hours.
It certainly was not meditation that brought me to such frightening places that I ended up as a child.
I too had some difficulty as a child when going from “night terror” back to the waking world (not that I wasn’t “awake" already, lucid.) at distinguishing reality from “not”(?) - or this alternate perception of consciousness that was the cause of so much trouble for me as a child.
The worst was this entity that would appear while I was out of body and wandering in my house at night trying to wake up my parents and failing horribly.
It was always proceeded by this electrical buzzing/popping like you hear under high tension power lines or a spark gap when it arches.
A triangle of burning fire...with an evil face, black eyes, screaming at me as it rushed me...I know it’s name but I will not name it.
When I was working particularly hard at self-inducing an out of body experience - this noise is one that I would hear again and the first few times it really scared the shit out of me because it brought up all this past horror and trauma from my experiences as a child - but...it, along with many other sounds I have come to believe are the sound of the transition from one plane of being or reality or consciousness to another.
You mention “Fairie”....yes *sigh*....somewhere there is a door at the bottom of a staircase...inside the door is a spiral slide made of the most beautifully grained polished wood you have ever seen...
I don’t remember what’s at the bottom...I just know I’ve always wanted to go back.
As for the “void” - I’ve posted several articles on the thread on how to escape it should one find themselves “trapped” within.
I will repost them in the next day or so along with any new info out there...it’s been a while since I’ve discussed it here.
I agree with all you wrote concerning the ego and moving toward transformation more than death.
It seems like it would make sense that there is a purpose for it...and would we really still be “individuals” without it?
It’s funny you say we need more harmony because that is exactly the reactions and effects of diminishing the activity of the DMN in the brain.
Yes...I remember the pure experiential nowness of being a child.
Lost in thought but not of the past or future...lost in imagination.
I’ve told this story before but I used to “play” with the wind....and as far as I can remember it - it played back.
People can dismiss me...but there were several instances where I would “conduct” the wind as a child.
I was the odd kid at the school...played by myself for the most part, though I had a good friend Chris.
We had this row of really giant Mulberry trees along the fence of the playground...and I would run under the branches with the wind following close behind only for me to stop and feel it “catch me”.
I would throw my arms up in the air and push it this way and that.
It wasn’t until one of the teachers asked me what I was doing (cause it probably looked very strange I must admit), that I became self-conscious about it and I stopped...too bad in retrospect.
The more I talk to my Mom (Dad passed in 2007), the more I hear about these really bizarre things I would do as a child and the more it brings the memories back to me - I have no doubt that I have blocked out certain things that were too traumatizing for me.
Mostly memories of what everyone said were “nightmares”....but it was always me fully lucid stuck in my house.
Sometimes I would get outside but that would take me to some really scary places too....so I mostly just stayed in the house and tried to wake people up.
It's funny because I know how to jump up and levitate in that reality...I remember practicing jumping up in the air in the living room and then holding it and I could almost explain or even do it here - but there is some element that is missing or I can’t quite tell you how to stay in the air other than you have to kind of “hold yourself up” (see - doesn’t make sense).
Of course they were all dreams according to everyone else...but like I said - I know I watched the “Terminator” sitting on the floor between my parents while I was technically still in bed.
All this sounds nuts I know...it sounds bonkers to me typing it even...but I have quite clear memories of a lot of things I would rather not.
Anyhow...I would be curious to hear about your own “journeys” if it’s not too personal or you aren’t too worried about what people think?
All my own night terror issues basically quit once I learned how to just jump back to my sleeping body and force it awake...but I was probably in the 4th grade by that time.
If anyone thinks I’m crazy - well, you didn’t live it...I can understand where one would assume that these are all imagined or dreamed experiences I had...and I sincerely wish that they all were - but there was also a lot of physical phenomena that went along with it all - those who witnessed that cannot deny that something bizarre took place.
I won’t assume to know what it all was exactly...that is why I have always been interested in this type of stuff.
Maybe someday we will figure it out.
Much love to all!
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Some info on the “Void” in case you were wondering what/where it was exactly.
Even this nice bit of info on it fails to address certain aspects of it as this mostly pertains to the Near Death Experience.
It is however, most likely the one and same place - there should be no reason why not?
And the article certainly has some preconceived notions of what the void is - I’m not sure we can be so sure as this article is?
Enjoy!
Many near-death testimonies involve the experiencer entering a realm commonly known in NDE circles as the "Void.”
This article discusses the nature of this realm to give the reader a good understanding of its purpose and how to deal with it after death.
The general consensus among near-death testimonies is that the Void is a realm of complete and profound darkness - empty of everything except for the thought and emotional patterns of those who enter it.
The Void is a perfect place for experiencers to examine themselves, contemplate their recent earth experience, and decide where they want to go next. For some experiencers, the Void is a beautiful and heavenly realm because, in the absence of all else, they are able to perfectly see the love and light within themselves.
For other experiencers, the Void is a terrifying, confusing, horrible hell because, in the absence of everything, they are temporarily unable to see the love and light within themselves.
For this reason, the Void also acts as a heavenly "Time Out" where the experiencer is forced to look within themselves.
There is no judgment in the Void except the possibility of self-judgment - a harsher form of self-understanding.
The Void has also been understood as a process of "ego death" where the "mask" of the personality is dissolved to allow the individuality of the soul to be experienced in relation to the Whole that is God.
For these reasons and more, this article may be the most important article you may read on this website.
Some near-death experiencers travel very quickly through the Void by means of the tunnel and on to higher realms.
Other experiencers, particularly those who have developed a strong attraction for some earthly desire may instead enter a lower realm called the earthbound realm in a vain attempt to re-enter earth.
But many near-death experiencers, as you will see, enter the Void immediately after death.
From there, they may then enter the tunnel toward the light in the next heavenly realm.
Other experiencers remain in the Void for one reason or another until they are ready to leave it.
For some souls, the time spent in the Void may feel like only a moment.
For others, it may seem like eternity.
This is because the nature of the Void is for contemplation.
Once the soul is ready, the light appears and the tunnel takes them into higher realms.
For souls who either refuse the light or have spent a lifetime ignoring the light within themselves, it may take what seems like an "eternity" before they are ready to move on.
The problem for some souls is they prefer darkness rather than the light for one reason or another.
For some of these souls, their only hope is reincarnation.
This is because it is not possible for any soul to be confined in the earthbound and Void realms forever.
God is infinitely merciful and would never abandon anyone to their own spiritual agony for too long; however, God allows souls to remain there only as long as it suits their spiritual growth.
The Void is not punishment.
It is the perfect place for all souls to see themselves and to purge themselves from all illusions.
For those souls who are too self-absorbed in their own misery to see the light, there are a multitude of Beings of Light nearby to help them when they freely chose to seek them.
The nature of love and light is such that it cannot be forced upon people who don't want it.
Choosing love and light over darkness is the key to being freed from the Void.
The moment the choice is made, the light and tunnel appears and the soul is drawn into higher realms.
"My dining room below was slowly but surely merging into another kind of space coming down from a source past my ceiling.
These two spaces or dimensions of space were merging into each other, but I was not moving.
I did not change position in any way.
I was where I was, but the world around me was changing and shifting and becoming something else.
My dining room faded from sight as this new space became more visible and more real.
It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It encompassed me.
The new space was both totally bright and totally dark at the same time yet without shape, form, sound, color, mass, or movement.
It was aglow but there was no light source.
It was dark but there was no darkness.
Somehow within this strange environment was the presence of all shapes, all forms, all sound, all color, all mass, and all movement.
Everything that ever was, is, or will be was there, yet there was nothing there at all.
It was everything and it was nothing, yet within it was a feeling, a pulse, a sensation of energy "winking" off and on -- a sparkling potential which "shimmered," just as Jell-O does before it responds to touch.
I called it "The Void" for lack of a better term or idea.
It was comfortable enough, so within its crammed nothingness I proceeded with my experiments (At this point, Atwater experiments in the Void by creating images, such as a house, with her mind. She is then visited by deceased relatives and Jesus. Afterward, she finds herself back in the Void).
I was now alone in this non-place and there was nothing.
For the first time I looked upon myself to see what possible form or shape I might have, and to my surprise and joy I had no shape or form at all.
I was naught but a sparkle of pure consciousness, the tiniest, most minuscule spark of light imaginable.
And that is all I was. I was content that way, without ego or identity, pure, whole, and uncomplicated.
Within that nothingness I had become, I simply existed, ecstatic in perfect bliss and peace, like perfection itself and perfect love.
Everywhere around me were sparkles like myself, billions and trillions of them, winking and blinking like on / off lights, pulsating from some unknown source.
I would have existed in that state of bliss forever had an irritation not made itself known, like an old sore deep within me; then energy waves burst forth from that deep old sore, and with them came the life of Phyllis, playing itself out from birth to death.
(At this point, Atwater experiences a life review) (P.M.H. Atwater)
The rest of this section will focus on important characteristics of the Void such as:
♦ There is no love there.
♦ There is no light there.
♦ Beings of light are nearby to help tormented souls.
♦ Religious references to the Void.
♦ Profound examples of people who experienced the Void.
The only love that exists in the Void is the love you bring into it.
The Void itself has no love or light and because of this, the only way to leave the Void and enter the higher realms is by choosing love.
The moment love is desired, the light appears as if summoned.
Most near-death accounts describe very brief encounters with the Void, if any at all.
It is probably true that most people choose love over darkness, much like most people choose to remain out of prison.
God does not force anyone out of the Void.
The way to heaven must be earned through cultivating and bearing the fruits of love and light.
This is the key to getting out of the Void and into heaven.
The following near-death accounts describe the loveless nature of the Void.
"While in second heaven - the Void - Howard Pittman felt an overwhelming oppressive feeling and wondered what was causing it.
He was told that it is because there is no love there." (Rev. Howard Pittman)
"In the Void, your only source of stimulation will be your own thoughts." (Robert Monroe)
An interesting thing that Mellen-Thomas Benedict learned while in the Void was that God was not there.
God is here on earth.
That's what it is all about.
Humanity's constant search for God outside of this world doesn't need to happen.
Everything is here.
We are God's exploration of God through us.
People are so busy trying to become God that they ought to realize that we are already God and God is becoming us.
That's what it is really about.
(Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
Light and love is God.
Because of this, God's influence in the Void is limited because darkness rules in the Void.
In the same manner, the influence of darkness (spiritual ignorance) on earth is limited because light rules on earth.
And light cannot be forced upon people.
But once light/love is chosen by the soul, the soul's stay in the Void is ended.
The problem is that many souls have not realized divine love and light within themselves while on earth.
This makes it difficult to leave the Void.
The following description of the second stage after death by Emanuel Swedenborg is a remarkable description of the Void:
"Immediately following death, there is a period of self-discovery in which the social masks worn on earth dissolve away and the true self is revealed.
Each soul then shapes their own situation to correspond with their real inner nature.
The second stage after death is where people learn the inward things that belong to their mind and their true selves.
Everyone is directed into this stage after death because it is the actual state of the spirit.
If a soul was inwardly involved in goodness while in the physical world, they will behave rationally and wisely at this stage.
If a soul was inwardly involved in evil while in the physical world, they will behave senselessly and crazily.
Once their outward matters are taken away from them, their madness is unveiled.
People who are thinking about divine matters while they are active on earth are in touch with angels of heaven.
It is a life of love, a life of behaving honestly and fairly in every task, that leads to a heavenly life.
This life is not hard."
(Emanuel Swedenborg)
The following is a description of the Void from the revelations of Edgar Cayce who referred to the Void as outer darkness - a term that can be found in the Bible.
"After death, we may enter a region that is Void of love, life, and light, Void of everything.
For some, this region is approximately their wish come true.
Here they are truly alone with themselves.
For some souls, this is a pain that is unbearable.
In the absence of truth, love, gentleness, and kindness, some souls fill the Void with an irrational and unbelievable amount of pain and fear.
It is so dark in the realm of outer darkness that the darkness hurts and panic grips them without knowing why.
There are various degrees of darkness to this realm, and it is darker and denser at the center than at its outer fringes.
The closer we are to the outer edges, the more interaction there is with others in the realm.
The closer to the center, the darker and more painful is the solitude.
Those who find themselves in outer darkness cannot travel across this dimension.
They must grow through the levels of this realm.
After death, one may find themselves in a particular degree of darkness that most closely corresponds to the degree of the absence of love in one's life.
Outer darkness is not a punishment.
It is a region which operates lawfully for the benefit of those who are there.
