Happy Christmas and a story
Happy Christmas to all who visit and contribute here!
I am sorry I have been somewhat absent of late, but I moved from the UK to New Zealand in August and started a new job in September. We bought a new house in October and then had to unpack a 40 foot container recently. Been chaos, but there is a story I want to share with you around this…it relates to my faith, so stop reading now if you get wound up by such things, but it is Christmas, so I get to be a Christian here today! It’s long, you might want to make a cup of tea first.
A year ago, I was sitting outside in my backyard on a cold winter’s night by a campfire having a cigar and a Bailey’s when I heard a scream coming from inside our house.
I jumped up, ran inside, and up the stairs worried something had happened to my wife. I found her on the floor curled up in a ball crying. She was surprised to see me as she didn’t think I would have heard her because it was on the other side of the house from the garden. I sat down next to her and asked her what the matter was.
She eventually told me she was screaming at God! She had been desperate to move back to NZ for years, but opportunities in my field are very rare over here, and corporations won’t even look at someone outside of the country normally, as evidenced by the lack of response to the applications I had made.
Anyway, I went straight on LinkedIn (again) and there was a job I was perfectly qualified for based in Auckland, so I applied, mainly just because I wanted to at least feel like I was trying. I didn’t really have any hope.
This was the beginning of December last year. A week later I was offered an interview which was a complete shock. Maybe, just maybe…
We prayed and prayed into it, asking only for God’s will…not just what we wanted, because the situation was complex.
By the end of January, I had a job offer, we had buyers for our house and a number of other things had happened that gave us a certainty that God was “behind the move.” Things seemed to align supernaturally; the house buyers were even from our church. We booked our flights for mid March and began the process of moving.
Now, for those who live in the UK, you may be aware that house sales are not legally binding until the very last minute. Our buyers, despite being Christian, started messing us about in mid February, then the company who offered me the job started to move the goalposts, expanding the role to East Asia, something I was very unhappy about…and yet we had felt so certain that God was behind this because some of the crazy coincidences and our continual prayer for his will.
About 3 weeks before we were due to move I had a bit of a breakdown because of the whole situation with our house, and the thought of spending the remainder of my career at airports. Also, I was feeling bad about leaving my Mum in the UK (the “complexity”). My wife said “let’s pull out”. We did. Neither of us was happy about it as we had felt certain “God was behind the move”, and we had both on balance felt it was the right thing to do, but going ahead no longer felt right either. We decided to still go to NZ for a holiday as by this stage neither of us had jobs in the UK (we’d both quit our existing positions), and the flights and AirBnBs were booked.
A few days before we went I got a message from another company. Quick rewind – in the period between starting to feel nervous about the move, and cancelling, I had applied for another job in NZ that had come up and I told them I would be moving to NZ in March (which was true at the time), but I’d forgotten all about it when we pulled out of the move. Anyway, they wanted to interview me.
We discussed it and decided “why not?” We are going anyway, and maybe “God really does want us to move.” (This is how we think as Christians!).
We went to NZ for a month, and I had a series of interviews. It was our last weekend in the country, I was down to the last two in the process, and I got a call from the company saying they had chosen the other person. We were absolutely gutted. Our hopes had been ripped from us, yet both of us had felt so strongly that “God was behind the move.”
As people who put every step of our lives into God’s hands, we declared that God does not disappoint, he had not just allowed us to believe we would be moving to NZ but had actively encouraged us to believe it would happen. At the airport we were miserable but kept saying…this is not how God works, we will be coming back to live, and soon…it is one thing us praying for stuff and not getting it, but quite another putting it in God’s hands, circumstances coming together miraculously to point one way, then having them ripped away. We kept lifting ourselves with this statement of faith “God does not disappoint.”
