It was with tremendous fascination that I read Dr Raymond Moody’s first book, Life After Life, stories of near-death-experiences (NDE’s). Published in the mid-seventies, this book was absolutely ground-breaking, in society, but also in my own life. It started me down the path to exploring the truths about the afterlife. These initial (for me) truths were provided by those who had experienced death and come back to tell about it. Dr Moody had documented hundreds, if not thousands, of peoples’ NDE’s. The utter consistency of these experiences was compelling. I had no doubt whatsoever about the veracity of their reports. Thus began a life-long interest in NDE’s. Although I would not describe myself as obsessed with these accounts, I did avidly read them whenever I encountered them.

So when I heard about a subsequent book written by Raymond Moody, I had to check it out! His new book, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from this Life to the Next, 2010, narrows its vision to one aspect of NDE’s, people who experience part of someone else’s NDE. Almost always this is a loved one accompanying the person who is dying. As the person’s body expires, sometimes there are mystical elements associated with this transition.

Again, as with his first book, Dr Moody is collecting stories of what he has come to call “shared death experiences”. And he documents the common elements of these experiences. No one person has experienced all seven of the common elements,           but “. . . a person having a shared death experience will most likely have a few of them–or perhaps even only one.” (p 76).

These seven elements are: change of geometry, mystical light, music and music sounds, out-of-body experience, co-living a life review, encountering unworldly or “heavenly” realms, mist at death. Moody expands on each of these, sharing many stories of people who experienced these various things.

In addition to telling many stories of shared death experiences, Moody also discusses this phenomenon in historical literature. He supposes these experiences (including NDE’s) have occurred all through history, but only recently has there been an effort to document them in any sort of systematic way.

One fascinating conclusion Dr Moody has come to through this study of shared death experiences is that they offer much more concrete proof of an afterlife than do NDE’s. There were many who, upon being exposed to the phenomena of NDE’s, were quick to explain them away as “. . . hallucinations, a phenomenon tossed up by biochemical and electrical failures in the dying brain.” (p 72). He discusses this as a safety net for those unable to accept something so radically different from their accepted belief system.

“However, shared death experiences do not offer any such safety net. . . . these people were not dying or even sick, an obvious fact that throws a major monkey wrench into the standard way of debating this highly important issue.” (p 72,73). In addition, NDE’s could be explained away as being one person’s experience, and thus subjective. Shared death experiences, on the other hand, were shared experiences, and not so easily shuffled aside.

Moody admits to being mystified by these experiences he has collected and documented. “There is no settled language to explain these experiences. But nonetheless they exist. It is as if the other side somehow opens up and invites us to take a closer look.” (p 73). Being mystified is not a negative, in Moody’s eyes. “I think it is good for mankind to have a hearty dose of the unexplained.” (p 165). These experiences are life-changing for those who undergo them. And while there is an inbuilt mechanism demanding explanations, it is good for us to have mystery in our lives. “We are a long way from explaining shared death experiences, a lack of explanation that I find a good thing. What the world needs now is an unexplainable mystery, one that offers great hope.” (p 166).

This mystery encourages us to surrender ourselves to the ineffable. Moody quotes Joseph Campbell, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” (p 164). And Carl Jung, “The seat of faith . . . is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God.” (p 165).

This is a fascinating little book, worth a read by anyone even remotely interested in the afterlife, the spiritual dimension to which we all are heading sooner or later!

This is the third in a series of books written by Kimberly Klein. The first, Hummingbirds Don’t Fly in the Rain, was reviewed by me some months ago. I would recommend anyone interested in these books to read Hummingbirds. . . . first. It tells the story which sets up the following two books, The Universe Speaks, books one and two.

The Universe Speaks are transcriptions of the messages received from Talia, a 13 year-old girl who died in an airplane crash December, 2007. After she died she began contacting her mother, the author, and others, most notably “G”, a family friend who began hearing from Talia in very clear communications.

The messages from heaven contained in these two volumes are profound, reassuring, healing, and utterly fascinating. They are reassuring to anyone doubting the reality of the afterlife. Talia removes all doubt about that little detail!!

They are healing in the sense that Talia shares some of what her life over there is like. She is very busy, all the time. She is hard at work preparing people on earth for an understanding of their eternal nature. She works at helping earthlings understand how they can help others toward new consciousness. It sparks my confidence to think that heaven and its occupants are working very diligently to help us here on earth grow spiritually, assisting the transition of earth to a higher consciousness.

From my own understanding of the Spirit realms, Talia must have been a very advanced soul prior to coming to earth as Kimberly’s daughter. She was able to contact her earthbound family and friends very shortly after her death. And she was able to do this over a long period of time, very consistently, as recorded in these books.

The things learned from Talia’s communications are profound. There is so much about God and the heavenly realms which we do not understand. To hear Talia speak matter-of-factly about these realms makes it seem real and concrete.

Although Talia did not grow up in a religious home, her language is permeated with religious concepts and language. There is nothing in the things she says which disagrees with the Christian writings, the Bible. If anything they are affirming of the biblical writings, expanding on them to be sure, and making them seem very concrete.

