Lessons From Near-Death Experiences

Lessons From Near-Death Experiences

Serious concern for authentic information on afterlife enormously enriches our present living with a profound perspective of eternity . Near-death experiences (NDE) have recently become an excellent source material for development of knowledge. The term NDE refers to those incidents when individuals are nearly or actually clinically dead with no measurable heart or brain activity together with total absence of vital signals that support physical life. Modern medical intervention has brought many people back from this twilight state and a number of researchers have recorded the accounts given by them on what the state is actually like. Interest in NDEs spread with the publication of Raymond Moody's Life After Death. Cardiologist Lommel wrote in a medical journal about his extensive research on NDEs and was taken seriously by the medical community . Karlis Osis contacted 5,000 American physicians and gathered 1,318 accounts of NDEs with coherent and impregnated visions from patients, a majority of whom were entirely ignorant of NDEs. Extensive research of Prof Hameroff, University of Arizona, with British physicist Roger Penrose has thrown a flood of light on quantum theory of soul, death and immediate afterlife.

Robert Crookall records a vivid account of a young woman who was presumed dead in the labour room during childbirth, “I heard the doctor say `Well she's dead! I must tell her husband!' Mean while, I had left my body and felt myself floating in what seemed like a dark tunnel...I had no pain, only a wonderful feeling of happiness...I heard a voice which said, `You must go back! The child needs you.' I returned to my body and heard the doctor say `No, by Jove, I can still feel her heart!“ As core experience, these people heard a diagnosis of clinical death, felt their consciousness located outside the body with clear perception of their surroundings, felt floating in a dark tunnel, had a glimpse of bright light at the end of the tunnel, felt no physical pain and finally an instruction to return to body again and recurrence of physical pain once again.

Findings from NDEs also refer to a quick life review like a flashback and even flash-forward.

For a moment the mind experiences a quick view of major occurrences and feelings of past and future. An altered concept of time and Self beyond body and an awareness of the continuity of life beyond death also constitute the core experience.

The parting words of the dying are identically indicative of a happy state beyond death. Goethe exclaimed, “More light!“ Edison said, “It is very beautiful there.“ Chopin said, “Now I am the source of all blessedness.“ Beethoven exclaimed, “In heaven I shall hear.“ Rousseau uttered, “There is God Himself who is opening His arms and inviting me to taste at last that eternal and unchanging joy that I have so long desired.“

Such experiences cannot be dismissed as hallucination or drug side effects which cannot occur after suspension of brain activity . Nor can these be attributed to particular religious faiths as people belonging to different religions reported highly homogeneous experiences.

As per Indic philosophy , we live in threefold bodies. The physical body is linked with astral body with senses of perception and mind, while the causal body contains the blueprint of our existence with karmic account and accumulation of desires. Prana or energy permeates all of them in different functional forms. After death, the nucleus of life force or soul leaves the physical body and remains with the astral and causal body to continue the journey in the afterlife.

Om Namah Shivay