Just over two weeks after getting back to the UK, my wife had been able to get her old job back and I was at home alone, and I ended up having a row with God. I said I could no longer say to my wife that God is not a God who disappoints as I have been disappointed for over 20 years with the outcome of my writing. There were many similarities between the situations. I had given my writing to God many years ago, I had even said I wanted to walk away from it because it was a massive ball-ache and perennially thankless, but he kept on producing signs, sometimes absurdly miraculous immediate answers to prayer, that kept me going. Then I had started to resign myself to the idea that my writing had achieved its potential and his purposes, but at the same time I had felt that he had led me to believe that I would be much more successful, so much so that I would be able to make a good living out of it. As a result, I have been disappointed with the outcome.
This was why I said to God that I could no longer say to my wife that he didn’t disappoint…he had allowed me to believe that my writing would really come to something more than it had. I said to Him that I would tell Kirsty that night that I no longer believe this and we had to accept we weren’t going to NZ any time soon.
Then I felt this familiar internal voice, gently say to me… “hold fire, give it a few days.” “End of the week, no more!” I replied to that voice…I know – bonkers.
The next morning, I got up early, as I do, shuffled down to make myself breakfast, started eating my cereal, then opened my emails on my phone.
“Dear Orson, the candidate we offered the position to is no longer going to take it, would you…”
Here we are in New Zealand 6 months later finding new buyers for our UK home, 4 months into a great job, now living in a house we fell in love with on the internet 2 years ago, a dream house that we could not have afforded then, but due to property prices going down in NZ and up in the UK and the pound doing well, we were able to buy now.
We were right to declare “God does not disappoint.” But here’s the kicker.
What do you think I thought after what happened? I spent a whole afternoon “contending” with God that I was disappointed with my writing, that I was certain he had allowed me to believe more was going to happen than has happened, so how could I say any longer that he doesn’t disappoint? How do you think I would react to the fact that the very next morning he reopened the door to NZ?
Of course I’m bloody well going to link the two! Of course I am going to connect things and therefore believe he was saying “you will not be disappointed with the writing” and of course I am going to believe that massive things are yet to come, and sooner rather than later. Moreover, I know that God knows I would make that connection, thereby reinforcing the sense that it is his will for me to believe this…and he will not disappoint.
So, if you got this far, and have read this, I am going to declare that God will not disappoint me when it comes to my writing – that big things, maybe massive things, are coming. I am not writing any new books at the moment, so it will be with one of the ones already out there…maybe one of the novels…that would be my dream, but it just has to be one of them. You will be witnesses to the outcome of this. Some might argue that I am testing God, but that is not what is happening here. I am so confident that something big is about to happen after this sequence of events, and my experience of walking with God, that I want the people here who have who eyes to see and ears to hear, to witness him working and come to faith if they haven’t already.
God does not disappoint…a you will see.
AwareofAware 
Hello ‘Ben’ Sorry to read about your struggle. The word is never simple. It tests us. It would be boring if it didn’t. You’ll walk it, ok. Happy Xmas. Rgds Paul”¬
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Edit. Should read the world. Not the word. Paul
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Merry Christmas
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Who are you,and what’s the point of your long tale,?
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I am the author of the blog (my real name is Orson Wedgwood), and the point is that it’s christmas and I wanted to share my experience of being a Christian this year. I normally avoid bringing my faith into it, but not today.
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happy Christmas
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Merry Christmas from Brazil, Ben, and to all the members of the blog spread around the world!
May God always continue to bless us, today and always, regardless of nations or cultural traditions. Let us remember that the Being of Light described in NDEs — whom I firmly believe to be God — always asks us what we have learned here and what we have done to help one another.
This Christmas, and on every day of our journey on this Earth, may we be steadfast in learning to love and in practicing help for others, for this is what God expects of us.
Merry Christmas to all!
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God ( if he exists) disappoints and has disappointed hundreds of millions, even billions of peop
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It depends what you expect from him. My only absolute expectation from him is relationship with him through obedience to his word (I call him a him, but he is more than a he or a she). Anything more than that is jam. Relationship with Him is everything…from that comes wisdom, knowledge, joy, hope, peace, compassion, justice and love…most of all love, and in all superficial circumstances these are available through that relationship. I try to remember all the time that everything physical I see and experience is passing, so if it brings me joy it is only temporary, if it brings me grief, it will pass…but my connection with Him – that must endure forever, that is my ultimate “ask” of him, then I will not be disappointed.