This region is not a realm which was created for any soul to experience, but one which came about as a consequence of the negative activity of souls in creation.
So great has been the desire for self, so monumental across time and space has been the selfishness of some of God's creatures, that this realm is the creation or manifestation of their own collective activities.
Outer darkness and the reality with which it is associated were created and are held in place by collective self-interest. (Edgar Cayce)
Near-death accounts involve the experiencer observing Beings of Light near the Void ready to help, or helping, souls in the Void.
Souls in the Void are unaware that Beings of Light are all around them, until they decide they need God's help.
"Asher Elmekiess was in a place where darkness was everywhere.
Yet there were sparkles all around like little stars.
It was a place of so much love, peace and joy.
Asher did not want to move or come back from there."
(Asher Elmekiess)
"There are souls called the shining ones who dedicate themselves to going into this dark realm and bringing spiritual light.
The souls who are dedicated to this work of rehabilitation are clothed in protective garments so that they are not harmed or pierced by the dagger-like thoughts of hatred which those in the dark realms are throwing out.
The shining ones are not allowed to go and talk to these people, but they stand nearby and call to them through thought - prayer, if you like.
The moment the souls in this dark area respond in a positive way, the ones who have come to help are able to bring them out into a less dense, foggy world and eventually out into the realm of light.”
(Margaret Tweddell)
The Void is known by many religious traditions by many different names.
Some of them are: purgatory, hell, outer darkness, prison, Gehennom, She'ol, pit, abyss, an-nar, and Preta-Loka.
The following is a brief description of some of these traditions.
"[During deep meditation] I lost all sense of individualness and only after attempting to regain a sense of myself did I realize that I had lost individual consciousness ... It was as if my consciousness turned off a gravitational force that somehow maintained selfness, allowing my mind to slip into an infinite vacuum much like the difference between a contained planetary atmosphere and infinite, airless outer space.
I assume this is what the Eastern seekers mean by entering the Void."
(John Van Auken)
"[During deep meditation] I immediately found myself in a beautiful place, right next to the Light and Presence of God, where we are all living traces of His movement, yet still Him in essence.
We are ourselves, yet also Him.
I could feel it!
All unique, but still Him.
We all were open both to God and to connecting with each other, and there was nothing else except this!
This was prior to inner and outer worlds, prior to space and time, prior to existence itself!
This is the place where there are no limits, where peace is not yet disturbed, where surrender is natural, and where our life is wholly our relatedness to each other and to God.”
(Stuart Dean)
The Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead teaches that once awareness is freed from the body, it creates its own reality as one would experience in a dream.
The Clear Light of the Ultimate Reality appears and the deceased must embrace this supreme experience not in a selfish and egoistic way but rather with love and compassion for everyone.
The deceased must then realize that his own self is one with this light in order to attain Nirvana.
If the deceased responds with fear, it is still not liberated and will descend into the second phase [the Void] where peaceful deities appear.
If liberation is not attained at this time, then the peaceful deities turn into wrathful deities.
It is important in this realm to recognize the Void-ness of all these beings as a projection of their own mind.
(Tibetan Buddhism)
The writers of the New Testament referred to the Void more than they did heaven.
Here are just some of these references: "This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”
(John 3:19-21)
There are many very interesting near-death accounts that involve an extended experience in the Void.
From such accounts, much information concerning the Void can be gleaned.
The following profound near-death experiences with the Void are the best I have come across.
Guenter Wagner's Void experience is too long to summarize here. His Void experience is one of my personal favorites.
Other excellent Void experiences come from: • Mellen-Thomas Benedict • Nancy Evans Bush • RaNelle Wallace.
Other, less in depth, Void experiences come from: • Don Brubaker • Rev. Kenneth Hagin • Dr. George Rodonaia • Tom Sawyer • Angie Fenimore
Examining your inner spiritual nature is an important part of soul growth and there is no better place to do this than in the Void.
Those who have learned to ignore their inner spiritual nature have the most difficulty in the Void because they have the most to learn.
This is why it is important to examine your inner spirituality on earth before you get to the Void.
In fact, that is one of the important reasons we come to earth in the first place.
"Lynnclaire Dennis entered a vacuum, a sacred space that was exceedingly real and where her grief disappeared.
The love within her saved her from oblivion."
(Lynnclaire Dennis)
"All you may know of heaven or hell is within your own self." (Edgar Cayce)
The ultimate purpose of the Void is for us to look perfectly within ourselves.
If a person looks deep enough within themselves, they will find the light that can bring them from the darkness.
The problem is that many people choose not to do this for one reason or another.
The following near-death accounts involve making decisions in the Void.
The suffering that souls experience in the Void serves a purpose for good.
Many religious traditions teach that God gives us suffering in order to create character, perseverance, and to cause us to rely more on God and not in our own strength (or weakness).
Suffering should never be viewed as a curse from God, but rather a blessing in disguise.
It is God's will for us to suffer in this world and in the Void in order to bring forth goodness.
In fact, this is the symbolism behind the cross of Jesus.
"Betty Bethards learned that the Void is a realm of total darkness where we must confront the fears we have built within our own minds.
As soon as we are able to meet them directly, to face them, they dissipate.
It provides the opportunity for people to confront and move beyond the negativity they have created.
Souls do not enter the Void unless they need to experience it for their growth.
Hell is a level of consciousness which can be experienced in or out of the body.
It is a lonely place where one is not allowed to be in communication with anyone other than one's own negativity."
(Betty Bethards)
"The type of near-death experience that Dr. PMH Atwater categorizes as the initial experience, involves elements such as a loving nothingness, the living dark, a friendly voice, or a brief out-of-body episode.
Unpleasant or hell-like experiences involve inner cleansing and self-confrontation."
(P.M.H. Atwater)
"Upon death, most souls go through a heavenly process before entering into heaven.
Some souls, instead of experiencing the tunnel and bright light upon death, find themselves in an abyss of empty, joyless, nothingness for a brief period of time.”
(Sylvia Browne)
Escaping from the Void is very easy for some souls and difficult for others.
Various near-death accounts provide a wealth of information on how to escape from the Void.
Here is a list of them:
a. Love sets you free from the Void.
b. The light sets you free from the Void.
c. Your faith sets you free from the Void.
d. Beings of Light set you free from the Void.
e. Reincarnation sets you free from the Void.
The following information is a more detailed discussion of these ways to escape from the Void:
The Void is a spiritual dimension that exists within us.
During our lives, we may fill this Void with many things such as: love, hatred, happiness, sadness, knowledge, ignorance, family, just to name a few.
And when we die, we actually step into this spiritual dimension we have filled.
Whatever we fill the Void within us with, at death, we enter into it.
Perhaps this is one good reason why the most important aspect of our missions in life have to do with love.
Realizing, filling and cultivating divine love within our Void and sharing this love with others during our life will create a heavenly paradise that will be manifested in death.
The following near-death insights deal with love and its relationship to the Void.
"After death, many people find themselves in the Void.
The way out of the Void is simple.
You must think of love.
Those who you love might show up to tell you to go back to your body or to think of love.
To recognize love as a reality is the key to getting out of the Void.”
(Brian Krebs)
Lynnclaire Dennis' love redeemed her from oblivion. "We only have to remember to make love real.”
(Lynnclaire Dennis)
"Ignorance of the need to seek spiritual growth may keep some souls in the Void for a long period of time.”
(Nora Spurgin)
"Those in the dark realm can progress, but their progress is limited. The key is love.”
(RaNelle Wallace)
"To protect yourself from the unspiritual souls in the darkness, whether on earth or in the Void, chose to focus on love.”
(David Oakford)
Joni Maggi was in a dark outer space and feeling total bliss. It was there she learned that the universe is upheld by love.
(Joni Maggi)
While some people describe leaving the Void through love, others describe leaving the Void through light.
They are both describing the same thing and the same God.
One near-death experiencer put it so nicely, "God is the light that loves."
"Laurelynn Martin floated up through blackness where there existed no fear, no pain, and no misunderstandings.
There was also a sense of well-being.
She was enveloped by total bliss in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance.
The darkness was warm and soft, a blanket of velvety love, stretching endlessly.
The freedom of total peace was intensified beyond any ecstatic feeling she had ever felt on earth.
In the distance, a glorious white, golden light beckoned her forward.”
(Laurelynn Martin)
"Ray Meir was in a very dark, vast, peaceful area.
It was much like floating through outer space and total darkness.
He felt extremely peaceful and very comfortable.
Ahead he could see an extremely bright light attracting him.
He felt a great love emanating from the light and he moved toward the light much like a child walking to its father.”
(Ray Meir)
"Barbara Springer entered a black space where there existed no light; but she wasn't frightened at all.
The space was totally comfortable.
Ahead of her she noticed a bright light."
(Barbara Springer)
"Darlene Holman approached the blackness.
Then see saw a light in the distance with souls around the edge of it.”
(Darlene Holman)
"Hal was in the darkness and could neither see nor feel himself nor anything else.
He wondered if the blackness was all there was and if he'd have to make do with his memories and imagination until they ran out.
He was absorbed in thought when a faint glimmer of light appeared; but it quickly vanished.
He tried to summon the light and another brief burst of light appeared.
He wondered if he could attract its attention.
The light appeared again and the nearer it came, the brighter it was.
In the light, he could dimly see himself.
The light grew very bright and he tried to look away.
It was so bright that he feared its intensity.
He yelled for it to stop and the light replied, "I will not harm you.”
(Hal)
By reflecting on positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts, and feeling the love and light within yourself, you will be able to progress from the Void. The following information demonstrates how faith can set you free.
"George Rodonaia was surrounded by a profound darkness which shocked and horrified him.
He wondered why he was in darkness and what he was supposed to do.
He realized that because he could still think, this meant he still existed.
Then he reasoned that since he existed, he should think only positive thoughts.
He wondered how to define what is positive in the darkness.
When he thought of light, he was instantly in the light."
(Dr. George Rodonaia)
"As soon as we are able to confront our fears directly, to face them, they dissipate.”
(Betty Bethards)
"Mrs. Walters tumbled in the blackness and felt frightened because she didn't know where she was going.
She thought, "I have to get back inside my body.”
Immediately, she was back inside her body without knowing how."
(Mrs. Walters)
Beings of Light are near and ready to help anyone in the Void out of their predicament.
All it takes is but a desire or a cry for help, no matter how large or small the desire.
Some experiencers, such as Linda Stewart, didn't belong in the Void at all and were automatically rescued from the Void.
The following is a summary of her rescue from the Void.
"Linda Stewart was irresistibly draw toward a vast, endless black Void or black hole.
Gradually, she felt herself sinking into it.
It appeared that she would simply disappear into the dark nothingness.
As her new awareness waned, she yielded to the heaviness overtaking her as darkness filled her mind.
Her vision became obscured as she began to merge into the blackness.
Offering no resistance, she released her hold on any remaining shred of consciousness and personal identity.
As she felt the last of herself disappearing into nothingness, she was suddenly buffeted by a powerful, energetic force that swooped beneath and lifted her, carrying her upward.
She was barely conscious.
Her only awareness was the sensation of rising.
Vast distances seemed to fly by her and the higher she rose, the more her head cleared.
She felt peaceful and loved immeasurably.
She knew that she was in the arms of a Being who cherished her with perfect love.
This Being was Jesus and he carried her from the Void into a new reality."
(Linda Stewart)
"Higher beings know what to do to help a soul in the Void advance themselves if they so choose to do so.”
(David Oakford)
God never abandons anyone to the Void.
Those who are either unwilling or ignorant about entering the light may have only one choice and that is to return to earth.
Again, this is not punishment; it is a way for such souls to return to the earth-school for more lessons and learn how to progress.
"For some souls, the only hope out of the Void is through reincarnation."
(Arthur Yensen)
Even this nice bit of info on it fails to address certain aspects of it as this mostly pertains to the Near Death Experience.
It is however, most likely the one and same place - there should be no reason why not?
And the article certainly has some preconceived notions of what the void is - I’m not sure we can be so sure as this article is?
Enjoy!
The Void and the Near-Death Experience
Many near-death testimonies involve the experiencer entering a realm commonly known in NDE circles as the "Void.”
This article discusses the nature of this realm to give the reader a good understanding of its purpose and how to deal with it after death.
The general consensus among near-death testimonies is that the Void is a realm of complete and profound darkness - empty of everything except for the thought and emotional patterns of those who enter it.
The Void is a perfect place for experiencers to examine themselves, contemplate their recent earth experience, and decide where they want to go next. For some experiencers, the Void is a beautiful and heavenly realm because, in the absence of all else, they are able to perfectly see the love and light within themselves.
