Near Death Experiences and National Geographic

David Bennett ("voyage of purpose") quoted here, tells his amazing story in my book "Its a Wonderful Afterlife Vol 1." 

What's fascinating about David's experience is he saw into the future, experienced himself surviving cancer, so when decades later, the doctor came to give him the bad news that he had weeks to live, he recognized this new doc's face from his NDE decades earlier. 

When the doc said "you won't survive this" he knew he would survive it and told him so. "You're in denial" the doc said. Turns out the doc was the one in denial. 

Good to see national geo opening up their field of vision.

From National Geographic's website:

"Coming Back From the Brink of Death"

What you see and feel in a near-death experience can profoundly change the rest of your life.



"One night off the California coast in 1983 David Bennett, chief engineer on a research vessel, and his crew tried to outrun a storm in an inflatable boat. About a mile from shore the boat was capsized by a 30-foot wave, and they were tossed into the chilly Pacific. His life vest was faulty, so his lungs filled with water. He remembers feeling total bliss. Something or someone told him it wasn’t his time, though, and after 18 minutes underwater he popped up to the surface. His crewmates, who were all floating on the water, were shocked to see him."

You can see an interview with David here, that is the source of the chapter in "It's a Wonderful Afterlife Volume One"

By Robin Marantz Henig

Photographs by Lynn Johnson

"At a family picnic at upstate New York’s Sleepy Hollow Lake, Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon, had just tried to call his mother on the phone. An approaching storm sent a lightning bolt through the phone into his head, stopping his heart. Cicoria says he felt himself leave his body, moving through walls toward a blue-white light, eager to be one with God. He emerged from his near-death experience with a sudden passion for classical piano, creating melodies that seemed to download, unbidden, into his brain. He came to believe he’d been spared so that he could channel “the music from heaven.”



"A head-on collision landed Tricia Barker, then a college student, in an Austin, Texas, hospital, bleeding profusely, her spine broken. She says she felt herself separate from her body during surgery, hovering near the ceiling as she watched her monitor flatline. Moving through the hospital corridor, she says, she saw her stepfather, struggling with grief, buy a candy bar from a vending machine; it was this detail, a stress-induced indulgence he’d told no one about, that made Barker believe her movements really happened. Now a creative writing professor, she says she’s still guided by the spirits that accompanied her on the other side."



"Carol Burke was seriously injured in a car crash in the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport employee parking lot, requiring surgery to remove her spleen and repair numerous broken bones. She lost half her blood. Feeling herself floating near the ceiling of the hospital room, she could see her mother and a friend at the foot of the bed, afraid that she would not return. She remembers feeling nothing but peacefulness and love." 



"Ashlee Barnett was a college student when she had a serious car crash on a remote Texas highway. Her pelvis was shattered, her spleen had ruptured, and she was bleeding profusely. At the scene, she says, she moved between two worlds: chaos and pain on one side, as paramedics wielded the jaws of life; and one with white light, no pain, and no fear. Several years later she developed cancer, but her near-death experience made her confident that she would live. She has three children and counsels trauma survivors."



"Pam Kircher contracted meningitis at the age of six. She remembers being in her room in a small house outside St. Joseph, Missouri, looking down at a girl on the bed. Immediately after she recognized herself, she returned to her body. Fearing ridicule and ostracism, she kept this near-death experience secret for almost four decades, yet it motivated every life decision she made. She became a family-practice physician. Now retired, she works in hospice care and talks openly about her experience, hoping it will bring comfort to people at the end of their lives."


For more information on near death experiences, or to share one that you've experience, highly recommend checking into iands.org - where I met David Bennett.

Memories, Dreams and Reflections

"Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious."  Carl Jung "Memories, Dreams and Reflections."

Carl Jung notes that "Man's task is.. to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious."

He also notes that man's "destiny.. is to create more... consciousness."

Perhaps.

Then on the other hand, perhaps consciousness isn't created solely in the brain, but is experienced by the brain.  That part of experiencing consciousness is reconnecting to who we are - and more importantly - who we once were. 

As I delve into accessing information from the Flipside - the journey I've mapped out for myself in the next book "Hacking the Afterlife" - I find that the more I delve into the idea that consciousness is not only created by the brain - but that it requires access to the "motherboard" - not the idea of a vast "collective unconscious" that Jung suggested - but individual consciousness of each person, that resides back in the mainframe of the computer, and is accessible when we are "outside of our physical bodies" - whatever that implies.

People who've had near death experiences, out of body experiences, under deep hypnosis, sometimes during a drug induced adventure - people are able to "shut off" the filters in the brain that keep us from accessing this information on a daily basis, and allow us to glimpse the nature of things.  That being that each one of us has a vast library of previous experiences, lifetimes to draw from - and that library exists between lives.

But as they say; the veil is thinning.  

As if the mechanical nature of the filters seems to be easing up, or the energetic construction of the filters seems to be adjusting to allow us more access to this point of view, or information.

How can accessing this information improve my life?

That's ultimately the point of understanding the nature of existence - not to realize that "all is relative" and that "I only exist relatively" (even though that appears to be accurate) but finding a way to process this new information about the nature of our existence so it allows us to enjoy and take advantage of what we're experiencing on a day to day basis.

One profound way that it can affect a person is to realize that what appear to be obstacles, setbacks and trauma, may have some genesis in the between lives realm.  Not in terms of "karma" - but in terms of "what kind of puzzle or task can I design for myself that will help me to overcome this issue?" 

If every task, obstacle or steback becomes an "apparent lesson" - then we can see them for what they really are.  Stumbling blocks that allow us to learn lessons by overcoming them.  The dark stone in your path turns out to be the glowing light of understanding once you've accomplished going through it.

What's that got to do with Presidential politics?

Well, imagine for a moment that each person that is running for office represents some part of the human experience.  Vanity, compassion, negativity, wisdom, etc.  And then imagine that whomever is running for office at this particular time is someone who helps people to examine these human characteristics.  Either to fight for their point of view, or to understand through compassion that they need to support someone who is aligned with their own beliefs and life experience.

Hard to imagine that whatever happens on the planet, is part of the learning experience we all go through.  Like classes in college, or a giant university, each one of us learns from setbacks, failures, or learns that working harder brings positive results.  One can only hope that is the case.

My two cents.