Think of the Soul. I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul, somehow to live in other spheres; I do not know how, but I know it is so.
—Walt Whitman
One hot and humid summer day in 1961 in suburban Cincinnati, I was engaged in aimless play at our neighborhood pool like any other nine-year-old boy. At one point, I jumped into the kids’ end of the pool. Or so I thought. I was so startled by the unexpected depth of the water that I began to panic, for I had not yet learned to swim. Instead of gently hitting bottom four feet down, I was now lost in a full ten feet. I struggled and churned, frantic to get my bearings. In a flash, time slowed down as I entered a place of sheer terror. But before I could take a gulp of water, I was pulled free by a vigilant lifeguard.
In the few seconds before the rescue, I had what I would call a mini near-death experience (NDE). I saw my short life pass before me in a complete review: scenes of parents, siblings, school chums, teachers, our cat, my bedroom, me riding my bike—an explosion of distinct images of encounters with each important person or thing in my young world. And each scene that paraded through had an aura of truth and light around it. The feeling associated with this instantaneous experience was rapturous though my body was paralyzed with fear. I believe that this experience provided a rare glimpse of—as Walt Whitman might say—the proportions of my soul. Much later, I came across a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to capture the essence of this modest childhood NDE:
The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity—
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place—
Not yet suspected—but for Flash—
And Click—and Suddenness.
Looking back, I believe that the sudden “Danger” of drowning disclosed to me a “distinct connection,” as Dickinson puts it. I caught a vivid peek of what I now believe was my youthful but immortal soul. I discovered (“as Lightning”) that the deeper self on the inside (my “Landscape”) is luminous. It’s available all at once in a “Flash.” And yet it was hidden away (“Not yet suspected”). An unfathomable self was hidden (as “Sheets of Place”) under the surface person I thought I was.
Dickinson was prescient in declaring that the soul, the essential self, suddenly reveals itself in “quick Calamity.” We’ll shortly see that NDE life reviews offer paranormal proof of that poetic proposition.
John Keats and the “Vale of Soul-Making”
My own small life review led me to several provisional insights that I have carried with me ever since. We carry within us our life-story-as-a-whole; it contains our essential personal experiences that are somehow cumulatively stored up within us. This corpus of experiences can suddenly disclose itself when we face mortality; and the wondrous and numinous quality of these memories must be evidence of an immortal pedigree.
Further research inspired by the Urantia Revelation builds on these insights. According to my synthesis hypothesis, not only does the human soul consist of the sum total of the energetic record of all of our experiences, but these poignant moments of spiritual significance also have what the UB calls survival value beyond this life and may even contribute something unique to universal evolution.
As I see it, our evolving soul is a living, growing, shimmering entity of light, but its luminosity differs from the pure light of that “spark of God” that, according to poets and Gnostics, also indwells us. Instead, the evolving soul is a psychic product of an alchemical blend of widely divergent elements that, in certain moments of daily experience, get “mixed” behind the scenes in our deepest interior. The process of soul-synthesis occurs when worthy impulses, intentions, or states rise above the instinctive or reactive level of mind to what one could call the mid-mind. There they engage with the indwelling God-self that reaches down from the higher mind, which seeks an energetic resonance of recognition. These factors—a resonating mental content and its acknowledgment by the inner spirit—dissolve, so to speak, into one another, creating a blended substance of the subtle realm whose luster is unique.
In essence, the spirit-self selects and highlights those mind-moments it deems worthy of immortality, even if the immediate experience involved is painful or disturbing or seemingly ordinary. Our afflictions and predicaments and our sincere efforts to adjust to such difficulties—as well as our aspirations and our efforts to attain worthy goals—are especially soul-making. But a third factor is required, according to the UB: another part of us, which the text calls our unchanging and unique personhood, unifies and holds the space for these transactions to occur.
Even a child has such a psychic repository of life memories constitutive of a young soul, as I discovered. But to gain any direct awareness of the soul’s subtle content is no small matter. The evolving soul seems to divulge its secrets only when we are in deep and sustained reflection and meditation—or else suddenly in dreams, epiphanies, or calamitous events.