The main reason I wrote this story is that I am so confident that something big is going to happen with my writing soon because he- if he exists, and I am certain he does…has allowed circumstances to conspire to create this expectation. In fact, I cannot logically look at things any other way. By sharing this beforehand, some…maybe you…who will have read this will be challenged to think more deeply about his existence.
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Orson, I’m honestly interested how you think how the discovery of thousands of reflecting objects pre-Sputnik in orbit effects your religious view. Prof. Villarroel and team have found these, published in Nature. Before this discovery I was very interested in the Christian message but this has changed me. We say this is “our” planet but that just doesn’t hold. Suppose they’re not biological – what then? Advanced AI? Do they get involved in religious stuff to control us?
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Hi Alan, good to hear from you.
I am 100% convinced that the universe is teaming with life, and that it is extremely likely that there are forms of life much more advanced than we are, and who possibly have either visited us in person, or who have developed a manner by which they can remotely observe us. I don’t know this to be true, but only a fool would dismiss the idea, and there is obviously lots of evidence to support the reality of UFOs etc.
On to your questions and doubts. To say this is our planet is silly…we’ve only been dominant as a species a few thousands years. The Bible does say that God has given us dominion over all things, and the reality is that we are indeed masters of life on earth for now…not particularly good ones, and if we are not careful it is possible we may disrupt the ecosystem so much that we mess it up for ourselves and others.
As for the possibility that advanced lifeforms may have been here, may have been interacting with our environment and even with us in ways we have not been aware of I say…so what if they have? How does that change the fundamental reality of the nature of life and the universe? Of course, it is possible they have been manipulating us into believing in religion etc, but firstly that is pure speculation and seems like an excuse not to believe, and secondly it still leaves the question of where they came from.
I discuss panspermia…the proposal that life was seeded here from other planets…in my book “DNA: The Elephant in the lab.” The emergence of life in this universe is impossible by natural means, therefore by suggesting that alien life is somehow responsible for everything and has all the answers, is just moving the same problem elsewhere and burying your head in the sand…a diversion from the fundamental questions behind any existence in our universe.
I believe that everything in the universe is the result of God’s creative imagination, and that the trillions upon trillions of life forms that exist are also a result of this. I suspect that he didn’t “create” everything individually, but that he initiated processes…such as the DNA – protein system here on earth, that would auto-generate new forms of life that he himself could wonder at, but I also believe that he has been intentionally involved as well…here and elsewhere, like a gardener watching things grow in unexpected ways, by tending to and nurturing…and I believe that there are beings like us who posses the same essential properties of awareness/consciousness that he has. Moreover, go down another layer, and you understand that what we observe is not real in the way we understand real to be, but then who are we to say what reality is?
I also discuss the idea that we are living in some AI generated simulation in my book “Did Jesus Die For Nothing?”. The truth is we cannot know the answer to that, but the existence of the question generates a dilemma not dissimilar to Pascal’s wager.
While I am conscious of these questions, I do not allow them to trouble me with regard to my faith. I do not allow questions that are unanswerable to rob me of the greatest thing I possess…experience and relationship with God. That experience, which is wonderful, is real to me, and I trust in it and Him. I absolutely trust that he is behind everything and that the answers are good and that I will learn them in due course when I “die” (or rather leave this stupid meat-suit behind) and all is revealed.
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Hi, BTW that was a very bold move to NZ, I can’t imagine it. Self and wife moved to Turkey years back but it wasn’t as dramatic! But…big house, countryside, two Kangals I run with in the forests and hills.
I’m trying to fit in a Christian faith with these sightings and what happened 2000 years ago and the figure that’s so central. And I wonder of an intelligence at play here actually very close by because surely whatever’s up there around Earth hasn’t just arrived. And I can’t see it would be biological – too many years have past. The possibility of a parallel civilization from our past has been discussed, there’s been enough past time. But whatever is there I also suspect “intervention”, maybe in ways we can’t imagine and in a form of great complexity and organisation.
