After suffering from a terminal illness in 1982, Mellen-Thomas Benedict “died” ... and for an hour and a half he was monitored showing no vital signs. Miraculously he returned to his body with a complete remission of the disease, and what may be the most inspirational near-death experience story known to date.

Guy Spiro: Mellen, I usually to start by asking people to briefly tell their story. What happened? You were “dead” for an hour and a half with no vital signs?

Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Yes, I’d ended up in a private hospice situation, withered away, and eventually succumbed to my disease. I had a living will which clearly stated that I didn’t want to be resuscitated or brought back or plugged in to anything. I really did want to die, because it was an inoperable and incurable form of brain cancer. When I was diagnosed, I was given six to eight months to live. I was not a spiritual person. I was not religious in any way and I was not even interested in the subject of God or philosophy. It was just pointless to me. I wasn’t even an atheist. At least they show some interest. Before my experience, I never really heard or paid attention to the word metaphysics or even to hospice. I had never heard that word either until I ended up in one. They were very kind to me and I was a very unhappy camper, let me tell you. I was very angry. I was someone from the ’60s, who really believed that the world was going to end in our lifetime. It wasn’t a religious thing, it was ecological and nuclear weapons. I was a classic product of the cold war.

GS: A great deal of pessimism in those days. I was there, too.

MTB: They used to show us kids in school films of what nuclear weapons would do and that only cockroaches would be left alive.

GS: Yes, we both ducked and covered.

MTB: Then everybody was building bomb shelters if they had the money, and if you didn’t have one, you felt left out. Most kids used the neighbor’s bomb shelters as a playhouse, anyway. But I carried that attitude for many years. Eventually I saw a photograph that some ecology group put out that likened an aerial photograph of the city of Los Angeles to a human cancer cell. The similarities were astounding. That did me in. From that moment on, I thought that nature had gone wrong and had created a living cancer on the planet called humanity.

GS: That still circulates. People still think that.

MTB: I know! I know! Of course, all the experts were backing all this up. Even back then they were saying, if we don’t straighten up right now, there is no hope. Of course, historically the experts have always been more wrong than they have ever been right about predicting the future. I don’t know why we listen to them.

GS: I know. Where is my flying car?

[laughter]

MTB: I was expecting a lot more by the time the 21^st century showed up. I really did. That was a lesson right there. I believed that humanity was a malignant cancer and I ended up with brain cancer.

     So I had this living will and I was in a hospice situation withering away and the day came. I was monitored, actually monitored with an amplified stethoscope and stuff like that for an hour and a half with no vital signs. That is not a record by the way. If you look at near death research for being dead or without vital signs, there have been much longer cases.

GS: It sounds like a long time to me.

MTB: For me it had two effects. It seemed like I had all the time in the world, but when it was over, it seemed like it took one second. I had an agreement with my hospice caretaker to monitor me before they called the mortuary. She monitored for an hour and a half and was convinced that I was gone. I don’t know if you have ever been present at the moment of death. I have many times since then as a volunteer. When someone dies, it is completely different than passing out or being asleep. It is very different. The longer you leave the body there, the stiffer it gets.

GS: And the colder, there is a very big difference between a body still alive and dead.

MTB: There really is. So during that time, I left my body, found myself alone in the darkness and eventually connected with the light that people talk about, which I had never heard of at the time, and had my experience with the light.

     Later I met P.M.H. Atwater, the great researcher in the field, who has written so many great books. She introduced me to Dr. Ken Ring and I started getting mentioned in these books and became, at that time, probably the most studied near death case in the world, because I volunteered in many, many research projects in the years after my experience. That is how I got into so many books ... and then the internet hit. Because everybody puts their books on the internet, my name came up a lot and started getting all over the planet. I was actually the last person to put up a website about me.

[laughter]

GS: One thing that I find surprising and interesting about your story is that, without any kind of metaphysical or meditative background, you had the presence to stop and ask the light questions.

MTB: That is what Ken Ring and others say. When I got to the light, I didn’t want to be rushed. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I didn’t want to be rushed. I asked the light, can we stop a minute and let me think about this? And there was no rush, there was no hurry, there was all the time in the world. At that point, I had this feeling—“this is interactive.” I tell people that just as life is completely interactive here on this side, the other side is also completely interactive.

GS: As above, so below.