The most potent soul-making situations, I believe, are those in which we wrestle with challenging dilemmas with an attitude of faith and hopefulness. We especially grow and stretch the soul when we are tested by demanding situations that summon creative choices among competing values. And if such choices and the resulting actions are infused with our highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness, then our soul growth is all the more accelerated.
The brilliant John Keats intuited this process in a famous letter to his siblings, in which he opines that the world is “a vale of soul-making” (“vale” referring to “valley”). While making a point about Christianity’s misguided theology of suffering, Keats takes a stand for courageous human development as the reason for our sojourn on Earth. To illustrate the idea, he contrasts his idea of soul-making with the traditional Christian idea that this world is a vale of tears. Note how his letter’s description of the soul’s purpose has an uncanny similarity to our synthesis hypothesis:
The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to heaven. What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “the vale of soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world. . . . There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity . . . in short they are God. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them, so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? . . . Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! . . . As various as the lives of men are, so various become their souls.1
This world of our travails is a “school for our souls,” proclaims Keats, the author of “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” And it’s fascinating to note that The Urantia Book has a direct allusion to this very letter of Keats: “Jesus hardly regarded this world as a ‘vale of tears.’ He rather looked upon it as the birth sphere of the eternal and immortal spirits of Paradise ascension, the ‘vale of soul making.’” [149:5.5]
In his letter, Keats prophetically distinguishes the evolving human soul from “the sparks which are God.” The “sparks of divinity” have “identity given to them,” as Keats puts it, and this evolving identity becomes increasingly able show to itself in our moments of crisis or penetrating thought—as Emily Dickinson points out.
Paranormal Revelations of the Soul
Can modern folks like us take inspiration from that which poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and John Keats proclaimed about the soul in the nineteenth century? Can we find scientific support today for what the Urantia Revelation asserted about the evolving soul when it was published in the mid-twentieth century? We can find confirmation, I believe, when we examine the burgeoning scientific data about near-death experiences and related paranormal phenomena.
I first heard about NDEs from Dr. Raymond Moody’s classic 1975 book, Life after Life. And I have long been aware that NDE research has generated other bestselling books and inspired feature films. But I was surprised when I later discovered that rigorous scientific research on NDEs has gone on for decades all over the world and is based on a vast archive of data. I’ve been even more amazed to discover that many of these same research scientists are stepping out as advocates for the existence of a soul or a nonmaterial self that survives into an afterlife. The NDE field has come a very long way from earlier days when experiencers who went public suffered ridicule, social ostracism, and even psychiatric and pastoral abuse and condemnation.
We now know that almost every account we have of the thousands of near-death experiencers (NDErs) includes a report of the joyful awareness of a discrete soul or nonphysical selfhood, along with the certain knowledge that it will survive death. These people are made aware of the same numinous qualities I felt in my mini-NDE, but with far more profundity. My terror of drowning induced a startling epiphany, but a “hard” NDEr actually does drown—as, for example, in the case of Dr. Mary Neal, the director of spine surgery at the University of Southern California, who perished in a whitewater kayaking accident but was revived after experiencing a spectacular NDE. “Before my near-death-experience,” says Dr. Neal in an interview, “I believed in God and took my kids to Sunday school but was not particularly religious. . . . With my near-death-experience, the truth of God’s promises and the reality of eternal life became a part of my every breath. I am in constant prayer and regardless of what I am doing, I try to reflect God’s love and live for His glory.”2 A similar case is that of David Bennett, a commercial diver who drowned in a violent storm but returned to tell his own NDE story. Bennett, previously a brash and self-centered young man, is now a well-known inspirational speaker and spiritual teacher.3
Generally speaking, NDErs report the following experiences: a temporary (and verifiable) death; a sudden eruption into a supernatural domain of light usually populated by celestial beings and deceased relatives; the experience of being jettisoned back into their once-lifeless body to survive on Earth; and the report of a life-changing memory of these events. Among the most profoundly evidential aspects of their stories are the ensuing radical changes in these people’s lives, as witnessed not only in the cases of Neal and Bennett but in hundreds of other instances as well.
