Death and Beyond

Dying

For a moment put yourself in my shoes. The year is 1970. You are sitting in your biology class. The teacher is writing notes on the board and reading them aloud as she writes. Her subject is tapeworms.

It's not an appealing subject. Even so, you notice you are getting a bit hungry - well, maybe an empty felling is a more accurate way of describing it. Just a faint sensation; you barely recognize it at first. But it rapidly grows stronger and along with it comes a ringing sound which progressively grows louder. A third impression, a sort of stunned feeling joins the emptiness and the bell.

Odd feelings come and go, you say. Nothing to get excited about. Hold on a minute and it will pass. But it doesn't. In less time than it takes to say it, that empty feeling becomes an unbelievable void, the bell is now a horrible clanging in your ears, and you are so dazed you feel like someone hit you over the head with a brick.

Out of Body Experience

Suddenly you feel yourself being pulled backward -- fast, real fast like you are riding a roller coaster, only you are in reverse gear. As you rapidly propel backwards, you are immediately plunged into total darkness. It appears to be some type of tunnel, but you don't have time to speculate on it. Pop, and you are out. Out of what? You are out of your body!

You are no longer moving backward; the bell has stopped ringing; and the empty, dazed sensations are over. Things seem to be back to normal again except, except you are observing the scene from the ceiling. You are now looking down on your classmates. And to your amazement, you are looking at the back of your own head!

What do you think of that?

I don't know how you would have handled it, but it scared the devil out of me. My first thought was, "How can I be seeing the back of my head?" Next, "Why am I out of my body?" Then, "I must be dead or dying, otherwise I wouldn't be out of my body."

That was quickly followed by, "But why am I dead? I was just sitting there at my desk. Nothing physical happened to me that I could tell. It doesn't make sense. How could this happen?" I was getting panicky now. The only consoling thought I could muster was, "If this is death, at least it's not painful."

My body was stiff as a board, sitting at attention. That wasn't like me at all. Normally, I slouch. At this point a friend sitting at the desk to my right interrupted the class saying, "Look at Jerry. He's white as a ghost."
The teacher stopped teaching, and the class broke into a general murmur.

A couple of guys from the back of the class came forward to examine my still rigid body. One asked Susie, the girl who sat behind me, if I were an epileptic. She claimed she didn't know me that well. From my position over head, I was beginning to get steamed. Susie knew me better than that. No, I wasn't an epileptic. And Susie should have told them so.

I watched one of them pull the billfold out of my back pocket. He thumbed through it looking for anything that might explain my strange behavior. He found nothing of importance and replaced my wallet. I watched him closely; I thought he might steal my money. Looking back at it so many years later, it's funny. Here I was worrying about my money when I thought I was dead!

Back in the Body

It wasn't long before one of the guys started to take my pulse. I watched him stick his fingers in my wrist. Evidently, he couldn't find any, so he dug his fingers in deeper. Then I felt something - a touch on the wrist. As he continued to dig deeper, I felt pain. I was back in my body again. No idea how I got there.

I felt blood rush through my veins. The circulation must have stopped. My whole body was now flush. Sweat poured out like it never had before or since. My clothes were drenched. It seemed like the whole class was around my desk staring at me. I got up and left the room.

What had happened? I believed I had a close call with death. But I decided not to tell anyone of the experience, it was all just too odd. No one would believe it. Why should they? I wouldn't have believed it myself, had it not happened to me. No, I didn't tell a soul, not for the next seven years.

In 1970, I had never heard of near-death-experiences. Today, it is rather a popular subject. But along with its popularity has come a great deal of misinformation too. Having gone through the experience myself, I do have a few things to say about it.

Reflections on the Experience

Let's dismiss a few things right from the start. I wasn't under the influence of alcohol or drugs. I was never an epileptic, nor did I have any other physical or mental problems which could account for the incident.

The experience was not an hallucination, dream, or trick of the mind. It was quite real. A wide gap separates reality from dreams. Reality has that predictable, matter-of-fact quality which you never encounter in a dream. And the dream has a sort of fuzzy, odd quality all of its own. You don't have any trouble telling which is which.

The near-death experience has all the vivid, factual quality of normal perception. When you go through it, there is no doubt in your mind what you are observing is actually taking place.

