Lessons from the Light

I don’t know why it took me so long to get my face into Kenneth Ring’s Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience. But I am glad I finally discovered it in my hands and then in my face.

Published in 1998, it’s one of the best books on NDEs I have ever read. To make it sweeter, it’s written especially for those of us who have not experienced an NDE and are rather envious of those who have.

(I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog that I most definitely temper my envy with the realization that people who have undergone this experience pay a hefty price for it. In many cases part of the price is intense physical pain. In many cases the NDEr faces intense feelings of rejection, either from having to come back into a broken body or dealing with people who refuse to listen to the NDEr’s story of life beyond the body. In many cases, the NDEr discovers newfound “gifts” that are difficult to accept, like being telepathically plugged into the world in a whole new (and not always fun) way. Beyond that, of course, is dealing with the instant and often profound rearrangement of reality the NDEr perceives.)

A major theme the book tackles is the life review. This is where the NDEr appears to step out of time to get a complete memory dump of astounding detail. It sounds awesome beyond belief. NDErs report remembering things during this life review that are minutiae to the max. You know, like the 13th spoonful of Cheerios on any given day during the 7th year of life.

NDErs report that not only do they feel (and re-experience) everything they ever thought and did, but they also feel everything their thoughts and deeds stirred up in others. One example from the book is the story of a bully who was a cruel kid. During his life review, he re-experienced every time he hit others kids. He also experienced what it felt like being the kid being hit! He received the impact of the punch he delivered.

It goes even farther than that. Say that you did something mean to someone. First you feel the impact of what you did. Then you feel the impact of how your thoughts and actions affected everyone else in the chain reaction of cause and effect. Say you cheated a guy out of some money. During the life review, you would feel his pain. You would also feel the ripple effect of how his pain affected others. Perhaps he, in turn, cheated someone else, who in turn slapped his wife, who in turn yelled at her child, who in turn tortured the cat. You would feel all of that because it was you who set it in motion.

Naturally, the same thing happens when you do good stuff. You experience the ripple effect.

This is not reward or punishment. It is just natural law that you reap what you sow. You create your own destiny by how you think and behave.

For us non-experiencers, of course, the issue is whether this vision of the life review is real or not. It would clearly make a difference if it were.

Listening to a steady stream of NDErs talking about their life reviews gives one the impression that 1) life reviews are real, and that 2) there’s a cosmic purpose why many of us are kept in the dark about them, as we are about much of the spirit world.

For those people who have them, life reviews make an indelible impression. They constitute part of the reason for the dramatic changes that people make when they return from such an out-of-body, not-out-of-mind journey.

Lessons from the Light is an awesome read, especially if you have not had an NDE and want to know more about what it’s like to have one.