NDE archives also include reports from deceased persons who channel from the other side, in what is technically known as After Death Communications (ADC).4 Many such cases are known as “evidentiary mediumship,” because their communications contain verifiable facts and information that could not possibly have been known by the medium. Speaking from the unseen realms, these voices provide unprecedented information about the afterlife through reliable psychic mediums on Earth, some of whom have been studied in extremely rigorous, controlled scientific experiments going back more than a century.
One of the world leaders in the scientific validation of such phenomena is Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona’s Department of Psychology. He is the director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, where he has conducted a myriad of double- and triple-blind studies. Schwartz, the author of The Afterlife Experiments and other important books in this field, has also published more than 450 scientific papers and has studied ADC and other paranormal phenomena for over three decades.
Perhaps the most reliable source of information and research on NDEs is IANDS, International Association for Near Death Studies. Other leading research centers of note in this field are the Institute for Noetic Sciences, led by its chief scientist, Dean Radin, PhD, and the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, led by former radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long. Both men are distinguished authors. Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, was a pioneer academic researcher and original editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
In some spectacular, well-documented cases, the dead are known to speak to us directly through electronic media in a phenomenon known as instrumental trans-communication (ITC).5 Such cases are included in NDE archives if they independently provide confirmable facts about an individual’s life, and for other reasons. Schwartz insists that scholarly afterlife study should include the data that has been gathered regarding NDEs, ADC mediumship, and ITC.
Afterlife reports by NDErs do have wide variations in their particulars and the degree to which these paranormal experiences can be recalled. But the shared characteristics that have been noted by peer-reviewed research scientists reveal uniform features across culture, religion, age, race, and gender. For example, according to premier early NDE researcher Kenneth Ring, author of the classic Lessons from the Light, “Religious orientation was not a factor affecting either the likelihood or the depth of the near-death experience. An atheist was as likely to have one as was a devoutly religious person.”6
But what’s most relevant for our inquiry is that innumerable NDE experiencers—including many children—report having had a life review. We now have at least five thousand documented NDE cases, and about a fifth of these include descriptions of some form of life review.
The cumulative weight of the vast body of life-review cases—along with the rigorous scrutiny of this data by scholars and scientists—points directly to my synthesis hypothesis: We carry within us an up-to-the-minute repository of the poignant experiences of our lifetime, and this record is radically distinct from the brain memories that get extinguished at death. Rather, a certain selection of our life history has been synthesized in and as an immortal soul that lives on without the physical body. This subtle entity survives into the afterlife and somehow displays itself in splendid detail in the NDE life review. It is possible, too, that elements of the life review are summoned from other extradimensional sources.
Such reports by NDE experiencers are all the more significant when we consider that, as author Roy L. Hill, puts it, “[NDErs] are not engaging in speculation. They are reporting consistent observations about the nature of the soul because they are reporting from direct experience. Put more simply, NDErs know the soul because they lived as the soul. Arriving back to their bodies, they were entrusted with more keys to their real essence.”7
I see NDErs as modern-day Gnostics. NDEs in general, and life reviews in particular, infuse the experiencer with self-knowledge, offering a dramatic revelation of true gnosis—a word that we examine in detail in chapter 6. “When you return to this life,” writes experiencer Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot, “you are still a regular person; you haven’t suddenly become a spiritual guru or a shaman, although you may become one later. On the other hand, everything in your paradigm has shifted and you possess a rare gnosis that life is eternally continuous. . . . I was reborn to a new life (reincarnated) in the same body.”8
Very often, NDErs describing their life reviews report that they were surprised, deeply embarrassed, and even horrified by the disclosure of their soul’s deepest secrets. They even beg to have the life review halted, but are always very lovingly reassured by any higher beings present that the outcome of the review will be beneficial.