For other experiencers, the Void is a terrifying, confusing, horrible hell because, in the absence of everything, they are temporarily unable to see the love and light within themselves.
For this reason, the Void also acts as a heavenly "Time Out" where the experiencer is forced to look within themselves.
There is no judgment in the Void except the possibility of self-judgment - a harsher form of self-understanding.
The Void has also been understood as a process of "ego death" where the "mask" of the personality is dissolved to allow the individuality of the soul to be experienced in relation to the Whole that is God.
For these reasons and more, this article may be the most important article you may read on this website.
1. Summary of insights concerning the Void
Some near-death experiencers travel very quickly through the Void by means of the tunnel and on to higher realms.
Other experiencers, particularly those who have developed a strong attraction for some earthly desire may instead enter a lower realm called the earthbound realm in a vain attempt to re-enter earth.
But many near-death experiencers, as you will see, enter the Void immediately after death.
From there, they may then enter the tunnel toward the light in the next heavenly realm.
Other experiencers remain in the Void for one reason or another until they are ready to leave it.
For some souls, the time spent in the Void may feel like only a moment.
For others, it may seem like eternity.
This is because the nature of the Void is for contemplation.
Once the soul is ready, the light appears and the tunnel takes them into higher realms.
For souls who either refuse the light or have spent a lifetime ignoring the light within themselves, it may take what seems like an "eternity" before they are ready to move on.
The problem for some souls is they prefer darkness rather than the light for one reason or another.
For some of these souls, their only hope is reincarnation.
This is because it is not possible for any soul to be confined in the earthbound and Void realms forever.
God is infinitely merciful and would never abandon anyone to their own spiritual agony for too long; however, God allows souls to remain there only as long as it suits their spiritual growth.
The Void is not punishment.
It is the perfect place for all souls to see themselves and to purge themselves from all illusions.
For those souls who are too self-absorbed in their own misery to see the light, there are a multitude of Beings of Light nearby to help them when they freely chose to seek them.
The nature of love and light is such that it cannot be forced upon people who don't want it.
Choosing love and light over darkness is the key to being freed from the Void.
The moment the choice is made, the light and tunnel appears and the soul is drawn into higher realms.
"My dining room below was slowly but surely merging into another kind of space coming down from a source past my ceiling.
These two spaces or dimensions of space were merging into each other, but I was not moving.
I did not change position in any way.
I was where I was, but the world around me was changing and shifting and becoming something else.
My dining room faded from sight as this new space became more visible and more real.
It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It encompassed me.
The new space was both totally bright and totally dark at the same time yet without shape, form, sound, color, mass, or movement.
It was aglow but there was no light source.
It was dark but there was no darkness.
Somehow within this strange environment was the presence of all shapes, all forms, all sound, all color, all mass, and all movement.
Everything that ever was, is, or will be was there, yet there was nothing there at all.
It was everything and it was nothing, yet within it was a feeling, a pulse, a sensation of energy "winking" off and on -- a sparkling potential which "shimmered," just as Jell-O does before it responds to touch.
I called it "The Void" for lack of a better term or idea.
It was comfortable enough, so within its crammed nothingness I proceeded with my experiments (At this point, Atwater experiments in the Void by creating images, such as a house, with her mind. She is then visited by deceased relatives and Jesus. Afterward, she finds herself back in the Void).
I was now alone in this non-place and there was nothing.
For the first time I looked upon myself to see what possible form or shape I might have, and to my surprise and joy I had no shape or form at all.
I was naught but a sparkle of pure consciousness, the tiniest, most minuscule spark of light imaginable.
And that is all I was. I was content that way, without ego or identity, pure, whole, and uncomplicated.
Within that nothingness I had become, I simply existed, ecstatic in perfect bliss and peace, like perfection itself and perfect love.
Everywhere around me were sparkles like myself, billions and trillions of them, winking and blinking like on / off lights, pulsating from some unknown source.
I would have existed in that state of bliss forever had an irritation not made itself known, like an old sore deep within me; then energy waves burst forth from that deep old sore, and with them came the life of Phyllis, playing itself out from birth to death.
(At this point, Atwater experiences a life review) (P.M.H. Atwater)
The rest of this section will focus on important characteristics of the Void such as:
♦ There is no love there.
♦ There is no light there.
♦ Beings of light are nearby to help tormented souls.
♦ Religious references to the Void.
♦ Profound examples of people who experienced the Void.
3. Love does not exist in the Void
The only love that exists in the Void is the love you bring into it.
The Void itself has no love or light and because of this, the only way to leave the Void and enter the higher realms is by choosing love.
The moment love is desired, the light appears as if summoned.
Most near-death accounts describe very brief encounters with the Void, if any at all.
It is probably true that most people choose love over darkness, much like most people choose to remain out of prison.
God does not force anyone out of the Void.
The way to heaven must be earned through cultivating and bearing the fruits of love and light.
This is the key to getting out of the Void and into heaven.
The following near-death accounts describe the loveless nature of the Void.
"While in second heaven - the Void - Howard Pittman felt an overwhelming oppressive feeling and wondered what was causing it.
He was told that it is because there is no love there." (Rev. Howard Pittman)
"In the Void, your only source of stimulation will be your own thoughts." (Robert Monroe)
An interesting thing that Mellen-Thomas Benedict learned while in the Void was that God was not there.
God is here on earth.
That's what it is all about.
Humanity's constant search for God outside of this world doesn't need to happen.
Everything is here.
We are God's exploration of God through us.
People are so busy trying to become God that they ought to realize that we are already God and God is becoming us.
That's what it is really about.
(Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
4. Light does not exist in the Void
Light and love is God.
Because of this, God's influence in the Void is limited because darkness rules in the Void.
In the same manner, the influence of darkness (spiritual ignorance) on earth is limited because light rules on earth.
And light cannot be forced upon people.
But once light/love is chosen by the soul, the soul's stay in the Void is ended.
The problem is that many souls have not realized divine love and light within themselves while on earth.
This makes it difficult to leave the Void.
The following description of the second stage after death by Emanuel Swedenborg is a remarkable description of the Void:
"Immediately following death, there is a period of self-discovery in which the social masks worn on earth dissolve away and the true self is revealed.
Each soul then shapes their own situation to correspond with their real inner nature.
The second stage after death is where people learn the inward things that belong to their mind and their true selves.
Everyone is directed into this stage after death because it is the actual state of the spirit.
If a soul was inwardly involved in goodness while in the physical world, they will behave rationally and wisely at this stage.
If a soul was inwardly involved in evil while in the physical world, they will behave senselessly and crazily.
Once their outward matters are taken away from them, their madness is unveiled.
People who are thinking about divine matters while they are active on earth are in touch with angels of heaven.
It is a life of love, a life of behaving honestly and fairly in every task, that leads to a heavenly life.
This life is not hard."
(Emanuel Swedenborg)
The following is a description of the Void from the revelations of Edgar Cayce who referred to the Void as outer darkness - a term that can be found in the Bible.
"After death, we may enter a region that is Void of love, life, and light, Void of everything.
For some, this region is approximately their wish come true.
Here they are truly alone with themselves.
For some souls, this is a pain that is unbearable.
In the absence of truth, love, gentleness, and kindness, some souls fill the Void with an irrational and unbelievable amount of pain and fear.
It is so dark in the realm of outer darkness that the darkness hurts and panic grips them without knowing why.
There are various degrees of darkness to this realm, and it is darker and denser at the center than at its outer fringes.
The closer we are to the outer edges, the more interaction there is with others in the realm.
The closer to the center, the darker and more painful is the solitude.
Those who find themselves in outer darkness cannot travel across this dimension.
They must grow through the levels of this realm.
After death, one may find themselves in a particular degree of darkness that most closely corresponds to the degree of the absence of love in one's life.
Outer darkness is not a punishment.
It is a region which operates lawfully for the benefit of those who are there.
This region is not a realm which was created for any soul to experience, but one which came about as a consequence of the negative activity of souls in creation.
So great has been the desire for self, so monumental across time and space has been the selfishness of some of God's creatures, that this realm is the creation or manifestation of their own collective activities.
Outer darkness and the reality with which it is associated were created and are held in place by collective self-interest. (Edgar Cayce)
5. Beings of light near the Void
Near-death accounts involve the experiencer observing Beings of Light near the Void ready to help, or helping, souls in the Void.
Souls in the Void are unaware that Beings of Light are all around them, until they decide they need God's help.
"Asher Elmekiess was in a place where darkness was everywhere.
Yet there were sparkles all around like little stars.
It was a place of so much love, peace and joy.
Asher did not want to move or come back from there."
(Asher Elmekiess)
"There are souls called the shining ones who dedicate themselves to going into this dark realm and bringing spiritual light.
The souls who are dedicated to this work of rehabilitation are clothed in protective garments so that they are not harmed or pierced by the dagger-like thoughts of hatred which those in the dark realms are throwing out.
The shining ones are not allowed to go and talk to these people, but they stand nearby and call to them through thought - prayer, if you like.
The moment the souls in this dark area respond in a positive way, the ones who have come to help are able to bring them out into a less dense, foggy world and eventually out into the realm of light.”
(Margaret Tweddell)
6. Religious traditions and the Void
The Void is known by many religious traditions by many different names.
Some of them are: purgatory, hell, outer darkness, prison, Gehennom, She'ol, pit, abyss, an-nar, and Preta-Loka.
The following is a brief description of some of these traditions.
"[During deep meditation] I lost all sense of individualness and only after attempting to regain a sense of myself did I realize that I had lost individual consciousness ... It was as if my consciousness turned off a gravitational force that somehow maintained selfness, allowing my mind to slip into an infinite vacuum much like the difference between a contained planetary atmosphere and infinite, airless outer space.
I assume this is what the Eastern seekers mean by entering the Void."
(John Van Auken)
"[During deep meditation] I immediately found myself in a beautiful place, right next to the Light and Presence of God, where we are all living traces of His movement, yet still Him in essence.
We are ourselves, yet also Him.
I could feel it!
All unique, but still Him.
We all were open both to God and to connecting with each other, and there was nothing else except this!
This was prior to inner and outer worlds, prior to space and time, prior to existence itself!
This is the place where there are no limits, where peace is not yet disturbed, where surrender is natural, and where our life is wholly our relatedness to each other and to God.”
(Stuart Dean)
The Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead teaches that once awareness is freed from the body, it creates its own reality as one would experience in a dream.
The Clear Light of the Ultimate Reality appears and the deceased must embrace this supreme experience not in a selfish and egoistic way but rather with love and compassion for everyone.
The deceased must then realize that his own self is one with this light in order to attain Nirvana.
If the deceased responds with fear, it is still not liberated and will descend into the second phase [the Void] where peaceful deities appear.
If liberation is not attained at this time, then the peaceful deities turn into wrathful deities.
It is important in this realm to recognize the Void-ness of all these beings as a projection of their own mind.
(Tibetan Buddhism)
The writers of the New Testament referred to the Void more than they did heaven.
Here are just some of these references: "This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”
(John 3:19-21)
7. Profound experiences of the Void
There are many very interesting near-death accounts that involve an extended experience in the Void.
From such accounts, much information concerning the Void can be gleaned.
The following profound near-death experiences with the Void are the best I have come across.
Guenter Wagner's Void experience is too long to summarize here. His Void experience is one of my personal favorites.
Other excellent Void experiences come from: • Mellen-Thomas Benedict • Nancy Evans Bush • RaNelle Wallace.
Other, less in depth, Void experiences come from: • Don Brubaker • Rev. Kenneth Hagin • Dr. George Rodonaia • Tom Sawyer • Angie Fenimore
8. The reasons for the existence of the Void
a. Self-reflection
a. Self-reflection
Examining your inner spiritual nature is an important part of soul growth and there is no better place to do this than in the Void.
Those who have learned to ignore their inner spiritual nature have the most difficulty in the Void because they have the most to learn.
This is why it is important to examine your inner spirituality on earth before you get to the Void.
In fact, that is one of the important reasons we come to earth in the first place.
"Lynnclaire Dennis entered a vacuum, a sacred space that was exceedingly real and where her grief disappeared.
The love within her saved her from oblivion."
(Lynnclaire Dennis)
"All you may know of heaven or hell is within your own self." (Edgar Cayce)
b. Decision-making
The ultimate purpose of the Void is for us to look perfectly within ourselves.
If a person looks deep enough within themselves, they will find the light that can bring them from the darkness.
