Saturday, February 26, 2011

Living Death?

  Death has reached my door, again. Yesterday, my cousin, age 43, died of cervical cancer. She was diagnosed this time last year and death has finally won. I believe that cancer is one of the most horrible ways to die. Fortunately, her children, who are from Dallas, had the chance last weekend to say good-bye. It does not make it any easier. I did not have the chance to spend her last days on this earth and I wished I would have been able. She is the baby of the family having lost her father, then soon after, her brother. What fascinates me about death is what lies beyond. Here are some stories of near death experiences.

Ken Mullins


  I was in hospital following a heart attack. I was having lunch and I felt very strange. I had a cardiac arrest and then it was instant death, but I felt I was aware the whole time. It was a strange, strange feeling.
  It was like when you wake from a sleep type-of-feeling, but it really wasn't sleep, then next thing I went into darkness - really, really black. There was just not one speck of light.
  I used to suffer from claustrophobia, but it didn't concern me. It was peaceful, very, very peaceful and then I felt movement, as if I was going somewhere, but I didn't know where.
  I was drifting, but I wasn't sitting up or standing up. I was just drifting in the form that I was in, whatever form it might have been. At what speed I don't really know, but I know it was incredibly fast, as fast as electricity you might say. That speed factor was an important point; it was very, very quick.
  Eventually, after a period, I can't say time because there was no sense of time, the darkness dispersed slowly, ever so slowly, and then a light appeared and it seemed like it was a million miles away.
  It was like a hundred thousand suns. Bright, incredibly bright. I could look directly in that light. It was so very powerful and ever so bright.
  Words can't really describe the magnitude of the all-consuming love experienced when being in the light. And not only love but perfection, peace, serenity, calmness and beauty. I felt that I was safely home. I was over-awed with the experience.
  The wisps of cloud are the things I can still remember most clearly - I just put my arms out to feel these clouds and I couldn't feel anything, then I looked and I had no arms and then I looked down and I had no body.
  Strange as it must seem I had 360-degree vision because I looked behind me and saw I had no back. But I did fully comprehend the fact that I was probably the size of a ball, but it didn't frighten me it was a feeling of "oh well, so what".
  It changed my whole outlook on life, my whole outlook on people and changed me from a bigoted type of person to being more broad minded and letting people accept what they want to accept.
  I felt there was a form in the light that I could see, but it was only vague.
I felt ever so humble. I felt that this was something greater than greater and I shouldn't have been there.
I couldn't see much more than what I imagined would be a head, but there were arms or what I felt to be arms in the light. They were outstretched and they raised me up. I felt ecstatic, but I still couldn't see into the form, I could look into the light, but I couldn't define that figure.
It was related to me - I can't say spoken because there was no such thing as speaking, it was like mind language and my mission was made ever so clear - I was to go back and help people overcome the fear of death. I would go back and write two-and-half books. I've written two but I get apprehensive about the third! But it was never to be done for money.
  The experience is just so powerful, so all-consuming that the difficulty I had as a free spirit was fitting back into the human physical form. I just didn't seem to fit - I'm not talking size - it just didn't seem right.
I'd gone back home; back where I came from and then I had to come back here and do this mission - to help people by telling them that in death your mind, soul, spirit never cease.
  Later I could tell people what had happened in the hospital room while I was dead, it's not like I was sitting on the ceiling, because I was travelling toward the light, but somehow I could also see what was happening there, I knew exactly what was being done where and when - it was like being omnipresent.
  The doctor said I was dead for 20 minutes; they'd stopped working on me, called for the morgue attendant as rigor mortis set in to my body, and then all of a sudden they said I gave a cough and I was back.
Afterwards I went back and spoke to all the nurses and doctors about it. They said that when I revived I was still black and purple. It was the longest time they'd had someone gone before being revived after a cardiac arrest.
I think I had to die to learn to live. It changed my whole outlook on life, my whole outlook on people and changed me from a bigoted type of person to being more broad minded and letting people accept what they want to accept.
  As a Christian I felt my faith was the only faith and this experience made that view just ludicrous.
I firmly believe that people fear death because of the uncertainty of how and when they will die, but I think death is just going to go into another chapter, another section of your existence