According to analysts, the life review experience is obviously designed to educate the experiencer with a rich variety of unknown facts and new perspectives on their entire life story. These can include thoughts, actions, or motives withheld from self and others; vivid experiences of how their behavior impacted others—including strangers, animals, and even plants; deep insights into how and why the NDEr needs to change upon returning to Earth; and often a disclosure of their life mission.
NDEs and life reviews appear to offer unearned self-understanding, but I suggest that we think of these phenomena as a contemporary form of divine grace. Startling new experiential knowledge of the soul and the higher worlds is now being poured out as a revelatory gift to a skeptical postmodern world, perhaps also for the purpose of complementing and even validating verbal revelations such as the UB and other forms of channeled or transmitted wisdom. Further, the literature and lore of NDEs make clear that experiencers are being taught about soul development for the purpose of accelerating their growth when they return to their bodies, as well as to inspire others they meet to pursue a more spiritual life. Many experiencers go on to engage in various forms of missionary or humanitarian outreach, personal healing ministries, or spiritual teaching not unlike that of a religious evangelist, but without the baggage of traditional religious doctrine.
NDE Life Reviews: Nonjudgmental and Multiperspectival
Life reviews are radical and startling. They are typically led by one or several angelic or celestial beings whose role is to help us distill our life lessons while communicating unconditional love for us. Contrary to the teachings of most religious traditions about the wrath of divine judgment in the afterlife, NDErs report without exception that these supervising beings are nonjudgmental, lavishly supportive, and deeply loving.9 Here, for example, is a typical life review account provided by well-known author and speaker Dannion Brinkley:
A powerful being enveloped me and I began to relive my entire life, one incident at a time. In what I call the panoramic life review I watched my life from a second person point of view. As I experienced this I was myself as well as every other person with whom I had ever interacted . . . When the panoramic life review ended, despite the many obvious mistakes I had made in my life, I experienced no retribution—no judgment and no punishment. I was the only judge presiding over my day in court! Given time to assimilate my life in retrospect, I was given the opportunity to know, first hand, both the happiness and the sorrow I had created through my actions.10
Much like Brinkley, many subjects report having a holographic experience overseen by benign beings, in which they engage in a vivid reliving of life episodes. Others compare a life review to watching a movie of one’s entire life, or specific scenes and segments, viewed on screens of some sort. Directed at each step by loving celestial beings of light, these experiencers will view their life in chronological sequence (or sometimes in reverse), or watch segments that can be fast-forwarded, slowed down, or paused to focus on a particular detail.
These descriptions strongly suggest, of course, some sort of heavenly storage medium that is being played back. Renowned medium Edgar Cayce, as well as theosophists and followers of Rudolf Steiner, claimed that our life chronology is embedded in the universal Akashic record, which contains the entire history of every soul that has ever lived.11 I depict these events as being stored locally, in and as the personal soul, but there is reason to believe that duplicates of these life records are available elsewhere in the universe and can be accessed on demand by celestials beings or by humans with the requisite psychic skill and the proper permissions.
The NDEr receives specific coaching and guidance throughout the review. Deeds that are considered most valuable by the celestial guides are those that express pure and unconditional love or forgivenes—small and spontaneous acts of kindness. For example, in one endearing segment of a woman’s life review, she was shown herself as a little girl spotting a tiny flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk, then bending down and cupping the flower, giving it her full unconditional love and attention. In her life review, she discovered that this one incident was the most important event of her entire life.12 Here’s a similar case: “Reinee Pasarow described how the most positive thing she did . . . was to give special attention to a not-so-lovable boy at a summer camp so that he would know he was loved. During the review, she said this act of kindness was more important from her viewpoint of expanded awareness than if she had been president of the United States or the queen of England.”13
Enjoy this excerpt from another classic account of a life review, this time from Betty Eadie in her 1992 bestseller, Embraced by the Light:
My life appeared before me in the form of what we might consider extremely well defined holograms, but at tremendous speed. I was astonished that I could understand so much information at such a speed. My comprehension included much more than what I remember happening during each event of my life. I not only re-experienced my own emotions at each moment, but also what others around me had felt. I experienced their thoughts and feelings about me. . . . I saw how I had often wronged people and how they had often turned to others and committed a similar wrong. This chain continued from victim to victim, like a circle of dominoes, until it came back to the start—to me, the offender. The ripples went out, and they came back. I had offended far more people than I knew, and my pain multiplied and became unbearable. . . . The Savior stepped toward me, full of concern and love. His spirit gave me strength, and he said that I was judging myself too critically. “You’re being too harsh on yourself,” he said. Then he showed me the reversed side of the ripple effect. I saw myself perform an act of kindness, just a simple act of unselfishness, and I saw the ripples go out again. The friend I had been kind to was kind in turn to one of her friends, and the chain repeated itself. I saw love and happiness increase in others’ lives because of that one simple act on my part. I saw their happiness grow and affect their lives in positive ways, some significantly. My pain was replaced with joy.14
Eadie’s case helps illustrate that most life reviews are multiperspectival—that is, seen and felt as if from a God’s-eye point of view that is inclusive of all who were involved with or even remotely connected to the experiencer.
