From mystical experience to a quest for enlightenment

‘Humanity … does need me. But what it doesn’t need is yet another self-help expert, guru, New Age preacher or self-promoting mystic.’ The remarkable story of the late Thomas Daniel Nehrer (1947–2019) is recapitulated in his new book, published posthumously.

At the age of 24, having left a career in chemical engineering to travel in Europe and Africa, Tom Nehrer, from Pennsylvania, had a mystical experience as he gazed across the ocean towards mainland Greece from a sunny beach on the island of Corfu. It ‘rattled my scientific view,’ he said, and set him on a ‘path to understanding’.

It was a moment of epiphany: ‘I could perceive, utterly clearly, and absolutely apparent, that I wasn’t one thing looking out over a collection of other things … but that I was a Oneness, looking at itself/myself from within its/my own being.’

Nehrer then embarked on an inner quest involving meditation, self-hypnosis and ideomotor response interrogation of the unconscious. He found that inner elements relating to outer problems, including health issues, could be changed, bringing about improvements in life relationships and endeavours.

In his 30s, when for a time he was giving psychic readings, he found a stratum of value and meaning underlying human consciousness. It took years of inner…