Bonnie is waist deep in doing research on UFOs, aliens and their relationship to Christianity. This is one branch of a massive tree that is contained within the subject of visionary and out of body experiences. Please subscribe to stay updated, if the subject of UFOs and its relationship to religious experience perks your interest.

Welcome all you weirdos, misfits, mystics, experiencers and seekers of the Divine!

My name is Bonnie Lumen, and I am a researcher and explorer who studies mystical visionary experiences of God.

There is a hidden history, a secret side to Christianity that has been lost—hidden in plain sight, but nevertheless far removed from the modern age that no longer believes in spiritual things anymore. It is my mission to uncover the ancient ways of the first Christians—the types of practices and disciplines that they engaged with—that lead them into higher and higher, sublime states of mind. In this state of mind they experienced full union with God. By full union, I mean that they experienced a direct connection with him in which they were able to see him, feel him, and hear him—not in a theoretical way, but in a direct experiential way.

Contrary to popular belief, God is not far away beyond the sky in the clouds somewhere. And Heaven is a place that can be experienced even while still being alive. Ancient Christians were able to fly outside of their physical bodies and enter into the secret realms of God in which they were able to witness his Light, and feel his Love. They were able to witness the dead, who had already crossed over the barrier between this world and the next. They were able to communicate with angels and obtain hidden knowledge—knowledge that is readily available to anyone who has the drive to practice deep disciplined mental prayer. 

I am an experiencer. And by that I mean, throughout my entire life I have had weird things happen to me that couldn’t be explained within the limitations of modern material science. Spontaneous out of body experiences, and non ordinary dreams have lead me to the realization that the human mind is far more powerful and more mysterious than could ever be imagined. 

It wasn’t a single thing that lead me down the road to studying Christian visionary experiences, but rather a series of events that guided me in this direction.  

I have always been drawn to meditation, with the same curiosity that a cat has when it is on the prowl. And even when I was not a Christian, I was always seeking after answers. Why are there so many different religions in the world? Is there a connection between them? If only one religion is the correct path, then why would God—who is omniscient (that is all knowing), allow a person to be born into a religion that isn’t the correct one?  

In the Amazon rainforest (and also in some other places of the world), there are native tribes of peoples who are still living without modern technology, who carve out an existence using only stone age tools. The governments of Brazil and Peru, have a no contact policy set in place for these “uncontacted” tribes. There are multiple reasons for this, the primary one being, that many of these tribes will attack outsiders. In addition the Brazilian and Peruvian governments want to protect these people from diseases and exploitation. Contact with the tribes is impossible. So this begs an important religious question.

Many Christians today say that Christianity is the only way to go to heaven. That believing in Jesus is the only path to salvation—otherwise they say that everyone is going to hell. If this is the case, as many denominations attest—then does this mean that everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus will go to hell? What about the native uncontactable tribes in Brazil and Peru? For certainly, they will never hear of Jesus. They will never know the Christian way. Does this mean that God created them, so that they are automatically on a direct path to hell?

It seems to me that something is missing here from the Christian understanding. For if God, who is supposedly all good, and all knowing—would knowingly create a person who is condemned to not believe in Jesus, then God himself would be evil. Because God already knows everything that is going to happen in the future, then this means, he also knows that certain people will never accept Christ. He created them, and allowed them to be born—in full knowingness—that they would never be able to accept Jesus. To me this is a glaring contradiction. God cannot be all good and evil at the same time. It is a contradiction in basic logic. 

Questions like these, are what lead me away from the Christian path initially. But I always believed in God, I simply didn’t think that Christianity had the answers. I doubted most every religion I came into contact with. It seemed to me that people were steeped in dogma and ritual to a point that they were missing the point.

What seemed obvious to me, were the everyday miracles that suggest a Divine Presence: The love a mother sees in the eyes of her newborn baby; the reciprocal love between a mother and child; the bond that a man and a woman can develop in a true loving relationship with one another; the fact that a tiny little acorn can become a massive tree; the complexity of DNA in all earth born species—these things and many others kept me believing in God, and kept me on the quest to understand him. Even though I was without a religion.

