Neil Kazen's Personal Light Experience

I struggled with my decision to publish my father's personal light experience. My father did not feel comfortable sharing this experience with people beyond his family, close friends, and colleagues from his theological studies. He believed that it would lower his credibility as an engineer and scientifically-minded person. He worried it would make him look like a quack. He thought people would judge him negatively for the events that I will describe below. However, a few years before he died, he gave me permission to publish this story. The story is not particularly flattering to anyone concerned, and my father was not proud to tell it. However, I believe that this story is too important not to share in full. 

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In Spring of 1984, my father was suicidal. His father had died a few months prior. Neil was very close to his father (but not to his mother). The death of his father crushed him. On top of that he was struggling financially as a recent immigrant in a severe slowdown in the engineering profession. In his attempt to improve his finances, he invested in gold and silver. Unfortunately, gold and silver had declined dramatically and he did not know how he was going to make ends meet.

As it happened, he had a generous life insurance policy for long enough that suicide was no longer an impediment to the beneficiaries (my mother, sister, and I) from collecting the proceeds after his death. He believed that the only way to make an honourable exit was to kill himself.

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The first time he tried to kill himself, he took Valium in a quantity that his doctor had informed him was enough to kill a horse. Somehow he survived.

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The second time he tried to kill himself was a few days later. He told me that he was driving on the highway and positioned himself in front of a large truck. He then slammed on the brakes, expecting the truck to crash into his car. However, the truck maneuvered around him, honking and yelling all the while.

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The third time he was going to try to kill himself was a few days later still, he set aside a quantity of Valium that was triple the quantity he set aside the first time (i.e. triple what his family doctor said would kill a horse). However, he did not take any of the Valium. Instead he decided that he would sleep first and then deal with it when he woke up. He then had his experience with what he believed was the Divine Light. The following PDF document has the clearest description of his light experience that I was able to find. It was a printout of an e-mail that he sent to an acquaintance of his in 2007. I have redacted it to protect the privacy of people that he names and to remove extraneous material that is not particularly relevant. 

 This is not objective proof of a higher power, but it was personal proof for my father (and for me).  Some people might choose to dismiss this story as a lie or an exaggeration. Others might dismiss it as merely a dream. Still others might argue it is just some physiological quirk that we have yet to understand. However, I find these arguments unpersuasive in view of the following:

• There was nothing physiologically wrong with my father when he saw the light. He did not have drugs in his system, he did not have a heart attack or stroke, he did not have a terminal illness, there was nothing wrong with his oxygen levels, and he did not have schizophrenia;
• He had this experience (and told me a child-friendly version of it) in 1984. This was before The Oprah Winfrey Show or any other popularization of near death experiences. This was prior to the World Wide Web. My father kept every book he ever read, and after he died, I went through each book, one by one to see if any should be kept - not one of the books was about near death experiences prior to the 1990s. Yet his description of the light is very similar to that of people from all over the world and all walks of life;
• Anyone who knew my father knew that he was stubborn. For him to suddenly abandon his atheism and begin going to Church was completely out of character;
• My father spoke with a stutter before this experience. After the experience, the stutter was gone;
• My father had nothing to gain by sharing this story;
• Finally, my father was not a quack. He was a down-to-earth person (arguably too down-to-earth) with a practical and accomplished career in structural engineering. When he retired, he was Lead Structural Engineer at the largest engineering firm in Canada. (If he was a quack, then this story would be the least of our problems given the numerous structures that he designed all over the world!) The following is the most recent version of his CV that I could find: 

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