The problem is that many people choose not to do this for one reason or another.
The following near-death accounts involve making decisions in the Void.
c. Purification
The suffering that souls experience in the Void serves a purpose for good.
Many religious traditions teach that God gives us suffering in order to create character, perseverance, and to cause us to rely more on God and not in our own strength (or weakness).
Suffering should never be viewed as a curse from God, but rather a blessing in disguise.
It is God's will for us to suffer in this world and in the Void in order to bring forth goodness.
In fact, this is the symbolism behind the cross of Jesus.
"Betty Bethards learned that the Void is a realm of total darkness where we must confront the fears we have built within our own minds.
As soon as we are able to meet them directly, to face them, they dissipate.
It provides the opportunity for people to confront and move beyond the negativity they have created.
Souls do not enter the Void unless they need to experience it for their growth.
Hell is a level of consciousness which can be experienced in or out of the body.
It is a lonely place where one is not allowed to be in communication with anyone other than one's own negativity."
(Betty Bethards)
"The type of near-death experience that Dr. PMH Atwater categorizes as the initial experience, involves elements such as a loving nothingness, the living dark, a friendly voice, or a brief out-of-body episode.
Unpleasant or hell-like experiences involve inner cleansing and self-confrontation."
(P.M.H. Atwater)
"Upon death, most souls go through a heavenly process before entering into heaven.
Some souls, instead of experiencing the tunnel and bright light upon death, find themselves in an abyss of empty, joyless, nothingness for a brief period of time.”
(Sylvia Browne)
9. How to escape from the Void
Escaping from the Void is very easy for some souls and difficult for others.
Various near-death accounts provide a wealth of information on how to escape from the Void.
Here is a list of them:
a. Love sets you free from the Void.
b. The light sets you free from the Void.
c. Your faith sets you free from the Void.
d. Beings of Light set you free from the Void.
e. Reincarnation sets you free from the Void.
The following information is a more detailed discussion of these ways to escape from the Void:
a. Love sets you free from the Void
The Void is a spiritual dimension that exists within us.
During our lives, we may fill this Void with many things such as: love, hatred, happiness, sadness, knowledge, ignorance, family, just to name a few.
And when we die, we actually step into this spiritual dimension we have filled.
Whatever we fill the Void within us with, at death, we enter into it.
Perhaps this is one good reason why the most important aspect of our missions in life have to do with love.
Realizing, filling and cultivating divine love within our Void and sharing this love with others during our life will create a heavenly paradise that will be manifested in death.
The following near-death insights deal with love and its relationship to the Void.
"After death, many people find themselves in the Void.
The way out of the Void is simple.
You must think of love.
Those who you love might show up to tell you to go back to your body or to think of love.
To recognize love as a reality is the key to getting out of the Void.”
(Brian Krebs)
Lynnclaire Dennis' love redeemed her from oblivion. "We only have to remember to make love real.”
(Lynnclaire Dennis)
"Ignorance of the need to seek spiritual growth may keep some souls in the Void for a long period of time.”
(Nora Spurgin)
"Those in the dark realm can progress, but their progress is limited. The key is love.”
(RaNelle Wallace)
"To protect yourself from the unspiritual souls in the darkness, whether on earth or in the Void, chose to focus on love.”
(David Oakford)
Joni Maggi was in a dark outer space and feeling total bliss. It was there she learned that the universe is upheld by love.
(Joni Maggi)
b. Light sets you free from the Void
While some people describe leaving the Void through love, others describe leaving the Void through light.
They are both describing the same thing and the same God.
One near-death experiencer put it so nicely, "God is the light that loves."
"Laurelynn Martin floated up through blackness where there existed no fear, no pain, and no misunderstandings.
There was also a sense of well-being.
She was enveloped by total bliss in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance.
The darkness was warm and soft, a blanket of velvety love, stretching endlessly.
The freedom of total peace was intensified beyond any ecstatic feeling she had ever felt on earth.
In the distance, a glorious white, golden light beckoned her forward.”
(Laurelynn Martin)
"Ray Meir was in a very dark, vast, peaceful area.
It was much like floating through outer space and total darkness.
He felt extremely peaceful and very comfortable.
Ahead he could see an extremely bright light attracting him.
He felt a great love emanating from the light and he moved toward the light much like a child walking to its father.”
(Ray Meir)
"Barbara Springer entered a black space where there existed no light; but she wasn't frightened at all.
The space was totally comfortable.
Ahead of her she noticed a bright light."
(Barbara Springer)
"Darlene Holman approached the blackness.
Then see saw a light in the distance with souls around the edge of it.”
(Darlene Holman)
"Hal was in the darkness and could neither see nor feel himself nor anything else.
He wondered if the blackness was all there was and if he'd have to make do with his memories and imagination until they ran out.
He was absorbed in thought when a faint glimmer of light appeared; but it quickly vanished.
He tried to summon the light and another brief burst of light appeared.
He wondered if he could attract its attention.
The light appeared again and the nearer it came, the brighter it was.
In the light, he could dimly see himself.
The light grew very bright and he tried to look away.
It was so bright that he feared its intensity.
He yelled for it to stop and the light replied, "I will not harm you.”
(Hal)
c. Faith sets you free from the Void
By reflecting on positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts, and feeling the love and light within yourself, you will be able to progress from the Void. The following information demonstrates how faith can set you free.
"George Rodonaia was surrounded by a profound darkness which shocked and horrified him.
He wondered why he was in darkness and what he was supposed to do.
He realized that because he could still think, this meant he still existed.
Then he reasoned that since he existed, he should think only positive thoughts.
He wondered how to define what is positive in the darkness.
When he thought of light, he was instantly in the light."
(Dr. George Rodonaia)
"As soon as we are able to confront our fears directly, to face them, they dissipate.”
(Betty Bethards)
"Mrs. Walters tumbled in the blackness and felt frightened because she didn't know where she was going.
She thought, "I have to get back inside my body.”
Immediately, she was back inside her body without knowing how."
(Mrs. Walters)
d. Beings of light set you free from the Void
Beings of Light are near and ready to help anyone in the Void out of their predicament.
All it takes is but a desire or a cry for help, no matter how large or small the desire.
Some experiencers, such as Linda Stewart, didn't belong in the Void at all and were automatically rescued from the Void.
The following is a summary of her rescue from the Void.
"Linda Stewart was irresistibly draw toward a vast, endless black Void or black hole.
Gradually, she felt herself sinking into it.
It appeared that she would simply disappear into the dark nothingness.
As her new awareness waned, she yielded to the heaviness overtaking her as darkness filled her mind.
Her vision became obscured as she began to merge into the blackness.
Offering no resistance, she released her hold on any remaining shred of consciousness and personal identity.
As she felt the last of herself disappearing into nothingness, she was suddenly buffeted by a powerful, energetic force that swooped beneath and lifted her, carrying her upward.
She was barely conscious.
Her only awareness was the sensation of rising.
Vast distances seemed to fly by her and the higher she rose, the more her head cleared.
She felt peaceful and loved immeasurably.
She knew that she was in the arms of a Being who cherished her with perfect love.
This Being was Jesus and he carried her from the Void into a new reality."
(Linda Stewart)
"Higher beings know what to do to help a soul in the Void advance themselves if they so choose to do so.”
(David Oakford)
e. Reincarnation sets you free from the Void
God never abandons anyone to the Void.
Those who are either unwilling or ignorant about entering the light may have only one choice and that is to return to earth.
Again, this is not punishment; it is a way for such souls to return to the earth-school for more lessons and learn how to progress.
"For some souls, the only hope out of the Void is through reincarnation."
(Arthur Yensen)
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.”
- Carl Jung
- Carl Jung
I have to say I agree with a friend of mine who wrote this in regards to the article -
I agree that it probably should not be a prophylactically administered drug.
Still - there are many positive things that this can be used for...it all depends on how it is applied.
Of course using it to dissociate instead of dealing is questionable.
Both could be a result.
It’s nice to know that there may be more powerful solutions for folks instead of some lame pills that don’t do jack and have terrible side-effects.
"Less than a third of depression patients respond to a drug within 14 weeks, according to the 2006 STAR*D trial, the largest clinical test of antidepressants."
Enjoy!
One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry.
At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine.
For 40 minutes, the drug flowed into her arm, bound for cells in her brain.
If it acts as expected, ketamine will become the first drug to quickly stop suicidal drive, with the potential to save many lives.
Other studies of ketamine are evaluating its effect as a vaccination against depression and post-traumatic stress.
Between them, the goal is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of mental illness itself.
Depression is the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 30 percent of Americans at some point in their lives.
But despite half a century of research, ubiquitous advertising, and blockbuster sales, antidepressant drugs just don’t work very well.
They treat depression as if it were caused by a chemical imbalance:
Pump in more of one key ingredient, or sop up another, and you will have fixed the problem.
PREPARED: One day, soldiers heading into combat could be treated to reduce the chance of getting PTSD.
But the correspondence between these chemicals (like serotonin) and depression is relatively weak.
An emerging competitive theory, inspired in part by ketamine’s effectiveness, has it that psychiatric disease is less about chemical imbalance than structural changes in the brain—and that a main cause of these changes is psychological stress.
“I really do think stress is to mental illness as cigarettes are to heart disease,” says Gerard Sanacora, the psychiatry professor running the ketamine trial at Yale.
The theory describes stress grinding down individual neurons gradually, as storms do roof shingles.
This, in turn, changes the nature of their connections to one another and the structure of the brain.
Ketamine, along with some similar molecules, acts to strengthen the neuron against that damage, affecting not just the chemistry of the brain but also its structure.
Mental hospitals don’t usually see patients until they break: a brain shaped by vulnerable genes, wrecked by the stress of loss or trauma.
This isn’t how it works with other sicknesses: heart disease, cancer, AIDS.
Detected early, these conditions can often be managed.
Crises averted.
If Sanacora and like-minded researchers are right, we may be on the cusp of a sea change that allows for a similar approach to mental health.
The new approaches may prevent mental illness before it hits, by delivering a vaccination for the mind.
The need for progress could hardly be more urgent: Of all illnesses, neuropsychiatric diseases are estimated to put the heaviest burden on society. Nearly half of Americans are affected by some sort of mental disorder at some point in life.
Suicides, 90 percent of them among the mentally ill, take 40,000 Americans every year—more than murder or car crashes.
Since 2005, the suicide rate among U.S. war veterans has nearly doubled; in the first half of 2012, more service members died by suicide than in combat.
Few medical failures are more flagrant than psychiatry’s impotence to save these people.
At the same time, treatment can be woefully ineffective.
Less than a third of depression patients respond to a drug within 14 weeks, according to the 2006 STAR*D trial, the largest clinical test of antidepressants.
After six months and multiple drugs, only half of patients recovered.
Thirty-three percent don’t respond to any drug at all.
When the pills do work, they are slow—a deadly risk, given that people with mood disorders kill themselves more often than anyone else.
Our treatments work so poorly in part because we don’t really understand what they do.
Serotonin, the most common target for current antidepressants, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries messages in the brain.
But it was first found, in 1935, in the gut.
Serotonin’s name comes from blood serum, where Cleveland Clinic scientists discovered it in 1948, noting that the chemical helps with clotting.
When Betty Twarog, a 25-year-old Ph.D. student at Harvard, later found serotonin in neurons, she wasn’t taken seriously.
At that time, brain signals were thought to be purely electrical impulses that leapt between cells.
Twarog called this old idea “sheer intellectual idiocy,” as Gary Greenberg reports in his book Manufacturing Depression.
Working at the Cleveland Clinic in 1953, she found serotonin in the brains of rats, dogs, and monkeys.
K: One obstacle to the therapeutic use of ketamine is its reputation as a recreational drug.
Twarog didn’t know yet what serotonin was doing there, but a clue came soon from D.W. Woolley, a biochemist at Rockefeller University, in New York.
In 1954 Woolley pointed out in a paper that lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is chemically similar to serotonin and is processed similarly in the brain.
Since LSD “calls forth in man mental disturbances resembling those of schizophrenia,” he wrote, another drug affecting serotonin might be used to treat schizophrenia.
Twarog’s original paper would take years to percolate through the male-dominated field, but her work and Woolley’s would become accepted as evidence of how important chemicals like serotonin could be to brain signaling.
The discovery was a breakthrough for neuroscience—but it also birthed a misleading, long-lived belief about mental illness.
“The thesis of this paper,” Woolley wrote, “is that ... serotonin has an important role to play in mental processes and that the suppression of its action results in a mental disorder.