I read a fair amount of spiritualistic writings. I have also had personal out-of-body experiences of the Spirit dimension. It is continually amazing to me (though it shouldn’t be, I guess!) how consistent all these messages are. Hearing the same things over and over, from diverse and numerous sources, makes these truths that much more real, lends them validity and credence.

One caution to potential readers: these books are quite spiritually profound and deep. Not everyone will be able to understand or accept the things presented in them. If you find that to be the case, then just chalk it up to something like perhaps you are not ready for these books. Or perhaps not ready to hear the truths being presented in them. Do not be judgemental toward those who are, and especially to those who go to the work of sharing these truths with the rest of us.

I am so thankful to Kimberly Klein for giving the world access to the personally painful experience of losing her daughter in the flesh, and then regaining access to her in the spirit. There is so much to learn from these communications.

Man, I just finished a most interesting book! This is a bit outside the usual subject matter on Urban Monk, but I have to post something anyway!

Roger Wiens is a cousin, related both to my wife and to myself. He is a scientist working for NASA in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This book details his involvement with developing one of the instruments on the Curiosity rover currently exploring our neighbouring planet Mars.

Attending family reunions over the years I always viewed the two Wiens boys from Minnesota as really, really bright kids. They both ended up with PhD’s, experts in their own fields. I particularly remember one reunion in the nineties where either Doug or Roger gave a talk on ways in which science and the Bible agree, and that we don’t have to divide ourselves into camps on one side or the other. In the setting of fundamentalist mindsets of many of those present I always viewed this as a tremendously courageous talk! I was proud to be related to these brilliant people. But I had no idea of the extent of their work.

Until the last few years. A couple years ago we were alerted to a television appearance by Doug, an earthquake expert, following the devastating Japan earthquake. And now this book, detailing Roger’s work in space exploration.

The book reads like an adventure novel! It is very well written, surprisingly so for someone as highly educated as Roger Wiens! (Sorry, Roger!!) It is an articulate telling of the compelling story of one particular aspect of the Mars rover story. Roger was in charge of an instrument called ChemCam which uses lasers to analyze the composition of rocks and soil on the Mars surface. All of the gritty details of their problems, failures, disappointments, getting cancelled at one point, and successes, are told in a very entertaining way. It is a real page turner, for sure!

Even if the reader is not in the least interested in space exploration, it is a very good read. And for me, who has always been interested in space, flight, the cosmos, etc, I could hardly put the book down!

Check it out! Red Rover, by Roger Wiens. You will not be disappointed.

This website is primarily devoted to writing spiritual insights, thoughts, experiences, etc. But I do read a fair amount, and I just finished a book which has little to do with spirituality, but was an impactful book none the less. This novel, written by Neil Gordon, has recently been made into a movie, which is what drew my attention to it. The movie review sounded like this was an interesting story. And boy, is that ever the truth!!

Growing up in the USA, an adolescent in the 1960’s, I was very affected by all the social unrest happening at the time. While I was never directly involved in much, I was fairly aware of the civil rights movement, the antiwar protests and the like.

This story deals with a few members of what began as the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a group I was distantly aware of. Then some of the more radical members formed the Weatherman Underground, and began planting bombs and blowing up government buildings in protest to the dominance of the ruling powers. The Weatherman ethics kept them from killing; they timed their explosions to be away from people and times when people were at work.

But of course, their activities were illegal, so many members were forced underground. Many surfaced over the next decades. But the two main characters of this novel remained underground until 1996. The novel takes place in 2006, in attempts to get parole for one of the characters. There are many, many “flashbacks”, both to 1996, and to the 60’s and 70’s.

Neil Gordon very accurately captures the mood of those earlier decades. Not all of us were actively spending our lives in protest over social injustices, but all of us were certainly impacted by those who did. This story took me right back into those times, telling an inside story of groups I knew only vaguely. But the author gets it right!

It is very well written. His character development is top-notch. I as the reader ended up caring very deeply what happened to these terribly flawed individuals as their lives slowly unfolded through the course of the book.

I would recommend this read to anyone wanting to understand just a little more about the generation of the 60’s and 70’s. It is entertaining on many levels, but also very insightful.

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, by Eben Alexander, M.D. is certainly right at the top of my list of most profound NDE’s I have ever read about.

As a practitioner of one of the most highly educated professions, Dr Alexander had no real belief in any sort of life beyond death. He was wholly immersed in the science of his field. He was an occasional church goer, but had no active participation in organized religion. He describes himself as a C & E’er Christian, attending services at Christmas and Easter!