I can’t see the “simulation argument” working – there’s the issue of physically generating all the matter with it’s properties known, nuclear physics/particle physics/general relativity etc. But yes, a creative intelligence idea I like.
I remember a book by a Nobel physicist (QCD-strong force theorist) Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question, who doesn’t mention God, but says reality is like work of art and he implies, and says, an *Artist*. In that an artist, like a sculptor, first has an idea in His mind before creating something. I thought he went a fair distance professionally saying this, given his stature in particle physics. Thanks for reply, will ponder your points, it’s a lot!
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Hi Ben,
Merry Christmas and thank you for keeping this blog running. I always check here to get my news on OBEs/NDEs.
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Hi Pablo,
I agree. A good blog which debates both sides. Season’s Greetings.
Rgds Paul”¬
PS. Keep up the good work, ‘Ben’. All the best for 2026.
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I greatly enjoy Ben’s blog, and I am convinced that, in time, the dualist view of the mind and its survival will ultimately be definitively supported. It is worth recalling that more than 40 years ago, Dr. Michael Sabom had already demonstrated that individuals who experienced near-death experiences (NDEs) described cardiopulmonary resuscitation procedures with greater precision and accuracy than experienced cardiac patients who had never undergone an NDE. To this day, I honestly have not found any study that convincingly refutes these findings.
More recently, the AWARE II study, conducted by Sam Parnia, reinforced that the phenomenon does indeed occur, even though Parnia was cautious in not asserting whether its nature is strictly physical or compatible with a dualist interpretation. Even so, it seems reasonable—at least from a common-sense perspective—to consider the hypothesis that something, in some manner, detaches from the body when the brain is severely compromised, allowing perception of the surrounding environment.
Oh, and one important detail that almost went unnoticed: right at the beginning of the AWARE II article, Parnia documents that only about 1% of CPR victims exhibit eye opening and ocular rotation during the procedure—something that was not reported in the NDE cases analyzed by Sabom.
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Excellent summary of the situation. There is no evidence these experiences aren’t real and a growing mountain of evidence they are.
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What, personally—at least for me—still needs to be explored in much greater depth is what in fact exists and occurs in those contexts in which consciousness manifests when it is detached, or partially detached, from the physical body.
I am aware that there are some individuals, both in the West and in the East, who exhibit psychic sensitivity. However, unfortunately, such cases are rare and, in general, these sensitivities tend to be quite restricted and limited. In the specific case of extracorporeal clairvoyance—that is, the ability to perceive and interact with spiritual planes and beings—its occurrence is poorly documented and rarely studied in a systematic manner, precisely because it manifests sporadically, unstably, and with little controllability in most sensitives.
It is important not to confuse extracorporeal clairvoyance with Extrasensory Perception (ESP), understood as the ability to perceive objects, locations, or physical information at a distance, without the use of the traditional senses. The latter, by contrast, is far better documented within experimental parapsychology, with notable cases such as Ingo Swann and Sean Harribance, whose performances exceeded chance levels in a statistically significant manner.
In this context, I believe that the Ganzfeld technique presents itself as one of the most promising approaches for the study of these structures and manifestations of consciousness. To date, it is precisely this methodology that has produced the most consistent and replicable results within parapsychological research.
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My forefathers were heavily into the spiritualist movement. My great aunt was a genuine clairvoyant. She never charged a penny, and was frighteningly accurate in many of the predictions she gave. She said she heard voices telling her from an early age things that would happen and they did. She wasn’t crazy, she was shy, modest and lived a very simple unmaterialistic life. I had absolutely no doubt at all that she was the real deal and that she was able to interact with beings that we regard as spiritual.
However, while I do not doubt her authenticity, the reality of her experience and her good intentions, I have very serious misgivings about the wisdom of interacting with these beings. Now, you could argue that she had no choice…they were always there and she could always hear them, so it’s not her fault, but at the same time I know from my own experience and the teachings I follow that we are surrounded by many such beings and that they are not all good. Moreover, we are told that some malevolent beings are able to masquerade as “beings of light”.
