Near-Death Experiences
Proof of Life after Death by Linda Sechrist
T
he advice that the White Queen gave to young Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-
Glass might be some of the best to offer non-believers and skeptics that ques- tion the credibility of near-death ex- periences (NDE). When Alice protests, “One can’t believe impossible things,” the White Queen famously retorts, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Glimpses of Grace The majority of physicians and clinical researchers in the medical community continue to consider NDEs as impos- sible and merely pure fantasies gener- ated by a surge of electrical activity as a dying brain runs out of oxygen. However, according to a Gallup poll, the 8 million Americans whose transcendental NDEs freed their con- sciousness to leave the body and enter into a wondrous reality that exists completely free of physicality, believe them to be real, meaningful and life- changing experiences. Recently, the renowned NDE
narratives of Anita Moorjani, author of Dying to Be Me: My Journey from
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I was overwhelmed by the realization that God isn’t a being, but a state of being… and I am that state of being… pure consciousness. ~ Anita Moorjani
Cancer to Near Death, to True Healing, and Dr. Eben Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, have sparked fresh public interest in NDEs, a word coined by Raymond Moody, Ph.D., in his 1975 classic, Life After Life. Moody, a psychi- atrist and professor of philosophy who has spent nearly 50 years investigating what happens when people die, has in- terviewed thousands of individuals that have personally experienced an NDE. “Over the past 20 years there have been enormous strides in resuscitation technology. Defibrillators and public access defibrillation programs, as well as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, are major factors that allow modern medi- cine to bring people back from a state that 100 years ago would have been labeled death,” observes Moody.
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Through his research, he has iden- tified numerous common elements that occur in NDEs—an out-of-body experi- ence, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel, encountering a bright light (usually interpreted as God, Jesus or an angel), communicating with deceased relatives, feeling emotions such as pro- found peace, well-being and love, plus a flood of knowledge about life and the nature of the universe. Perhaps the most significant element he reports is the supremely conscious and superbly blissful state that exists beyond both limitations of the senses and intellect and the confines of space and time— the pure conscious form of each one’s truly real Self.
Life as Love
Rushed to the hospital in a coma, Moorjani, whose body had been devoured for four years by cancer of the lymphatic system, describes the real self that she discovered during her NDE. “There I was, without my body or any physical traits, yet my pure essence continued to exist. It was not a reduced element of my whole self; in fact, it felt far greater and more intense and expan- sive than my physical being. “I felt eternal, as if I’d always existed
and always would, without a beginning or end. I was filled with the knowledge that I was simply magnificent,” explains Moorjani, whose cancer completely disappeared within five weeks after her release from the hospital. “Not only did I come back with a clean slate, I brought back one of my biggest lessons—to love myself and be an instrument of love. I also returned to life here with a sense of purpose—to fearless- ly be as authentically me as I can be. This means,” she clarifies, “that in whatever I do, I am acting from my sense of passion and the sheer joy of doing it.” During Alexander’s seven-day coma in a hospital, brought about by antibiotic-resistant E. coli menin- gitis that attacked his brain, he left his mortal identity behind. “My brain wasn’t working at all,” he relates. “My entire neo-cortex, the part that makes us human, was entirely shut down. I had no language, emotions, logic or memories of who I was. Such an empty slate granted me full access to the true
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