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SPIRITUALITY
How Accounts of Near-Death Experiences Improved My Life in 2022
I never saw it coming.
One evening over the summer, probably right after I finished watching that week’s episode of Tasting History, I discovered YouTube channels where people narrate other people’s near-death experiences (NDEs) or directly interview the people who had them.
I’ve discovered a deep passion for exploring this subject and for doing something with my interest. I’ve never had an NDE and don’t seek to have one, but I, like most people, have always wondered what happens to us after we die.
For most of my life I presumed that once we die, we’re just gone, that consciousness ceases to exist. Heaven was a nice thought, but it couldn’t possibly be real. It was just something religions told you.
Listening to numerous accounts of NDEs has taught me how wrong my presumption was. I say this because NDEs are all astoundingly unique and yet consistent with each other. — staggeringly consistent, so consistent it cannot be ignored.
Sure, some NDE experiencers will tell you they saw the Rapture. Others will tell you they had a very rational conversation with the Source of All. Some people describe conversations with Jesus, while others will say that religion gets it all wrong.
That’s the window-dressing part, the part of an NDE that is unique to each person. Other characteristics of NDEs are so consistent with each other that they can be used to determine the nature of the afterlife.
I would like to write a book about them. I don’t want to merely list accounts of more NDEs. What I want to do is a kind of pseudo-scientific analysis of them. I want to speculate about them. What effect might they have had on human culture through the millennia?
As for how they have bettered my life? They have filled me with a sense of profound awe that I never had before. They have made me decide to strive to be a more loving person, to think about consequences more than I have in the past. They have made me consider visiting nursing homes regularly and befriending the people who live there.
Listening to these accounts has made me feel more confident about talking to grieving people. They have made me more confident that the Creator is real and that all of us are deeply loved, even if we don’t always feel it while alive.
One person who experienced an NDE said in his account of it, “Life is a classroom, not a courtroom.”
That should give hope to all of us.