Much of the life review account published by experiencer Rajiv Parti, MD, represented the actual experiences of his immediate family: “I was able to feel all points of view, my father’s and grandfather’s, and my mother’s.”15 Parti’s important book tells the story of how his NDE led to his transformation from an obsessive, materialistic anesthesiologist to a healer, speaker, and spiritual teacher. He had led a successful career as the chief of anesthesiology at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital in California, but Parti was not above physically abusing his own son and mistreating his wife. In his near-death experience, archangels and his deceased father led him on a journey in review of the violence that had plagued his family for generations. After his experience, Dr. Parti awoke as if “born again.” He gave away his mansion, quit his career, opened a wellness clinic, and completely turned around his relationships with his family. To this day, he still teaches widely and converses with angels.
At the other end of the spectrum from Dr. Parti is Erik Medhus, an aimless young man who committed suicide at age twenty. Erik has become an evidentiary spokesperson for the spirit world, channeling through a respected medium—complete with the slang and expletives he once used as a teen hipster. The detailed story of his death and afterlife was edited by his mother, Elisa Medhus, MD. Here’s a highlight from his life review that once again reveals the use of multiple perspectives as a radical teaching device:
As my entire life unfolded before me, I was not only experiencing every single moment I ever lived but I was also observing and feeling what everybody else in my life went through in reaction to whatever I said or did to them. . . . Not only could I feel the emotions they had in response to my actions, but I could actually see things from their perspective. It was like I was them.”16 [emphasis added]
Eadie reports, “I experienced their thoughts and feelings about me,” but Erik’s story—like numerous others in the literature—goes further by stating that he witnessed his behavior as the other person.
While some NDE accounts may seem to go far afield, scientists are discovering patterns that reassure us that something substantive is occurring. For example, a widely used scale to classify and measure NDEs for the sake of more precise academic study was developed by Professor Bruce Greyson. According to Greyson, the phenomenon of life review is unique to NDEs, and his data shows that they are reported by 22 percent of experiencers. Oddly, Greyson found that more atheists who reported NDEs (literally 100 percent) reported having a life review than any other category of experiencer.17 One wonders: are their souls trying to tell them something?
I would suggest that our souls are always trying to tell us something. And it is for this reason that I can’t agree with Greyson that life reviews are exclusive to NDEs. Bear in mind that our souls are constituted by our most intimate and heartfelt experiences. It stands to reason that this most precious of all of our life assets should become more accessible to us, especially as we mature, gain perspective, and grow in wisdom. Indeed, I am witness to the fact that in advanced psychospiritual settings, a partial review of a life event can tumble or even hurl itself into consciousness. You too have likely noted how certain special memories spontaneously arise during prayer, in deep reflection, or in therapy settings—especially those memories that need examination for drawing life lessons that may have been missed along the way. No longer can our psychological defenses hold back these crucial insights, some of which are embedded in traumas of the past. Certainly almost all of us need to be reminded of a key activity or a significant past relationship whose import has fallen into neglect, especially when a relevant lesson involved has ripened for integration. Might these be prompts provided because of our soul’s superior intelligence?
