Near-Death Experience
Many have had them — perhaps you are one
I first got interested in Near Death Experiences or NDEs after hearing a sermon by a former pastor, Cindy Senarighi. Cindy is a remarkable woman. I learned a lot from her about being a compassionate human being. She is the owner of a Christian spiritual yoga company called Yoga Devotions.
Dr. Mary Neal
Cindy introduced me to the book To Heaven and Back by Dr. Mary C. Neal. Since Pastor Cindy’s sermon six or eight years ago, I have been fascinated by this topic.
I decided to read Dr. Neal’s book. Being a medical doctor and an orthopedic surgeon, I figured she would not be prone to flights of fantasy. Nor would she be doing it for the money.
As I later learned, she kept her experience quiet for many years out of concern for what it might do to her medical practice. This wasn’t the whole reason, as you will see below, but it was a big factor.
I had my own Significant Transformative Experience (STE, similar to an NDE) almost 20 years ago. This may explain why I was so intrigued by Pastor Cindy’s sermon and the book she cited.
I didn’t die, but I sure thought I was going to. I had been taking a medication that was causing some alarming side-effects. The doctor told me to stop taking it. That threw me into a tailspin with severe anxiety and depression. I was hospitalized for several days. The doctor called it a psychotic break. It took a lot of therapy and medication to get me back to a semblance of “normal.” So, I am familiar with how severe trauma, at least psychic trauma, can impact a person. But this article is not about me.
Dr. Neal had an accident in which she drowned during a kayaking adventure on the Fuy River in southern Chile in January 1999. She was underwater for about 20 minutes before her friends could get her out of the river and administer CPR.
During that 20 minutes, Dr. Neal says a group of spiritual beings met her and took her down a path. She didn’t go into heaven. She did, however, meet with God/Jesus during her experience and aftermath and was told to share her experience when she returned. Due to two severely broken legs, and the damage done to her lungs by drowning, she had a long, slow, painful recovery.
Her story is an amazing one. The constellation of miracles that surround her NDE is incredible. So many things happened that are inexplicable.
Twelve years later, in 2011, Dr. Neal’s book came out. She said between her medical practice and other things that occupied her, she did not have the time to write the book even though she knew God wanted her to write it.
Her son Willie’s death in June 2009 delayed publication of the book. A car driven by an inattentive driver struck and killed him while he roller skied with a friend in Maine.
Dr. Neal felt that one of the reasons she had been sent back was to aid her husband and the rest of the family in coping with Willie’s death. She felt her NDE helped her accept that her son was in a good place, full of love and beauty, a place she longed to return to despite her great love for her family.
Since devouring Dr. Neal’s book (I’ve read it several times) and several other NDE books, I’ve read many accounts and watched dozens of video presentations by others with similar stories. IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies, and NDERF, the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, both have extensive archives filled with case studies of such experiences.
Some estimate that due to modern resuscitation techniques there are now millions of people who have had Near-Death Experiences. You may be one or know someone who is.
Glimpses of Heaven
I call NDEs “glimpses of heaven.”
Several years ago, I led a “glimpses of heaven” book club for some elderly people in an assisted living facility. We read a dozen or so books by various people who had had such experiences. Many of those men and women have now passed away. I think they died more peacefully for having read and discussed those books.
Marvin Besteman
Marv Besteman, a retired banker, wrote one of the books we read, My Journey to Heaven. Two men dressed in business attire entered Marv’s hospital room one night and escorted him to a huge gate. There he met St. Peter, and saw some amazing things from the entrance, but he could not enter due to an invisible barrier. He could see through to people he recognized waving to him from the other side. He wanted desperately to remain, to go in and visit with these people. Alas, that was not to be.
St. Peter could not find Marv’s name in his book, so he told Marv it wasn’t his time and he’d have to return. Marv protested, but despite his protests, he was sent back. Marv said he was extremely disappointed.
Upon his return, Marv decided he would not tell anyone what had happened. He figured if he did they would think him insane or that he’d had a hallucination. Marv knew better. He had experienced something incredibly wonderful and more real than anything he had ever known. Despite his love for his family, he longed to return to that joy-filled paradise of love.
Almost everyone who has had such an experience yearns to return.
Dr. Eben Alexander
Dr. Eben Alexander certainly wanted to stay. He had survived a near-fatal case of bacterial meningitis that rendered the neocortex of his brain essentially dead. Yet he survived and completely regained his memory and mental and physical functions. Despite his medical knowledge and consultation with his doctors and other specialists, he could not explain how that was possible.
