It
is the ultimate irony. That the heavenly abode should butt its way
into our consciousness as a living reality in the Age of Modernism is
utterly confounding. It is also doing it in ways that makes denial
impossible and as delusional as we would have held those same
opinions in the past.
You
end up knowing a new living reality of the soul. You do not exit the
experience holding a shred of doubt. In my own interlude, reported a
few months back, I simply went into a trance or what we now describe
as a luminous dream state. I found myself in a grey forest of young
conifers that was a tree farm like one I recognized from my youth. I
walked forward to exit the forest and gain the road. I met a guide
clothed in a gown who I could not recognize. He informed me that he
was my brother. ( Before I was born, my mother lost a son as still
born ) He pointed me in the direction of what appeared to be my
childhood farm. I did not need this direction as I could see light
in that direction cutting the surrounding greyness and intangible
abodes or lands of others. I then immediately walked along the road
to the beginnings of this apparent abode and followed through to the
gate area. I was seeing lit fallow fields through the fencing and
fence row plantings which somehow did not seem as rich as I am now
more used to. Before it was over, I entered an abode and came into
the presence of my mother but did not communicate with her. During
this time I also observed a number of unexpected data points in an
attempt to take something back with me.
My
point is that I came out of this experience with a clear grasp in
real understanding of the existence of heaven that coincided with the
body of knowledge I have read over the years. In no way would I
confuse it with a simple dream. This item shows how others are
having the same experience.
We
have all been working with the reasonable conjecture that Heaven was
wishful thinking with no scientific basis whatsoever. In practice
that has been the scientific starting point for which there is some
merit, most important been that it pretty well forced the individual
to practice skepticism. It has served us well. Now Heaven has
elbowed itself back into our awareness and the original conjecture
falls far short.
My
own conjecture is that mankind created GOD at least 30,000 thousands
of years ago along with the individual SOUL and that we have the
right to access and join this consciousness of the UBERMIND. The
ubermind can be imagined as a mature internet. At least this
blanket conjecture explains all the data.
The
church suffers the same problem as anyone never touched. Simply been
able to credit the inexplicable as a natural phenomena outside all
revealed teachings is hard enough, let alone when you are even a
teacher of those same teachings.
Proof of heaven popular, except with the church
By John Blake, CNN
“God, help me!”
Eben Alexander shouted
and flailed as hospital orderlies tried to hold him in place. But no
one could stop his violent seizures, and the 54-year-old neurosurgeon
went limp as his horrified wife looked on.
That moment could have
been the end. But Alexander says it was just the beginning. He found
himself soaring toward a brilliant white light tinged with gold into
“the strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.”
Alexander calls that
world heaven, and he describes his journey in “Proof of
Heaven,” which has been on The New York Times bestseller list
for 27 weeks. Alexander says he used to be an indifferent churchgoer
who ignored stories about the afterlife. But now he knows there’s
truth to those stories, and there’s no reason to fear death.
“Not one bit,” he
said. “It’s a transition; it’s not the end of anything. We will
be with our loved ones again.”
Heaven used to be a
mystery, a place glimpsed only by mystics and prophets. But popular
culture is filled with firsthand accounts from all sorts of people
who claim that they, too, have proofs of heaven after undergoing
near-death experiences.
Yet the popularity of
these stories raises another question: Why doesn’t the church talk
about heaven anymore?
Preachers used to
rhapsodize about celestial streets of gold while congregations sang
joyful hymns like “I’ll Fly Away” and “When the Roll is
Called up Yonder.” But the most passionate accounts of heaven now
come from people outside the church or on its margins.
Most seminaries don’t
teach courses on heaven; few big-name pastors devote much energy to
preaching or writing about the subject; many ordinary pastors avoid
the topic altogether out of embarrassment, indifference or fear,
scholars and pastors say.
“People say that the
only time they hear about heaven is when they go to a funeral,”
said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Heaven in the American
Imagination” and a history professor at Grove City College in
Pennsylvania.
Talk of heaven
shouldn’t wait, though, because it answers a universal question:
what happens when we die, says the Rev. John Price, author
of “Revealing Heaven,” which offers a Christian perspective
of near-death experiences.
“Ever since people
started dying, people have wondered, where did they go? Where are
they now? Is this what happens to me?” said Price, a retired pastor
and hospital chaplain.
A little girl’s
revelation
Price didn’t always
think heaven was so important. He scoffed at reports of near-death
experiences because he thought they reduced religion to ghost
stories. Besides, he was too busy helping grieving families to
speculate about the afterlife.
