Near-death experiences confirm faith in God

Dr. Jeffrey Long writes: “When I first realized that over 40 percent of near-death experiencers were aware of the existence of God or a supreme being during their NDE, I was shocked. This was an extraordinary finding! No prior NDE study had asked so many NDErs directly about encountering God in their NDEs, and no other study had reported such high numbers of NDErs being aware of God.

“To put this statistic in context, the percentage of NDErs who were aware of God or a supreme being during their NDE is greater than the percentage of NDErs reporting a tunnel, encountering deceased loved ones, or a having a life review. This new information tells us one element of NDEs happens more often than any of these other NDE elements: awareness of the existence of God.

“It is also remarkable how much near-death experiencers’ belief in God increases after their NDE. Before their experience 39 percent of NDErs believed “God definitely exists.” At the time they shared their NDEs with the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), an average of twenty-two years later, 72.6 percent of the NDErs believed “God definitely exists.”

"To put this another way, there was an 86 percent increase in those who believe God definitely exists after their NDEs.

“In my research, I found that NDErs generally experience the heavenly realm in three different ways, with some overlap: (1) as an overwhelmingly beautiful place; (2) as a boundary between life and death; or (3) as a meeting place with God, spirits, or deceased loved ones.”

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (HarperCollins e-books, 2010).

Research by NDERF into afterlife experiences

Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist in Houma, Louisiana, founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation in 1998. Under the auspices of the NDERF he collected and studied the stories of thousands of people who have journeyed to the afterlife. Though there are a wide variety of differences in how people experience NDEs—some see a bright light, others go through a tunnel, still others experience a review of their life—he discovered that many of the accounts shared a remarkably similar description of God; a Supreme Being who radiated love and grace.

Long and writes in God and the Afterlife: “Encounters with God almost always take place in a heavenly realm that may consist of a variety of common earthly elements, including mountains, valleys, forests, streams, lakes, rivers, and dwellings. Often they are described as having a decidedly unearthly appearance (often due to color or brightness or scale). There can also be vast cities that may be beautiful beyond anything on earth.

“Typically this place is associated with feelings of peace, love, and connection in the environment. Beautiful or ‘indescribable’ music is reported. Sometimes spiritual beings or angels are present. The importance of learning or gaining knowledge is also often in evidence, and there are frequent reports of seeing or experiencing institutions of learning (sometimes called ‘temples of knowledge’). People also often describe receiving knowledge directly in the form of telepathic exchange from Light Beings.” (135-136)

This is Edna’s experience: I went down a blue tube with a bright light at the bottom. When I exited the tube, I was surrounded by the most wonderful music—similar to pan pipes—that was everywhere. The feeling was so peaceful and there was no pain. I asked, “Where am I?” and was told, “The Halls of Music.” There were a lot of people, and they were all exuding so much love. The sky was a wonderful blue and the grass so green. I saw a bridge and wanted to cross it, but I couldn’t—there was some kind of invisible barrier. Someone I felt I knew appeared on the other side of the bridge, and he said, ”It’s not time yet. You still have work to do.” I wanted so much to stay, but in no time I was back in my body. (145-146)

Diane’s experience is visually different but also uplifting: Words are inadequate to describe Heaven. But I knew I was home. I knew this was where I’d come from. I first came to a serene and beautiful countryside filled with animals—they were so beautiful and contented, so full of love. The grass and trees and flowers were all so exquisite, and a vibration of love flowed back to me from them. The water was living and sparkled back to me with love. I heard music all around, fully more melodic and more beautiful than anyone could write on this earth, just suddenly playing and filling my soul with joy. Everything was richer and more beautiful than anything we could ever create on earth. I realized that everything we create that is beautiful—all paintings, woven rugs, tapestries, carvings—all have their seed from Heaven. We saw all this before we came to earth, and we try to recapture some of Heaven while on earth. We deeply desire Heaven on earth. We miss it deep in our souls. An angel took me to view the reflection of God’s Light—not the full force of His Awesome Wonder. I was so filled with love and wanted to hug Him with joy. His voice came into my mind, and He commanded me to stretch out my hands and arms so that I could see I was made of solid light. And then He imparted the knowledge that we all are made of solid light, and we each have our own identity and purpose. Each of us was created before we entered earth, and each was male or female before that entry. He contains both sides, and this is the truth of it. For it is not the sexual side, but the strong and the gentle of both sides of Him that determine who we will be—a balance of His being. I have a peace most people don’t have about death because I know that is what Christ meant by the words, “Unless you are born again, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” They have nothing to do with the meaning religion has given them; they are about something we all must do.  Our Father told me that I had to go back to earth and complete my test; there was much I still needed to do. He affirmed that He loved me and would be with me all my life. (151-153)

Jeffrey Long, MD and Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (2016).