I have heard medical and psychological "experts" question the near-death experience. One thing all of these so-called experts have in common is that none of them have ever gone through the near-death experience themselves. That is sort of like a "legal expert" who has never been to law school or a "swimming expert" who has never set his foot into water.

Tell me, if you wanted to know what London is like, would your first choice be someone who has read a brochure on the city, or would you rather ask someone who has actually been there and seen the city?

Evidence of Near Death Experiences

Each self-appointed expert attempts to explain away the near-death experience as something other than reality. But their explanations don't stand up under close scrutiny. Patients who supposedly were unconscious and at death's door have come back from resuscitations giving accurate detailed accounts of the procedures. Patients with no medical background whatsoever are able to describe their emergency room doctors, nurses, and attendants and tell what each did to save the patients' lives.

Such specific inside information would not be known unless the patient actually saw the event. Lying flat on his back with his eyes closed, a patient could not see anything from his own body. Somehow or another patients must be out of their bodies and above the operating table to observe such details. And that is exactly where they claim they were.

Some patients claim they not only left their bodies, they also left the operating room and went into other rooms of the hospital. They corroborate their stories with precise reports of what was taking place elsewhere in the hospital while their bodies remained on the operating table. Strangely enough, their stories check out.

Again, no explanation is possible, unless they really were where they said they were.

In The Light Beyond, Dr. Raymond Moody provides us with several striking examples of people coming back from resuscitation with uncanny memories of the event. He tells of a forty-nine year old man with a severe heart attack. Electroshock paddles eventually brought the man around.

Later the patient gave a full description of what went on in the emergency room, and he even described the emergency nurse. The patient said she had a wedge hairdo, her last name was Hawkes, and she rolled a cart into the operating room with what looked like two ping-pong paddles. He was right on all thee accounts. Those two ping-pong paddles were electroshock equipment. "How did you know the nurse's name was Hawkes?" asked the doctor. "I read her name tag," replied the patient.

A seventy-year-old woman, blind from the age eighteen, described in vivid detail the procedures doctors used to revive her after her heart attack. She identified the color, shape, and size of each instrument. Moody points out that most of that equipment had not even been invented when she could last see.

The blind patient topped it off by telling the doctor he was wearing a blue suit when he began the resuscitation. She was right about the suit and everything else she claimed to "see." Her mind, soul, or spirit had witnessed the doctor's efforts, and obviously it was not blind.

Dr. Moody also tells of a man who described in accurate detail the appearance of each instrument used in resuscitation. He knew the order in which they were used, and he recalled the color and shape of the equipment. He even identified the dial settings on the machines.

Now that is remarkable. But what really got the doctor's attention was when the patient told him not to worry about the accident. That morning, the doctor had run into the back of another car, and he was worried about a possible lawsuit. Here we find that the patient could not only see the operating room procedures, but could somehow read the doctor's mind as well.

In my own case, although my head was facing forward, I watched Susie, who sat behind me, deny she knew me. I watched the young man take the billfold out of my pocket. I watched him run through its contents. I watched the guy stick his fingers into my wrist taking my pulse. I was there!

None of these were hallucinations, bad dreams, or tricks of the mind. They were eye witnessed, verifiable, events. There is only one logical explanation, that is, they really happened.

Evidence of the Human Soul

What can we learn form these near-death experiences? Humans, we find, are hybrids: part spirit and part animal. We can see the body, but not the soul. For this reason some people jump to the conclusion that we are only physical bodies, collections of atoms, no different from other animals.

But as anyone who has gone through the near-death experience knows, the soul is ever bit as real as the physical body. More than that, the soul is the very essence of what you are. All the thinking, all the feeling, all the seeing, all the hearing, all that was really me was embodied in that soul gazing down on the events below. The body is no more than a structure in which the soul, the real you, lives.

After leaving the body, the soul remains intact. It doesn't seem to change at all. I say that because when I thought I was dead, I was frightened. When I thought I was dead, I wanted very much to find a logical reason for my death.

I was peeved at Susie for distancing herself from me when I was in trouble. I was suspicious when the guy started going through my wallet. And I was embarrassed at all the unwanted attention showered on me. Yes, all of that was me - frightened, logical, short-tempered, suspicious, and easily embarrassed. Leaving my body had not changed my personality a bit.