Given this, I focus my spiritual “antenna” on the one being I know who is good and whom I trust absolutely. He has given me all the information I need to live life in a perfect way, and as the story of my past year illustrates, he interacts with us in this dimension if we we seek him and tune our thinking to his. Many is the time that he has broken through the veil and interacted with me and others who follow him in this dimension.
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I recommend an in-depth reading on the phenomenon of ESP (Extrasensory Perception), especially in light of the decades of research conducted both by traditional parapsychology laboratories and by laboratories led by declared skeptics. In this context, the studies involving the psychics Sean Harribance and Ingo Swann stand out, as they were extensively evaluated under controlled conditions.
There is a particularly relevant analytical article, written by Bryan J. Williams, which rigorously examines the experiments conducted with Sean Harribance. In several of these studies, the results exceeded chance expectation by extraordinary statistical margins— in some cases reaching probabilities on the order of trillions upon trillions against chance—making conventional explanations highly problematic.
Also noteworthy is the extensive body of work published by the neuroscientist and skeptic Dr. Michael Persinger. Despite his critical stance toward spiritualist interpretations, Persinger acknowledged the empirical reality of the ESP phenomenon in the cases of Sean Harribance and Ingo Swann. His attempt was to explain such effects as arising from physical and electromagnetic mechanisms, particularly related to brain activity and environmental fields.
However, this strictly physical hypothesis was later strongly challenged by Stephan A. Schwartz, especially through the SANGUINE and Deep Quest projects. These studies, conducted in contexts in which there was no plausible possibility of conventional electromagnetic transmission, significantly weakened the thesis that ESP can be reduced to a local physical phenomenon. The results instead suggest that the observed effects do not depend on known electromagnetic mediations, opening space for non-local models of consciousness.
Taken together, this body of evidence indicates that ESP cannot be dismissed as a statistical illusion or experimental fraud, nor satisfactorily explained by classical physical mechanisms, remaining an open challenge to traditional materialist conceptions of mind and consciousness.
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The video above refers to a lecture by Dr. Michael Persinger on his studies involving Ingo Swann and Sean Harribance, in which he proposes a theory for the ESP phenomenon based on the action of extremely low-frequency electromagnetic waves (ELF).
However, this specific hypothesis put forward by Persinger — which directly associates ESP with the propagation of ELF waves — was later empirically refuted by Stephan A. Schwartz. In his experiments, Schwartz demonstrated that ELF waves are strongly attenuated when penetrating seawater, particularly in environments such as submarines. Even so, despite these conditions of significant electromagnetic shielding, the sensitives continued to exhibit consistent performance in the remote viewing phenomenon.
These results substantially weaken the ELF-based explanation and indicate that the observed phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by this specific physical mechanism.
Schwartz’s article is available on ResearchGate under the title:
“Two Application-Oriented Experiments Employing a Submarine Involving a Novel Remote Viewing Protocol, One Testing the ELF Hypothesis.”
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Good afternoon from Brazil, Ben, and wishing you a happy New Year 2026 in advance!
I fully understand your observation. In the tradition I follow—the Kardecist Spiritism—we are constantly encouraged to study and understand that there are both good and bad spiritual beings. According to the Doctrine, we should always practice good deeds, keep our hearts pure, and cultivate positive thoughts, because this is what, in specific situations, facilitates interaction with benevolent spirits.
It is taught that when we are morally aligned with goodness, we attract positive spiritual influences; likewise, the opposite is also true.
I believe I have mentioned before that I developed severe sepsis of pulmonary origin. According to the emergency room physician at the hospital where I was urgently admitted—and I say this without any exaggeration or sensationalism—after examining me, he told my parents: “He will only survive by a miracle.”
In my case, I did not have a Near-Death Experience (NDE), because at no point did my heart stop beating. During the period in which I was in an induced coma and intubated—about 16 days in the ICU—I experienced hallucinations that do not correspond to the classic pattern of an NDE.
