‘My belief is that if everyone had an NDE there would never be
another war, no one would starve or be the victim of violence and
greed would become a thing of the past.’
Christine Stewart (quoted from The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences)
***
‘It is the fact that every day counts us down that makes each one such a gift.’
Kathryn Mannix
One of my favourite non-fiction books is The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, by Dr Penny Sartori. I like her book because of its scientific, objective approach and because it is based on her own primary research, which she conducted during the years she worked as a nurse on an intensive care unit. In the book, Sartori distinguishes between the near-death experience (NDE) and the out-of-body experience (OBE) although in both categories her patients were hospitalised and in the care of medical professionals.
In December of last year I received another great book, entitled With the End in Mind, written by Kathryn Mannix. It’s a book about dying, not NDEs.
Shortly afterwards, on the 14th, my mother-in-law died completely unexpected, leaving us shell-shocked and deeply saddened and I didn’t pick up Mannix’s book again until a few weeks later.
Mannix describes patterns dying people go through (depending on the circumstances), such as: becoming more tired, needing more sleep, slipping into a coma and becoming unconscious.
But as I was reading Mannix’s book through the lens of my own experiences, I began to reflect on her frequent mention of ‘being unconscious’ as death approaches, and on the few times I left my body (OBEs) and the time I was given a general anesthetic.
When I was anesthetized, I was unconscious too, but had I left my body at that point I would have been conscious and aware of what was going on around me.
My point is that people who are close to death may seem unconscious, but as we can’t be sure whether ot not they’ve left their bodies, they could well be conscious and experiencing an OBE or NDE and be fully aware of what’s going on around them.
But this is just a small observation; Mannix’s book is very well written and draws you in from the first page.
Nancy Evans Bush, has written a book on negative NDEs, entitled: Dancing Past the Dark (Distressing Near-Death Experiences). An interesting approach to an interesting topic. Apparently, one in five near death experiences is negative and Bush candidly details her own. Her experience happened during the birth of her second child when she was twenty-eight years old. She left her body and went up into a place where there was only darkness. Then a group of circles appeared and they started to mock her, telling her (without words) that nothing was real and that she herself had never existed. It wasn’t until six years later that she realised the circles she’d seen were Yin/Yang circles.
In a paragraph with the heading ‘synchronicity,’ she writes that twenty years after her experience she got an office job at the International Association for Near-Death Studies. It was here that she learnt her experience had a name (page 7).
All three of these books are must-reads—if you’re into that stuff of course.
