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Life After Life Fact, Not Fiction � Medical science has advanced to the point where people can enter a hospital DOA (Dead On Arrival) and leave it alive! Cardiac Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and other medical procedures are restoring the life functions of many who would have been considered irreversibly dead in earlier times. According to a recent Gallup poll at least 8 million people in the United States have had Near Death Experiences (NDE's). Most of these people now have an unshakable belief that there is something beyond this earthly life of ours. There have been some small attempts by scientists to clarify whether these experiences are real or hallucinatory. Their attempts have lead to some intriguing statistics. Dr. Kenneth Ring found out quite early that a patient who receives anesthesia is less likely to report a NDE than one who has not. Thus drugs do not seem to be the cause of NDE's. World wide researchers have found that NDE's do not vary from country to country or culture to culture. An Australian Aborigine will report the same kind of experiences as a New York Taxi Driver (not using the same language, of course). Also the number of reported incidences is amazing. Thousands have entered their names into the database of the International Association of Near Dead Studies. There is disagreement about what NDE's are, but that they have occurred to millions of normal people, is beyond doubt.
Some of the evidence is anecdotal. One lady found herself floating up to the hospital roof, where she noted a red shoe in the gutter. Upon her return to life, she told the doctor, who laughed and laughed. The Doctor told the janitor who also laughed, but he went up on the roof and looked for himself, and sure enough, there was the red shoe in the gutter! Another lady told her doctor she had watched her medical procedure while floating above the operating table. To prove it she mentioned that there were several coins on top of the cabinet in the operating room. The doctor got a chair, stood on it and looked, and sure enough the money was there in the denominations the patient had mentioned. Some evidence is more scientific. Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist connected with the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, divided patients into two groups; twenty-two patients who had reported NDE's while being resuscitated, and twenty-five who didn't. He asked the twenty-two patients who had the NDE's to describe what the resuscitation attempt had looked like to them. He asked the twenty-five who had not reported any such experience to imagine as accurately as possible what they thought their resuscitations had been like. � Twenty out of the twenty five of the imaginers made major errors in their attempts to report what had happened. None of the twenty-two experiencers made any major errors. Six of the twenty-two were able to recall very specific events during their resuscitation, such as the gurneys they were riding on, the shape of the paddles used to revive them and which family members were or weren't waiting for them in the waiting area. This is not a big study and many more of a larger nature need to be done to confirm the matter on a scientific level, but it is an intriguing start. It certainly indicates the experience is more than just a hallucination brought on by a part of the brain being stimulated and that the out of body viewpoint is real. There are several stages typical of a NDE. Not all experiencers report every stage. The early stages are reported more often than the later stages. Among those stages reported are, feelings of peace and quiet, finding oneself out of one's body, going through a dark tunnel, meeting up with a Being of Light, having one's life reviewed, coming to a border of some kind and being told if one goes through the border, one can't return, and making the decision to return. � Not all experiences are positive, though bad experiences seem to be rare. Some people report a place of blackness and doom. I was in a bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida. They had a copy of Raymond Moody Jr's. "Life After Life." and I made a comment about it. A person overheard me and reported that she was a Nurse. She had been involved in an attempted resuscitation of an individual who had been brought in with heart problems. They kept getting him back, and they kept losing him. Every time he came back he screamed, "Don't let me die, I was just in Hell!" They kept trying to revive him over and over again but they eventually failed. I heard of a similar case in the book, "To Hell and Back," where a person who kept dying and being brought back to life had his apparent destination of Hell switched to Heaven when the Doctor who was presiding over his resuscitation told him to shout, "Jesus is the Son of God. Keep me out of Hell, and if I live, I'm yours." The Doctor did this only to quiet the very loud Patient but to his amazement, it worked. The next time they got the Patient back he was a lot calmer and reported that time the experience had been a positive one. This is a good thing to remember. If you have a near death experience and you find yourself being dragged to a not very nice place, try sincerely shouting "Jesus is the Son of God! Keep me out of Hell and I'm yours." Even if you believe that NDEs are only illusions and you expect to cease to exist 30 seconds later surely you will want your last few moments of consciousness to be positive and not frightening, so make a note to remember this Patient's experience. Pray, "Jesus is the Son of God, Keep me out of Hell and I'm yours!"
So do people who end up in Hell suffer forever? I hope not. There is a scripture verse that indicates the suffering might not last forever. Matthew 10:28 says, "Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Hell." If God destroys the soul it will not suffer anymore. The word for Hell was "Gehenna" which originally was the name for a garbage dump where trash was burned. There is another scripture verse (Mark 9:48) that says that in Hell the worm does not die and the fire does not go out, but this is true in an ordinary garbage dump also. But trash that is put in a garbage dump is destroyed by burning, though the fire and worm are kept going, being continually fed by new garbage as it arrives. How do we avoid Hell? Certainly no one is good enough to earn an eternity of pure bliss. That it is a gift is certain. Christians believe the Being of Light who people see is Jesus Christ and that His sacrifice on the cross paid the price for mankind's sins, allowing us entry into Heaven. It is logical that He would take the blame for our faults Himself. He made us, we did not make ourselves. Have you ever done the polite thing and thanked Christ for dying on the cross for you? Have you ever asked Christ to come live inside of you and be your Lord and Savior? Have you ever asked Him to forgive your sins? If you haven't you should. It's the right thing to do. Then you will have a little piece of God inside of you, loving you from the inside out, from the deepest marrow of your being, outward. The peace He brings is beyond description. Most people have a big aching void inside of their emotional centers, and whether they know it or not, Christ is what they are searching for. That Heaven is a manufactured place is agreed upon by Christ. He said in the Gospel of John chapter 14:2, "In Heaven are many dwelling places, I go to prepare a place for you." The underlining is mine. Since the Bible also says in 1 Corinthians 12:27 that we are the Body of Christ and "individually members of it," and in Ephesians 4:15, "But speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ," mankind can be said to evolve into God and build Heaven. There is science behind the building of Heaven, not magic, except in the Arthur C. Clark sense of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Christ is the capstone of evolution, the future of all living things. Indeed what else is ultimately worth doing with Humanity's future? Exploring space? Certainly, but the two goals are not in conflict with one another. Jesus said in Mark 13:27, "And then shall He send His Angels, and shall gather together his elect from the uttermost part of the Earth to the uttermost part of Heaven." So in the future Humanity goes everywhere, even to the ends of the Heavens! But wherever we go, our Loving God will find us. *************************** Except for the meeting with the nurse in the bookstore which was a personal experience, the sources of the material for this pamphlet came from, "A Case For Heaven. Near Death Experiences as Evidence of the Afterlife." by Mally Cox-Chapman, "Life After Life" by Raymond Moody, Jr." the Bible, Yahoo, and "To Hell and Back" by Maurice S. Rawlings, M.D. ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH TO TRY AN EXPERIMENT?
Copy-right 2005 Elizabeth Hensley. I hereby give permission to anyone to reproduce my pamphlet providing the words are not changed and my name, url, and email address stay attached.
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