Long Jeffrey - God and the afterlife: the groundbreaking new evidence for God and near-death experience

EVIDENCE OF THE AFTERLIFE

Dedicated to the thousands of people who have shared their exceptional experiences with us over the years, and to those who will share in the future. You are among the greatest of teachers.

Dedicated to near-death experience researchers, past and future.

Dedicated to Jody Long, whose efforts made this book possible.

D ue to the overwhelming percentage of loving and warm experiences reported in near-death experiences (NDEs), I occasionally receive e-mails from people, often in a depression, wondering if they should try suicide in order to induce one. I immediately respond: Absolutely not! I encourage those who are depressed to seek counseling and also to discuss their life issues with their health-care team. People who had near-death experiences as a result of suicide attempts almost uniformly later believe that their suicide attempts were serious mistakes. An NDE should never be sought by creating a life-threatening event.

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesnt know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

Albert Einstein

I ts easy to see why people are fascinated with near-death experiences (NDEs). I have been intrigued by them for many decades. As a trained medical doctor, I know what should be possible when bodies break down near death. At a time when no memory should be possible, when people are either certifiably unconscious or even dead, those reporting NDEs consistently describe highly lucid and organized experiences. Many report details of what is happening to and around their bodies from a perspective outside of their bodies, details that are later verified by other witnesses. That should not be possible if these reports were merely the result of traumatized brains. Something else is at work in these stories.

But not only do these tales seem medically impossible; they also give accounts of a mysterious world that humanity has always been curious about but has never had direct evidence of: the land of the afterlife, a place where some meet God, dead relatives, and other spiritual beings.

In my last book, Evidence of the Afterlife, I surveyed over thirteen hundred testimonies of NDEs and demonstrated both why medically and logically these could not be merely explained away and why I concluded they were credible memories of peoples experiences. I also summarized the most common components of these experiences. In this follow-up book, I survey many more stories, but this time I want to focus on the remarkable world people discovered on the other side.

Our situation regarding NDEs is similar to the way humanity learned of exotic lands during the ancient era of exploration. After sailors returned from long voyages and wrote their accounts, scholars would survey multiple accounts from different voyagers, discern where they agreed or disagreed, and come up with the most likely descriptions of the geography, culture, rituals, and traditions of a particular exotic land. We are in a similar position today when it comes to the world of the afterlife.

Near-death experiences are surprisingly common. A Gallup poll found that about 5 percent of those surveyed had an NDE at some time during their lives. From this and other surveys, we believe that millions of people around the world have had near-death experiences. People who previously would have died are now being saved due to advances in medical equipment and better training for emergency personnel. These life-saving measures would be expected to result in a higher incidence of NDEs than ever before.

Remarkably, the content of near-death experiences is strikingly consistent. Even after rigorously studying NDEs for over fifteen years, I still marvel at how amazingly similar these experiences are regardless of the experiencers age, cultural beliefs, education, or geographical location.

By comparing these accounts, we begin to see a coherent picture of this other world. For example, one striking aspect of these accounts, which we will explore more fully later in this book, is the consistency with which a divine is described. Those who report meeting a divine being generally portray God as someone who radiates incredible love, light, grace, and acceptance. This is not religious dogma or theology, but one of the most consistent claims of multiple individuals who have encountered a heavenly being. In other words, people are not merely stating or projecting their religious yearnings or beliefs, but, like the explorers of old, are describing an entity they have encountered. The fact that they describe these encounters so similarly gives us confidence that they have, indeed, met the same Being.

My goal in this book is nothing less than to provide the most scientifically rigorous account of the afterlife world described by those who have had a near-death experience.

Before we explore more fully the world of the afterlife, let me summarize what we know about near-death experiences in general. As I wrote in my first book, Evidence of the Afterlife, I first encountered the idea of NDEs during my medical residency at the University of Iowa as I was reading an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There Dr. Michael Sabom, a Georgia cardiologist, described how he had closely examined 107 case studies of people who had nearly died. Many reported that they had had NDEs and described their experiences in vivid visual detail. Dr. Sabom defended his findings against those who wanted to explain them away as a fantasy of death or as manifestations of a hypoxic brain attempting to deal with the anxieties provoked by medical procedures and talk.

This led me to read Dr. Raymond Moodys classic, Life After Life, the book that introduced the phenomenon of near-death experiences to the world. A masterpiece of philosophy and logic, the book is now required reading for anyone interested in the field of NDE studies.

I continued my studies in radiation oncology, which is the medical use of radiation to treat cancer and which is still the specialty I work in today. But over the next several years after this initiation into NDEs, I continued to read about them. I was fascinated by the mystery of how people whose hearts had stopped were having conscious experiences that they often later considered to be the most profound of their life. With blood circulation stopped, shouldnt lucid and prolonged consciousness be impossible? I asked myself. Yet NDE accounts vividly described how consciousness left the body. What is going on? I wondered.

As I read further about NDEs, I became more intrigued, especially when I kept encountering both logic and evidence that made it hard to dismiss these stories. Like anyone else I wondered, What happens to us when we die? NDE case studies seemed to directly answer that question. In many areas of life, when facing the unknown, we often seek out those who have already experienced what we are facing in order to get guidance and answers. So if we are curious about what happens when we die, it makes perfect sense to listen to those who actually nearly died or even experienced clinical death.

As intrigued as the NDE case studies left me, at this earlier time in my life there was little or no time to conduct more extensive research or to search efficiently for new case studies. For NDE studies to fully blossom, at least to my way of thinking, researchers needed hundreds of case studies from which to draw conclusions. To find NDE case studies in those daysthis was in the 1980sresearchers often had to rely on word of mouth or referrals.