His attitude changed,
though, after a young woman visited his Episcopal church one Sunday
with her 3-year-old daughter.
Price had last seen
the mother three years earlier. She had brought her then-7-week-old
daughter to the church for baptism. Price hadn't heard from her
since. But when she reappeared, she told Price an amazing story.
She had been feeding
her daughter a week after the baptism when milk dribbled out of the
infant's mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. The woman
rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where she was resuscitated
and treated for a severe upper respiratory infection.
Three years later, the
mother was driving past the same hospital with her daughter when the
girl said, “Look, Mom, that’s where Jesus brought me back to
you.”
“The mother nearly
wrecked her car,” Price said. “She never told her baby about God,
Jesus, her near-death experience, nothing. All that happened when the
girl was 8 weeks old. How could she remember that?”
When Price started
hearing similar experiences from other parishioners, he felt like a
fraud. He realized that he didn’t believe in heaven, even though it
was part of traditional Christian doctrine.
He started sharing
near-death stories he heard with grieving families and dejected
hospital workers who had lost patients. He told them dying people had
glimpsed a wonderful world beyond this life.
The stories helped
people, Price said, and those who've had similar experiences of
heaven should “shout them from the rooftops.”
“I’ve gone around
to many churches to talk about this, and the venue they give me is
just stuffed,” he said. “People are really hungry for it.”
Why pastors are afraid
of heaven
Many pastors, though,
don’t want to touch the subject because it’s too dangerous, says
Lisa Miller, author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with
the Afterlife.”
Miller cites the
experience of Rob Bell, one of the nation’s most popular
evangelical pastors.
Bell ignited a
firestorm two years ago when he challenged the teaching that only
Christians go to heaven in “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell,
and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
The book angered many
members of Bell’s church as well as many in the evangelical
establishment. He subsequently resigned.
“Farewell, Rob
Bell,” one prominent evangelical tweeted.
“It’s a tough
topic for a pastor,” said Miller, a former religion columnist for
the Washington Post. “If you get too literal, you can risk sounding
too silly. If you don’t talk about it, you’re evading one of the
most important questions about theology and why people come to
church.”
If pastors do talk
about stories of near-death experiences, they can also be seen as
implying that conservative doctrine – only those who confess their
faith in Jesus get to heaven, while others suffer eternal damnation –
is wrong, scholars and pastors say.
Many of those who
share near-death stories aren’t conservative Christians but claim
that they, too, have been welcomed by God to heaven.
“Conservative
Christians aren’t the only ones going to heaven," said Price,
"and that makes them mad."
There was a time,
though, when the church talked a lot more about the afterlife.
Puritan pastors in the
17th and 18th centuries often preached about heaven, depicting it as
an austere, no fuss-place where people could commune with God.
African-American
slaves sang spirituals about heaven like “Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot.” They often depicted it as a place of ultimate payback:
Slaves would escape their humiliation and, in some cases, rule over
their former masters.
America’s fixation
with heaven may have peaked around the Civil War. The third most
popular book in 18th century America – behind the Bible and “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin” – was "Gates Ajar," written in the wake
of the war, Miller says.
The 1868 novel was
“The Da Vinci Code” of its day, Miller says. It revolved around a
grieving woman who lost her brother in the Civil War. A sympathetic
aunt assures her that her brother is waiting in heaven, a bucolic
paradise where people eat sumptuous meals, dogs sun themselves on
porches and people laugh with their loved ones.
“This was a vision
of heaven that was so appealing to hundreds of thousands of people
who had lost people in the Civil War,” Miller said.
Americans needed
heaven because life was so hard: People didn’t live long, infant
mortality was high, and daily life was filled with hard labor.
“People were having
12 kids, and they would outlive 11 of them,” said Smith, author of
"Heaven in the American Imagination." “Death was
ever-present.”
The church eventually
stopped talking about heaven, though, for a variety of reasons: the
rise of science; the emergence of the Social Gospel, a theology that
encouraged churches to create heaven on Earth by fighting for social
justice; and the growing affluence of Americans. (After all, who
needs heaven when you have a flat-screen TV, a smartphone and endless
diversions?)
But then a voice
outside the church rekindled Americans' interest in the afterlife. A
curious 23-year-old medical student would help make heaven cool
again.
The father of
near-death experiences
Raymond Moody had been
interested in the afterlife long before it was fashionable.
He was raised in a
small Georgia town during World War II where death always seemed just
around the corner. He constantly heard stories about soldiers who
never returned from war. His father was a surgeon who told him
stories of bringing back patients from the brink of death. In
college, he was enthralled when he read one of the oldest accounts of
a near-death experience, a soldier’s story told by Socrates in
Plato’s “Republic.”
