Life After Life

     This Saturday in Chyk class, Swamiji arranged a documentary for us called life after life which showed the experiences of people who have very nearly experienced death but come back to live from that state. Dr. Raymond Moody Jr. has devoted his life to studying such people and their experiences to unravel the mystery of death and out of the 2000 cases he has seen, 6 of them are discussed at length in this documentary which spans about an hour.

     All of the people in the documentary claimed that they could see their bodies lying on the bed and themselves, they floated above freely, without sensing the pain which is a characteristic of the body and not the true me. The true self was detached from the body and pervaded all the boundaries. It had no space, no time. They felt like being everywhere simultaneously. Seeing everything at once. This feeling although now it makes them ecstatic, looked to them as though it was with them all the time.

      Some of them said that they could see a tunnel dark and scary and making them afraid and uneasy and could simultaneously hear the doctors say, "He's passed away". Although their consciousness assimilated this knowledge, their body didn't respond and on top of it the darkness scared the shit out of them. But soon at the end of this tunnel, they could see a light so bright that they had to hold their vision for some time to get used to it. This light they say was a marker of destruction of ignorance and they again felt at ease, that this is the infinite from where we come and where we have to go. And that brightness is where uncertainty holds no room and thereby discern that fear of death is not rational and that we are just going to go to where we belong, so no point in getting afraid of it.

     Another interesting thing which they saw was a panoramic view of their life from their birth till now. All pictures since their birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, all striking them simultaneously and they could see how their behavior affected others, their kith and kin people, good and bad all together. And all of them admitted that in the final stage, they could see the random acts of kindness done to other people unconditionally which were manifestations of the love which pervades space-time even in the conscious world and testified that love is the only rational act.

      We had a small group discussion thereafter.All of this unless experienced personally is very difficult to believe and trust but faith is what one can hold in their convictions as they seem to make some sense. But again the rational mind or the intellect challenges their beliefs. It thinks of them as some dogmas laid down to evade thinking and in some remote way make sense of them. Until the next time I see Swamiji, the questions shall keep lurking in my mind and I would post the answers which Swamiji gives me the next time I see him. Au revoir till then.