What he experienced had such a strong impact on him that he gave up his successful and lucrative medical practice. He had been an academic neurosurgeon for 25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham & Women’s and the Children’s Hospitals and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He now devotes his to writing and speaking, often to medical groups, about his experience and his new understanding of death and consciousness.
His mission now is to convince the medical community that consciousness persists after death. He says the brain operates more as a filter than as a memory storage device. He believes that medical science misunderstands the nature and function of the brain in some fundamental ways.
As you can imagine, injecting a note of spirituality into the materialistic world of medicine is not an easy task.
Dr. Alexander describes his experience in Proof of Heaven.
What did these people experience?
They entered or saw a place so full of love and beauty that they wanted more than anything else to stay there. According to them, two things survive death: love and relationships. They felt an all-encompassing love stronger than anything they’d ever experienced during their life on earth.
And, they met loved ones who had preceded them in death. Somehow they recognized them even though some appeared younger and healthier than when they’d known them in this life.
Almost all NDEs say they now feel no fear of death. They say they felt no pain upon their death or afterward. In fact, in heaven they felt young and vital, better than ever. Dying, some said, was like stepping through a veil.
They felt extreme, unconditional love and acceptance so thick they could feel and taste it. A party of friends and relatives who had gone before them often welcomed these new arrivals. Love and joy flowed from everyone and everything.
Beautiful music filled the air: melodies like thousands of angels singing in perfect harmony, music like nothing we’ve ever heard.
Dr. Alexander soared through paradise on the wing of a butterfly with a beautiful young lady whom he later learned was a sister he never knew he had. (Dr. Alexander was adopted and had not yet gotten in touch with his birth family at the time of his NDE.)
No wonder when they returned to the pain and agony of their bodies, they wanted to return home to heaven.
One minister who had “died” in a terrible auto accident had to wear a horribly painful orthopedic device for months to repair his mangled leg. He wrote in 90 Minutes in Heaven that he became angry and severely depressed.
What will heaven be like for us?
My conclusion is that it depends on what we think it will be like. I am convinced the way we live our lives now is preparation for what we will experience after we die.
Though Christ went ahead to prepare a place for us, we are co-creators. What we say and do now is the “bricks and mortar” of what will be our place in the hereafter.
My belief is that we do not have to earn our way into heaven. Christ did that for us. But, what we experience once there depends very much on how we have lived our lives here, how much we’ve loved our neighbors, how helpful we’ve been.
One of the mysteries that intrigues me most is the absence of time. NDE experiencers say they couldn’t say whether they’d been dead for minutes, hours, days, or years. Time stood still.
This opens up another interesting aspect: travel. You can be anywhere you want at the speed of thought.
It also brings up the possibility of time travel. We will be able to have dinner with anyone we choose and chat with them as long as we like. Coffee with Einstein anyone? Dinner with Aristotle?
Apparently there are no language barriers, either. A friend once told my wife he’d recognize her in heaven by her accent. I doubt that will be possible, but we will have our unique personalities, our essence. Souls without physical bodies?
And, speaking of thought, most say they communicated telepathically without speaking.
Many reported how learning in heaven differed from learning on earth. Questions there are answered instantly. The person asking didn’t know how they knew — they just knew.
Dr. Alexander reported that he was taken into the “core” and shown the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Sadly, he says, he could not remember much of what he had learned there. Such knowledge, apparently, is not for this world, at least not yet.
The doctor did come back with the knowledge that in heaven love reigns supreme.
And, what is love but being patient and kind and wanting the best for the other person? It also involves working to help them get what they desire if it is in their best interest. Love in heaven, Dr. Alexander says, is unconditional. We don’t have to earn it. It’s a given. And, it is overwhelming.
All this makes me look forward with eagerness. It allows me to look at death as a grand entrance rather than a final curtain.
As with Shakespeare and the Bible, we can say “Oh death, where is thy sting?”
We will all die someday, but we need not be afraid.
The best is yet to come.
Some recommended reading:
- Alexander, Eben, M.D., Proof of Heaven.
- Anderson, Reggie, M.D. Appointments with Heaven.
- Atwater, P.M.H., Near-Death Experiences.
- Besteman, Marvin J., My Journey to Heaven.
- Burke, John, Imagine Heaven.
- Burpo, Todd, Heaven is for Real.
- Harris, Trudy, R.N., Glimpses of Heaven.
- Malarkey, Kevin & Alex, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven.
- McVea, Crystal, Waking up in Heaven.
- Moorjani, Anita, Dying to be Me.
- Musick, Steven R., Life After Heaven.
- Neal, Mary C., M.D., To Heaven and Back.
- Piper, Don, 90 Minutes in Heaven.
- Vest, Freddy, The Day I Died.
