In the first half, author and hospice volunteer Dannion Brinkley talked about his life-changing Near-Death experiences (NDE), the prophetic visions that came out of them, and what his perceptions of the afterlife were like. He described being hit by lightning while talking on the phone which brought on his first NDE in 1975. The nails of his shoes became welded to the nails of the floor, "and that's what grounded me," he detailed, adding that he was blown up to the ceiling and felt like his body was on fire. He felt enormous relief when he left his body. "Everything had an aura; everything was producing an energy...and nothing was solid," he said, as he witnessed paramedics arriving to rescue him. "I didn't know whether to go with the body or stay where I was."
He then heard a series of harmonic tones and went through a tunnel of bright lights. He became aware of a being that was present with him, and then he embarked on a "life review" and saw his actions from the perspective of all the people he ever interacted with. At one point, he traveled with the being becoming part of the transporting medium-- a "blue-silver mist." He saw magnificent crystal cities, like boxes of light, and thirteen pulsing beings. In the ensuing years, Brinkley would go on to have two other NDEs, which expanded his visions further.
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In the latter half, Jungian psychologist, Dr. Art Rosengarten discussed the 600-year old Renaissance-based Tarot deck and how it is a potentially high-powered psycho-spiritual instrument for the 21st century. Tarot allows for a movement out of the ordinary rational mindset and "into a far more intuitive place-- some call it vision logic," he cited. Our normal thinking process has a kind of "blind spot," he continued, and is devoid of higher awareness. Tarot is a reading of the present situation, and the future can be only be interpreted from that stance, he explained.
Rosengarten has "re-tuned" the standard Tarot deck using just the 25 major arcana cards with the addition of five new cards he's developed as "the archetypes of transformation." These new cards include the Great Web (interconnectedness), the River (flow), the Ring (wholeness), the Well (renewal), and the Dragon (initiation). We have the illusion that we live in an advanced, sophisticated society, but our "smart" objects are not wise, and underneath the veneer, our level of consciousness remains very low, he remarked. He believes that Tarot offers a way of solving problems from an intuitive level, and can be a tool to raise our consciousness level from within. Rosengarten announced he's launching a new series of online seminars for understanding and using Tarot beginning in September.
News segment guests: Lauren Weinstein, Peter Davenport