His fascination with
the afterlife was sealed one day when he heard a speaker who would
change his life.
The speaker was George
Ritchie, a psychiatrist. Moody would say later of Ritchie, “He had
that look of someone who had just finished a long session of
meditation and didn’t have a care in the world.”
Moody sat in the back
of a fraternity room as Ritchie told his story.
It was December 1943,
and Ritchie was in basic training with the U.S. Army at Camp
Barkeley, Texas. He contracted pneumonia and was placed in the
hospital infirmary, where his temperature spiked to 107. The medical
staff piled blankets on top of Ritchie’s shivering body, but he was
eventually pronounced dead.
“I could hear the
doctor give the order to prep me for the morgue, which was puzzling,
because I had the sensation of still being alive,” Ritchie said.
He even remembers
rising from a hospital gurney to talk to the hospital staff. But the
doctors and nurses walked right through him when he approached them.
He then saw his
lifeless body in a room and began weeping when he realized he was
dead. Suddenly, the room brightened “until it seemed as though a
million welding torches were going off around me.”
He says he was
commanded to stand because he was being ushered into the presence of
the Son of God. There, he saw every minute detail of his life flash
by, including his C-section birth. He then heard a voice that asked,
“What have you done with your life?"
After hearing
Ritchie’s story, Moody decided what he was going to do with his
life: investigate the afterlife.
He started collecting
stories of people who had been pronounced clinically dead but were
later revived. He noticed that the stories all shared certain
details: traveling through a tunnel, greeting family and friends who
had died, and meeting a luminous being that gave them a detailed
review of their life and asked them whether they had spent their life
loving others.
Moody called his
stories “near-death experiences,” and in 1977 he published a
study of them in a book, “Life after Life.” His book
has sold an estimated 13 million copies.
Today, he is a
psychiatrist who calls himself “an astronaut of inner space.” He
is considered the father of the near-death-experience phenomenon.
He says science, not
religion, resurrected the afterlife. Advances in cardiopulmonary
resuscitation meant that patients who would have died were revived,
and many had stories to share.
“Now that we have
these means for snatching people back from the edge, these stories
are becoming more amazing,” said Moody, who has written a new book,
“Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.”
“A lot of medical
doctors know about this from their patients, but they’re just
afraid to talk about it in public.”
Ritchie’s story was
told through a Christian perspective. But Moody says stories about
heaven transcend religion. He's collected them from Jews, Muslims,
Buddhists and atheists.
“A lot of people
talk about encountering a being of light,” he said. “Christians
call it Christ. Jewish people say it’s an angel. I’ve gone to
different continents, and you can hear the same thing in China, India
and Japan about meeting a being of complete love and compassion.”
It’s not just what
people see in the afterlife that makes these stories so powerful, he
says. It’s how they live their lives once they survive a near-death
experience.
Many people are never
the same, Moody says. They abandon careers that were focused on money
or power for more altruistic pursuits.
“Whatever they had
been chasing, whether it's power, money or fame, their experience
teaches them that what this (life) is all about is teaching us to
love,” Moody said.
Under 'the gaze of a
God'
Alexander, the author
of “Proof of Heaven,” seems to fit Moody's description. He’s a
neurosurgeon, but he spends much of time now speaking about his
experience instead of practicing medicine.
He'd heard strange
stories over the years of revived heart attack patients traveling to
wonderful landscapes, talking to dead relatives and even meeting God.
But he never believed those stories. He was a man of science, an
Episcopalian who attended church only on Easter and Christmas.
That changed one
November morning in 2008 when he was awakened in his Lynchburg,
Virginia, home by a bolt of pain shooting down his spine. He was
rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a
disease so rare, he says, it afflicts only one in 10 million adults.
After his violent
seizures, he lapsed into a coma — and there was little hope for his
survival. But he awakened a week later with restored health and a
story to tell.
He says what he
experienced was “too beautiful for words.” The heaven he
describes is not some disembodied hereafter. It’s a physical place
filled with achingly beautiful music, waterfalls, lush fields,
laughing children and running dogs.
In his book, he
describes encountering a transcendent being he alternately calls “the
Creator” or “Om.” He says he never saw the being's face or
heard its voice; its thoughts were somehow spoken to him.
“It understood
humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely
greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that
all my life I’ve always associated with human beings and human
beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos … even irony and humor.”
Holly Alexander says
her husband couldn’t forget the experience.