I have explored many religions on my path towards understanding. And I found meditation through my studies of both Hinduism and Buddhism. And meditation, surprisingly, was what actually lead me back to Christianity—not the Christianity of the masses, in which people condemn each other to hell, but a Christianity that remembers the Light. 

It is important that I make a note here, that prayer—deep internal prayer in which the practitioner spends hours alone with God, is the same thing as meditation. What the Buddhist calls meditation, the ancient Christian calls prayer. There is a modern discrepancy and misunderstanding that has come about because of a lack of education about what real prayer is. Prayer is not dancing to a rock concert on Sunday morning during Church service. Prayer is supposed to be a quiet time in which the prayerful spends effort emptying their minds of all things that are not God. Seeking solitude, seeking emptiness, seeking the quiet is what makes room for the Holy Spirit to enter. 

Meditation, or prayer is what lead me to the truth. And no other thing, except for prayer and meditation, can bring people to the truth. No religion can offer the answers. Religion can provide a map, but it is not the same thing as arriving on the shores of the destination. Religion is theoretical knowledge. Witnessing God by encountering him directly is experiential knowledge. To know truth, requires experience. 

I had a strange experience early on with meditation that I have never been able to explain with material science. I experienced a state of mind in which I heard a voice, that was not my own, say to me, “I am all the Lights and Stars after death.” And as I was in this state, I felt this Being as something that was all-encompassing, and all-consuming. It was larger than life and massively expansive. It was the whole of everything, separate from me, yet part of me. This experience lasted for only a brief moment, but I knew in my heart of hearts that it was God that I had witnessed. 

And it wasn’t until I came across Saint Hildegard of Bingen that the truth within Christianity became apparent to me. Saint Hildegard herself had visionary experiences, and what she said in her life story, brought Christianity back into focus for me. In her work Scivias, she said that she witnessed a Light, a force that caused her to “rise high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spread itself out among different peoples.” In her vision she experienced a Light that wasn’t “spatial, but was far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun.” She could “measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it,” and she also claimed that she was given hidden knowledge through it. She said that the knowledge came to her, as “the sun, the moon and the stars appear on water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for her, and gleam within it.” She even went on to claim that the Light that she experienced was felt as some kind of Unconditional Love. She said, “I cannot describe when and how I see it, but while I see it, all sorrow and anguish leave me, so that then I feel like a simple girl instead of an old woman.” She named this Force, this Divine Energy, the Living Light (Scivias p. 18). In Christian terms, that would be the Holy Spirit. For she always connected her visions back to Jesus. She always knew that the Light she experienced was God. 

I could only react with surprise after reading this. After years of searching, here was someone whose words and experience matched my own. I spent years in solitude, knowing that people didn’t understand, that they couldn’t understand what I had witnessed. I couldn’t tell people, for fear of being ridiculed. My entire life, I have existed among people with this secret boiling under the surface, this secret that I couldn’t tell a soul, because I thought people would say that I was schizophrenic. The few times that I tried to tell people, I was rejected. The modern world is full of what I like to call Christian-Atheists. These are people who claim to be Christian, but the moment that you point out the miraculous to them, they shut down. They want material, scientific proof. They don’t believe that miracles are possible. It is a strange contradiction to call yourself a Christian, and to not believe in the impossible. Since then, I have come to understand that some people hold their religion as an identity, and they cannot sway from their identity for even a moment to consider alternative possibilities. They are Christian by name, but not by their hearts. For as far as I can tell, if a person is not willing to spend time alone with God in prayer, if Sunday and Church is little more than an after thought, then they are not a real Christian. They are materialists, living in a material society, and they are not concerned with spiritual things.

