Ever since I was at a conscious age I have believed in the paranormal and the supernatural. Today though I am 24, there are times when I still get scared to be alone in my room at night. During my early childhood years until I was in my 10th grade I was even sacred to go to the washroom alone. I made my mother stand out and till the time I was in she had to keep speaking with me. In this post I will be talking about the reality behind Life after Death, Near Death Experiences (NDE), Out of Body Experiences (OBE) and even Pre-birth experiences. This however, is my personal opinion and by no means an imposition on anyone reading this article.
PARANORMAL PHENOMENA- What Lies Beyond
A Glimpse of the Afterlife
The notion that there is a life after this one on Earth is a widely held belief that predates recorded history. While cultures like that of the ancient Egyptians believed existence continued in "the Land of the Dead," the more modern Christian beliefs offer an afterlife in Heaven as a reward or in Hell as a punishment. Even more recent ideas suggest that life might continue in another dimension or plane of existence - perhaps even on another planet.
Whatever the ideas, it's clear that humans want to believe - perhaps even need to believe in life after death. There is no definitive proof, of course, that a life after death exists. But there are some rather compelling anecdotes that suggest there might be: remarkable cases of claimed reincarnation or past-life recall, for instance. There are also countless cases in which the recently deceased have appeared briefly to family members and friends to tell them that they are well and happy in another world.
Perhaps the most intriguing "evidence" is the stories related by people who have gone through the "near-death experience." It's estimated that 9 to 18 percent of people who are near death have a near-death experience. Although mainstream science suggests that these experiences are nothing more than the result of certain brain activity under extreme stress or hallucinations brought on by drugs or medication, perhaps these accounts shouldn't be so readily dismissed. If they are real, after all, they hold the only clues we have as to what life in the hereafter might be like.
A few cases of near-death experience (NDE), here is a glimpse of life after death:
The Tunnel and the Light
[A Near Death Experience in 1964 - Anonymous] - "In front of me I saw a small light in the vast distance. The light started to get larger. It became more brilliant and it stopped in front of me. I felt an intense love, which came from the Light. I know without a doubt that this beautiful intense loving Light was God. The Light started to communicate with me; but the communication was telepathic, it was not verbal. The Light asked me if I wanted to come with it. At this point I completely understood the nature of the question and the consequences of my answer. If I choose to continue with the Light I knew that I would die and never return to earth. I thought about this and replied that I thought that I still had important things to do back there (on earth). At that point the Light began to recede. I found myself waking up on the bed of my dorm room."
[Tom Sawyer: What I Learned by Dying]- "I saw nothing but absolute, total blackness. In this capacity, though, I was looking at absolute nothingness or darkness, but my eyes were not straining. I had the desire to look around inquisitively. What is this place? Where am I? Instantaneously, this darkness took the shape of a tunnel. It was perfectly level; however slightly ambiguous in that it was straight before me and it was cloud-like. It was very vast, as opposed to small and confining, and was anywhere from a thousand feet to a thousand miles wide. I was very comfortable and inquisitive. It was cylindrical. If you took a tornado and stretched it out straight, it would be similar to that..."
[Near-Death Experiences - Rob]- "All was panic. The water was very cold. My heavy winter clothes were making it difficult to stay afloat. I continued to struggle mightily, thinking "I'm only nine. That's too young to die." The longer I was under the ice, the less significant time became. It was as if time had no meaning. Everything happened sequentially but simultaneously. I became very tired. I noticed that I could no longer feel the cold. My hearing was heightened. I could hear the movement of the water. I could hear the traffic on the bridge overhead and behind me. I could see clearly, even though it was dark and I was under the ice and moving downstream. Then, a complete calm and serenity overtook me. I was at total peace. I began to come into awareness that all was not over. I could sense a light. It was brilliant, but caused no discomfort when looking at it. In fact, I gained strength by looking into the light. I then sensed a presence. I had the knowledge that this was Jesus, and he was assuring me that everything was fine. I felt total love from this presence. I was home. More so than I was ever home before. I was presented with a sense that all questions were to be answered if I stayed."
(‘Above mentioned research conclusions by Kevin Williams’)
The NDE and Pre-Birth Connection –
It is not unusual for people in near-death experiences (NDE) returning from the clinical death, to report having received information concerning their pre-existence before they were conceived in the world. Some report of learning how they chose various aspects of their lives even before they were born. Some of the choices people have reported having chosen before birth include the selection of their birth parents, choosing their mission in life, and even choosing how they will die. This knowledge regarding near-death experiences of the past and future shows how some things in life are pre-destined while other things are not. This information is based on the first hand accounts revealed by people who have had a brush with NDEs. It shows how free will and pre-destination both exist and work hand in hand. It means we choose our destiny in life before our birth into the world to live it.