He suddenly contracted a deadly disease, “spontaneous E. coli bacterial meningitis.” This disease aggressively began eating his brain, most notably, the cortex, the part of the brain which most makes us human, the part we think with, and analyze, and form ideas with. The bacteria was eating his brain from the outside in. And it is the outermost layers of the brain which are the most “human”. This disease is so rare that the medical personnel treating him could find no precedent cases. They finally considered his case as a “N = 1”. In other words, completely unique, nothing for them to base treatment on, etc. Every other case of this disease ever recorded always had some precipitating condition, such as brain surgery or some immune deficiency. For a completely healthy, active person, in mid-life, this disease was completely unprecedented. And the disease is so aggressive that there is over a 90% fatality rate. And even if they could save his body, the chances of him ever regaining any semblance of human functioning were pretty much a complete zero.

While in a seven-day coma from this disease Eben Alexander had one of the most unique and profound near-death experiences ever recorded. The first lesson he learned from this, after recovery, was that human consciousness, our awareness of who we are and what we are, is completely separate from brain function.

But while I was in coma my brain hadn’t been working improperly. It hadn’t been working at all. The part of my brain that years of medical school had taught me was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached. What I’d experienced was more real than the house I sat in, more real than the logs burning in the fireplace. Yet there was no room for that reality in the medically trained scientific worldview that I’d spent years acquiring. (p 129f)

During his NDE Eben experienced three levels of the Spirit realm, or “heaven”, in his words. He first experienced what he came to call the “Earthworm’s-Eye View”, then moved into the “Gateway”, and then “. . . into the black but holy darkness of the Core. . .” (p 70). He would go back and forth between these places. It was in the Core, in the presence of God, that he learned the most profound spiritual truths.

The Earthworm’s-Eye View was a somewhat unpleasant place, not necessarily frightening, just a subhuman consciousness. He initially had no awareness of himself as human, or even animal. “I wasn’t human while I was in this place. I wasn’t even animal. I was something before, and below, all that. I was simply a lone point of awareness in a timeless red-brown sea.” (p 30f) But, the longer he stayed there, the less comfortable he felt.

As my awareness sharpened more and more, I edged ever closer to panic. Whoever or whatever I was, I did not belong here. I needed to get out.”

But where would I go?

Even as I asked that question, something new emerged from the darkness above: something that wasn’t cold, or dead, or dark, but the exact opposite of all those things. If I tried for the rest of my life, I would never be able to do justice to this entity that now approached me . . . to come anywhere close to describing how beautiful it was.

But I’m going to try. (p 32)

Initially light appeared, splintering the darkness around him. “Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard.” (p 38) Then he found himself flying. As he flew through an opening in the light, he found himself “. . . in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.” (p 38) It was a green, lush countryside of trees, fields, flowers, streams and waterfalls. People were there, children, singing and dancing.

I don’t know how long, exactly, I flew along. (Time in this place was different from the simple linear time we experience on earth and is as hopelessly difficult to describe as every other aspect of it.) But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t alone up there. (p 39f)

He found himself accompanied by a beautiful girl, riding on the wing of a butterfly. This Being conveyed messages to him.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real–was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

 

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

 

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the girl said–again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question.

Back where? (p 40f)

This is one aspect of Alexander’s NDE which is quite different from most other NDE’s reported. “Many people have traveled to the realms I did, but, strangely enough, most remembered their earthly identities while away from the earthly forms.” (p 76f) Also, most NDE’ers report undergoing a life review of some sort.

I experienced none of these events, and taken all together they demonstrated the single most unusual aspect of my NDE. I was completely free of my bodily identity for all of it, so that any classic NDE occurrence that might have involved my remembering who I was on earth was rigorously missing. (p 77)

Eben Alexander believes it is this aspect of his particular NDE which allowed him to go so deeply into the spiritual realms. “Throughout my entire time in those worlds, I was a soul with nothing to lose. No places to miss, no people to mourn. I had come from nowhere and had no history, so I fully accepted my circumstances–even the initial murk and mess of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View–with equanimity. And because I so completely forgot my mortal identity, I was granted full access to the true cosmic being I really am (and we all are). . . . At the risk of oversimplifying, I was allowed to die harder, and travel deeper, than almost all NDE subjects before me.” (p 78)

When Eben returned to his earthly life, he immediately began wanting to re-educate his peers. But he encountered the same paternalistic attitudes which he himself had previously practiced upon patients trying to explain their experiences while in coma or medically dead states. This book is one of his efforts to educate the general population on the reality of the Spirit realm. And there is so much more in the book than I can include here. Just discovering the identity of the girl on the butterfly wing is worth the read!!!

I will conclude this lengthy review with Eben’s experience of going to church approximately a month and a half after his experience.

My memory of my time out of the body was still naked and raw, and everywhere I turned in this place that had failed to move me much before, I saw art and heard music that brought it all right back. The pulsing bass note of a hymn echoed the rough misery of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View. The stained glass windows with their clouds and angels brought to mind the celestial beauty of the Gateway. A painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the communion of the Core. I shuddered as I recalled the bliss of infinite unconditional love I had known there.

At last, I understood what religion was really all about. Or at least was supposed to be about. I didn’t just believe in God; I knew God. As I hobbled to the altar to take Communion, tears streamed down my cheeks. (p 147f)