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Is There Life After Death?
Near-death Experiences Excerpt from “The Source of Life” by Sarina Damen, published by Whirling Rainbow Publishing 1992. Continued (back to first page)
The belief that these occurrences are the result of alterations in brain functioning or hallucinations at the time of death have also been rejected for the same reasons.
`The thing that I was conscious of was that I knew it was not a dream because, I could hardly wait to get conscious so that I could tell my mother that I had seen my father.' 45. `I've had a lot of dreams and it wasn't like any dream that I had had. It was real.' 46. `I tried to tell my minister, but he told me I had been hallucinating so I shut up.' 47.
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Such inviting descriptions of the `other side' might persuade some people to escape to the beauty, peace and love of `heaven' through taking their lives, but this is warned against by those who have experienced NDE's, including those who tried suicide and fortunately failed.
`I got the feeling that two things...would be completely forbidden...to kill myself or to kill another person.' 48.
The events which led the person to try to take their own life were played back, over and over in a continuous sequence, impressing upon the person never to attempt such an action again.
"I would go through it once, and at the end I would think, `Oh, I'm glad that's over', and then it would start over again, and I would think, `Oh, no, not this again'." 49.
The importance of not trying to kill oneself was further emphasized in Dr Raymond Moody's Reflections on Life After Life in which he stressed that people who experienced NDE `felt their suicidal attempts solved nothing. They were involved in exactly the same problems from which they had been trying to extricate themselves by suicide. Whatever difficulty they had been trying to get away from was still there on the other side, unresolved.' 50.
Near-death experiences cannot prove `beyond reasonable doubt' that life continues after the death of the physical organism, but it does strongly suggest that our consciousness continues beyond the grave.
Recognition of NDE's as actual events, that occurred in the physical and spiritual dimensions, presents us with a number of intriguing questions:
If consciousness survives physical death, does the consciousness or mind constitute the soul or a quality of the soul?
If consciousness is the eternal soul or an expression of the soul, do all organisms that experience an `awareness of self' possess a soul?
A number of people who had a near-death experience report of being greeted, not only by religious figures, beings of light, or deceased relatives, but also by much loved pets who had died, in some cases, many years previously. According to science, human beings are literally star matter made conscious of itself. As we are made from the very same elements as all other constituents of the universe, and that we as children of the universe are aware of our existence and relation to our environs, isn’t it also logical to assume that all matter has the potential to become aware of itself (or possibly is already conscious of itself, in one form or another)? When we take this into consideration, it would be feasible from a scientific perspective to accept organisms, other than humans, may also possess a form of eternal consciousness.
If our consciousness is unaffected by death, and therefore immortal, and is only attached to the body for a short time, did our consciousness exist prior to the birth of the physical shell?
If we accept the common religious view that all was created in the ‘beginning’, this consciousness must have existed before physical conception. This, then raises the question of what the consciousness has been doing for eternity before its’ `one' earthly incarnation.
Although acceptance of near-death experiences as recollections of real episodes raises many queries, it also seems to answer two of the most important questions pondered since the dawn of humankind - there is life after death and the purpose of life is love.
SUGGESTED READING - NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES Life After Life by Dr Raymond Moody, Bantam Books, New York, February, 1975. Reflections on Life After Life by Dr Raymond Moody, Bantam Books, New York, November, 1977. The Death of Forever: A New Future for Human Consciousness by Darryl Reanney, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991. Recollections of Death by Dr Michael Sabom, Corgi, London, 1982. Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Dr Carl Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffé, Flamingo, London, 1989. The Tibetan Book of the Dead compiled & edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, psychological commentary by Dr C.G. Jung, Oxford University Press, London, 1960. And When I Die Will I Be Dead? compiled by Bruce Elder from ABC Radio Documentary, ABC Enterprises, Crows Nest, NSW, 1987.
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