In other words, it is the lack of serotonin which is the cause of the disorder.”
Around the same time, other researchers stumbled on the first antidepressants, iproniazid and imipramine.
Intended to treat tuberculosis and schizophrenia, respectively, these drugs also happened to make some patients “inappropriately happy.”
Researchers found that the drugs elevated levels of serotonin, along with related neurotransmitters.1
This began a huge search to find chemically similar drugs that worked better as antidepressants.
Drug companies often say mood disorder is caused by a “chemical imbalance.”
But the evidence for this story is slim.
Iproniazid was the first of a class of medicines that block an enzyme from breaking down serotonin, as well as dopamine and norepinephrine, two other neurotransmitters.
The chief downside of these drugs, called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), is that they require a strict diet: no aged cheeses, wine, beer, or cured meats.
Combined with these foods, the drugs can cause deadly spikes in blood pressure, a hassle that often inclines patients to ditch them. (The novelist David Foster Wallace took an MAOI for decades; in part to escape the food restrictions, he got off the drug months before his suicide.)
On the other hand, tricyclic antidepressants, like imipramine, work by blocking the re-absorption of serotonin and norepinephrine.
The cost is a host of side effects, from dry mouth to weight gain to erectile dysfunction and loss of libido.
The next generation of drugs focused on fine-tuning the same mechanisms, and had somewhat improved side effects.
A new class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, arrived in the ’80s, bringing huge commercial successes like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.
Since SSRIs are more specifically focused on serotonin, they were heralded as cleaner options; but they are not much more effective at lifting mood than the older drugs.
We often take for granted the diabetes analogy for depression: If you are depressed, it is because you need serotonin, just as a diabetic person needs insulin.
Drug companies often say that mood disorder is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in serotonin or a signal like it.
One ad for Zoloft, the blockbuster antidepressant, featured a sad white circle crawling cutely beneath a gray cloud; the voice-over boasted that depression may be “related to an imbalance of natural chemicals in the brain. Zoloft works to correct this imbalance.”
But the evidence for this story is slim.
Prozac raises serotonin levels within hours yet doesn’t change mood for weeks.
When scientists deplete serotonin in healthy people, it does not make them sad.
And when doctors measure serotonin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of depressed people, they do not find a consistent deficiency; one 2008 study even found increased levels of serotonin in depressed people’s brains.
The drug tianeptine, discovered in the late ‘80s, decreases serotonin levels yet relieves depression.
And studies have shown that people falling in love show lower, not higher, levels of serotonin.
Serotonin is clearly not just a feel-good chemical.
If a serotonin-based drug like Zoloft makes you happier, it works in some other, indirect way.
As psychiatrist Ronald Pies, editor of Psychiatric Times, put it in 2011, “The ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”
Meanwhile, as serotonin falls far short of explaining depression, a more likely candidate is emerging.
Stress in moderation is not harmful, but motivating. Cortisol, a stress hormone, cycles daily; synchronizing with sunlight, it helps arouse us for the day.
In health, the hormone spikes when we need to pay attention: a test, a job interview, a date.
Studies on rodents and humans confirm that brief, mild increases in stress are good for the brain, particularly for memory.
During these spikes, neurons are born and expand in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped finger of tissue responsible for forming new memories and understanding three-dimensional space, and rodents learn better.
The student who gets stressed while studying is more alert and remembers more than the one who feels no urgency—up to a point.
The problem comes when stress is either too intense at one moment, as in a rape or violent attack, or too sustained, as in long-term poverty, neglect, or abuse.
ACCENTUATING THE NEGATIVE …: Under prolonged stress, neurons in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, expand like overgrown shrubbery and become hyperactive.Image from “Nature Reviews Neuroscience”*
Stress changes brain architecture differently, depending on how long it lasts.
After chronic stress, like childhood trauma, the effect of hormones on brain cells inverts: Neurons in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for mood and impulse control, start to shrink, while those in the amygdala, the almond-shaped seat of fear and anxiety, expand like overgrown shrubbery.
But people are differently vulnerable, depending on genes and on prior life experience.
“If you take two people and subject them to the same stressful event, for one of them it will be harmful and for the other, no,” says Maurizio Popoli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Milan. “It is because they perceive the stress differently.”
… AND ELIMINATING THE POSITIVE: In the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, regions responsible for memory, attention, and self-control, chronic stress shrinks the branches of neurons.Image from “Nature Reviews Neuroscience”*
Stress hormones’ most important effect is to flood parts of the brain with glutamate, the brain’s “go” signal.
Used by 80 percent of neurons in the cortex, this key neurotransmitter drives mental processes from memory to mood.
Glutamate triggers neurons to generate sudden bursts of electricity that release more glutamate, which can in turn trigger electrical bursts in nearby neurons.
This cellular signaling is called excitation and is fundamental to how information is processed in the brain.
Like sexual excitability, it ebbs and flows; a “refractory period” follows each neural firing, or spike, during which the neuron cannot be excited.
Other neurotransmitters, like serotonin, are called “modulatory,” because they change the sensitivity of neurons that secrete glutamate (among others). Less than 1 percent of neurons in the cortex signal with these modulators.
As Popoli puts it, these modulators are “very important for fine-tuning the machine.
But the machine itself is an excitatory machine,” driven by glutamate.
Glutamate moves like a ship between neurons.
The sea it sails is called the synapse, the shore it departs from is the presynaptic neuron, and the destination, on the synapse’s far side, is the post synaptic neuron.
Another component, called a glial cell, works to remove glutamate ships from the synapse and recycle them.
The glutamate system is affected at each of these points by stress hormones: They push the first neuron to send more ships, interfere with the glial cell’s recycling, and block the docks on the distant shore.
All of these changes increase the number of glutamate ships left in the synapse, flooding the cell with aberrant signals.
Indeed, depressed people’s brains, or at least animal models of depression, show all three of these problems, leading to long-lasting excesses of glutamate in key portions of the brain.
This superabundance of glutamate makes a neuron fire sooner than it should and triggers a cascade of signals inside the cell, damaging its structure. Glutamate binds to the neuron and allows in a flood of positively charged particles, including calcium, which are vital to making a neuron fire.
But in excess, calcium activates enzymes that break down the neuron.
Each neuron has tree-like branches, called dendrites, which are used to communicate with other neurons.
When overdosed in glutamate, this canopy of branches shrinks, like a plant doused with herbicide.
First the “twigs,” called spines, disappear.
After prolonged stress, whole branches recede.
This harmful process, called excitotoxicity, is thought to be involved in bipolar disorder, depression, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.
In depressed brains, many areas are shrunken and underactive, including part of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
The brain changes that cause mood disorders, Sanacora and his colleagues believe, come in part from chronic stress overexciting neurons with glutamate.
Ketamine works faster than any other drug, and for up to 65 percent of patients who don’t respond to existing treatments.
We usually think of our brains’ adaptability as a good thing.
Just as neurons grow during development, the wiring in the adult brain can change.
After strokes or other brain injuries, neural signals re-route themselves around damage, allowing even very old people to re-learn lost skills. Psychotherapy and meditation can change patterns of brain activity in ways that persist after treatment.2
But the neuroplasticity hypothesis of mental disorder highlights the drawback of such neural liberalism: The human brain’s flexibility allows regeneration, but also renders it vulnerable to being altered by stress.
Subjected to the trauma of war, a bad breakup, or a bout of homelessness, a person with a genetic predisposition may find his mind stuck in a loop of chronic fear or depression.
The mood drugs in wide use now focus on modulatory neurotransmitters like serotonin.
Ketamine, however, works directly on glutamate signaling.
If ketamine is tapping into the root of the problem, this might explain why it works faster, better, and more often than more popular antidepressants.
Not everybody accepts the idea that glutamate and stress are central to depression.
Some experts see the effects of stress as downstream effects, not the root cause of mood disorder.
“The mechanism of action of a good treatment does not have to be the inverse of a disease mechanism,” says Eric Nestler, an expert on addiction and depression at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Serotonin drugs and ketamine may affect depression indirectly, without a serotonin or glutamate abnormality at the root of depression.
Nestler also points out that depression probably includes a diversity of subtypes, without any single cause.
He treats depression not as a unified disease, but a constellation of symptoms, each with discrete neural roots.
Even so, we do know that ketamine works faster than any other drug, and for up to 65 percent of patients who don’t respond to existing treatments.
If ketamine turns out to be a psychiatric savior, it will be one with a surprising history.
Since 1962 it has been a go-to anesthetic for children in emergency rooms, because it kills pain, muffles consciousness, and rarely causes breathing or heart problems.
Children given ketamine enter “a trance like state of sensory isolation” free of pain, memory, and awareness, as one review put it.
Emergency room doctors rely on ketamine to make sure kids have no awareness or memory of, say, the trauma of having a shattered arm set back into place.
On the other hand, ketamine is a well-known recreational drug with potential for abuse.
The dissociative trip caused by a moderate dose of ketamine has made it popular in clubs and raves since the 1970s, especially in Asian cities like Hong Kong.
Its sedative effect made “special K” a date-rape drug.
Doctors, patients, and the government agencies that fund research are often suspicious of a drug known to cause hallucinations, as they have been of psychedelics like psilocybin and ecstasy, despite their potential for treating depression or anxiety.
Each tends to show fast results after a single dose, like ketamine.
In 1999, the same year ketamine was declared a controlled substance in the United States, Yale researchers happened upon its antidepressant power.
A team co-led by Dennis Charney, now dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, in Manhattan, and John Krystal, now chair of the department of psychiatry at Yale, used ketamine to study glutamate: Since ketamine was known to block glutamate receptors, it might show what role the excitatory neurotransmitter plays in the depressed brain.
To their surprise, they found that the drug made patients feel better, often within hours.
A single dose, much smaller than what’s used for anesthesia, tended to last for weeks.
Since 1999, a dozen studies have replicated the results, often on patients who failed to respond to other drugs.
Ketamine also works for bipolar people in depressive phases, without triggering mania, as classic antidepressants sometimes do.
The majority of depressed people studied have responded to ketamine.
For patients who are often suicidal, this fast response can be lifesaving.
Some 50 doctors in the U.S. now offer ketamine infusions for depression.
The first evidence in humans that ketamine might work to prevent mood disorder came from the battlefield.
Many leaders in the field see the emergence of ketamine, and future fast antidepressants based on glutamate, as a great leap forward for the field.
“In my mind,” Sanacora told NPR recently, “it is the most exciting development in mood-disorder treatment in the last 50 years.”
Ketamine and the old antidepressants both result in fuller neural “trees,” but by different routes, at different speeds.
Prozac and other serotonin-based drugs take four to six weeks to kick in.
A landmark 2003 Science study by Columbia University’s René Hen and Ronald Duman, now at Yale, found that serotonin-based antidepressants only work if they spur birth of new neurons in the hippocampus.3
These new neurons take four to six weeks to mature, roughly the same amount of time that conventional antidepressants take to lift a depressed person’s spirits.
A 2010 paper argued that SSRIs like Prozac may work by dampening glutamate release in response to stress.
So even old-school antidepressants, when they work, may act on the glutamate system.
Ketamine, on the other hand, seems to act directly on mature neurons, fertilizing them to grow branches more robustly, or protecting them against damage.
Ketamine’s key effect is to block glutamate receptors of one type.
This causes less calcium to flow into the neuron, reducing the risk of the neuron shrinking or self-destructing.
Today ketamine is offered by psychiatrists and anesthesiologists, at prices ranging from $300 to $1,000 per dose, for people who are morbidly depressed or have chronic pain.
Insurance doesn’t usually cover the cost of an infusion, because even though it is FDA approved as an anesthetic, it has not been approved as an antidepressant.
Each new use of a drug requires multiphase clinical trials for FDA approval, usually funded by pharmaceutical companies, which have little incentive to invest in a drug they can’t monetize.
Ketamine got its original patent in 1966, and that expired long ago.
So even if drug companies steered ketamine through the expensive approval process as an antidepressant, doctors could still prescribe the cheap, generic versions already available for anesthesia instead of pricier, patented versions intended for depression.
This is an old story.
Lithium carbonate, which also acts on glutamate receptors, is still one of the most reliable drugs for treating bipolar disorder.
But lithium, which is an element, can’t be patented.
So, despite their effectiveness, these generic pills do not attract many corporate dollars.
One tough truth about mood disorder is that not all forms may ever be curable.
Brain-imaging studies have shown structural differences between the white matter in healthy versus bipolar brains.
Differences in personality and sleep patterns also persist in bipolar people, even between manic or depressed episodes.