MTB: Yes, and so you are not on an automatic rollercoaster ride that starts there and ends there. In that period, I had a lot of questions. I was sort of an information person before I died, generally speaking, and I liked science and stuff like that. I asked a lot of questions and the light would answer in a most brilliant way, so that I would personally understand. I would fully and completely understand the information that was being released to me, transferred to me. We had these great conversations that felt like it took forever, and then there came a point when I really had no more questions. All my questions had been answered. I tell people that even though all my questions have been answered to my satisfaction, I don’t know everything by any stretch of the imagination. I think each and every one of us is born with a different set of questions to the universe for us to explore. There are many things that I am not interested in that I didn’t ask about. Many or most things, maybe. Every question that I had, though, every fundamental question was answered.

     The other thing that Ken Ring and that Phyllis Atwater pointed out right away was that they were surprised to hear that I go back to the light every day. I really had not heard about near death until I met Atwater, and many of my after effects were really very similar to other near deathers, except they were surprised that I was going back to the light every day and it was a natural occurrence. For me, it usually happens each day as I wake up and I realize that I’m alive. If people can understand what it means to just wake up in the morning, with your full life ahead of you and the unlimited potential of any day of your life, it is humbling. It is amazing. That is typically when I pop out of my body and go to the light for a little while.

     So I was having these experiences with the light, which I thought was normal, although at first it was scary because I’d leave my body and I thought I was dying every time. I would always be returned and I would always have these interesting conversations. So I asked the light early on, “I would like to be able to bring things back to the world, things that would help the world.” I’m not a philosopher and I am not a religious person, but now I have a large spiritual life. I am not that interested in philosophy because I think a six-pack and two humans and you have philosophers. So I asked to be a nuts and bolts guy, and I was given that gift and the enhanced gift of invention. I have been tested in universities to be able to invent on command on just about any subject. That is one of the things that I am really well known for, actually, bringing back useful technical information.

GS: What kind of things have you brought back that have worked out?

MTB: I only have two requirements. I don’t work on weapons systems and I don’t work for the police or the government. But I have a lot of patents. You can check those out at the patent office for technologies, for regeneration healing tools. I am an eclectic inventor and I invent every day. It never stops and I record everything.

     One of the things I did that got me a lot of attention was working with the University of Texas. I was brought in with Dr. Ken Ring and not told what it was going to be or any details whatsoever and I didn’t know anything until we entered the room. By the way, this was videotaped and recorded. At that time, I could do almost a self hypnosis and get to the light. So, the University of Texas sat me down and they said, “Today, we are going to be working on something call CNT.” That was all the information that they gave me, that it was a medical problem, and then I did my technique. In those days, the only tools that I brought with me were a big pad of paper and large Crayola crayons. I could sit there, go to the light and still speak to you and draw pictures while seeing. With this experiment, I went to the light and asked “What information can we bring back?” I almost immediately started drawing and I drew something that to me looked like two horse shoes. A big horse shoe facing down on the bottom and a smaller horse shoe facing up on top. I said, “The answer is in this upper horse shoe and it’s these three segments.” I numbered them exactly and I said, “That’s where the problem is and the real problem is in this third piecing which is this thing.” I was pointing out a gene, but I didn’t know any of that. And then I drew picture and I said, “There are two heads on it and one head is normal and the one that isn’t right is overriding the head that is. If we can figure out a way to cleave that head off, I think we can cure this.”

     It turns out that I was exactly right. I helped decode a genetic disease and the information was very accurate. Everybody thanked me and I went away. Then about three months later, I started getting letters and calls saying, “My God, you hit it right on the head! This is astounding. There is no way you could have had this information in advance.” I did a fair number of projects like that and a fair number of think tanks, all of which you have to sign nondisclosures and promise to never talk about. I worked in a lot of think tanks with some very impressive world class scientists over the next ten years until I retired from all that in 1995.

GS: What then?

MTB: Then I moved out to California and became very interested in developing some of my ideas. Quite often in research tanks and institutions, you can bring in the information and then nothing ever happens. That used to make me a little bit crazy. We would bring in useful information and yet nobody would do anything. Just, “Okay, thanks.” I would be correct. I would be accurate, yet no one would go further with it. I asked about this. I said, “It looks like the information is the easy thing.” And the light said, “You are right. At this time in history, don’t be surprised that even if you could answer every question in the world for humans, their focus right now is on the questions more than the answers.”

GS: I read a quote just a couple days ago. I don’t remember who it was, but he said, “Don’t worry about people stealing ideas. If it is original, you’ll have to jam it down their throats.”

[laughter]

MTB: It’s amazing, isn’t it? So then I became involved with private business people. Boy, did I have a lot to learn about the business world and Silicon Valley and all that. I came out to California with my little butterfly wings and the first thing they did snap those wings off.

GS: You mean it’s not all rainbows and unicorns?

[laughter]

MTB: Not in Silicon Valley. That gets ripped off pretty darn fast.

GS: How disappointing.

