Over the past few months, it seems that more articles have been published about people having “near death” experiences than I can remember over similar time periods. Each one quotes the affected party’s reaction to feeling they were dead for short periods of time, usually several minutes. I have a theory about their reactions and why they could have been predicted based on the prior lives of those remembering their experiences.
Before going further into these tales, I must confess that I have no professional experience in such matters and have not interviewed those involved other than reading about their statements in newspaper or magazine articles penned by others.
The first example that comes to mind involved the period of time surrounding the death of one of our country’s richest inventors and executives. During his life, his mind was constantly throwing out ideas for new devices or protocols to improve the country and our lives.
Nothing was too bold or undefinable for him to be able to create a visual description of his potential creation. He was bombastic in expressing his yet to be born projects and every one was “spectacular” or “unbelievable.” As he was passing, he began to paint the picture of what he was experiencing and, again, everything was overwhelming, spectacular, impossibly beautiful, and much more. To me, the afterlife he was attempting to describe was totally consistent with how he lived his life and how others would describe his personality. What he saw in death was how he lived life.
The next story was about a businessman who remained “dead” for around six hours, which was much longer than anyone else I read about. Interestingly, he said that when he “died” he was surrounded and taken control of by several people who treated him as if he was a nobody, not worth listening to, and certainly not worthy of their time. He felt alone, unloved, scorned and otherwise dismissed by this group which obviously felt superior to the new afterlife member. The article described his life, when alive, as a tough businessman who expected more work, more ideas, and more execution from his employees than they were able to deliver and more than he should have expected. My conclusion is that he was treated during his near-death experience exactly the same as he treated those with whom he worked and lived. The article would have had the perfect ending if it described his survivor life as having turned around as a result of how he was handled in death.
Finally, there was the article about a woman who felt she had “died” who had nothing but extremely positive descriptions of how she was treated and how everyone welcomed and loved her for who she was. There wasn’t much in the article about her life prior to her experience, but there was the underlying impression that she was a lovely person who championed the people she had the pleasure of working with, and that she helped anyone she felt needed her assistance. Again, her experience in death mirrored her exper-ience in life.
After every article I read, and continue to read when I come across them today, I wish I had the expertise to analyze the statements and surrounding events properly and professionally. I would also like to have been presented with the opportunity to interview people in each of their lives who could describe their demeanors and attitudes during their lives prior to their “deaths”. My guess is that each person who experienced what they described following their deaths was unknowingly also describing how they treated others during their respective lives.
Some day, we’ll know.
Maybe we need to repeat the Golden Rule to ourselves once a day: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”