extraordinary%20encounters

40 Being of Light
was led to paranormal subjects such as psychic
phenomena, channeling, and spirit communication.
In 1983, Anka sat in with a channeler
and spent several months absorbing information
from discarnate sources. The entity offered
to teach whoever might be interested in
learning how to channel, and Anka decided to
take a course from the channeler. Midway
through the course, Anka first heard from
“Bashar,” who said he was the pilot of the
spaceship Anka had seen a decade earlier.
Bashar claimed to have come from a planet
w h e re all communication is done thro u g h
t e l e p a t h y. The people there do not have names
as such. He called himself Bashar—Arabic for
“c o m m a n d e r”—for Anka’s conve n i e n c e .
After a period of telepathic communication
with Bashar, Anka started to channel—in
other words, to speak with his (or Bashar’s)
voice so that others could hear. In due course,
Anka has become an internationally known
channeler who has taken Bashar (as well as another
entity, Anima) to a variety of nations on
several continents. Bashar has told Anka that
he and his people live on the planet Essassani,
five hundred light years from Earth but in a
different dimension. Bashar was speaking not
just for himself but collectively expressing his
society’s sentiments.
“I have no way of proving ‘Ba s h a r’s’ existence
to anyone,” Anka concedes. “The most
i m p o rtant thing is that the information, where
ver it’s coming from, had made a difference in
many people’s lives, including my ow n” (Anka,
n.d.). Anka’s organization, In t e r p l a n e t a ry
Connections, coordinates the channeling eff
o rts and circulates tapes of their re c o rd i n g s .
See Also: Channeling
Further Reading
Anka, Darryl, 1990. Bashar: Blue Print for Change, A
Message for Our Future. Simi Valley, CA: New Solutions
Publishing.
“A Message from Darryl Anka,” n.d. http://www.
bashartapes.com/about/message2.html
Being of Light
In his best-selling Life after Life (1976) Raymond
A. Moody writes of near-death experi-
ences in which persons undergo visionary encounters
of what seems to be a kind of heavenly
realm. In out-of-body states, according to
testimony Moody collected, percipients observe
a brilliant light at the end of a tunnellike
passage. A telepathic message from the
light asks the observer something like, “Are
you prepared to die?” or “What have you
done with your life?” Immediately afterward,
the dying person experiences a “life review” in
which significant events are rapidly played out
either in order of their occurrence or all at
once in, as Moody puts it, “a display of visual
imagery . . . incredibly vivid and real.”
The percipient feels great love and warmth
emanating from this being, who is usually interpreted
as a divine figure from the individual’s
own religious tradition. Some see it as
God or Christ, others as an angel. All, however,
feel that the being is “an emissary, or a
guide.”
Moody characterized the meeting with the
being of light as “perhaps the most incredible
common element in the accounts.” Other researchers
who followed in Moody’s wake,
however, only ambiguously replicated this
particular finding. Kenneth Ring, Margot
Grey, and others found fewer such encounters
in their own samples of people who had undergone
near-death experiences. Many neardeath
accounts described the observation of
an overwhelmingly loving, beautiful light surrounding
them and suffusing the landscape,
but only a small minority of reports had that
light as a “being.” A typical expression of the
light was more like one offered by an Englishwoman
who encountered it while her heart
stopped as she was anesthetized during dental
surgery: “The light is brighter than anything
possible to imagine. There are no words to describe
it, it’s a heavenly light” (Grey, 1985).
Frequently, percipients encounter recognizable
figures, usually either Christ or deceased
friends and relatives.
Further Reading
Grey, Margot, 1985. Return from Death: An Explo -
ration of the Near-Death Experience. Boston, MA:
Arkana.