The structural changes likely have genetic roots, and once they arise, are difficult or impossible to reverse.
Nevertheless, if a drug prevents a mood disorder from manifesting, it might prevent harmful anatomical changes from ever taking place.
Just as a vaccine triggers the body to arm itself against a particular virus, a drug like ketamine, given before the crisis that triggers a breakdown, might protect the brain against the effects of stress.
Like a vaccine, the drug might only need to be given once for lasting resilience.
The first evidence in humans that ketamine might work to prevent mood disorder, not just treat it, came from the battlefield. U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq were treated with various anesthetics, including ketamine.
Since ketamine can cause hallucinations, surgeons worried that it might make trauma worse:
Scary combat-related hallucinations could put soldiers at higher risk of mental illness.
But they found the opposite. Out of 25,000 service members wounded in Iraq between 2002 and 2007, the data showed, veterans treated with ketamine for burns had lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Among civilians and soldiers hospitalized for burns, as many as 45 percent end up with PTSD.
But soldiers treated with ketamine on the battlefield got PTSD about half as often—even though they had more severe burns requiring more surgeries and longer hospital stays.
Mental hospitals don’t usually see patients until they break:
This isn’t how it works with other sicknesses.
Rebecca Brachman, a neuroscientist and recent doctoral graduate from Columbia University, and her supervisor, Christine Denny, tried giving ketamine to mice and then exposing them to stressors.4
The researchers tested several types of stress, including one in which subject mice are “bullied” by more aggressive mice for two weeks.
After this daily hazing, mice ordinarily develop the rodent equivalent of PTSD and depression: freezing in a new space, refusing to interact with other mice, and not moving in a forced swim test.
But the mice “vaccinated” before the bullying fared far better: They didn’t act depressed afterward.
Brachman and Denny found that the protection from a single dose lasted for weeks, even though ketamine only stays in the body for a few hours.
Though they haven’t tested it yet, it is possible that, like a vaccine, this protection could last for much longer.
Their rodent research suggests ketamine may work even better as a prophylactic than as an antidepressant.
Denny says that we may eventually routinely use ketamine to prevent PTSD in combat veterans, rape victims, or survivors of car crashes or mass shootings.
Ketamine seems to be most strongly protective in mice when given before stressful events, Brachman says.
Since we can’t predict most traumatic life events, this would limit the drug’s utility.
But if injected after a trauma yet before the psychological damage sets in—as with the burned soldiers—ketamine may still be protective.
Denny is investigating this possibility now.
And in some situations, violent shock is predictable.
“You don’t know when an earthquake will happen,” Brachman says, “but we do know when we’re about to send U.N. workers into an area devastated by a disaster.”
When people know they are going into an acutely traumatic situation, she imagines, a preventive drug given ahead of time might protect their brains from the long-lasting effects of stress.
Think of earthquake aid workers, fire fighters, or rescue workers in Syria, dragging mangled people from rubble.
The idea that a single injection could prevent mood disorders is a radical departure from current psychiatric thinking.
But there are some precedents: Talk therapy and mindfulness meditation have long focused on building resilience to stress.
Bipolar patients take “neuroprotective” drugs like lithium not to treat current symptoms, but as a protection against future breakdowns, for instance.
Not everyone is confident that ketamine is a safe bet, to be sure.
Ketamine’s long-term safety is not known, says Nestler.
No lasting ill effects are seen in anesthesia patients, who take much larger doses, but they haven’t received routine treatments, the way it is administered as an antidepressant.
Plus, ketamine’s reputation as a street drug is tough to shake.
Many doctors consider the hallucinogenic an unacceptable risk for patients, who they fear may develop a taste for the high.
Yale’s Sanacora points out that patients in his trial, who are screened for drug or alcohol abuse, often find the trip feeling unpleasant or disturbing.
The psychedelic experience is surreal, he points out, not the mellowing pleasure of a drug like alcohol, Xanax, or heroin.
Extreme ketamine trips, referred to as falling in a “K-hole,” are often compared to near-death or unsettling out-of-body experiences; they hardly sound like fun to most people.
But since the antidepressant dose is far lower than the one taken to get high, many patients don’t even notice.
Drug companies are also competing to develop a less trippy alternative.
Johnson & Johnson is testing a nasal spray form of esketamine, a version of ketamine with less psychoactive impact.
A company called Naurex has finished phase II trials of Rapastinel, an injected drug that partially blocks the same glutamate receptors as ketamine, but is not psychedelic.
The ketamine pioneers emphasize that their prevention research is the beginning of a new road, raising hopes, rather than offering an immediate cure. Brachman and Denny stress that ketamine may not be the drug that ultimately makes it into widespread use; like the anti-tubercular drugs in the 1950s that spawned the antidepressant era, it is the first to trail-blaze this new class of psychiatric prophylactics.
“What this work shows us is that we can intervene beforehand and create some sort of self-reinforcing stress resilience,” Brachman says.
“We didn’t know that before; that’s what’s important. Everything else—should we use it, how should we use it—that all comes later.”
Taylor Beck is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Before writing, he worked in brain imaging labs studying memory, aging, and dreams.
References
1. Maxwell, R.A. & Eckhardt, S.B. Drug Discovery Humana Press, New York, NY (1990).
2. Kennedy, S.H., et al. Differences in brain glucose metabolism between responders to CBT and venlafaxine in a 16-week randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Psychiatry 164, 778-788 (2007).
3. Vogel, G. Depression drugs’ powers may rest on new neurons. Science 301, 757 (2003).
4. Brachman, R.A., et al. Ketamine as a prophylactic against stress-induced depressive-like behavior. Biological Psychiatry (2015). Retrieved from DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.04.022
*Images reprinted from Popoli, M., Yan, Z., McEwen, B., & Sanacora, G. The stressed synapse: the impact of stress and glucocorticoids on glutamate transmission. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, 22-37 (2011).
I agree that it probably should not be a prophylactically administered drug.
Still - there are many positive things that this can be used for...it all depends on how it is applied.
Of course using it to dissociate instead of dealing is questionable.
Both could be a result.
It’s nice to know that there may be more powerful solutions for folks instead of some lame pills that don’t do jack and have terrible side-effects.
"Less than a third of depression patients respond to a drug within 14 weeks, according to the 2006 STAR*D trial, the largest clinical test of antidepressants."
Enjoy!
A Vaccine for Depression?
Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness.
Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness.
One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry.
At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine.
For 40 minutes, the drug flowed into her arm, bound for cells in her brain.
If it acts as expected, ketamine will become the first drug to quickly stop suicidal drive, with the potential to save many lives.
Other studies of ketamine are evaluating its effect as a vaccination against depression and post-traumatic stress.
Between them, the goal is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of mental illness itself.
Depression is the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 30 percent of Americans at some point in their lives.
But despite half a century of research, ubiquitous advertising, and blockbuster sales, antidepressant drugs just don’t work very well.
They treat depression as if it were caused by a chemical imbalance:
Pump in more of one key ingredient, or sop up another, and you will have fixed the problem.
PREPARED: One day, soldiers heading into combat could be treated to reduce the chance of getting PTSD.
But the correspondence between these chemicals (like serotonin) and depression is relatively weak.
An emerging competitive theory, inspired in part by ketamine’s effectiveness, has it that psychiatric disease is less about chemical imbalance than structural changes in the brain—and that a main cause of these changes is psychological stress.
“I really do think stress is to mental illness as cigarettes are to heart disease,” says Gerard Sanacora, the psychiatry professor running the ketamine trial at Yale.
The theory describes stress grinding down individual neurons gradually, as storms do roof shingles.
This, in turn, changes the nature of their connections to one another and the structure of the brain.
Ketamine, along with some similar molecules, acts to strengthen the neuron against that damage, affecting not just the chemistry of the brain but also its structure.
Mental hospitals don’t usually see patients until they break: a brain shaped by vulnerable genes, wrecked by the stress of loss or trauma.
This isn’t how it works with other sicknesses: heart disease, cancer, AIDS.
Detected early, these conditions can often be managed.
Crises averted.
If Sanacora and like-minded researchers are right, we may be on the cusp of a sea change that allows for a similar approach to mental health.
The new approaches may prevent mental illness before it hits, by delivering a vaccination for the mind.
The need for progress could hardly be more urgent: Of all illnesses, neuropsychiatric diseases are estimated to put the heaviest burden on society. Nearly half of Americans are affected by some sort of mental disorder at some point in life.
Suicides, 90 percent of them among the mentally ill, take 40,000 Americans every year—more than murder or car crashes.
Since 2005, the suicide rate among U.S. war veterans has nearly doubled; in the first half of 2012, more service members died by suicide than in combat.
Few medical failures are more flagrant than psychiatry’s impotence to save these people.
At the same time, treatment can be woefully ineffective.
Less than a third of depression patients respond to a drug within 14 weeks, according to the 2006 STAR*D trial, the largest clinical test of antidepressants.
After six months and multiple drugs, only half of patients recovered.
Thirty-three percent don’t respond to any drug at all.
When the pills do work, they are slow—a deadly risk, given that people with mood disorders kill themselves more often than anyone else.
Our treatments work so poorly in part because we don’t really understand what they do.
Serotonin, the most common target for current antidepressants, is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries messages in the brain.
But it was first found, in 1935, in the gut.
Serotonin’s name comes from blood serum, where Cleveland Clinic scientists discovered it in 1948, noting that the chemical helps with clotting.
When Betty Twarog, a 25-year-old Ph.D. student at Harvard, later found serotonin in neurons, she wasn’t taken seriously.
At that time, brain signals were thought to be purely electrical impulses that leapt between cells.
Twarog called this old idea “sheer intellectual idiocy,” as Gary Greenberg reports in his book Manufacturing Depression.
Working at the Cleveland Clinic in 1953, she found serotonin in the brains of rats, dogs, and monkeys.
K: One obstacle to the therapeutic use of ketamine is its reputation as a recreational drug.
Twarog didn’t know yet what serotonin was doing there, but a clue came soon from D.W. Woolley, a biochemist at Rockefeller University, in New York.
In 1954 Woolley pointed out in a paper that lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, is chemically similar to serotonin and is processed similarly in the brain.
Since LSD “calls forth in man mental disturbances resembling those of schizophrenia,” he wrote, another drug affecting serotonin might be used to treat schizophrenia.
Twarog’s original paper would take years to percolate through the male-dominated field, but her work and Woolley’s would become accepted as evidence of how important chemicals like serotonin could be to brain signaling.
The discovery was a breakthrough for neuroscience—but it also birthed a misleading, long-lived belief about mental illness.
“The thesis of this paper,” Woolley wrote, “is that ... serotonin has an important role to play in mental processes and that the suppression of its action results in a mental disorder.
In other words, it is the lack of serotonin which is the cause of the disorder.”
Around the same time, other researchers stumbled on the first antidepressants, iproniazid and imipramine.
Intended to treat tuberculosis and schizophrenia, respectively, these drugs also happened to make some patients “inappropriately happy.”
Researchers found that the drugs elevated levels of serotonin, along with related neurotransmitters.1
This began a huge search to find chemically similar drugs that worked better as antidepressants.
Drug companies often say mood disorder is caused by a “chemical imbalance.”
But the evidence for this story is slim.
Iproniazid was the first of a class of medicines that block an enzyme from breaking down serotonin, as well as dopamine and norepinephrine, two other neurotransmitters.
The chief downside of these drugs, called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), is that they require a strict diet: no aged cheeses, wine, beer, or cured meats.
Combined with these foods, the drugs can cause deadly spikes in blood pressure, a hassle that often inclines patients to ditch them. (The novelist David Foster Wallace took an MAOI for decades; in part to escape the food restrictions, he got off the drug months before his suicide.)
On the other hand, tricyclic antidepressants, like imipramine, work by blocking the re-absorption of serotonin and norepinephrine.
The cost is a host of side effects, from dry mouth to weight gain to erectile dysfunction and loss of libido.
The next generation of drugs focused on fine-tuning the same mechanisms, and had somewhat improved side effects.
A new class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, arrived in the ’80s, bringing huge commercial successes like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.
Since SSRIs are more specifically focused on serotonin, they were heralded as cleaner options; but they are not much more effective at lifting mood than the older drugs.
We often take for granted the diabetes analogy for depression: If you are depressed, it is because you need serotonin, just as a diabetic person needs insulin.
Drug companies often say that mood disorder is caused by a “chemical imbalance” in serotonin or a signal like it.