 

Rupert Sheldrake's Christian faith

Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. [1]

Sheldrake explains his faith in God in his book The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. He begins a chapter on “The Greening of God” by noting: “If nature is alive, she can be thought of as entirely autonomous, with no need for God.” But “if God exists,” God must “be the God of a living world.”

As a young man Sheldrake was attracted to “the religious traditions of the East,” because it seemed to him that Christianity had “lost contact with mystical insight, visionary experience, a sense of the life of nature, and the power of ritual.” He lived and worked in India for several years, staying for a year and a half in Tamil Nadu in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk. Much to his surprise, Sheldrake writes, through this experience he was “drawn back to Christianity.”[2]

In The Rebirth of Nature Sheldrake affirms a “new, evolutionary view of God,” as described in a 1981 book entitled The Liberation of Life: From Cell to the Community: “God is not the world, and the world is not God. But God includes the world, and the world includes God. God perfects the world and the world perfects God. There is no world apart from God and there is no God apart from some world. Of course there are differences. Whereas no world can exist without God, God can exist without this world. Not only our planet but the whole universe may disappear and be superseded by something else, and God will continue. But since God, like all living things, only perfectly, embodies the principle of internal relations, God’s life depends on there being some world to include.”[3] The authors of this “evolutionary” view of God? Two process Christian theologians, Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr.

In an interview on YouTube,[4] Sheldrake describes God as ”a being, a conscious being—as consciousness itself.” He sees God as representing the same ultimate source of all that is, like the Hindu notion of Brahman—“the ground of all being, all existence, all consciousness—the being who sustains the universe.”

Sheldrake finds meaning in both the Hindu and Christian traditions of a divine trinity. God the father, the ground of all. God the Son, the Logos, the order or form of all that is becoming. God the Spirit, the active and energetic nature of God. “Speaking involves both a flow of air and words that may be understood—a combination of Spirit and Logos. God the father is the source of both speaking and energy in the universe.” Sheldrake attends worship in the Church of England near his home and finds comfort and meaning in traditional Christian prayer, in the liturgical events of the Christian calendar, and in the sacraments.

1 https://www.sheldrake.org/.

2 Rupert Sheldrake, the Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1991, 1994), 184.

3 Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1981), 196-97.

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WaCc_61Z90.

A Prayer

O God of Love. 

May your grace and peace come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven. 

Keep us healthy and humble 'til our time has come. 

And as we forgive those who've done us harm, forgive us for the harm we've done. 

And keep us safe from temptation and evil. 

For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light, now and forever. 

Amen.

A Cosmic Christmas Story

In the Christmas story told in the gospel of Matthew a bright star guides three strangers to a stable where a baby named Jesus is born. The three men, known as “wise men” because they studied both the stars and the scriptures of the Jews, bring gifts to a child destined to change the world.

The story links the mystery of the universe with human life on earth. As an adult, Jesus would teach his followers a prayer that begins: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The life of Jesus embodies this prayer and more than two billion Christians continue to say this prayer and to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Every person who has ever lived, however, is also a child of the stars. In their book Journey of the Universe authors Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker write that “the stars are our ancestors.” In the heat and pressure of stars, and then in their supernova explosions, stars give “birth to the elements that eventually form our planet and our bodies.” Stars are, Swimme and Tucker affirm, “wombs of immense creativity.”

