Arthur Yensen's Near-Death Experience

Arthur Yensen was another near-death experiencer who received knowledge of reincarnation. In August of 1932, Yensen, a university graduate, geologist, and staunch -materialist -turned -syndicated -cartoonist, decided to take some time off to research his weekly cartoon strip, "ADVENTUROUS WILLIE WISPO." Since his main character was a hobo, Yensen became a hobo for a time, blending in with the over sixteen million unemployed at that time in our nation's Great Depression. He bummed rides from Chicago through Minnesota, until a young man in a convertible coupe picked him up on the way to Winnipeg. Going too fast for the road conditions, the car hit a three-foot-high ridge of oiled gravel and flipped into a series of violent somersaults. Both men were catapulted through the cloth top before the car smashed into a ditch. The driver escaped unharmed, but Yensen was injured, losing consciousness just as two female spectators rushed to his aid. After seeing the afterlife during this near-death experience, he later learned that telling others about his NDE often brought criticism, especially from the church. But there were those who would listen and as time wore on, more and more people would ask him about it. Finally in 1955, Arthur Yensen published a report of his near-death experience after much public interest. His booklet entitled "I Saw Heaven" (now out-of-print, but a photocopy of the booklet is available for $5 from Eric Yensen, 1415 E. Oak St., Caldwell, Idaho 83605 or email yensen@micron.net.) describes his NDE and gives answers to questions he was always asked. On this web page I have some excerpts from his booklet. His NDE also appears in P.M.H. Atwater's book "Beyond the Light." 

I didn't omit them intentionally. It's only that I didn't see God, Christ, or hear anything about salvation. However, I do consider the Master-Vibration as part of God because it controls the universe and seems to regulate everything except the evil minds of people on Earth.

To understand God, I believe one would have to be almost as great as God is. Or at least be like Christ who was in harmony with God. On the other hand, salvation is simple. All one has to do is to love so unselfishly that his soul-vibrations will rise high enough to fit him into heaven.

Sin is anything that stops spiritual growth. The three great sins are: Not learning from experience, letting leadership turn into tyranny, and letting selfishness turn into greed.

Everyone should constantly check themselves for developing greed, tyranny, fear, worry, anger, hate, jealousy, and especially guilt. By conquering these harmful traits we keep in tune with our oversouls (guardian angels), God and the universe. Sin is anything that causes us to lose this contact. When the subconscious mind feels guilty it is ashamed to face its oversoul and builds up barriers to shut it out. Without the oversoul to guide it, such a person is like a child lost in the dark. The only hope it has is to get rid of its guilt and re-connect with its oversoul.

By unselfish love. When we love unselfishly, our vibrations are so high that the only place we'll fit into is heaven. There is no other place we can go if we want to. This is divine justice because it gives all the people who ever lived, as well as all the higher animals who know right from wrong, an equal chance to eventually attain internal harmony which will fit them into some kind of heaven - regardless of their intelligence, education, indoctrination, ignorance, wealth or poverty.

The Father, of course, is God, or Infinity, who created and controls the universe.

The Son is an individualized portion of God who has attained a perfect oneness with God - which is also our goal.

The Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit, would be the Master-Vibration which flows into us as freely as the barriers we have built up against it will allow.

No, but if there is one, he would have to be an insane angel who was crazy enough to fight with God, which would be as futile as for us to try to stop the sunrise. I believe the devil is a mythological character, invented by humans and used for a scapegoat. Grown people with immature minds like to blame the devil for their misdeeds instead of acting like people and taking the blame themselves.

However, there may be earthbound spirits of low vibrations, whom we may regard as devils because they annoy us through mental telepathy. These demons tune in on us through our low vibrations of hate, fear and greed. They can be tuned out with unselfish love, or if necessary be chased away by the stronger spirit of Jesus Christ.

There's an old saying, "Birds of a feather, flock together." The way to be rid of the "devil" is not to be like him.

Both. Since they told me I had a destiny, why wouldn't everyone else have one? Obviously, our brains can only know what we've recorded in them, but our oversouls know all about us. 

That's why they try to guide us, and keep us in our bodies until our life's work is finished - just like we try to stay in our cars until we reach our destinations.

Yet, we all have free will. Any of us can get drunk and drive into a telephone pole.

Things change little in the hereafter. Suppose we have the fixed idea that we'll sleep till the resurrection of the body. Then suppose there isn't a resurrection of the body. We might sleep a very long time.

On the other hand, if we have no fixed beliefs about anything, we'd be free to adapt to the new surroundings and fit in where we belong with no unusual difficulty.

Everything has its place. Fixed beliefs are useful in prayer where doubt is fatal. Yet doubt is always useful in sizing up religious dogma, reading junk mail, listening to commercials, and the promises of politicians.

Any complete body of knowledge is like a spoke in a wheel - pointing to the center of ultimate truth. Science, art, music, philosophy and religion run into trouble because they are not yet complete bodies of knowledge even though religion is advertised and sold as such.

Many religionists think they have the whole truth and the only short-cut to heaven. And in their well-meaning zeal to rescue wayward humanity, they argue, persuade and even go to war to force non-believers to accept their formula for getting into heaven.

Outsiders are turned off mostly because the churches can't agree among themselves. Some churches have even resorted to torture to force their particular brand of God's love on people who were perfectly satisfied and thought they were on good terms with God already.

But even though the churches have abused religion, and the beliefs of some churches are ridiculous to other churches, I believe everyone should have some kind of a religion, or philosophy, to encourage them to think and grow spiritually.