Before, I mentioned Moody's reference to the seventy-year-old blind woman seeing her resuscitation. My experience had some of that element in it. I have been quite nearsighted for a long time. Back in the early 1960's I started wearing contact lenses, and had them on during the 1970 near-death experience.

I remember one of the nurses who gave me an eye chart exam commenting, 'Without your contacts, you wouldn't be able to see a train if it were about to run over you." It was too true to be funny. But outside the body, my soul didn't need contacts or perhaps even eyes to "see."

Questions and Answers on the Near Death Experience

What did my soul look like? I don't have any idea. I didn't even think of trying to see what I looked like in the spirit, assuming I could. I was too absorbed in the events taking place below to think of anything else. Apparently, none of my classmates or the teacher saw me outside the body. No doubt, I was invisible.

Dr. Raymond Moody reported on a number of near-death events which didn't happen to me. For instance, I didn't see a light phenomena, review of my life, nor did I encounter any unusual beings. No, I didn't discover any warm comfortable feelings either. And I didn't come back overwhelmed with love for my fellow man. Maybe I just wasn't "dead" long enough to see or feel any of that.

Occasionally someone asks, "Could this near-death experience have somehow come about because that is what you wanted to happen or that is what you expected to happen?"

At the time, I thought there were only two possibilities. If Christianity were correct, the dead would "sleep" or be unconscious until Christ's second coming - the day of judgment. If Christianity were wrong, at death all consciousness would cease. And that would be the end of it. I really didn't have a strong opinion either way.

But as I found out neither is true. At the point of death, or maybe just before it, the soul comes tearing out of the body and finds itself in the immediate vicinity of its own remains. That came as a complete surprise for me. In my wildest imagination, it never occurred to me that at the point of death, I would find myself hovering around my biology class.

Is the near-death experience unusual? A Gallup poll in the early 1980's found that eight million adults in the United States have had a near-death experience. That means about one out of every twenty adults have been through it. Statistically, there is a good chance you might be acquainted with one or more of these people.

Did I ever lose consciousness during the near-death experience? No, I was wide awake during the entire episode.

What caused my near-death experience? Everything in the body seems subject to malfunction. The heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, circulation system - you name it, it can go bad on you. No one has yet to put their finger on it, but I suspect there is a death mechanism in the brain. When the body is in great stress, for instance, when you are undergoing a heart attack or stroke, or you've been shot, the body goes into shock.

That, I believe, triggers the death mechanism or death sequence which begins with the empty feeling, the ringing in your ears, and the stunned sensation. Since everything else can go wrong, it is very likely this death mechanism can malfunction too. That is, it could be triggered accidentally, and you could begin to die for no apparent reason.

Conceivably, it is possible that it might malfunction the other way around too. In the final stage of life, the body undergoes a general life support breakdown. At this point the death sequence should kick in. But, for whatever reason, it fails to activate. As a result, people who have suffered severely live on - some in pain, some in a coma, others somewhere in between. That would explain why death takes some so quickly, while others live on for so long.

So what can we conclude? Death, we find, is always close at hand. Anyone of us, at any time, could suddenly go for any reason, or for no reason at all as I almost did. Your hold on life is temporary and very tenuous.

My advice is to get your priorities in order. Decide what you want to do with your life. Then do it. Don't put off until tomorrow. You might not have tomorrow. You never know how close you are to death until it is too late.
There's no hard evidence for the immortality of the soul. That is a matter of faith.

On the other hand, there is strong evidence that the soul does survive the death of the body. More than eight million Americans are eyewitnesses to that fact. Some back up their testimony with verifiable proof. Isn't that all we can reasonably ask for?

The naturalist theory is left with gaping holes. Souls exist as well as bodies. Life continues after the body dies. There's more to us than a mere chance meeting of random atoms of matter. In fact, the most important part of us isn't physical at all - it's an invisible, undetectable spirit. It is beyond the sphere of naturalism. We find that naturalism is an inadequate explanation for both life and reality.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.com

Jerry Boone, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, United States webmaster@merechristianity.us Mr. Boone is a sailor, author, and webmaster of merechristianity.us with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Georgia State University. His works include: Mere Christianity.us and SAFETY LINE - EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN, an apologetic study published 1998.