150. NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES
Phyllis Tickle was a professor, dean, and author. In a report from Religion News Service in The Christian Century, David Gibson told of Tickle’s near-death experience when she was 21. She entered a tunnel with grass all around.
“And I went to the end of the tunnel to this incredible — people call it ‘the light.’ I guess that’s as good a name as any. But an incredible peace, a reality, unity, whatever. The voice, which fortunately was speaking in English … said, ‘Do you want to come?’ And I heard myself saying, ‘No, I want to go back and have his baby’ meaning [her husband] Sam. She turned around and went back down through the hole in the ceiling and into her body.
“’You’re never afraid of death after that,’ Tickle said. ‘You don’t invite that kind of thing. It’s a gift.’ … As she reflected on her life, Tickle said she has always seen herself as a listener. An inner voice has told her what to do. And she has always obeyed it. … ‘Just like I’m told to do this,’ she said, referring to [her] terminal illness. ‘Which is why it doesn’t bother me. The dying is my next career.’”
Many others have reported their near-death experiences. Although they vary, these experiences share common threads. In an IONS Noetic Sciences Review article, scientist, professor, and author John Wren-Lewis told about his near-death experience. He said it was the most important experience of his life.
“I discovered, in the moment of time-stop, that human consciousness is grounded in the same fundamental energy that moves the sun and other stars and tempests too — an energy for which ‘love’ is the only word we have, though its common sentimental associations are hopelessly misleading.”
Wren-Lewis challenges the experiences of those who describe going away from this world and this life to find light and love in some other realm. This does violence, he adds, to what he believes to be the most significant feature of the experience. Experiencers, he says, “find their eyes have been opened to light and love right here in the world to which they return on resuscitation.”
“Yes, experiencers do indeed come back with new spiritual drive and urge toward a better world, but that often means preferring poverty to dull jobs that would keep families in the style to which they’re accustomed, helping strangers rather than going to neighborhood cocktail parties, and looking at scenery for hours instead of taking Junior to Little League.”
He cites transpersonal psychologist, Abraham Maslow, “who described the blissful calm he experienced in the two years he lived on after his near-fatal heart attack … as ‘my posthumous life.’”
After making references to the movie, Fearless, Wren-Lewis says this: “The most interesting thing of all about the film as a whole for me, however, is the way it explores what I have come to see as the $64,000 question: Why is it that something like a close brush with death is normally needed for the heavenliness of the world to be experienced? … The film’s answer, if I understand it right, seems to be that the natural biological fear-response seems to have gotten out of hand in the human species, to the point where it governs the whole organization of social life down to the minutest detail, blocking out aliveness in the process. For the fortunate minority, coming close to death unravels the knot, but when we have the problem of finding out how to organize practical affairs with fear as life’s servant rather than its master, something about which even the world’s greatest mystics and religious teachers have left us only very partial blueprints.
“NDEs are often spoken of as rebirths; mine felt more like a resurrection, because I was reconstructed with all my past experience, but with the fear-response now operating ‘to one side,’ as it were, so that for most of the time I can heed it rationally but not be run by it.”
Q: With which lessons from these near-death experiences do you agree?
