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Near Death Experience
"...What is the predominant feeling most people experience at the moment of death? Is it doubt, fear, or hope?
- Doubt for hardened skeptics, fear for the guilty, and hope for the good. " (The Spirits' Book q.961 by Allan Kardec)
A replay of significant events from your life may pass before your eyes — the process only takes a few seconds, but time seems to slow down for you during this process. Next, you may have an out-of-body experience and see emergency workers or medical personnel working on your body. Then you may see a brilliant, warm, white light and find yourself moving through a dark tunnel toward that light. You may even be greeted by friends and family members who have passed on before you.
But in a second, the whole transcendental event can end, and you
wake up in a strange place, such as a hospital bed. Your near-death experience is over — your physical body survived.
There are, in fact, literally thousands of documented cases of
people who have had a near-death experience. Well-established medical doctors, psychologists, theologians, cardiologists, and social scientists of various kinds have done extensive research and detailed study on the phenomenon. Researchers such as Cobb, Crookall, Savage, Hyslop, Richet and many others, have accumulated data from subjects over the last hundred years. More recently, books by doctors Moody, Kubler-Ross, Sabom, Lundahl, Gabbard, Twenlow, and others have been added to an extensive and varied library of professional journal articles and previous
research papers.
If there were any questions about the pervasiveness of near-death experience, George Gallup, Jr., of Gallup Poll fame, has laid them to rest. In his book, Adventures in Immortality, Mr. Gallup reports that five percent of the U. S. adult population has had a near-death experience. This percentage equals about 8,000,000 people who have had such an experience. If nothing else, Gallup’s statistics speak well for the medical emergency technology’s ability to resuscitate c
linically dead or near-dead patients.
But the pervasiveness of the phenomena has not always been convincing in itself. In 1975, when Dr. Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Ph.D. published his best-selling book, Life After Life, his descriptions and conclusions were often viewed with considerable skepticism or simply dismissed out of hand by members of the medical and scientific community.
In this book, Dr. Moody describes accounts of many different people who have had near-death experiences. He was the first to coin the term “near-death experience.”
For many, a near-death experience, or NDE, is a life-altering
event. This incredibly personal and profound experience proves to the person who went through it that there is in fact life after death.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of near-death experiences is the consistency of their descriptions. The consistency occurs in spite of the fact the persons involved uniformly characterize their NDE as inexpressible or ineffable. The difficulty people have in describing their near-death experience appears to be due to the fact that our language is symbolic—words are only names for our experiences. Inasmuch as NDEs fall outside our common experience, adjectives and superlatives may be inadequate
to describe the events that occur during an NDE.
Clearly, near-death experiences provide a strong argument for life after death. Deathbed experiences add additional fuel to the fire. Together, both forms of “data collection” agree with each other and provide us with a better understanding of what might be occurring on the other side.
Near-death experiences are giving society answers to such questions. In general, near-death experiences reveal that the quality of our lives after death isn’t determined by HOW we die, but by how we LIVE.
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From the book Those Left Behind – Understanding Suicide from a Spiritist View,
by Jussara Korngold (In Press) - www.sgny.org BOOKS
extract from Spiritist News – www.ssbaltimore.org BOOKS
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