Since reincarnation is a concept found in many cultures and religions, the metaphor of life as a river which we chose before our birth, shows up in many of these cultures and religions. There are many aspects to a river which make it an excellent analogy to help us understand where we came from, where we're going, who we are, why we're here, and what life is all about.
Someone once asked Deepak Chopra, the famous endocrinologist and spiritual guru, "Does this mean that we are born into a pre-determined destiny and if so, why even bother cultivating free will or striving to be faithful?" He said:
"This connection isn't fixed or automatic, it merely represents numerical probability. Our conscious choices help determine our destiny. The deterministic world is ignorance. When we navigate from awareness, we exercise free will. It's the difference between ignorance and enlightenment. To surrender to divine intelligence, know that everything both comes from God and belongs to God. If life is a river between the banks of hope and despair, our ultimate destiny is to become independent of both, unmoved by either.”
So the future is not fixed in stone but consists of probabilities based on current choices. This answer from Deepak Chopra is another way of saying we choose our destinies.
Out of Body Experiences
The following is a true account excerpted from of Dr. George Ritchie’s book Return from tomorrow. In 1943, he died of pneumonia and nine minutes later returned to life to tell about it:
The men let go of my arms ... I heard a click and a whirr. The whirr went on and on. It was getting louder. The whirr was inside my head and my knees were made of rubber. They were bending and I was falling and all the time the whirr grew louder. I sat up with a start. What time was it? I looked at the bedside table but they'd taken the clock away. In fact, where was any of my stuff?
I jumped out of bed in alarm, looking for my clothes. My uniform wasn't on the chair. I turned around, and then froze. Someone was lying in that bed. I took a step closer. He was quite a young man, with short brown hair, lying very still. But, the thing was impossible! I myself had just gotten out of that bed! For a moment I wrestled with the mystery of it. It was too strange to think about - and anyway I didn't have the time.
I went back past the offices and stepped out into the corridor. A sergeant was coming along it carrying an instrument tray covered with a cloth. Probably he didn't know anything, but I was so glad to find someone awake that I started toward him.
"Excuse me, Sergeant," I said. "You haven't seen the ward boy for this unit, have you?"
He didn't answer. Didn't even glance at me. He just kept coming, straight at me, not slowing down.
"Look out!" I yelled, jumping out of his way.
The next minute he was past me, walking away down the corridor as if he had never seen me, though how we had kept from colliding I didn't know. And then I saw something that gave me a new idea. Farther down the corridor was one of the heavy metal doors that led to the outside. I hurried toward it. Even if I had missed that train, I'd find some way of getting to Richmond!
Almost without knowing it I found myself outside, racing swiftly along, traveling faster in fact than I'd ever moved in my life. Looking down I was astonished to see not the ground, but the tops of mesquite bushes beneath me. Already Camp Barkeley seemed to be far behind me as I sped over the dark frozen desert. My mind kept telling me that what I was doing was impossible, and yet ... it was happening. I was going to Richmond; somehow I had known that from the moment I burst through that hospital door. Going to Richmond a hundred times faster than any train on Earth could take me.
Almost immediately I noticed myself slowing down. Just below me now, where two streets came together, I caught a flickering blue glow. It came from a neon sign over the door of a red-roofed one-story building with a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer sign propped in the front window. Cafe, the jittering letters over the door read and from the windows light streamed onto the pavement. Staring down at it, I realized I had stopped moving altogether. Finding myself somehow suspended fifty feet in the air was an even stranger feeling than the whirlwind flight had been. But I had no time to puzzle over it, for down the sidewalk toward the all-night cafe a man came briskly walking. At least, I thought, I could find out from him what town this was and in what direction I was heading.
Even as the idea occurred to me - as though thought and motion had become the same thing - I found myself down on the sidewalk, hurrying along at the stranger's side. He was a civilian, maybe forty or forty-five, wearing a topcoat but no hat. He was obviously thinking hard about something because he never glanced my way as I fell into step beside him.
"Can you tell me please," I said, "What city this is?"
He kept right on walking.
"Please sir!" I said, speaking louder, "I'm a stranger here and I'd appreciate it if ..."
