Intimations of mortality

"At the moment you embrace death as inevitable and the end of your life’s journey, that’s the moment you start to savor the sweetness of life.”

I can’t recall now who said that line – or words to that effect – but all of us with no exception have had intimations of mortality, especially in these dire times.

We’ve seen our dearly beloved – relatives, friends, high school classmates and acquaintances – taken away from us by COVID-19.

At no other time in our life have we thought that our turn might soon come in the pre-departure line.

But death is not to be feared if we go by the words of non-religious gurus and of those who have experienced dying but came back.

Death should even be celebrated and those who have gone before us envied instead of pitied, going by the teachings of the non-religious gurus and those who have had NDE’s (near death experiences).

For, according to these people, death is just an end to this journey and a beginning of a new experience.

By “non-religious gurus” I mean authors of bestselling books like Dr. Brian Weiss, Dr. Raymond Moody, Bruce Goldberg, Neale Donald Walsch, U.S. Andersen and Dolores Cannon.

Dannion Brinkley, Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Mary C. Neal and Betty Eadie are among an endless list of people who penetrated the Veil and came back to tell their stories of what happened to them in the Life Beyond.

The people mentioned above wrote their stories matter-of-factly, with no intention to proselytize.

I am taking liberties quoting freely from their works.

“We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives,” said Brian Weiss, former head of the psychiatric department of Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Florida.

Dr. Weiss discovered the Life Beyond and our lives preceding this lifetime through his patient, a woman named Catherine in his book, Many Lives, Many Masters.

“I had discovered that a large number of patients seemed truly to go back in time to past lives. Not only did they say they had, but many of them provided proof through their hypnotic regressions that they had indeed lived in an earlier era,” said Raymond Moody, a psychologist and forensic psychiatrist, in Paranormal: My Life In Pursuit of the Afterlife.

Dr. Moody also wrote the bestseller Life After Life.

“The main point (of this book) is to demonstrate that it is not an experience to fear. Perhaps it is something not to look forward to but it is not to be feared,” said Bruce Goldberg, a clinical hypnotherapist who has regressed 11,000 individual patients.

Goldberg wrote the international bestseller Past Lives – Future Lives.
“Have no fear of hell – there is no such thing. There is only heaven, consciousness of the immortal Self which each of us shall eventually attain,” said U.S. Andersen in Three Magic Words.

“When the time comes, the journey toward the brilliant white light that marks the barrier between this world and the next will not hold as much fear as it once would have been,” said Dolores Cannon, a hypnotherapist who specialized in past life regressions.

“The body never ‘dies’ but merely changes form… Death in that instance is a glorious moment; a wonderful experience. Now the soul can return to its natural form, its normal state,” said Neale Donald Walsch, a bestselling author and former journalist.

Neale wrote a sequence of books, known as the Conversations with God. The books have been translated into many languages.

And now let’s hear from those who died but came back.

“My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience goes beyond the grave,” said Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, who had a near-death experience that happened in 2008 due to meningitis.

Dr. Alexander wrote the book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife.

“Why do bad things happen to good people,” said Mary C. Neal, author of To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again: A True Story.

Neal, a spine surgeon, had an NDE in a boating accident in South America.

“Horrible events in life serve as a catalyst for major changes in our life perspective and as teaching tools for helping others,” said Dannion Brinkley in Saved by the Light.

Brinkley, who used to be a US military sniper, was struck by lightning while having a conversation on the phone at his home.

He claims to have gone to a “luminous crystal city” where he met other spiritual beings.

Brinkley also claims to have predicted disasters before they happened, such as the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident in Russia in 1986, after his NDE.

“Life does not end when we die. Death is a rebirth into a spirit world of light and love, a transition from the physical to the spiritual that is no more frightening or painful than passing between rooms through an open doorway; it is a joyful homecoming to our natural home,” said Betty Eadie in Embraced by the Light.

Eadie had an NDE while recovering from a surgery. Her doctor verified her death due to hemorrhage.

This columnist invites you to read the books I mentioned earlier.

I had a morbid fear of the end of life’s journey – called death – until I read those books one after the other.

As Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms said: “Cowards die a thousand deaths; the brave only die once.”

So, enjoy this journey called life. We have many, many more lifetimes ahead of us in an endless journey towards perfection.