WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?

ALICE asked the question: “WHO IN THE WORLD AM I?” The answer to that question may be another question: “WHO DO I THINK I AM?” Darwin shaped our answer some 150 years ago with his theory of evolution:“Mankind is descended from the apes.” Unlike Darwin, when Alice asked her question she was reaching out to the Unknowlables, to the mystery of
life that cannot be understood by human reason alone.

DARWIN’S ceiling is still in place in our mind, in our children’s minds, in all phases of our lives. His theory of evolution captivated the world in the 1860’s and we remain captive of it today, as evidence in our press that still features “new” evidence of our purported family relationship with the monkey-tree. (iii) Words have meanings, and “descended from the apes” has a misguided meaning in terms of our understanding of human destiny.

RELIGION works with concepts of faith and trust to counter the “reality” of physical death, while dealing with grief for those remaining behind. Efforts to reconcile religion with science find difficulty in reconciling the words of the knowables with the words of the Unknowlables where one is based upon “proof” and the other is based upon “faith.” Yet both should be brought together as an integral part of a complex mind.(iv)

COMMENCEMENT is a ceremony that marks the time of passage from one stage of experience to a higher one. We associate commencement with a degree of measurement of accomplishment in practical things, but not of life itself.

GRADUATION as destiny is a different thought. Graduation as destiny has been revealed to great minds over the centuries, but not thought of as a natural progression until recent times when individual cases of near-death experiences became recorded by the medical profession, and two doctors in particular became widely read through their research. At the time of my experience in 1963, there were no published reports that I could turn to for
understanding. It took five years before I felt free to publish essays about my out-of-body experience, and it was another sixteen years before I was persuaded to correspond with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, whose book ON DEATH AND DYING brought widespread awareness to the subject.

Dr. Raymond Moody published LIFE AFTER LIFE in 1976 on the subject of near-death experience, which sold more than 12 million copies. Today he is a much sought-after speaker, having established a justly deserved reputation as a knowledgeable surveyor of the frontiers of human consciousness. He was the one whose research with hundreds of near-death survivors first established the startling frequency of floating above the body, being drawn to a white light, of unspeakable beauty and feeling a peace that no words can tell. People who return from the brink of death after these experiences lose their fear of death and, in most cases, find themselves adopting a new perspective on life. In an interview with Daniel Redwood in 1995, Dr. Moody said, “They have complete confidence that what we call death is just a passage into another level of reality. All I can do is speak for
myself and for my many colleagues in medicine who have looked into this and we’re all convinced that the patients do get a glimpse of the beyond.”(v)

DEATH AND DYING by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had been considered a declaration of war on the denial of death in America. She had her outlook conditioned by her visits to the concentration camps following World War II, working in relief stations for refugees and visiting recently liberated camps. “I would never have gone into this work on death and dying without that experience. Our hospices – there are 2,100 in America – came out of the concentration camps.” But even as she was transforming the American approach to death, her own thinking was beginning to change. More and more she heard from her patients about strange experiences they had on the brink of death and beyond. Patients who floated above their bodies, who saw departed loved ones – but she was afraid to write about it in the beginning.(vi)

THE PROCESS CALLED LIFE was the seventh in a series of philosophical essays, which was included in the material sent to Elizabeth. In 1976, she wrote me: “This is a brief Hello to thank you for your contribution, your answers to my questions, the most impressive newspaper pictures of the crash, but most of all, the very unique and beautiful booklet entitled THE PROCESS CALLED LIFE. There are very few brief booklets that are put together with my own philosophy of life. I wonder whether they are available for special people or if you simply print them for your own friends and relatives as Christmas gifts. The idea is naturally very intriguing and the print very beautiful. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you once more for all your gifts, and do hope that one day our paths will cross.”

Dr. Elizabeth-Kubler Ross was a close neighbor and friend of Dr. Raymond Moody, and had purchased 300 acres of farmland from him to establish the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Center in Virginia. She had written the foreword to Raymond Moody’s famous LIFE AFTER LIFE in which he coined “NDE” (for Near-Death Experience). The two decades after the 1970’s marked the transformation of our culture at large, in which they were pioneers. The lectures given by Elizabeth during this period were titled Life, Death, and Transition. It was her focus upon Transition that lead to her second book, LIFE AFTER DEATH, in 1991. In her own words: “Mankind has finally learned to look at death, and when you look, you find. The time is right now. You cannot work with dying patients over any period of time and leave the spiritual out. It’s just the most beautiful thing that can ever happen to you. My real job is to tell people that death does not exist.”

(iii) AP Science writer, Joseph P. Verrengia, 3/25/04
(iv) Diagram I – The Knower
(v) Interview with Dr. Raymond Moody, www.drredwood.com
(vi)Interview with Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Magazine 1/22/95

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