The star in our galaxy we call the sun makes life on earth possible. And as its temperature has increased, the earth “has adapted itself so as to remain in the narrow band that enables life to flourish. By drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis, Earth altered the composition of its atmosphere to keep itself cool, as the Sun grew hotter. This adaptive dance between life and nonlife changes our thinking about our planet. Earth is not just a big ball upon which living beings exist. Earth is a creative community of beings that reorganizes itself age after age so that it can perpetuate and even deepen its vibrant existence. This dynamic or reorganization is possible because of life’s most essential capacity—its power to adapt.”

“The deep truth about matter,” Swimme and Tucker explain, “is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.” We are, however, “the first generation” to learn that our sun is one of trillions of stars “in one of the billions of galaxies in an unfolding universe.” Our human responsibility “is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves.”

The universe story, Swimme and Tucker suggest, “has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are.” For “as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human. And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.”

The scientific story of the universe was unknown to Jesus, but he knew the earth story offered us the challenge of doing “on earth as in heaven” the will of the one he called “Our Father.” May we be inspired this Christmas to “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) in these stories.

Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press, 2011).

"Consciousness survives across lifetimes"

Scientist Jim B. Tucker writes: “How might the larger part of each of us—the Dreamer—be connected to the other dreamers? In looking at the way our world works so seamlessly—once I observe the outcome of an event, the result is set for any future observers—I think the unique consciousness in each of us must be part of a larger whole. Each of us is contributing to a tapestry of existence rather than creating our own individual work.

”The I in my nighttime dreams, my character in the dreams, is part of a bigger I, my larger mind out of which my dream world arises. All the people in the dream are arising from the same consciousness, in the case of my nighttime dreams, from mine. In the same way, all the individuals in the physical world may also arise from the same consciousness, from some larger conscious force.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that happens is planned or intended by this Mind. I don’t control or plan the events in my nighttime dreams, and I know my mind creates those. The physical world may work the same way. This conscious-created reality may include painful or negative events that happen randomly without any conscious intent or control. Even so, we may be able to reduce them by appealing to the benign aspect of this larger Mind.

“Since part of us seems able to transcend the various dream worlds as we move from one to another in different lifetimes, there must also be existence outside of these worlds and outside of space-time—an existence of pure Mind. Each of us may be like a single train of thought in one large Mind. We seem to be like a chain of islands as William James suggested, separate when seen above the water but connected at the ocean floor. More than just connected, islands turn out to be projections that are so many small parts of a single larger object, the planet. Likewise, each of our minds may turn out to be small streams of consciousness that are all part of a larger Mind, a ‘cosmic consciousness’ as James said.

“I know this is a long way from children’s past-life memories. But as each step has followed the other, this is where the journey has led. A little boy who repeatedly relives the exact details of the terrible death of a young World War II pilot challenges the mainstream understanding that consciousness is always created by—and confined to—a physical brain. Exploring quantum physics then produces a way to understand such events because it leads to a rational conclusion that the physical world grows out of consciousness, meaning that consciousness must not be limited by the physical. A child in Louisiana remembering events from the life of a pilot from Pennsylvania offers a glimpse that consciousness survives across lifetimes and that experiences separated by great distances and many years can nonetheless be connected and intertwined. 

“This connection, along with the seamless way in which observation from countless observers create our holistic world, indicates that a single individual consciousness is only a tiny piece in the act of creation, that all the pieces work in concert as part of a bigger whole, and just as our physical world grows out of consciousness, so the entirety of existence grows out of this bigger whole, this Ultimate Source. As mere streams of thoughts from one large Mind, we are not separate; we are all in this together. And just as our experiences in life can enrich our individual minds, if this awareness that we are all part of the Ultimate helps us be a little more patient, a little more accepting, a little more loving, if it helps us focus more on our shared experiences and less on our differences, then perhaps in some small way, we will be better able to enrich the Ultimate and, with it, all of existence.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 195-219.

Are we really dreaming our lives?

Researcher Jim B. Tucker writes: “One possibility that I hope you are now open to is the prospect of life after death that our cases of past-life memories suggest. Each of the children seems to have a consciousness that existed before in another person. Though this may seem ludicrous from a materialist standpoint, the situation gets much more interesting when we take the findings from quantum physicists into account. If the physical universe grows out of consciousness, there is no reason to think that a person’s individual consciousness ends when the physical brain dies. It may continue after death and return in a future life.

