This was the
obvious next step in this line of research.
Train mediums to become careful interviewers and proceed to compare
reports. Thus we have here the report of
a passing spirit from well before our current understanding of Near Death
Experience or NDE. That they continue to
report the same information is excellent news.
If anything we
gain more clarity because it appears to be a much richer experience than one in
which it is known the person dying will be returning.
While most
folks are struggling to believe that this is real, the actual science is moving
ahead smartly and well it should. The
challenge is to develop mind to mind protocols that allow significant
information transfer. This proving to
not be a small diffiuculty.
Total
Death Experiences
Posted by Greg at 06:38, 23 Apr 2014
The following excerpt is from Stop
Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife, which looks into the evidence for the
survival of consciousness beyond death. The book is available right now as an eBook download and in paperback format.
NDEs
and Communication Through Mediums
After days of struggle against the disease
that had struck him down, Dr. Horace Ackley could take no more. All of a
sudden, he felt himself gradually rising from his body, with the distinct
feeling that he had been divided, though the parts retained a tenuous
connection of some sort. As the organs within his physical body ceased
functioning, the feeling of being divided came to an abrupt halt, and he found
himself whole again. Except he now appeared to be in a position slightly above
his lifeless physical body, looking down on it and those who had been in the
room with him. Then, without warning…
…the scenes of my whole life seemed to move
before me like a panorama; every act seemed as though it were drawn in life
size and was really present: it was all there, down to the closing scenes. So
rapidly did it pass, that I had little time for reflection. I seemed to be in a
whirlpool of excitement; and then, just as suddenly as this panorama had been
presented, it was withdrawn, and I was left without a thought of the past or
future to contemplate my present condition.
Dr. Ackley realized that he must have died,
and was gratified to learn that it seemed a rather pleasant experience. “Death
is not so bad a thing after all,” he said to himself, “and I should like to see
what that country is that I am going to, if I am a spirit.” His only regret,
looking down on the whirl of activity in the room, was that he was unable to
inform his friends that he lived on, to set their minds and hearts at ease. At
this point, two ‘guardian spirits’ appeared before Dr. Ackley, greeting him by
name before leading him from the room into an area where a number of ‘spirits’
whom he was familiar with had assembled.
You may well be saying to yourself “ho-hum,
another stock-standard near-death experience”. You might guess that Dr. Ackley
then woke up in his resuscitated body and told an NDE researcher about his
experience. But if you did, you would be wrong. Dr. Horace Ackley truly did die
that day, never to return to this life. The report that you read above was an
account of his death, allegedly given by him through a spirit medium – one
Samuel Paist of Philadelphia. And what makes it truly remarkable is that it was
written down by Paist in his book A Narrative of the Experience of Horace
Abraham Ackley, M.D., and published in 1861 – more than a century before the
near-death experience had come to the attention of researchers and the general
public. And yet Paist/Ackley tells of an OBE shortly after death, a “panoramic”
life review (the exact word "panoramic" is used, just as in many
other NDEs), and being greeted by spirits who subsequently guided him to an
afterlife realm!
The after-death narrative of Dr. Horace Ackley
is not an isolated instance. More than a decade before the publication of
Raymond Moody’s Life After Life – the book that started the modern
fascination with near-death experiences – another scientist had already
investigated and written at length on the topic. In a pair of relatively
obscure books – The Supreme Adventure (1961) and Intimations of
Immortality (1965) – Dr. Robert Crookall cited numerous examples of what
he called “pseudo-death,” noting the archetypal elements that Moody would later
bring to the public’s attention as the near-death experience. What’s more
however, Crookall also compared these tales of ‘pseudo-death’ with accounts of
the dying process as told by ‘communicators’ through mediums – and found a
number of these same recurring elements, well before they became public
knowledge through Moody’s Life After Life.
For example, Crookall showed that, according
to ostensibly dead ‘communicators’ talking through mediums, the newly-deceased
are usually met by other deceased loved ones: “Usually friends or relatives
take the newly-dead man in charge”. This of course may not be considered a
surprising thing for a medium to say – it’s probably what most people would
expectantly hope for upon entering the spirit realm. But the common elements continue,
and include some of the more idiosyncratic features of the NDE. For instance,
Crookall noted that, as with the case of Dr. Ackley above, communicators often
declare through mediums that “in the early stages of transition, they
experienced a panoramic review of their past lives”. In one case the
communicator recounted that shortly after death “the scenes of the past life”
are revealed; another said that upon ‘waking’ his “entire life unreeled
itself”. A dead communicator by the name of Scott told medium Jane Sherwood
that his thoughts “raced over the record of a whole long lifetime”, while
another communicator said that he saw “clearer and clearer the events of my
past life pass, in a long procession, before me.” Crookall even discovered a
reference in ancient texts to the experience of dying which agreed with the
above accounts: the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras (circa 500 BCE) taught
that at the time of death, the soul “sees, over and over again, its earthly
existence, the scenes succeeding one another with startling clearness”.
Considering how many near-death experiencers
say the life review is a personal ‘judgement day’, with feelings of right and
wrong accompanying each action and scene, it is fascinating to note the
recurring motif that accompanies this aspect, as told to mediums by ‘dead’
communicators. “I saw my life unfold before me in a procession of images. One
is faced with the effects emotionally of all one’s actions”, said a
communicator quoted in a 1929 book. “Each incident brings with it the feelings
not only of oneself alone but of all those others who were affected by the
events”, according to another communicator. And again, this account given by a
medium, from 1928: “Like everyone who passes over, he had been through the
whole of his past life, re-living his past actions in every detail. All the
pain he had given to people he experienced himself, and all the pleasure he had
given he received back again”. Given the similarities to some of the NDE
accounts mentioned earlier, we must remind ourselves here that this is the
apparent testimony from deceased communicators, speaking through mediums, not
accounts of near-death experiencers – and well before the elements of the
archetypal NDE were well known. And yet the parallels are extraordinary.
Beyond the meeting with the familiar dead,
and the past life review, Crookall’s research also found that mediumistic
communicators regularly make note of the out-of-body experience component. For
example, one communicator noted that he “seemed to rise up out of my body”.
According to another, “I was not lying in the bed, but floating in the air, a
little above it. I saw the body, stretched out straight”. Furthermore, they
also describe the familiar element of traveling through a tunnel! “I saw in front
of me a dark tunnel,” said one communicator, before travelling through it and
then stepping “out of the tunnel into a new world”. Another communicator noted
that they remembered “a curious opening, as if one had passed through
subterranean passages and found oneself near the mouth of a cave… The light was
much stronger outside”. And once through the ‘tunnel’, the environment is once
again familiar to anyone who has perused a catalogue of NDEs: “I was with ‘B’
[her son, killed in the War]: he took me to a world so brilliant that I can’t
describe it”.
The common elements are compelling. For
anyone familiar with the NDE literature, these reports through mediums are
startlingly similar to the accounts of near-death experiencers – and yet
Crookall collected them years before the archetype of the NDE became common
knowledge. And not only do they seem to offer support for the validity of the
near-death experience, they also hint that there may well be more to the
much-maligned subject of mediumship.
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