However, I consider two events that occurred after I emerged from the coma to be extremely significant.
The first was the reaction of the very emergency room physician who had initially treated me. When he saw me awake and recovering, he said, visibly surprised:
“Lucas? Wow, is that really you, Lucas? I can’t believe you’re alive. I’m going to tell the entire emergency room team about your case.”
The second episode occurred a few days later. I had been unable to sleep for three days due to the constant noise of the ICU machines. On the fourth day, when I finally managed to fall asleep, I can say with conviction that I awoke in another place—a place I know was not this one.
That environment was very similar to an ICU: there were comparable pieces of equipment and the same hospital-like setting, but everything seemed larger. There were nurses whom I did not recognize and, above all, one striking detail that I have never forgotten: a curved ramp that led to a brightly illuminated corridor.
I also remember that a nurse—likewise unknown to me—told me that if I managed to get out of bed (despite being extremely weak) and wanted to take a “walk” down the corridor, I could do so. However, if I chose to remain in bed to continue receiving treatment, it would be so that I could help others.
Personally, I do not consider this experience to have been an NDE, since, as I mentioned, my heart never actually stopped. Even so, I am fully convinced that it was a spiritual experience. When I fell asleep again, I awoke back in the original ICU. Shortly thereafter, I asked the nurses whether I had been transferred to another ICU, and they said no. I asked my parents the same question during their visit, and they also confirmed that there had been no transfer.
To remove any remaining doubt, some time later I formally submitted a request to the hospital to verify whether I had been transferred to another unit at any point. The official response was clear: no transfer had occurred.
This experience was decisive for me. It profoundly reinforced my spiritual convictions and led me to become a firm defender of Kardecist Spiritism.
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Very interesting. I understand why you follow this belief. Our different experiences and choices in response to those experiences lead us down different paths.
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Quantum Consciousness, New Studies: Brain Connected to the Universe.
Research Institution: DIWISS Research Institute, Roth, Germany
Principal Investigator: Joachim Keppler
Publication Year: 2025 (December)
Journal: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1676585 TRL: 3-4 (theoretical validation with concrete experimental proposals)
Source Link: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2025/1/niaf011/8127081?login=false&fbclid=IwY2xjawPCDOhleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETA4NjN6Zlg3ck1RekN4VlFMc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHg—SPlbq26HDwf-pys0DXK-_XZac-ouNjRqWmnxNKBL0jPkvtshpzu-p9j_aem_irOHxI0b9QXVNeRdArSdbg
Happy 2026
https://www.futuroprossimo.it/2025/12/coscienza-quantistica-nuovi-studi-cervello-connesso-alluniverso/
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Happy new year guys! Just for the information, Charlotte Martial is on the latest episode of the IANDS podcast if you want to see what her position is. It’s pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from her on French podcasts. She thinks old research on NDEs isn’t rigorous enough and her view is that the brain spikes on the brink of death are causing NDEs. She claims having data on these spikes in humans, is that true Ben? Anyways, she still does look like she remains opened to other views but will stick to mainstream science until she gets hard data suggesting otherwise. Academic attention and recognition seem like an issue for her, I can understand why she sticks to mainstream. Anyways, have a good one!
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Hi Paul, can you share a link, and do you need to be a paid member (I cancelled my membership years ago). I am not aware of anything she has published that would support that position and suspect she is referring to the Bjorgijin [sic] data, which as you know, I have completely dismantled here.
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The podcast is free and available on Spotify or the Apple equivalent. The name of the podcast is IANDS : afterlife revealed. Didn’t find anything recent either!
BTW, concerning your fascinating story and the comment about your aunt, can’t help but wonder if you have a special ability yourself. Alleged-psychics and mediums often say they can connect to a higher power too! I wish I had this two-way communication but I feel my hardware is locked in the most basic and rational perception of reality despite my intentions. Luckily, I’ve still always felt cared for in some way by a higher power in my life…
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Had a listen, will write a post on it today 🙂
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Happy New Year
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