This is a story I wrote years ago after a memorial encounter with author, entrepreneur, and general genus, Dannion Brinkley. His books include, Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received and At Peace in the Light.
The Chamber
I had asked Mel, Dannion Brinkley’s cousin and a friend of mine, if Dannion would let me try out his Klini “bed.” Mel had told me about the bed, and I had subsequently read about it in one of Dannion’s books. It was some sort of bed that put people into an altered state of consciousness. Among other things, Dannion used the bed in his hospice and advocacy work with veterans.[i]
Mel helped Dannion organize and keep track of his busy appearance schedule. They grew up together in Aiken, SC. Mel talked to Dannion about my meeting him and experiencing his Klini bed. Dannion had sent word back to me through Mel that, yes, he would be at his old home place in Aiken, and he would let me experience the chamber and the bed. Chamber? I thought it was a bed of some type? Nonetheless, I felt truly privileged that he had agreed. Mel later told me that Dannion only invited a few people to his house to use this special chamber. It was his family’s home and where he grew up. He stayed there when he was in Aiken from all his world travels, which were extensive. I felt greatly honored.
Dannion was a true Warrior, even though his work now is that of a healer, teacher, and advisor. If ever there was a Platonic copy that reflected the Ideal Warrior, Dannion was it. He stands about 6’3” and was striking with his red hair and goatee. Women’s heads turned when he passed. At age 56, he still looked in top shape and not someone with whom you would want to tangle. On top of all this, he was brilliant and talented. Among his many talents were his psychic abilities, which were substantial. To encounter Dannion was be a real head trip. Before his first near death experience (NDE), he was just your everyday black ops commando sort of guy.
He started this illustrious career as an angry boy in Aiken, getting in fights with anyone that would take him on and in general, raising hell. By the time he was in high school, he had to go out of town to find someone to fight him. Such was his reputation and abilities. As a young adult, the local police knew him well, and usually sent him home when they caught him out drinking and getting into his general mischievous activities. They did not want to tangle with him physically. He was likable even then.
Vietnam came and he joined the armed services. His talents and abilities being recognized, he was trained in special operations. He was a hit man. He would go out in the jungle alone, sitting for days to take out specific high ranking enemy targets. After Vietnam, he moved on to help out the CIA with similar activities in South America. A very talented guy. Then came his first NDE.
Dannion writes about his near death experiences in his book, Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received. As his story goes, while talking to his mother on the phone one evening during a thunderstorm, he had just remarked that they really should get off the phone so that they would not get electrocuted. (Remember the days of telephone lines, before cordless versions or cell phones?) Lightening struck, and he was glued to the ceiling by the powerful electrical charge that came through the telephone line. If it had not been for his wife at the time, who was a nurse, he probably would have died. It took him years to recover from the neurological and physical damage from this near fatal accident. It ended his career as a hired killer, and turned him down the path of a peaceful warrior. He still suffered greatly from intense pain from those injuries.
I seem to attract these warrior types into my life, maybe because of my own warrior archetype, which is embodied by Bandido, my Jungian Shadow and alter-ego.
By the time I met these fellow warriors, they were living Clark Kent sort of lives; most of them mild-manner, healer types. Aside from Dannion, to name a few, there was Ari Maayan (deceased), a Muskogee Creek medicine man with whom I did my first vision quest.[ii] He was not only “special forces,” in his younger years, but he trained special force units in Israel. He was the best of the best. Then there was Ray, whose job it was “to hurt people” as a special police unit working against the drug cartel. Ray was now a mental health counselor like myself. Finally, there was my friend Bill. He is truly the mild mannered Clark Kent types, just one of your ordinary, everyday college professors who was Captain Death in his earlier life. So Dannion fits right into this mysterious warrior pattern in my life.
Dannion was the best selling author of Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received; At Peace in the Light; Secrets of the Light: Lessons from Heaven; and others. In his Saved by the Light book, he tells the story of his two deaths or near death experiences, twice by being stuck by lightening. (The moral here: don’t stand close to Dannion during a lightening storm. Don’t even talk to him on the phone.) His spirit guides instructed him on building the Klini bed and his chamber in his first near death experience. His tremendous psychic and spiritual abilities also resulted from this first NDE.
I figure the spirits suggested Dannion’s Klini bed/chamber approach because most people wouldn’t care to be struck by lightening or go through a NDE just to get ”enlightenment”. Dannion’s deaths-by-lightening makes him what is called a lightening shaman (curandero) in Peru. In the Andean shamanic tradition, to be a true shaman, you must be struck by lightening. Of course, the trick here was to survive. Many don’t. Dannion barely did.
Arriving at Dannion’s door in Aiken with Mel, I was greeted with a big, unexpected hug right off the bat. As I found out, Dannion liked to hug. These were not just cursory hugs. These were serious hugs. He said now after his NDE’s, he knew he would get all those hugs back when he died. So he collected them like money in his heavenly bank. After some introductory chit chat, Dannion took me around to a small building beside the house. On the threshold, he instructed me to remove my shoes and step inside the door.
Taking off my shoes, I took a tentative, cautious step into the room. As my foot connected with the mauve carpet, and I passed through the doorway, I felt the electrical energy field surround me. The field’s effect was so strong that I felt that I was wrapped in an energy blanket. Energy flowed under my feet. It pulsed around me like a swirling, invisible vortex. I am momentarily alarmed as visions and conversations of electrical line workers came back to me. Stories from them about being able to feel the electrical power in the 10,000 volt lines they were working on.
Mel had warned me that the rooms had been fully charged to 9,000 volts for my visit. I thought he was joking. Now I believed him.
Dannion let me pick a chair to sit down. He was very relaxed. I was a little tense to say the least. He was having a good time watching my reactions. I was not sure what I was having—a cow, a cat, a mild meltdown? I looked around at the pink colored room. The windows were of stained glass. Sunlight filtered into the room through them in rainbows of color.