People fail to realize that Christianity is something that you do. It is not only something that is believed. Believing in Jesus is not enough. It is not enough, if belief is not followed by actions, otherwise it is not real belief. Christians should be following in Jesus’ footsteps, and taking the actions that Jesus took. And it was Jesus who spent 40 days alone in the desert to pray (Matt 4:1-2). Jesus was the one who showed people the proper way to pray—in quiet, in solitude—for long periods of peaceful communion. Saying a quick prayer at a rock concert on Sunday morning is not a proper way to pray. In fact, Jesus was really against this type of prayer. He disliked the Pharisees for their public prayers, and he continuously insisted that prayer was to be a private endeavor, done in secret.” (Matt 6:5-6).

But I digress. Finding St. Hildegard was life changing for me. But it wasn’t the only thing that happened that lead me back to the Christian path. Not long afterwards I had a dream, a type of dream that Tibetan Buddhists call a Clear Light Dream. This is a type of dream in which the person doing the dreaming, receives information that either helps them in some way in their physical life, or the person witnesses future events. A Clear Light dream is not like an ordinary dream. Normal dreams are foggy, and they jump from event to event without clarity in-between. But a Clear Light dream on the other-hand, contains information that cannot be gleaned in any other way. There is a clarity, a brightness, and a knowledge to these dreams. The bible is full of people who have had prophetic dreams. Joseph was warned by an angel in his dreams to flee with Mary and the baby Jesus to Egypt.” (Matt 2:13).

My dream, while it wouldn’t be that interesting to most people, left a mark on me. At the time in my life that I had this dream, I was concerned with a great many worldly concerns that were very inconsequential. I was under stress, worried about career, worried about money, worried about anything and everything except for God. I was consuming too much social media and it was affecting my health and emotions. It is easy to get caught in the trap of social media, following the news, listening to what other people say, even if they are saying things that don’t ring true. I was carrying anger inside of myself, anger at the actions of other people, anger at the things that they said and did. Naturally this is a waste of time. Social media was actually causing me mental and emotional harm, because I was carrying the emotions with me all day, after seeing a post that angered me. Long story short, I had a dream in which Saint Ignatius of Loyola appeared to me, and said to me scoldingly, that “I needed to fill my mind with thoughts of God.” It was a very clear dream, and I was simultaneously given to understand that I was living my life in an improper way. What really shook me about this dream, was that I knew little to nothing about Saint Ignatius of Loyola before having this dream, yet in the dream, the dream was so clear that without a doubt, I knew that it was him. 

Needless to say, I picked up a book on Saint Ignatius’ life, and came to understand that he too had visions of God, and he also saw God as a brilliant and all-consuming Light—much like Saint Hildegard. So this was a double confirmation for me that my experience was real. That I wasn’t alone, and other people had this experience as well. I have since come to learn that many saints have had visionary experiences in which they perceived God as an all-loving Light. Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross are two of the most profound. 

What I can’t understand, and what disturbs me at night, is why more people do not know this. It isn’t only the saints within Christianity who have witnessed God as a brilliant unconditional Light, but other people from other cultures and other religions have also claimed similar experiences. It is very sad to me, that there are millions of Christians by name, who aren’t experiencing God. Over and over again, in the New Testament, in various places we are told that the Holy Spirit is within us. (1 Cor 3:16, 1 Cor 6:19, Rom 8:9-11, 2 Tim 1:14, Gal 4:6) Yet, we have fallen so far, and so low that we ignore this statement, as if it were inconsequential.

But it isn’t inconsequential. 

It is the most important thing in the world. As all answers lie within this one tiny clue. The Holy Spirit is within us. Therefore we must go within to know the Holy Spirit. 

And how to do that?

Jesus spent 40 days alone in the desert in prayer. The saints spent a minimum of 1-2 hours daily in private prayer. Buddhists spend hours in meditation. This is the only way to cross the boundaries between the physical and immaterial worlds. It is the only way to witness God’s many mansions. There is no reason under the sun, that a person should have to wait for death to see what is on the Otherside. As Christians it is our birthright to see and know this, not just theoretically, but experientially. After all, God gifted the Holy Spirit to us. 

But the truth is, that the Holy Spirit has been there all along. The gift…is that God is simply making us aware of it. God is calling us. It is up to us to answer the call.