“I no longer imagine that we go to another place when we die. Instead, we have another dream. The idea of some entity—a soul or a consciousness —moving from one world to another places too much emphasis on the physical worlds. Instead, the new experiences continue to be creations of the mind. If the shared dream model is correct, there need not be just one afterlife. Each individual starts another dream at the point of death, and the nature of the dream can vary from person to person.

“Near-death experiences (NDEs) are, as the name suggests, the events that people report having when they come very close to death before being revived. The specifics of these experiences can vary. Just as people’s nighttime dreams are affected by their previous experiences, I would expect afterlife events to be affected by experiences in life, and this seems to be the case. In particular, though there are common features of NDEs across cultures, there are also cultural differences.

Allan Kellehear, medical and public health sociologist at the University of Bradford in the UK: “reviewed reports of NDEs that had been published from a number of countries. Looking at the parts of NDEs that are common in the Western cases, he found that the major features seen across cultures were going to other worlds and encountering other beings. An out-of-body experience was present in the NDEs of most cultures, and the life review was present in several. With the model I’m presenting, differences would be expected when people experience their next consciousness-created reality, their next dream.

“Our cases [involving past life memories] involve young children who have not been close to death and in fact usually aren’t old enough to fully comprehend the concept of death, yet their reports can be quite similar to NDE reports—thus posing a problem for psychological explanations offered for NDEs. Both phenomena—near-death experiences and intermission reports from young children [of an afterlife experience before being reborn]—may in fact be glimpses of the afterlife, and they are both consistent with the model of conscious-created reality.

“With the past-life memories they report, the children in our cases seem to be returning to the world in which they lived a previous life. A better way of describing this is to say that regardless of whether the children have an intermission experience, they fall back into the same dream they were in before—meaning this world. They have to be a new character as they continue, since the previous person has died in the dream at that point. Imagine that you are sleeping at night; you are awakened in the middle of a dream—perhaps you are startled awake by something traumatic that happens in it—but then you fall back asleep quickly and continue on in the same dream. This is completely analogous to what happens in our cases.

“Dying young increases the likelihood that a child will later report memories of a previous life. With the model I’m proposing, this makes sense. Individuals whose dreams end prematurely—by being brief or through an abrupt ending—are more likely to return quickly to the same dream. This idea of returning to the same dream also explains another pattern. The previous person was from the same country as the child in over ninety percent of our cases, often having lived fairly close by. Cases involving ordinary deaths are more likely to be same-family cases. The families are more likely to be strangers when more exceptional deaths were involved, meaning when the previous person died an unnatural death, died younger, or died unexpectedly even when the death was from natural causes.

“Nonetheless, there is no evidence that most children have such memories and thus no evidence, even if you accept our cases, that everyone is reborn back into this world. I see no reason to think that other mind-created worlds, other shared dreams, wouldn’t exist in addition to the world we know here. Just as we don’t usually return to the same dream when we sleep at night, the same pattern may well be true for our lives. Though individuals occasionally return to this shared dream, it might be more common to begin participating in a different shared dream after we die.

“Likewise, your life experiences could affect the mind-created worlds that follow after you die. Many Christians say your actions or beliefs determine whether you go to Heaven of Hell. But if I am right about existence being like a shared dream, then there might not be just one Heaven or just one Hell. There might be an infinite number of shared dreams, some heavenly, some hellish, and some like this world—heavenly at times, hellish at times, and most of the time somewhere in between. I do find it notable, however, that in this model I’m suggesting, the religions are right that the decisions and actions you make in this life help determine the kind of existence you have next. Though this would not involve a Judgment Day of any kind, you could experience a ‘good’ afterlife or a ‘bad’ one based on your life now, in what would be a purely naturalistic process.

“I don’t think there is our world and then the real spiritual world. Our world is as real as it gets. It is created by Mind, but that is also true for all other worlds. Existence grows out of consciousness. The world is indeed like a mind-simulated virtual reality, in a way, but it’s as real as reality gets. Along with my character in the short-lived dream, I as a dreamer also have my real self that exists apart from the dream. Likewise, I think we each have a larger part of us that transcends the individual dream—the individual lifetime—and continues to take part in creating other dreams, other lifetimes or worlds.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).