I know, I know. I'm disregarding what I just wrote about keeping your mouth shut if you're having a conversion. Take this as me saying "Isn't this fascinating!" and draw your own conclusion. This blog is where I tell my story, and this is the center of my story right now.
Gallup did a survey in the 1980s and 8 million people reported an NDE/ADE - 4 percent of the American population. How incredibly arrogant to say that even half those people were "just hallucinating" remarkably similar experiences. (Nobody was describing things that sound like an LSD trip.)
The parts of all this that are most inspiring to me are what people with ADEs conclude after they come back.
"After his experience, he had become a caring, truthful, and positive person."
"I created a home of love and as a family we work together to love each other and the world - a small mirror of what I experienced in that land of light. After this experience I have no fear of death."
"[After she came back] she felt 'like a stranger in a strange land.' She also felt disoriented and couldn't grasp why everyone was running from place to place and task to task."
"She now hated to do harm to others, as she had felt the pain that she had caused others. She felt that the most important thing in life was to take the opportunities to be of assistance to others, even if these were sometimes the more difficult options."
"Some invisible force had opened up new paths along which I must travel, something to strive for. That my life was not in vain, and that I should have goals that fill the needs of those around me as well as my own, and that every day should be filled with good and meaningful activities."
Everyone who comes back talks about needing to do it a) for their children or spouse who love and need them, and oftentimes b) to fulfill some life purpose. Boy I want a guiding purpose and reason for being here, but I know outside of loving my family, it's not time for me to fully move into it yet. Maybe part of it was to attempt obedience to the Catholic Church's teachings about birth control, then go on record in the most powerful newspaper in the world as proving it to be harmful in a myriad of ways.
Consistently, during a person's life review, they find themselves judging themselves from "a place of absolute transparency and truth" (no "hands of an angry God"). Maybe the best part of all is that the being of light who guides them through it is so compassionate, they reportedly impart a message of, "It is alright, this is what humans do, humans make mistakes." For about five years now I've felt like an enabling liberal flake because, in my better moments, this is how I feel about myself and everybody else, too. We're given these faulty bodies with faulty brain chemistry in this flawed world. It is hard being here. Forgive us for we know not what we do (at least apparently until we honestly review our life for ourselves, something that can also happen long before death - AA is a powerful vehicle for this).
Or maybe my favorite part of all these ADE testimonies is that, by all accounts, the being of light has a great sense of humor and is "more human than us."
Gallup did a survey in the 1980s and 8 million people reported an NDE/ADE - 4 percent of the American population. How incredibly arrogant to say that even half those people were "just hallucinating" remarkably similar experiences. (Nobody was describing things that sound like an LSD trip.)
The parts of all this that are most inspiring to me are what people with ADEs conclude after they come back.
"After his experience, he had become a caring, truthful, and positive person."
"I created a home of love and as a family we work together to love each other and the world - a small mirror of what I experienced in that land of light. After this experience I have no fear of death."
"[After she came back] she felt 'like a stranger in a strange land.' She also felt disoriented and couldn't grasp why everyone was running from place to place and task to task."
"She now hated to do harm to others, as she had felt the pain that she had caused others. She felt that the most important thing in life was to take the opportunities to be of assistance to others, even if these were sometimes the more difficult options."
"Some invisible force had opened up new paths along which I must travel, something to strive for. That my life was not in vain, and that I should have goals that fill the needs of those around me as well as my own, and that every day should be filled with good and meaningful activities."
Everyone who comes back talks about needing to do it a) for their children or spouse who love and need them, and oftentimes b) to fulfill some life purpose. Boy I want a guiding purpose and reason for being here, but I know outside of loving my family, it's not time for me to fully move into it yet. Maybe part of it was to attempt obedience to the Catholic Church's teachings about birth control, then go on record in the most powerful newspaper in the world as proving it to be harmful in a myriad of ways.
Consistently, during a person's life review, they find themselves judging themselves from "a place of absolute transparency and truth" (no "hands of an angry God"). Maybe the best part of all is that the being of light who guides them through it is so compassionate, they reportedly impart a message of, "It is alright, this is what humans do, humans make mistakes." For about five years now I've felt like an enabling liberal flake because, in my better moments, this is how I feel about myself and everybody else, too. We're given these faulty bodies with faulty brain chemistry in this flawed world. It is hard being here. Forgive us for we know not what we do (at least apparently until we honestly review our life for ourselves, something that can also happen long before death - AA is a powerful vehicle for this).
Or maybe my favorite part of all these ADE testimonies is that, by all accounts, the being of light has a great sense of humor and is "more human than us."
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