One ad for Zoloft, the blockbuster antidepressant, featured a sad white circle crawling cutely beneath a gray cloud; the voice-over boasted that depression may be “related to an imbalance of natural chemicals in the brain. Zoloft works to correct this imbalance.”
But the evidence for this story is slim.
Prozac raises serotonin levels within hours yet doesn’t change mood for weeks.
When scientists deplete serotonin in healthy people, it does not make them sad.
And when doctors measure serotonin levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of depressed people, they do not find a consistent deficiency; one 2008 study even found increased levels of serotonin in depressed people’s brains.
The drug tianeptine, discovered in the late ‘80s, decreases serotonin levels yet relieves depression.
And studies have shown that people falling in love show lower, not higher, levels of serotonin.
Serotonin is clearly not just a feel-good chemical.
If a serotonin-based drug like Zoloft makes you happier, it works in some other, indirect way.
As psychiatrist Ronald Pies, editor of Psychiatric Times, put it in 2011, “The ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”
Meanwhile, as serotonin falls far short of explaining depression, a more likely candidate is emerging.
Stress in moderation is not harmful, but motivating. Cortisol, a stress hormone, cycles daily; synchronizing with sunlight, it helps arouse us for the day.
In health, the hormone spikes when we need to pay attention: a test, a job interview, a date.
Studies on rodents and humans confirm that brief, mild increases in stress are good for the brain, particularly for memory.
During these spikes, neurons are born and expand in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped finger of tissue responsible for forming new memories and understanding three-dimensional space, and rodents learn better.
The student who gets stressed while studying is more alert and remembers more than the one who feels no urgency—up to a point.
The problem comes when stress is either too intense at one moment, as in a rape or violent attack, or too sustained, as in long-term poverty, neglect, or abuse.
ACCENTUATING THE NEGATIVE …: Under prolonged stress, neurons in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, expand like overgrown shrubbery and become hyperactive.Image from “Nature Reviews Neuroscience”*
Stress changes brain architecture differently, depending on how long it lasts.
After chronic stress, like childhood trauma, the effect of hormones on brain cells inverts: Neurons in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for mood and impulse control, start to shrink, while those in the amygdala, the almond-shaped seat of fear and anxiety, expand like overgrown shrubbery.
But people are differently vulnerable, depending on genes and on prior life experience.
“If you take two people and subject them to the same stressful event, for one of them it will be harmful and for the other, no,” says Maurizio Popoli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Milan. “It is because they perceive the stress differently.”
… AND ELIMINATING THE POSITIVE: In the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, regions responsible for memory, attention, and self-control, chronic stress shrinks the branches of neurons.Image from “Nature Reviews Neuroscience”*
Stress hormones’ most important effect is to flood parts of the brain with glutamate, the brain’s “go” signal.
Used by 80 percent of neurons in the cortex, this key neurotransmitter drives mental processes from memory to mood.
Glutamate triggers neurons to generate sudden bursts of electricity that release more glutamate, which can in turn trigger electrical bursts in nearby neurons.
This cellular signaling is called excitation and is fundamental to how information is processed in the brain.
Like sexual excitability, it ebbs and flows; a “refractory period” follows each neural firing, or spike, during which the neuron cannot be excited.
Other neurotransmitters, like serotonin, are called “modulatory,” because they change the sensitivity of neurons that secrete glutamate (among others). Less than 1 percent of neurons in the cortex signal with these modulators.
As Popoli puts it, these modulators are “very important for fine-tuning the machine.
But the machine itself is an excitatory machine,” driven by glutamate.
Glutamate moves like a ship between neurons.
The sea it sails is called the synapse, the shore it departs from is the presynaptic neuron, and the destination, on the synapse’s far side, is the post synaptic neuron.
Another component, called a glial cell, works to remove glutamate ships from the synapse and recycle them.
The glutamate system is affected at each of these points by stress hormones: They push the first neuron to send more ships, interfere with the glial cell’s recycling, and block the docks on the distant shore.
All of these changes increase the number of glutamate ships left in the synapse, flooding the cell with aberrant signals.
Indeed, depressed people’s brains, or at least animal models of depression, show all three of these problems, leading to long-lasting excesses of glutamate in key portions of the brain.
This superabundance of glutamate makes a neuron fire sooner than it should and triggers a cascade of signals inside the cell, damaging its structure. Glutamate binds to the neuron and allows in a flood of positively charged particles, including calcium, which are vital to making a neuron fire.
But in excess, calcium activates enzymes that break down the neuron.
Each neuron has tree-like branches, called dendrites, which are used to communicate with other neurons.
When overdosed in glutamate, this canopy of branches shrinks, like a plant doused with herbicide.
First the “twigs,” called spines, disappear.
After prolonged stress, whole branches recede.
This harmful process, called excitotoxicity, is thought to be involved in bipolar disorder, depression, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.
In depressed brains, many areas are shrunken and underactive, including part of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
The brain changes that cause mood disorders, Sanacora and his colleagues believe, come in part from chronic stress overexciting neurons with glutamate.
Ketamine works faster than any other drug, and for up to 65 percent of patients who don’t respond to existing treatments.
We usually think of our brains’ adaptability as a good thing.
Just as neurons grow during development, the wiring in the adult brain can change.
After strokes or other brain injuries, neural signals re-route themselves around damage, allowing even very old people to re-learn lost skills. Psychotherapy and meditation can change patterns of brain activity in ways that persist after treatment.2
But the neuroplasticity hypothesis of mental disorder highlights the drawback of such neural liberalism: The human brain’s flexibility allows regeneration, but also renders it vulnerable to being altered by stress.
Subjected to the trauma of war, a bad breakup, or a bout of homelessness, a person with a genetic predisposition may find his mind stuck in a loop of chronic fear or depression.
The mood drugs in wide use now focus on modulatory neurotransmitters like serotonin.
Ketamine, however, works directly on glutamate signaling.
If ketamine is tapping into the root of the problem, this might explain why it works faster, better, and more often than more popular antidepressants.
Not everybody accepts the idea that glutamate and stress are central to depression.
Some experts see the effects of stress as downstream effects, not the root cause of mood disorder.
“The mechanism of action of a good treatment does not have to be the inverse of a disease mechanism,” says Eric Nestler, an expert on addiction and depression at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Serotonin drugs and ketamine may affect depression indirectly, without a serotonin or glutamate abnormality at the root of depression.
Nestler also points out that depression probably includes a diversity of subtypes, without any single cause.
He treats depression not as a unified disease, but a constellation of symptoms, each with discrete neural roots.
Even so, we do know that ketamine works faster than any other drug, and for up to 65 percent of patients who don’t respond to existing treatments.
If ketamine turns out to be a psychiatric savior, it will be one with a surprising history.
Since 1962 it has been a go-to anesthetic for children in emergency rooms, because it kills pain, muffles consciousness, and rarely causes breathing or heart problems.
Children given ketamine enter “a trance like state of sensory isolation” free of pain, memory, and awareness, as one review put it.
Emergency room doctors rely on ketamine to make sure kids have no awareness or memory of, say, the trauma of having a shattered arm set back into place.
On the other hand, ketamine is a well-known recreational drug with potential for abuse.
The dissociative trip caused by a moderate dose of ketamine has made it popular in clubs and raves since the 1970s, especially in Asian cities like Hong Kong.
Its sedative effect made “special K” a date-rape drug.
Doctors, patients, and the government agencies that fund research are often suspicious of a drug known to cause hallucinations, as they have been of psychedelics like psilocybin and ecstasy, despite their potential for treating depression or anxiety.
Each tends to show fast results after a single dose, like ketamine.
In 1999, the same year ketamine was declared a controlled substance in the United States, Yale researchers happened upon its antidepressant power.
A team co-led by Dennis Charney, now dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, in Manhattan, and John Krystal, now chair of the department of psychiatry at Yale, used ketamine to study glutamate: Since ketamine was known to block glutamate receptors, it might show what role the excitatory neurotransmitter plays in the depressed brain.
To their surprise, they found that the drug made patients feel better, often within hours.
A single dose, much smaller than what’s used for anesthesia, tended to last for weeks.
Since 1999, a dozen studies have replicated the results, often on patients who failed to respond to other drugs.
Ketamine also works for bipolar people in depressive phases, without triggering mania, as classic antidepressants sometimes do.
The majority of depressed people studied have responded to ketamine.
For patients who are often suicidal, this fast response can be lifesaving.
Some 50 doctors in the U.S. now offer ketamine infusions for depression.
The first evidence in humans that ketamine might work to prevent mood disorder came from the battlefield.
Many leaders in the field see the emergence of ketamine, and future fast antidepressants based on glutamate, as a great leap forward for the field.
“In my mind,” Sanacora told NPR recently, “it is the most exciting development in mood-disorder treatment in the last 50 years.”
Ketamine and the old antidepressants both result in fuller neural “trees,” but by different routes, at different speeds.
Prozac and other serotonin-based drugs take four to six weeks to kick in.
A landmark 2003 Science study by Columbia University’s René Hen and Ronald Duman, now at Yale, found that serotonin-based antidepressants only work if they spur birth of new neurons in the hippocampus.3
These new neurons take four to six weeks to mature, roughly the same amount of time that conventional antidepressants take to lift a depressed person’s spirits.
A 2010 paper argued that SSRIs like Prozac may work by dampening glutamate release in response to stress.
So even old-school antidepressants, when they work, may act on the glutamate system.
Ketamine, on the other hand, seems to act directly on mature neurons, fertilizing them to grow branches more robustly, or protecting them against damage.
Ketamine’s key effect is to block glutamate receptors of one type.
This causes less calcium to flow into the neuron, reducing the risk of the neuron shrinking or self-destructing.
Today ketamine is offered by psychiatrists and anesthesiologists, at prices ranging from $300 to $1,000 per dose, for people who are morbidly depressed or have chronic pain.
Insurance doesn’t usually cover the cost of an infusion, because even though it is FDA approved as an anesthetic, it has not been approved as an antidepressant.
Each new use of a drug requires multiphase clinical trials for FDA approval, usually funded by pharmaceutical companies, which have little incentive to invest in a drug they can’t monetize.
Ketamine got its original patent in 1966, and that expired long ago.
So even if drug companies steered ketamine through the expensive approval process as an antidepressant, doctors could still prescribe the cheap, generic versions already available for anesthesia instead of pricier, patented versions intended for depression.
This is an old story.
Lithium carbonate, which also acts on glutamate receptors, is still one of the most reliable drugs for treating bipolar disorder.
But lithium, which is an element, can’t be patented.
So, despite their effectiveness, these generic pills do not attract many corporate dollars.
One tough truth about mood disorder is that not all forms may ever be curable.
Brain-imaging studies have shown structural differences between the white matter in healthy versus bipolar brains.
Differences in personality and sleep patterns also persist in bipolar people, even between manic or depressed episodes.
The structural changes likely have genetic roots, and once they arise, are difficult or impossible to reverse.
Nevertheless, if a drug prevents a mood disorder from manifesting, it might prevent harmful anatomical changes from ever taking place.
Just as a vaccine triggers the body to arm itself against a particular virus, a drug like ketamine, given before the crisis that triggers a breakdown, might protect the brain against the effects of stress.
Like a vaccine, the drug might only need to be given once for lasting resilience.
The first evidence in humans that ketamine might work to prevent mood disorder, not just treat it, came from the battlefield. U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq were treated with various anesthetics, including ketamine.
Since ketamine can cause hallucinations, surgeons worried that it might make trauma worse:
Scary combat-related hallucinations could put soldiers at higher risk of mental illness.
But they found the opposite. Out of 25,000 service members wounded in Iraq between 2002 and 2007, the data showed, veterans treated with ketamine for burns had lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Among civilians and soldiers hospitalized for burns, as many as 45 percent end up with PTSD.
But soldiers treated with ketamine on the battlefield got PTSD about half as often—even though they had more severe burns requiring more surgeries and longer hospital stays.
Mental hospitals don’t usually see patients until they break:
This isn’t how it works with other sicknesses.
Rebecca Brachman, a neuroscientist and recent doctoral graduate from Columbia University, and her supervisor, Christine Denny, tried giving ketamine to mice and then exposing them to stressors.4
The researchers tested several types of stress, including one in which subject mice are “bullied” by more aggressive mice for two weeks.
After this daily hazing, mice ordinarily develop the rodent equivalent of PTSD and depression: freezing in a new space, refusing to interact with other mice, and not moving in a forced swim test.
But the mice “vaccinated” before the bullying fared far better: They didn’t act depressed afterward.