[laughter]

MTB: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I had a lot to learn. In those days, never having been in business before or anything, I thought people that had business degrees from great schools were a lot smarter than me on that level. My God, I was used and abused on a whole range of scenarios. You finally wise up and learn from your life experience. A lot of people say, “Why don’t you go to the light and have them give you a million dollars and everything.” I say, “No, I’ve been to the light and they are not interested in that. That is our interest and we have to figure that out here.” I brought back brilliant ideas that people could make millions from, but once you bring it down to planet Earth, it is a different scenario. That’s why if the higher self on the other side could help you with that, everyone could win the lottery.

GS: Do you think the higher self is separate, another being?

MTB: Not at all. In fact, one of the greatest lessons that I learned on the other side I will be putting out in my book. Only the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve learned is on the internet. One of the greatest things that I learned is the concept of the Gaia. Not only the planet and everything on it is one living being and one living system, but so is the solar system, so is the galaxy, so is the universe a living being. We are all one. We are all one, I finally got to understand.

GS: There is only the One.

MTB: There is the great self and then there is the individual self and all in between, but it is all the great self. That is why every human being on the planet Earth is the same being. That is why we only have one higher self, Matrix, for the whole planet. We all have the same higher. It’s a direct extension. You can never be separated from it. You can never lose it and you can never screw it up in any way with anything you do. It is untaintable. Thank God!

GS: My basic work is to articulate the new paradigm, and under the old paradigm, the idea was the lower self surrender to the higher self. But the new paradigm is you realize that you are your higher self.

MTB: Exactly. Of course, there are many other dimensions. But we are intimately involved in the three dimensional and we tend to conceptualize the fourth dimension of time, which is an illusion by the way. There is no time. There never was a past and there is no future. It is always now.

GS: All simultaneous.

MTB: It is, no matter what you do or where you go, you are always going to be here now.

GS: It appears that time kicks in at this density.

MTB: But it is useful. Time is very useful because you can say, “Let’s meet at 12 noon for lunch.” It’s useful, but on the other hand, it also can be a burden.

GS: Oh yeah, you better pay the rent by the first.

 [laughter]

MTB: The counting of time really began the digital age thousands of years ago. It was in India that they invented the number one and it was the Mayans that invented zero. One/zero, off/on, is the whole basis for our entire binary code.

GS: Off/on, yes/no. When you come to the place where you realize that there really is only One and what we have is the illusion of separation from the One. That illusion of the separation is dependent upon two and there you have duality.

MTB: I actually like duality.

GS: So do I. This “let’s get off the wheel and not have any more lifetimes” does not appeal at all to me any more. I like it here. I know I am going to stub my toe once in a while.

MTB: Oh yeah. It surprises people sometimes, but I have often said, “The other side is not all that it is cracked up to be.”

[laughter]

MTB: Having organs is absolutely marvelous. You don’t want to suffer, but having organs is absolutely marvelous. What I learned is that having a body without conscious awareness of spirit is a wasteland, but also, spirit without a body is sort of a wasteland. The two together, heaven on earth, is what we are really talking about.

GS: I believe the Earth, the physical plane, is basically a theme park.

MTB: I heard once that Earth is one of the more favored reincarnation destinations because this is where you get a rest or a vacation from eternal bliss.

 [laughter]

MTB: Don’t expect it here. You can always have eternal bliss, but you are here because you need a vacation from it.

GS: We’re attracted to this plane for its density because what we experience here seems so real.

MTB: And it is. What astounded me on the other side is that it is all more real than what we imagine and even the unimagined is real. It is various layers of ultra subtle energy to ultra dense energy and it is everything in between. What is amazing is that all of this, every band of energy, every thought, every vibration in the entire universe, is self organizing and self correcting. You know, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Water seeks its own level. It’s absolutely amazing how that works.

GS: So what are you teaching for the individual to grab hold of and change their lives?

MTB: It actually has boiled down to four subject areas and it covers almost everything. The four subject areas that I love to teach in my workshops, and these are the four questions in all cultures of mankind over history, is this. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going, and is there life after death? One of the great things I learned on the other side is that reincarnation is more real than most people imagine. But I was shown on the other side the quantum physics and the quantum mechanics of reincarnation and it is solid. I love to work with people on this and draw them pictures and show them how it works, because once you get a grip on this, you can become interactive with the reincarnation path you are on.

GS: Have you found that there are actual systems in place or it is more chaotic than that?

