A Conversation with ...
MELLEN-THOMAS BENEDICT and Guy Spiro
From November 2007 issue of the “Monthly Aspectarian”.
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.
Guy Spiro: A great deal of pessimism in those days. I was there, too.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: They used to show us kids in school films of what nuclear weapons would do and that only cockroaches would be left alive.
Guy Spiro: Yes, we both ducked and covered.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: That still circulates. People still think that.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: I know. Where is my flying car? [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: I was expecting a lot more by the time the 21st 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.
Guy Spiro: It sounds like a long time to me.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: And the colder, there is a very big difference between a body still alive and dead.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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]
Guy Spiro: 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.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: As above, so below.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Yes, and so you are not on an automatic roller coaster 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.
Guy Spiro: What kind of things have you brought back that have worked out?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: What then?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.”
Guy Spiro: 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]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: You mean it’s not all rainbows and unicorns? [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: Not in Silicon Valley. That gets ripped off pretty darn fast.
Guy Spiro: How disappointing. [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: Do you think the higher self is separate, another being?
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: There is only the One.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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 unattainable. Thank God!
Guy Spiro: 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.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: All simultaneous.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: It is, no matter what you do or where you go, you are always going to be here now.
Guy Spiro: It appears that time kicks in at this density.
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: Oh yeah, you better pay the rent by the first. [laughter]
Mellen-Thomas Benedict: 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.
Guy Spiro: 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.
