Death: the not-so-final frontier
It was reported in the news right before Bob Hope's death in 2001 that Hope, a frail 98 years old, was spending a few days in the hospital because of pneumonia. Dr. Lee Kagan, at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, said, "Left untreated, it would have been catastrophic."
Death at the age of 98, a catastrophe? But no doctor would ever go on record as saying, "Too bad we got him to the hospital. Left untreated, this bout of pneumonia would have provided Mr. Hope with a quick, painless, and inexpensive exit from the body." Despite—or maybe because of—medicine’s vast technical know-how, death is still seen as the great defeat. But that’s because science has eliminated the possibility of studying life before and after death by saying there’s no such thing. Piles of evidence to the contrary allow us to beg to differ with that opinion.
Ram Dass reported that a Indian guru who was asked what to tell people about dying replied soothingly, "Tell them it’s like taking off a tight shoe." Studying what we call death reveals that this "tight shoe" is our physical body—the one the hospital helped poor old Bob Hope stay stuck in just as he was making an escape attempt. Studying information about the continued existence of the energy that comprises our essential self usually eases the mind about departed loved ones and about the prospect of one’s own departure from the tight shoe of the body. And, by this point, you surely realize that anything that eases the mind is good for the body.
"You’re as dead now as you’ll ever be," remarked Seth, the entity channeled by Jane Roberts. According to modern psychics, the basic information about using—and being—the energy of consciousness is the same whether you’re in a physical body or out of one. Besides casting some reassuring light on an area of ignorance and fear, studying accounts of what it’s like not to be in a physical body can also provide useful information about this energy of consciousness that we all manipulate and focus with our beliefs. Such perspectives come in handy when you are trying to understand and apply concepts related to healing and the mind.
Suggested reading for enlarging your view of where you live, what you live for, and where you’re headed:
- Raymond Moody’s Life After Life : The Investigation of a Phenomenon--Survival of Bodily Death is a classic.
- Silly as the title sounds, Complete Idiot's Guide to Near-Death Experiences by P.M.H. Atwater is the most up-to-date encyclopedia of information about near-death experiences.
- In Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives, journalist Tom Shroder follows Dr. Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, on his investigations of reports of reincarnation in India and Beirut. As Shroder says about the paradigm-busting conclusions that can be drawn from Stevenson’s extensive research, "If it’s not science, maybe it should be."
- Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives and the sequel, Destiny of Souls: New Case Studies of Life Between Lives, by Michael Newton, Ph.D., provide thought-provoking accounts from hypnotic regression subjects who recount strikingly similar experiences of life out of the body.
- Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (A Seth Book), is a must-read classic by Jane Roberts, which opens the mind to a world of different ways to think about life and death.