Brachman and Denny found that the protection from a single dose lasted for weeks, even though ketamine only stays in the body for a few hours.
Though they haven’t tested it yet, it is possible that, like a vaccine, this protection could last for much longer.
Their rodent research suggests ketamine may work even better as a prophylactic than as an antidepressant.
Denny says that we may eventually routinely use ketamine to prevent PTSD in combat veterans, rape victims, or survivors of car crashes or mass shootings.
Ketamine seems to be most strongly protective in mice when given before stressful events, Brachman says.
Since we can’t predict most traumatic life events, this would limit the drug’s utility.
But if injected after a trauma yet before the psychological damage sets in—as with the burned soldiers—ketamine may still be protective.
Denny is investigating this possibility now.
And in some situations, violent shock is predictable.
“You don’t know when an earthquake will happen,” Brachman says, “but we do know when we’re about to send U.N. workers into an area devastated by a disaster.”
When people know they are going into an acutely traumatic situation, she imagines, a preventive drug given ahead of time might protect their brains from the long-lasting effects of stress.
Think of earthquake aid workers, fire fighters, or rescue workers in Syria, dragging mangled people from rubble.
The idea that a single injection could prevent mood disorders is a radical departure from current psychiatric thinking.
But there are some precedents: Talk therapy and mindfulness meditation have long focused on building resilience to stress.
Bipolar patients take “neuroprotective” drugs like lithium not to treat current symptoms, but as a protection against future breakdowns, for instance.
Not everyone is confident that ketamine is a safe bet, to be sure.
Ketamine’s long-term safety is not known, says Nestler.
No lasting ill effects are seen in anesthesia patients, who take much larger doses, but they haven’t received routine treatments, the way it is administered as an antidepressant.
Plus, ketamine’s reputation as a street drug is tough to shake.
Many doctors consider the hallucinogenic an unacceptable risk for patients, who they fear may develop a taste for the high.
Yale’s Sanacora points out that patients in his trial, who are screened for drug or alcohol abuse, often find the trip feeling unpleasant or disturbing.
The psychedelic experience is surreal, he points out, not the mellowing pleasure of a drug like alcohol, Xanax, or heroin.
Extreme ketamine trips, referred to as falling in a “K-hole,” are often compared to near-death or unsettling out-of-body experiences; they hardly sound like fun to most people.
But since the antidepressant dose is far lower than the one taken to get high, many patients don’t even notice.
Drug companies are also competing to develop a less trippy alternative.
Johnson & Johnson is testing a nasal spray form of esketamine, a version of ketamine with less psychoactive impact.
A company called Naurex has finished phase II trials of Rapastinel, an injected drug that partially blocks the same glutamate receptors as ketamine, but is not psychedelic.
The ketamine pioneers emphasize that their prevention research is the beginning of a new road, raising hopes, rather than offering an immediate cure. Brachman and Denny stress that ketamine may not be the drug that ultimately makes it into widespread use; like the anti-tubercular drugs in the 1950s that spawned the antidepressant era, it is the first to trail-blaze this new class of psychiatric prophylactics.
“What this work shows us is that we can intervene beforehand and create some sort of self-reinforcing stress resilience,” Brachman says.
“We didn’t know that before; that’s what’s important. Everything else—should we use it, how should we use it—that all comes later.”
Taylor Beck is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Before writing, he worked in brain imaging labs studying memory, aging, and dreams.
References
1. Maxwell, R.A. & Eckhardt, S.B. Drug Discovery Humana Press, New York, NY (1990).
2. Kennedy, S.H., et al. Differences in brain glucose metabolism between responders to CBT and venlafaxine in a 16-week randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Psychiatry 164, 778-788 (2007).
3. Vogel, G. Depression drugs’ powers may rest on new neurons. Science 301, 757 (2003).
4. Brachman, R.A., et al. Ketamine as a prophylactic against stress-induced depressive-like behavior. Biological Psychiatry (2015). Retrieved from DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.04.022
*Images reprinted from Popoli, M., Yan, Z., McEwen, B., & Sanacora, G. The stressed synapse: the impact of stress and glucocorticoids on glutamate transmission. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, 22-37 (2011).
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Wow...very powerful words John!
When I said meditating I didn’t mean those types of experiences - I meant my self-soothing behavior of sitting in a tree for hours.
It certainly was not meditation that brought me to such frightening places that I ended up as a child.
I too had some difficulty as a child when going from “night terror” back to the waking world (not that I wasn’t “awake" already, lucid.) at distinguishing reality from “not”(?) - or this alternate perception of consciousness that was the cause of so much trouble for me as a child.
The worst was this entity that would appear while I was out of body and wandering in my house at night trying to wake up my parents and failing horribly.
It was always proceeded by this electrical buzzing/popping like you hear under high tension power lines or a spark gap when it arches.
A triangle of burning fire...with an evil face, black eyes, screaming at me as it rushed me...I know it’s name but I will not name it.
When I was working particularly hard at self-inducing an out of body experience - this noise is one that I would hear again and the first few times it really scared the shit out of me because it brought up all this past horror and trauma from my experiences as a child - but...it, along with many other sounds I have come to believe are the sound of the transition from one plane of being or reality or consciousness to another.
You mention “Fairie”....yes *sigh*....somewhere there is a door at the bottom of a staircase...inside the door is a spiral slide made of the most beautifully grained polished wood you have ever seen...
I don’t remember what’s at the bottom...I just know I’ve always wanted to go back.
As for the “void” - I’ve posted several articles on the thread on how to escape it should one find themselves “trapped” within.
I will repost them in the next day or so along with any new info out there...it’s been a while since I’ve discussed it here.
I agree with all you wrote concerning the ego and moving toward transformation more than death.
It seems like it would make sense that there is a purpose for it...and would we really still be “individuals” without it?
It’s funny you say we need more harmony because that is exactly the reactions and effects of diminishing the activity of the DMN in the brain.
Yes...I remember the pure experiential nowness of being a child.
Lost in thought but not of the past or future...lost in imagination.
I’ve told this story before but I used to “play” with the wind....and as far as I can remember it - it played back.
People can dismiss me...but there were several instances where I would “conduct” the wind as a child.
I was the odd kid at the school...played by myself for the most part, though I had a good friend Chris.
We had this row of really giant Mulberry trees along the fence of the playground...and I would run under the branches with the wind following close behind only for me to stop and feel it “catch me”.
I would throw my arms up in the air and push it this way and that.
It wasn’t until one of the teachers asked me what I was doing (cause it probably looked very strange I must admit), that I became self-conscious about it and I stopped...too bad in retrospect.
The more I talk to my Mom (Dad passed in 2007), the more I hear about these really bizarre things I would do as a child and the more it brings the memories back to me - I have no doubt that I have blocked out certain things that were too traumatizing for me.
Mostly memories of what everyone said were “nightmares”....but it was always me fully lucid stuck in my house.
Sometimes I would get outside but that would take me to some really scary places too....so I mostly just stayed in the house and tried to wake people up.
It's funny because I know how to jump up and levitate in that reality...I remember practicing jumping up in the air in the living room and then holding it and I could almost explain or even do it here - but there is some element that is missing or I can’t quite tell you how to stay in the air other than you have to kind of “hold yourself up” (see - doesn’t make sense).
Of course they were all dreams according to everyone else...but like I said - I know I watched the “Terminator” sitting on the floor between my parents while I was technically still in bed.
All this sounds nuts I know...it sounds bonkers to me typing it even...but I have quite clear memories of a lot of things I would rather not.
Anyhow...I would be curious to hear about your own “journeys” if it’s not too personal or you aren’t too worried about what people think?
All my own night terror issues basically quit once I learned how to just jump back to my sleeping body and force it awake...but I was probably in the 4th grade by that time.
If anyone thinks I’m crazy - well, you didn’t live it...I can understand where one would assume that these are all imagined or dreamed experiences I had...and I sincerely wish that they all were - but there was also a lot of physical phenomena that went along with it all - those who witnessed that cannot deny that something bizarre took place.
I won’t assume to know what it all was exactly...that is why I have always been interested in this type of stuff.
Maybe someday we will figure it out.
Much love to all!
Hi Skare - some very powerful words of your own too , which are always very much appreciated
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Something we'll all be hearing more about in the near future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty
Hi Skare - some very powerful words of your own too , which are always very much appreciated. I see you have posted a lot more material - I am going to have a good read and digest over the next day or two rather than dash something off the cuff right now. Very many thanks for your thread as always ....
No problem John...take a month...lol...you don’t have to answer me at all if you don’t want!
I’m not one to get too offended by that.
Sorry...I kind of went off on a tangent and the retelling of childhood strangeness!
I just don’t really care any more what people think of my experiences...I used to, even here somewhat in this thread.
But...what the hell...people can’t think what they will, I think it may be more valuable to put it out there for others to consider and contemplate than to keep it all to myself worried that I might be viewed as a bit “out there” or whatnot...lol.
Was trying to show you that your experiences are in a nonjudgmental space.
Let me know when you have time also what you think in regards to the “void” and that attached article.
Take care of yourself!
Something we'll all be hearing more about in the near future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty
Especially once they start to implant thing in our brains...like, hey...do you want the new AT&T Samsung ear-receivers?
Listen to music, make phone calls, adjust the volume, auto-noise cancelling - sounds amazing right!?
Just make sure you pay your bill or your hearing will be temporarily shut off...a deposit may be required to turn service back on.
Or access to extra memory...a direct mental connection to the cloud - one also has to think of viruses being uploaded into peoples’ heads then too.
Like “Snow Crash”...fucking awesome book that they should never try to make into a movie (though an anime might do it justice).
We are already seeing such challenges of cognitive liberty...the whole thing about psychedelics being used for depression or other mental issues that people have, or even just to reach a deeper understanding of your “self" - who gives anyone the right to say you cannot explore your own consciousness?
Cheers man!
HAHA I love this!! Too relatable.
I know right...lmao...his face is precious though hahahaha!
Thanks Jenny for your continued support!
So, I’m sure you all may have heard about this guy -
RIP
He was killed by native tribesman on North Sentinel Island which is strictly OFF LIMITS to outside people.
The indigenous peoples who have lived there for 1000s of years do not have many of the antibodies in their immune system that wouldn’t even bother us living where we do - in other words...he could have very well been responsible for the genocide of the two dozen of so tribespeople left.
I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead - but this is exactly the kind of irresponsible behavior that is displayed by certain zealots wanting to “spread the word of God”...instead he could have very well spread disease and possibly exposed a group implicitly protected from just such BS and outsiders coming to their island - it is still possible even though they killed him with arrows that he has killed or will severely impact these few handfuls of people.
This is the kind of stuff that just irks the shit out of me - you want to save their souls?
They don’t even speak a language you can understand - how you gonna do that first of all?
Second of all they don’t want you there enough that they will shoot you full of arrows - probably best that you stay the fuck away.
It seems when religion gets involved that certain folks become incredibly presumptuous and feel that they are only beholden to the laws of their religion.
All common sense flies out the window.
It’s very sad that he was killed, I feel for his family and his loved ones - but he just may be responsible even still for the genocide of the final remaining tribesman....not cool or very “loving”.
Way to go spreading the word....*sigh*.
So now we have more of the story...apparently this guy went to shore the day before and held up his Bible proclaiming how he was there to save their souls through Jesus and in response they shot an arrow through his fucking Bible - so he ran and left.
Then that night decided that it was worth the risk to go back the next day?!
What kind of mental illness did this fellow have?
They shot an arrow through the BIBLE he was holding in his hands...I don’t know how much clearer they could have made it for this young man.
That’s some damn good and frightening marksmanship!
Very frustrating to see the audacity of the zealous.
I’m interested in everything you said Skare - there’s a lot to take in and I want to do it justice. Got caught up with too many other things today. I think your childhood experiences are pretty relevant to my own and I very much appreciate your sharing them. I just wanted to let you know I’m still with this .......
Something we'll all be hearing more about in the near future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_liberty
This got me to thinking. Maybe we will be able to create cyber extensions to our brains eventually - but then there may be no limit to how far this could go. We could end up with more cyber than bio, and then maybe our sense of self could migrate into the cyber and not need the bio any more.
Consciousness is nonlocal it is an emission that we sense time and space and perceive ourselves as the body. The merkabah is a dodecahedron construct and multidimensional and we are in no the 3 dimensional space and in the field at the same time because of superposition. Every second atoms phase out of this reality and report our perceptions back to the field. Thus reality is created by our perceptions and the wave is collapsed by our consciousness