“He was driven to
write 12 hours a day for three years,” she said. “It began as a
diary. Then he thought he would write a medical paper; then he
realized that medical science could not explain it all.”
“Proof of Heaven”
debuted at the top of The New York Times bestseller list and has sold
1.6 million copies, according to its publisher.
Alexander says he
didn’t know how to deal with his otherworldly journey at first.
“I was my own worst
skeptic,” he said. “I spent an immense amount of time trying to
come up with ways my brain might have done this.”
Conventional medical
science says consciousness is rooted in the brain, Alexander says.
His medical records indicated that his neocortex — the part of the
brain that controls thought, emotion and language — had ceased
functioning while he was in a coma.
Alexander says his
neocortex was “offline” and his brain “wasn’t working at all”
during his coma. Yet he says he reasoned, experienced emotions,
embarked on a journey — and saw heaven.
“Those implications
are tremendous beyond description,” Alexander wrote. “My
experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not
the end of consciousness; that human experience continues beyond the
grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves
and cares about each one of us.”
Skeptics say
Alexander’s experience can be explained by science, not the
supernatural.
They cite experiments
where neurologists in Switzerland induced out-of-body experiences in
a woman suffering from epilepsy through electrical stimulation of the
right side of her brain.
Michael Shermer,
founder and publisher of Skeptic magazine, says the U.S. Navy also
conducted studies with pilots that reproduced near-death experiences.
Pilots would often black out temporarily when their brains were
deprived of oxygen during training, he says.
These pilots didn’t
go to heaven, but they often reported seeing a bright light at the
end of a tunnel, a floating sensation and euphoria when they returned
to consciousness, Shermer says.
“Whatever
experiences these people have is actually in their brain. It’s not
out there in heaven,” Shermer said.
Some people who claim
to see heaven after dying didn’t really die, says Shermer, author
of “Why People Believe Weird Things.”
“They’re called
near-death experiences for a reason: They’re near death but not
dead,” Shermer said.
“In that fuzzy
state, it’s not dissimilar to being asleep and awakened where
people have all sorts of transitory experiences that seem very real.”
The boy who saw Jesus
Skeptics may scoff at
a story like Alexander’s, but their popularity has made a believer
out of another group: the evangelical publishing industry.
While the church may
be reluctant to talk about heaven, publishers have become true
believers. The sales figures for books on heaven are divine: Don
Piper’s “90 Minutes in Heaven” has sold 5 million
copies. And “Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story
of His Trip to Heaven and Back” is the latest publishing
juggernaut.
Colton Burpo says he
saw heaven and describes the color of Jesus' eyes.
“Heaven is for
Real” has been on The New York Times bestseller list for
126 consecutive weeks and sold 8 million copies, according
to its publisher.
The story is told from
the perspective of Colton Burpo, who was just 4 when he slipped into
unconsciousness while undergoing emergency surgery for a burst
appendix.
Colton says he floated
above his body during the operation and soared to heaven, where he
met Jesus.
Todd Burpo, Colton’s
father, says he was skeptical about his son’s story until his
son described meeting a great-grandfather and a miscarried baby
sister — something no one had ever told him about.
Todd Burpo is a
pastor, but he says he avoided preaching about heaven because he
didn’t know enough about the subject.
“It’s pretty
awkward,” he said. “Here I am the pastor, but I’m not the
teacher on the subject. My son is teaching me.”
Colton is now 13 and
says he still remembers meeting Jesus in heaven.
“He had brown hair,
a brown beard to match and a smile brighter than any smile I’ve
ever seen,’’ he said. “His eyes were sea-blue, and they were
just, wow.”
Colton says he’s
surprised by the success of his book, which has been translated into
35 languages. There’s talk of a movie, too.
“It’s totally a
God thing,” he said.
Alexander, author of
“Proof of Heaven,” seems to have the same attitude: His new life
is a gift. He’s already writing another book on his experience.
“Once I realized
what my journey was telling me," he said, "I knew I had to
tell the story.”
He now attends church
but says his faith is not dogmatic.
“I realized very
strongly that God loves all of God’s children,” he said. “Any
religion that claims to be the true one and the rest of them are
wrong is wrong.”
Central to his story
is something he says he heard in heaven.
During his journey, he
says he was accompanied by an angelic being who gave him a three-part
message to share on his return.
When he heard the
message, he says it went through him “like a wind” because he
instantly knew it was true.
It’s the message he
takes today to those who wonder who, or what, they will encounter
after death.
The angel told him:
“You are loved and
cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to
fear.”
“There is nothing
you can do wrong."
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