I don't know. I didn't see him. But I did feel a Master Vibration which must be a part of God because it kept everything in good order and controlled the universe. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit.

People differ a great deal in their ideas of what God is like. Little children imagine him to be a gray-haired old man with a long white beard.

One religious denomination believes there is a Mr. and Mrs. God. Other churches consider God to be a universal spirit that created and rules the universe, while the atheists say there is no God at all - until they get in a jam. Then they pray like there really is one!

Under self-hypnosis, I once asked what God was like. I saw a huge mountain almost covered with clouds. Here and there were small peepholes through which I could see lightning and great activity. Then a voice from somewhere said, "To fully understand God, you'll have to be almost as great as God is!"

This put me in my place. But for reasoning purposes I had to have some kind of a mental image of what God is like. To me now, after many years of thought, he's a combination of many things such as: the known and unknown laws of nature, light, electricity, gravity, time, space, infinity, love and life itself - totally incomprehensible! But since we have life, we must all be a small part of him.

That's probably why we call him Father and consider ourselves his ornery kids - who always need forgiveness.

Karma is the totality of all our actions - good and bad - which determine our fate, or destiny.

If we do only good things we will eventually run out of bad karma and only good things will happen to us, and vice versa. The purpose of karma is to force us to learn life's lessons whether we want to or not.

Between lives, with the great knowledge of our oversouls, we choose the next life we are going to live and how much karma we are going to meet and settle. For example, if you abused animals, or people, in one life your oversoul would probably cause you to reincarnate into a situation where you'd get abused to make you realize the misery you've caused others.

The only way to bypass karma is to develop so much unselfish love that paying for bad karma will serve no purpose - much like a college student challenging a course he already knows.

"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." John 3:3. Reincarnation certainly explains a lot of things that would be hard to account for otherwise. From my experience I'm convinced we have all lived and died many times. The reason we don't remember our former lives is because our vast soul memories are not transferred to our baby brains at birth. All we know in this life is what we learned in past lifetimes. That would be the reason why some things are so much easier for us to learn than others. For example, Mozart didn't have to learn music because he already knew it.

One of the good things about reincarnation is that at the beginning of each lifetime we are cleared of all past prejudices, learning blocks and wrong teachings, and are ready for a fresh start - just like a new term at school - and, like school, when we have learned enough of life's lessons, we graduate and don't have to come back to this Earth anymore, except as volunteers to teach stragglers.

Since our opportunities for spiritual growth on this planet are probably limited time-wise, we should realize that in dealing with children, the learning value of any incarnation can be spoiled by indoctrination before the child is old enough to reason. In some cases this is worse than murder because it may waste a whole lifetime instead of just a few years.

Some scholars say that in the Dark Ages the Church had all references to reincarnation deleted from the Bible, so as to better control the people by threatening them with hell fire. But they didn't get rid of every passage that refers to reincarnation because there are some that could hardly mean anything else, such as: "He who overcomes, I will make a pillar in the temple of God and he shall go out no more..." Revelation 13:12.

Jesus was called a master because he had mastered all the problems of mankind. To help us with our slow spiritual progress he magnanimously volunteered to reincarnate and teach us how to evolve faster through unselfish love.

His teachings made so much sense to his followers that they called him the long-looked-for MESSIAH! And they would have crowned him king except that the ruling Jews who were afraid of their jobs, had him crucified first.

But their murder of Jesus backfired. His disciples, and many others, believed that he had risen from the dead and that he was the son of God! And so Christianity was born.

Then traditional Jewish sacrifices were such a bloody nuisance, the Christians proclaimed that Jesus had sacrificed his life on the cross to end all other sacrifices! And that's how the doctrine of vicarious atonement got started. It made good sense in those days and saved the lives of thousands of innocent sheep and doves.

But now, 2,000 years later, it's pure nonsense. Suppose I were God, and to please me, you sacrificed a son, or a daughter. I'd be outraged! Or suppose you cut a lamb's throat and let it bleed to death just to please me. Next lifetime I'd let you be the lamb! But if you gave your wife a bouquet of beautiful flowers - I'd love you for it!

I don't see how a physical body would be of any use in the spiritual world - unless it is vastly improved and able to travel with thought. At present we can't even see the spiritual world until we get out of our physical bodies. The people I saw in heaven seemed to get along very well with translucent spiritual bodies.

Born on a Nebraska sandhill during the blizzard of 1898, Yensen recalled being force-fed religion as a youngster. Not only did he turn against it, but he started challenging his parents at every turn - including questioning the way they ate. He observed that their farm animals did just fine on a diet of fresh greens and whole grains, yet family members were always suffering indigestion and constipation from the white flour, sugar, and grease they consumed. Behind his parents' back, he cured himself by eating bran flakes. He continued to defy the conventions of his day, switching from atheism to mysticism after his near-death experience at the age of thirty-four, marrying afterwards, and built his own home in Parma, Idaho, from blocks of tuffa (pumice) he and his sons quarried. He later became an educator, public speaker, was active in politics, specialized in historical sculpture (his work adorns Parma's city park), was a movie extra in several Hollywood films, an authority on organic gardening and nutrition, and was singled out as one of Idaho's "Most Distinguished Citizens."

Although a public figure, Yensen was frequently at odds with the school boards where he taught: opposing any procedure that capped a child's creative drive; speaking out against the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II; and ignoring school rules by sharing his near-death experience in class as proof to his students that morality matters and life really has a purpose. Ironically, Yensen was still questioning whether or not he had fulfilled his life's work when he returned "home" in 1992, the quiet benefactor of thousands.