MTB: It is both. It can be absolutely chaotic and it can also can be absolutely, fully conscious. Every day of your life can be chaos or as much order as you want in it. That is one of the greatest gifts that we have been given. Interestingly enough, the universe has no meaning whatsoever. Those stars in the sky have no meaning whatsoever except to you. That is the beautiful gift that we have been given, that we give meaning to everything and that is open ended, also. Catholics can believe one thing, Buddhists another, an Atheist can believe something else, a naturalist can believe that. It all comes together. The great gift that we have is that we can look out at the universe, name stars, and come up with astrology. When you look at those stars in the sky, most of them aren’t even there anymore and new ones are there that we haven’t seen yet. In the last 10,000 years those stars have moved on. They only make sense to us if you are standing on planet Earth. If you were on another planet, those stars don’t look anywhere near the same as they do to us. Astrology works for us here and now, and it is amazing that it has been developed to such a high art that people can turn it into useful information.

GS: When people ask me about astrology, I tell them that the planets and the stars cause nothing. They are not causative, they are reflective. And they are reflective because we have put those meanings on them.

MTB: Exactly. That is one of the metaphors. We are a very metaphorical species. We live more in our dreams and daydreams than we actually do with our feet on the ground most of the time. One of the great metaphors is Adam and Eve in the garden started naming everything. That is very human.

GS: The whole creation myth is allegory.

MTB: Yes, of course, it has to be. I have shown a history of religions from the most modern religions to where there weren’t any religions at all, where there weren’t any humans on the planet. In the early times, in the earliest spiritual thoughts, we worshiped nature directly. We worshiped the rain, we worshiped the ground, we worshiped the trees, and the more our intellect developed, the more we started then worshiping like at Stonehenge and calculating the stars. So the mind began to evolve and create these cosmo conceptions, which overrode our natural lower brain.

     Then you move to where you get to Egypt, where they started combining humans and animals as gods, and then you move up to the Greeks who just had the human form of the gods. And then, maybe 2000 years ago, in that range, you have what I was told were religions of the mind, and these are the people that must have a book and the book is the word. Anybody that has to have the book and it’s all in the book, these are religions of the mind. These are religions of a mental system, which have in many ways tried to disconnect us from the natural system. It is not that there is anything bad about it. It is just that the mind has become super dominant and really, these cells in your heart are infinitely more ancient than the cells in your brain. If you look at the highly developed natural order of things, how rain is made, how blood circulates, how your immune system works, compared to the systems created by the minds, the legal system, the banking system, politics, which is more evolved? We are maturing as a species, which is very good because we have been acting a lot like teenagers. “My God can beat up your God.” It is all very childish.

GS: That is one of my own lines.

MTB: It doesn’t mean we are bad or we are doomed, but the Gaia, the living system, just loves us and is giving us everything that we are going to need for our manifest destiny. So in my workshops, I love to go through both of these concepts. My big focus is on practical things, practical things that you can use.

GS: People think that their mind is who they are. They identify with the noise in their heads. And I usually go, “Think about it for a second. If the noise in your head is who you really are, oooooh!”

[laughter]

MTB: Then God help you. That is true. From the Gaia perspective, I learned that the brain is the latest thing on planet Earth. Humans, by the way, are going to be the last new species. There are going to be no new species after us. Eventually we are going to leave the planet. Very soon in cosmic times, within the next thousand years or so, actually within the next 400 years we’ll be colonizing other planets. Because we have to leave here. Every star, every planet has a certain life span. The Earth, in human years, is about 80 years old already. She has already expended about ninety percent of her life energy. That is why humans, which are at the top of the DNA chain, not that that is more superior or anything, are the book of life on this planet, and it reflects in our DNA. Every human alive today has been everything. We have been through everything from the first cell to the present. Every one of us alive has taken that path and made it and we are like Noah’s Ark. When we start colonizing, we will take all life with us, everywhere we go.

GS: We better learn to get along with each other here before go to other places.

MTB: That is why we are coming to the end of wars and to the end of religions as we have known them. One clear message that I keep getting is that fundamentalism is more dangerous than nuclear proliferation, and patriotism without conscience is fanaticism.

GS: If you look at the last, say 300 years, the prevailing wind is towards liberality and enlightenment.

MTB: Absolutely. I keep trying to point this out to people. Despite some of the things that are happening, like Iraq now and the leadership that we have now, things are generally getting better. It is the dance of light, which is typically two steps forward, one step back. I have often said recently that the people that seem to be the most lost right now are our leaders. The guy on the street seems to know better.

GS: Well, except to the point that they are scared by leadership.

MTB: Fear sells. Fear controls, and that is one of the reasons why the near death experience is becoming larger than ever, and will become larger. We have to transcend the fear of death. In the future, money doesn’t make any sense. There is super abundance here. There really is. There is more than enough food, more than enough light, more than enough land.

