It Often Takes a Long Time, Much Longer than Expected

My astonishment is not abating from re-reading books now in my old age that I read when I was young. I am able to see so much more in them now and there is a feeling that they are true and faithful friends.

My recent re-reading of Betty Eadie's account of her near-death experience is a case in point. I actually feel stunned by reading it now, there is so much magnificence there that I did not see before.

Pim van Lommel mentions in his book on NDE's that the experience deepens over a long time for the people who have them:

As mentioned earlier, the process of integrating and accepting an NDE may take many years because of its profound impact on people's values and outlook on life. Finally, the lifelong transformational effects of an experience that lasts only a few minutes was a striking and unexpected finding.

Perhaps there is some way in which it helps to die, as it were, to so much that is important to us and to experience how upside down and illusionary and shallow things are which we and the world hold dear. Then we can let the truth be.

Van Pimmel relates the following incident:

Research has also shown that most patients remain silent about their near-death experience because nobody believes them when they first try to talk about it. This was confirmed during and NDE conference at an American university hospital in 1994 attended by some three hundred people. After a few presentations, a man got up and said, “I've worked as a cardiologist for twenty-five years now, and I've never come across such absurd stories in my practice. I think this is all complete nonsense; I don't believe a word of it.” Whereupon another man stood up and said, “I'm one of your patients. A couple years ago I had a cardiac arrest and had an NDE, and you are the last person I would ever tell.”

One of the things I am getting from this is a vision of the possibility that we will eventually be able to see that many of the glimpses we have had that seemed fantastic or impossible, magnificences that we haven't dared believe, we may see clearly one day to be true.