I have watched in amazement as certain forgotten life experiences have arisen during long meditation retreats, dressed up in living color and almost demanding my scrutiny. These vivid, charged images appear almost as if on cue from some inner guide who seems to know my spiritual needs better than I do. And there are many other provocateurs of modified life reviews. The soul rises up in moments of danger, as Emily Dickinson teaches us. Falling in love can bring soul contents to our inner eyes—and I’ve even had such experiences while encountering powerful works of art such as operas, symphonies, and movies. Dreams can be symbolic media for life review, and no less than Carl Jung has made clear that a life review of sorts may take place if one connects the dots of a long series of dreams. But even given all these cases, it appears to me NDE life reviews unveil the soul like no other experience.
Shall we not at least follow the trails blazed by such poets as Dickinson and Keats, as well as NDE experiencers and scientists worldwide? They provide our point of departure in this book, but with the unprecedented detail in the Urantia Revelation, we can go further.
1 See the entire letter at: http://www.mrbauld.com/keatsva.html.
2 This interview is posted at the Amazon page for her book, To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again; A True Story (WaterBrook, 2012). Neal’s book has more than 2,400 favorable Amazon reviews.
3 Bennett had yet another NDE after a bout with stage IV cancer. See his story at http://ndestories.org/david-bennett/.
4 Such reports may pose difficulty for Urantia Book students because the UB clearly states that contact with the dead is forbidden. Yet today’s advocates for the phenomenon can point to a vast array of instances of evidentiary channeling, including cases documented in peer-reviewed scientific studies. I have personally come to the conclusion that the UB’s rule prohibiting ADC may have been suspended as an act of mercy during our time of planetary crisis.
5 The definitive documentary on the subject of ITC is Calling Earth, produced by Daniel Drasin. Drasin frames the controversy in ways that will quell the protests of all but the most hardened skeptic. See https://vimeo.com/101171248.
6 See a summary of Ring’s seminal research at http://www.near-death.com/experiences/experts04.html.
7 Roy L. Hill, PsyD, Psychology and the Near-Death Experience: Searching for God (White Crow Books, 2015), p 39.
8 Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot, The New Science of Consciousness Survival (Dog Ear Publishing, 2016), p 72. In this book directed at fellow scientists, Hugenot, who has a doctorate in engineering, provides perhaps the most extensive scientific discussion of the paradigm-shattering implications of ADC and NDE research. See especially pp. 115–134. Hugenot is the current president of another important paranormal research organization called the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies.
9 See this helpful summary: http://www.near-death.com/science/research/life-review.html.
10 http://www.dannion.com/dannion-brinkley-near-death-experience/
11 Cayce claimed the ability to access both the subconscious mind of the individual for whom he was giving a reading as well as their Akashic record, which he said was held in a great hall of records. “It is a hall without walls, without ceiling, but I am conscious of seeing an old man who hands me a large book, a record of the individual for whom I seek information. . . . Upon time and space is written the thoughts, the deeds, the activities of an entity. . . . Hence, as it has been oft called, the record is God’s book of remembrance.” (Excerpted from Edgar Cayce Reading 1650–1.) The UB broaches the idea that an additional record of our life is kept by our recording guardian seraphim, but little more is stated about that topic. In this connection, I discuss throughout this book the idea that our evolving souls—as they accrue wisdom and experience—contribute to the growth of the cosmic oversoul (also known in the UB as the Supreme Being). Further research should examine the possible connections between the seraphic records of one’s life, the oversoul concept of the UB, the many traditions about an Akashic record, and perhaps the emerging philosophical idea of nonlocality.
12 Quoted in: http://www.near-death.com/science/research/life-review.html
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Rajiv Parti, MD, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016), p. 44.
16 Erik Medhus and Elisa Medhus, MD, My Life after Death: A Memoir From Heaven (Atria Books/Beyond Words, 2015), p. 56
17 http://www.near-death.com/experiences/atheists01.html