A near death experience (NDE for short), is not quite as it sounds. The individual does not come close to dying and then come back. The person actually dies. The heart stops pumping, sometimes for an amount of time that is much longer than is possible to survive without brain damage afterwards. However, there is no brain damage usually after an NDE is experienced. How could this be? There must be a third party involved with repairing the damage done during the NDE.
The message I want to deliver today is that of how near death experiences change our spiritual beliefs. Even by looking at the term NDE, we see the word ‘experience’. All the major religions that are followed today began with a supernatural experience that a human being had. These experiences moved the person so much, as to give them the motivation to get as many people as possible to know about it and for them to follow this newly discovered spiritual path. Mystics throughout the ages have had direct experience with the spirit world and this is how they turned their belief into something substantial. Through spiritual experiences, their faith was strengthened tremendously. What does this have to do with NDEs? Well, a near death experience is exactly what mystics, shamans, and founders of religions had experienced. They all came in contact with the spirit world, the nonphysical plane of reality. However, in the case of people who had NDEs, they did not leave the physical world at that time since it was not time for them just yet.
Without discussing what an NDE is in depth, since that will be talked about at a later time, I will mention how changes in beliefs occur from NDEs. People who have an NDE die. This is a fact. They are clinically dead. There are millions who have had a NDE and the reoccurring theme is the same…becoming one with the Light. This is the Source that we are all longing to reconnect with and go back to. Religious beliefs and preferences change, sometimes drastically, after NDEs. Obviously, this is telling us something.
Below is a chart with religious preferences before and after a NDE.
This is a very interesting chart. First of all, we can notice that from this sample population, nobody became or stayed an atheist after having a near death experience. Also, people who had previously said they were religious (meaning participating in ritualistic and dogmatic activities), saw a huge decrease to zero after the NDE. Perhaps the greatest point of interest of those who embraced Spirituality after their NDE. Before the NDE, there were only 2 individuals who said their beliefs were closest to Spiritual/Universal. After the NDE, that number jumped to 49! That change is astronomical. If we were to use this sample population and magnify it from its size of 230 to 230,000,000 which is about 80 million less than the population of the United States, those statistics would consist of 2,000,000 people having Spiritual/Universal beliefs before the NDE and an amazing 49,000,000 people following Spirituality after the NDE. Compare 0.86% with 21.3% and clearly, this is telling us something.
As Spirituality does not belong to any single religion, nor any single creed or dogmatic system, it makes sense that it would be the choice of a person who had just had a NDE. Perhaps they realize, while they are in the spirit world for those few minutes, that there is no one religious belief system that is the “only way”. Out of the 100,000+ religious belief systems, it is not our job to search for the one that is the “only way” but to realize that all beliefs are searching and attempting to attain the same thing, they just do not agree on the methods used to attain those goals. Perhaps this research will generate some hope, insight, or at the very least, food for thought and meditation so that you may be able to come to self-realization of the purpose for life.
