Psychiatrist and near-death researcher Raymond Moody reports in his 2016 book, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from this Life to the Next, on “shared death experiences” involving physicians, nurses, and other professionals providing care for patients in hospital and hospice environments. These shared experiences involve “extraordinary knowing” by healthy persons and often scientifically trained persons, as in the case of a psychologist in North Carolina who writes:

 

“The deathbed scene is not fully in this world. And although I am not religious, hospice work has awakened me to a spiritual dimension of life. In my opinion, everyone who works with the dying long enough must have some awareness of these experiences. I believe the spiritual experiences of dying people somehow leak out and pervade the area around them. If you step into that area with the right temperament, you will receive, I feel, a sense of the sacred in the presence of the dying. I have experienced the room taking on a different configuration a number of times. The only way that I can describe it is that moving energy pulses through the room. I often feel something that I can’t name.

 

“The bedside of the dying offers a view into eternity. Like looking through a window into elsewhere, from time to time I see lights and twice have had clear views of what appear to be structures. On both occasions I saw patients leave their bodies in a cloud form. I saw them rise out of their bodies and head toward these structures. I would describe these clouds as a sort of mist that forms around the head or chest. There seems to be some kind of electricity to it, like an electrical disturbance. I don’t know if I see it with my physical eyes, but it’s there all the same. There is no doubt in my mind that you can sometimes see people depart for the other side.”

 

Physician Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), known for her writings about death and dying, urged her medical colleagues: “We shouldn’t nail the dying to the threshold between two states of consciousness. We shouldn’t prolong their lives with medication, injections and life-support machines. We should let them go. They’re not going into nothingness. They’re entering another state of being. We must let our dead go into that world.” (David Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard Books, 1995), 180.

 

There is scientific evidence for an afterlife. The shared death experiences that Moody and Kübler-Ross report involve sensory experience affirmed by hospice caregivers who are not on drugs or overwhelmed by their feelings as relatives of dying loved ones might be. They are professionals who have witnessed many deaths, and they confirm that the dying are entering “another state of being.”

 

To thrive in this life on earth, we need to live without fear of death. Then our life journey will not be cut short by physical death but will extend far beyond and attain greater meaning and purpose. This is even more important when we are living in a time of human-caused ecological devastation that is threatening the survival of our species. Open your heart and mind to the scientific and personal experiences of “the other side.”

 

Is this an eco-choice? Absolutely. In a time of increasing species extinction, embracing eco-choices with compassion requires hope in a universe of meaning and purpose. 

 

On earth we should do all we can to sustain other species and our lives as well, for this is our purpose now. Our greater purpose will be revealed after our physical death. 

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Have you had an extraordinary experience? Did this experience expand your living-world and offer you a life-transforming choice? 

 

Robert Traer, Extraordinary Experiences (2021).