He began to briefly explain a little of how the room worked and its engineering. I was having trouble following his rapid-fire explanations. (I would discover a little later that “rapid-fire” is Dannion’s only mode.) I commented to him about my difficulty in following his explanations. He smiled and says that’s the way the room worked. It was difficult to maintain a left-brain thought train in the room, he said. The purpose of the room was to relax you, he explained, in preparation for the second room and the Klini “bed”.
With that, I closed my eyes and let myself sink relaxed into the chair. I felt the intensity of the energy field ratchet up. It was not that the field had increased. Rather, my letting go into it increased my sensitivity. In the background Mel and Dannion were talking, but it was as if they are somewhere else. I sank deeper, feeling my arms and legs relax as the room’s energy field seemed to drain tension from them. The muscles across the back of my shoulders relaxed. “This is nice,” I thought. Dannion and Mel had grown quiet. Even though my eyes are closed, I know they were observing me. I could feel Dannion’s psychic scan of me.
He gently touched me and said it was time to go into the second room. Again, he gave me a brief explanation about this room. Forget that noise. All I seemed to catch was that its energy fields are different and that it had silver nitrate in the paint. This room was greenish. The bed itself was black. It looked like a flat piece of plywood covered with a pad and black cloth. It was supported by a large rectangular box underneath, also painted black. I know it was much more. At one end was a headboard-box with dials and other electronic components on it. It was difficult to see details in the darkness. The “darkness” refers to both the room and my head. The fuzzy darkness inside my head was because of how the electrical fields were messing with it.
At Dannion’s gesture, I lay down on the Klini bed. He adjusted some dials and explained to me a little of what the experience would be like; the music, the energy resonance, the harmonics, etc., as the bed moved energy up and down my spine and through my chakras.
Lying there, at first I was aware only of a little tingling. The bed enveloped me in an energy cocoon as the lights dimmed further, then went to black. Music came to me through the headphones Dannion had placed over my head. The music took over. I drifted in darkness, wrapped in vibrations, music, and who knows what else, coursing up and down my body. It was not scary, just strange.
I laid there, wondering what I should be doing. Should I be doing something? My linear, left-brain thoughts evaporated nearly as soon as they formed. I let go, giving up on “thinking”. In addition to experiencing the bed, I had come here for clarity, especially about the direction of my second book. I prayed silently, asking for guidance.
As I asked, almost instantly I found myself walking along a dirt road with Jesus. He was dressed in blue jeans, a t-shirt, and sandals. This was interesting, I thought. It was summer. Along the narrow road on both sides of us, trees and vines were leafed out. I asked Jesus about a book I was trying to write. He said several things, but the most important was about writing from the heart—and teaching from the heart. He said that this was my path. The science stuff, my forte, he said should be interwoven, but that the heart was the center of my teachings. We discussed other things that evaporated from my consciousness nearly as soon as they were spoken. This was a little disconcerting to me. A thought about my father, who was in the hospital, passed through my mind.
As all this is going on, I was aware of Dannion coming in a couple of times and making adjustments to the Klini’s control. He placed something near my head. I felt like I had been there about ten minutes when the lights started to brighten, the music stopped, and Dannion turned off the bed. I found out it had been over thirty minutes. He instructed me to lie there until I felt like I could sit up. After a few minutes, I was able to get up. We went back into the first room/chamber. My head was not quite right. I was functioning in a right-brain mode that had difficulties understanding verbal language, which was a left brain function.
As Dannion talked, I said something about quantum physics’ string theory, resonance, and energy field, ideas that had been on my mind recently and came to mind as Dannion was initially explaining the chamber and how it worked to me.
The frequency of the bed and rooms was around 12.6 cycles per second. This was the same frequency of alpha brain waves and of Nature’s Schumann waves.[iii] With my mention of string theory, etc., Dannion got excited. We talked about how all this fits together with spiritual work. I was still having trouble following him. My head was still not screwed on quite right.
I mentioned something to Dannion about my Dad being back in the hospital. My mother had called yesterday, and said she had taken him to the hospital. He was very weak and anemic. The doctors thought he had internal bleeding somewhere, but could not locate it. He had recently come home from heart by-pass surgery, and his recovery was going slow. This morning I had done a shamanic journey and had seen a perforation on the back wall of my Dad’s large intestine. I had not shared any of this with Dannion or anyone. Until this moment, I had not even mentioned anything about my Dad to Dannion.
Dannion asked me which hospital? I told him. His eyes slowly blink as he seemed to go elsewhere. After a few seconds, he came back. His eyes opened, and he told me that my Dad was bleeding internally in two places, his intestines and a place behind his lungs. I asked him specifics about the intestinal lesion. Dannion confirmed that it is on the horizontal part of the large intestine on the outside wall, just as I had seen in my journey earlier that morning.
The next day, Mel and I were out in the country sitting around talking about my experience with Dannion. We were camping in my motor home in a state park near Aiken. Mel informed me that while I was on the Klini bed, Dannion had returned from one of his adjustments and remarked to Mel that I was thinking about my Dad.
Mel’s cellphone suddenly rang. He answered it. He said, “Yes,” and chuckled. He looked over to me and says, “It’s Dannion,” Mel turned to me and says. “Dannion said we were talking about him and my experiences yesterday. He said to put that in my book.” (So here it is!) I was amazed. How had Dannion known we were talking about him and my experiences? Who was this guy anyway?
Mel must have seen my look of puzzlement. He laughed at me. He was used to Dannion doing this sort of thing. It was a new experience for me, though. Dannion had informed me yesterday that I was family now. I think to myself that I might as well get used to Dannion and his abilities.