We reached the cafe and he turned, reaching for the door handle. Was the fellow deaf? I put out my left hand to tap his shoulder. There was nothing there.
I stood there in front of the door, gaping after him as he opened it and disappeared inside. It had been like touching thin air. Like no one had been there at all. And yet I had distinctly seen him, even to the beginnings of black stubble on his chin where he needed a shave.
I backed away from the mystery of the substance-less man and leaned up against the guy wire of a telephone pole to think things through. My body went through that guy wire as though it too had not been there.
There on the sidewalk of that unknown city, I did some incredulous thinking. The strangest, most difficult thinking I had ever done. The man in the cafe, this telephone pole ... supposes they were perfectly normal. Suppose I was the one who was - changed, somehow. What if in some impossible, unimaginable way, I lost my ... hardness. My ability to grasp things, to make contact with the world. Even to be seen! The fellow just now. It was obvious he never saw or heard me.
And suddenly I remembered the young man I had seen in the bed in that little hospital room. What if that had been ... me? Or anyhow, the material, concrete part of myself that in some unexplainable way I'd gotten separated from. What if the form which I had left lying in the hospital room in Texas was my own?
And if it were, how could I get back to it again? Why had I ever rushed off so unthinkingly?
I was moving again, speeding away from the city. Below me was the broad river. I appeared to be going back, back in the direction I had come from, and it seemed to me I was flashing across space even faster than before. Hills, lakes, farms slipped away beneath me as I sped in an unswerving straight line over the dark nighttime land. I was standing in front of the base hospital, and so began one of the strangest searches that can ever have taken place: the search for myself. From one ward to another of that enormous complex I rushed, pausing in each small room, stooping over the occupant of the bed, hurrying on. I backed toward the doorway. The man in that bed was dead! I felt the same reluctance I had the previous time at being in a room with a dead person. But ... if that was my ring, then - then it was me, the separated part of me, lying under that sheet. Did that mean that I was ...
It was the first time in this entire experience that the word death occurred to me in connection with what was happening. But I wasn't dead! How could I be dead and still be awake? Thinking. Experiencing. Death was different. Death was ... I didn't know. Blanking out. Nothingness. I was me, wide awake, only without a physical body to function in. Frantically I clawed at the sheet, trying to draw it back, trying to uncover the figure on the bed. All my efforts did not even stir a breeze in the silent little room.
Suddenly I was aware that it was brighter, a lot brighter, than it had been. I stared in astonishment as the brightness increased, coming from nowhere, seeming to shine everywhere at once. All the light bulbs in the ward couldn't give off that much light. All the bulbs in the world couldn't! It was impossibly bright. It was like a million welders' lamps all blazing at once.
"I'm glad I don't have physical eyes at this moment," I thought. "This light would destroy the retina in a tenth of a second."
"No, I corrected myself, not the light. He. He would be too bright to look at."
For now I saw that it was not light but a man who had entered the room, or rather, a man made out of light, though this seemed no more possible to my mind than the incredible intensity of the brightness that made up his form.
Kevin Williams: Without a doubt, the most important lesson NDEs teach us is the supreme importance of unconditional love. Love is where we all came from and love is where we will all eventually return. Love is what life is really all about. Learning and growing in unconditional love is why we are all here on this blue marble called Earth. Life itself is God. Love itself is God. Everyone and everything is a part of God.
All things are held together by the power of love. Love is the way to eternal bliss and the way to overcome the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. There is no greater force in the universe than unconditional love because it is universal and divine. The more love we cultivate within ourselves and the more love we give to others and the more we evolve towards embodying unconditional love, then the closer we come to our goal - liberation from death. True love can never die. Love and knowledge are the only things we can really take with us when we die. Death doesn't change much of anything.
I like how one particular experiencer, Chuck Griswold, put it. “He said death is merely a body problem. This is so true. We are also continually born into this world and subjected to death until we have evolved and embodied unconditional love as Buddha and Jesus did. We don't go to heaven. We grow to heaven to become permanent citizens of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is within us. When it becomes fully manifested within ourselves and the world through unconditional love, then we are no longer the prodigal children away from God. To manifest our higher spirit of love within us into conscious reality is the way we return to our origins - to the Source of All Things. Then wherever we find ourselves, heaven will always be manifested within us and we will always be in heaven - never to die again. This is the evolutionary goal of humanity”.
(Article courtesy - http://www.near-death.com/
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa082800a.htm)
Good Day People!!!!
God Bless!!
Love and Regards,
Aarti Kapoor!!!!
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