GS: The belief in limitation and lack is the worst form of materialism.

MTB: Yes, absolutely. To live your life that way is very stressful. I asked about the future and I asked why most people are wrong about predicting the future. You cannot predict, it is extremely rare that you can predict the exact date and time of something. The future is the present, it depends on whatever the mass potential is, and that changes. If you want to be accurate about predicting the future, you look at the mass potential and not the minutia. The mass potential is way, way to the positive and spectacular and brilliant.

GS: For a variety of reasons, I lost my fear of death a long time ago, but I am very interested in how it happens.

[laughter]

MTB: Now that the baby boomers are the dominant population on earth, this has become a very interesting subject. My research has shown that one of the hottest subjects on the internet for baby boomers is the subject of reincarnation. I was just in Canada for a week doing talks up there, and when I was doing talks ten years ago, I would ask the audience certain questions so I could kind of see where they were at. One of the questions that I would always ask was, “Who believes in reincarnation?” Maybe a couple hands would come up. Well, I just got back from Canada and I asked that same question and nearly every hand in the room went up. Fascinating.

GS: We are really morphing into the next level of no longer homo sapiens, but homo luminoso, with such things as seeing the planet from space. Human consciousness is changing so radically, so fast.

MTB: The average child today has more information at their fingertips than Einstein could imagine. They are born with it. It is given to them.

GS: What a toy store of a lifetime.

MTB: It really is. Sometimes I feel like a wonder child in wonderland.

GS: We talk about reincarnation and we know that it is a real thing that really happens, and at the same time we know that everything is happening simultaneously. So this linear experience is really only linear at the levels that we are experiencing it, when we know that that’s not really the case.

MTB: Right, and more and more awareness is coming up. Sometimes it scares people when they become aware of these things that they can’t quite grasp because of their knowledge base. Really, one thing that I have learned, and I like to go into great detail in my workshops, is the concept of the past and the present and the future being now. If you change the present, you change the future. But, the cat’s out of the bag. The past is also just as changeable as the present and the future. Through techniques, such as past life regression, you can go back and rescue tortured selves in past lives and bring them into the present. That is what I call the big now, the big moment of now. There are certain techniques and certain processes that really facilitate that and give you tools to actually do that, because you shouldn’t leave any part of yourself in the past that is suffering or lost. You can rescue all the fragmented parts of yourself, and that includes some of your future selves that can also be brought into harmony with the present.

GS: I recently wrote that in one of my editorials, that fixing things here and now fixes things in all the other lives.

MTB: It does. It goes both ways, because it is an open ended thing. You can bring the past, present and future into a more harmonious awareness of existence.

GS: So any tips on how the rest of us can ask questions of the light?

MTB: Well, I suggest don’t do what I did.

 [laughter]

It can work through hypnosis, it can work through meditation. It can work through a spontaneous event. What I tell people is just try. But that light, that you see at the end of the tunnel that everybody talks about, that light starts at your heart. It is already there.

GS: It is really the same thing as the guidance that we receive all the time. Not the noise in the head, but the true still small voice.

MTB: Yeah, but the mental realm is really tricky and slippery, so you want to seek the higher guidance rather than the strictly mental. That higher guidance is your own higher self. Anytime you spend time channeling anything but your higher self, you are wasting time.

GS: Talk a little bit about what you will be doing at the workshop here ...

MTB: In workshops, I give the essence of this whole Gaia paradigm and how it affects you right here and now, the living system you are a part of. How to more effectively interface with it and how to improve your health in dramatic ways with techniques I learned from the other side. I will be bringing a Kirlian photography set-up where we will actually do experiments and we will actually measure the before and after of your energy. And I am talking about true Kirlian and not fake Kirlian. The real Kirlian is a phenomenal tool for showing you where your consciousness is at. True Kirlian, which is used all through Europe and used for research is an amazing tool to check out conscious state, homeopathic, and much more sensitive than muscle testing, so I will be bring a fantastic Kirlian system that you can actually play with. I love feedback devices and one of the amazing things about the time that we live in is that you can test almost anything now in subtle energy realms. It is an amazing time to be alive. I will bring a variety of toys and techniques. I like to call it a playshop instead of a workshop.

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Mellen-Thomas Benedict will present free lectures on Thursday, November 29, 7:00 p.m. at Transitions Bookplace in Chicago, and on Friday, November 30 7:00 p.m. at the Theosophical Society in Wheaton. A one-day workshop takes place on Sunday, December 1, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Unity on the North Shore in Evanston. For event registration and information, 847-940-0703 or www.juniper-events.net, and visit Mellen’s website at www.mellen-thomas.com.

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