 George Ritchie
At the age of twenty, George Ritchie died in an army hospital. Nine minutes later, he returned to life. What happened to him during those nine minutes was so compelling it changed his life forever. This is one of the most starling and hopeful descriptions of the realm beyond ever written.
Early in December 1943, as American troops fought the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, and as the Allies prepared to invade Normandy, a twenty year old army private named George Ritchie celebrated his good luck. He was to go to the Medical College of Virginia, where he would become a doctor at government expense.
Seven days before he was to leave for medical school, Private Ritchie developed a bad chest cold. It turned into influenza, and he was hospitalized. Over the next few days he seemed to recover. But the night before he was scheduled to leave for Richmond, his temperature soared to a life-threatening 106.5 degrees Fahrenheit. His surroundings became a dizzy blur. He heard the click and whir of the X-ray machine-- and then silence.
The young soldier woke up on a strange bed in a small, dimly lit unfamiliar room. His head was clear. In a panic that he might miss the train to Richmond, Private Ritchie jumped out of bed. "My uniform wasn't on the chair," he remembered later. "I looked beneath it. Behind it. No duffel bag either... Under the bed maybe? I turned around, then froze."
Ritchie was shocked to see that a young man was lying in the be that he had just vacated. "The thing was impossible," he recalled. "I myself had just gotten out of that bed. For a moment I wrestled with the mystery of it. It was too strange to think about- and anyway, I didn't have time." Private Ritchie shivered and ran from the room. The only thing he could think about was getting to Richmond. Out in the hall a sergeant walked toward him carrying an instrument tray. "Excuse me, Sergeant," Ritchie said. " You haven't seen the ward boy for this unit, have you?" The sergeant did not answer or even slow down. At the minute Ritchie yelled, "Look out!" but the man walked right past him. The next minute he was behind him, walking away without even looking back at Ritchie. Before he had time to wonder if he was delirious or dreaming, Ritchie found himself outside the hospital. It was dark and he was moving fast, as though flying through the air. He still wore only his army hospital pajamas but had no sensation of cold. After willing himself to slow down, Ritchie landed on a street corner in a town by a large river. People walked by without seeing him. He leaned up against a thick guy wire bracing a telephone pole, but his body passed right through it. "In some unimaginable way, " George Ritchie wrote later, "I had lost my firmness of flesh, the body that other people saw."
Oddly, given the bizarre circumstances, the young man's most pressing concern was that he was not going to be able to study medicine in his present disembodied form. He knew he had to get back to his physical body as fast as he could. The return to the hospital was quick, even faster than his voyage away from it had been. Running from ward toward and room to room, Ritchie searched the faces of sleeping soldiers. It was not easy to distinguish them in the dim light, so he decided to look for his identifying onyx and gold fraternity ring on their hands instead. After what seemed an eternity, Private Ritchie found a left hand with the correct ring on the third finger, but the body was covered with a sheet. For the first time he thought, "This is what we human beings call 'death', this splitting up of one's self." At the same time, he wondered how he could be dead and still be awake, thinking and experiencing.
Suddenly, the room was filled with an intense illuminations, and Ritchie saw that a man made of light had appeared. From inside himself he heard the words, "You are in the presence of the Son of God." Simultaneously, his whole life, "every event and thought and conversation, as palpable as a series of pictures," he said later, passed before him in review.
At the age of twenty, George Ritchie died in an army hospital. Nine minutes later, he returned to life. What happened to him during those nine minutes was so compelling it changed his life forever. This is one of the most starling and hopeful descriptions of the realm beyond ever written.
Then Private Ritchie woke up in his own body, to the astonishment of the physician who had just signed his death certificate. An orderly who had been preparing the body for the morgue noticed feeble signs of life in the corpse and called the doctor, who hastily injected adrenaline directly into the heart. Although Ritchie had not taken a breath for nine full minutes, he showed no symptoms of brain damage. The commanding officer at the hospital called the Ritchie case "the most amazing circumstance" of his career and signed an affidavit that George Ritchie had indeed made a miraculous return from virtual death on the night of December 20, 1943.

Please send me your comment, story or near-death experience to my email that can be found in the profile section of my blog.     theblogmeister

Where The Hell Have I Been?

  I have been lost for the past several weeks. I realize that I have not published anything on my blog and the reason is I did not want to relive what has happened to me, lately. It is soon to be the anniversary of my Mothers' death. I can still hear my Father calling me at 5am and telling me that he could not wake her up. The feeling that a force has reached in and ripped out your chest is very hard to forget. My wife and I was at my parents house in less than 5 minutes. When we walked into the back door my Dad was cradling my Mom and weeping. She was lying on the couch and appeared to be asleep when my Dad got up to make coffee. He made the coffee, looked at my Mom lying peacefully on the couch, then went into the den to turn on the TV. When the coffee was done my Dad poured himself a cup and went back to watch the news before going to work. At around 5am he turned off the TV and bent down to give my Mom a kiss on the cheek. Immediately he knew that something was not right. She felt cold. He called me and we made it to their house quickly. My Mother was dead. It looked as if she went to sleep and never woke up. It was the beginning of a whirlwind of activity. After we buried my Mom, the family spent a great deal of time talking about her. She was the first woman to have quadruple bypass heart surgery at UAB. It was done in 1969 when she was only 33 years old. The surgery lasted 17 hours. Dad shared some stories from her first of three open heart surgeries. He even relayed something that had happened to her that was not very well known in 1969. She had had a near death experience. She told of the bright light and the feeling of complete and total happiness. She recalled seeing her loved ones that had gone on before her. She also knew that my Dad could not take care of 5 children all under the age of 12. She remembered fighting the urge to stay in the utopia that she had gotten a taste. She just knew that she had to come back. It was not until my Mothers death that my Dad had shared this experience with us. What lies on the other side? For the next few weeks we are looking into this to find out if it is true. I believe it is.   theblogmeister