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"ANOTHER LOOK..." is an ongoing column I write for Vital Signs Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the International Association For Near-Death Studies. Each segment will appear here from now on, as well as in the Newsletter. This new feature gives me a format with which to explore varied issues about near-death states. Should you wish to make a comment or want to suggest future topics, please feel free to contact me. I may be able to use your suggestions directly. Thank you. P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)
P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) P. O. Box 7691 Charlottesville, VA 22906-7691
© 1998 P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)
I would like to share with you a few of my case studies that suggest the survival of consciousness after death. These stories have each been verified by relatives of the experiencer involved. The family of Carroll Gray of Atlanta, Georgia, is still shocked by the fact that at the age of two, while "dead" of hypothermia, she spoke with a grandfather who had died several years before she was born. After Carroll recovered from her ordeal, not only did she accurately describe the man she saw (by picking out his picture from a family album she had never seen before), but she relayed numerous and exact details about the two-bladed pocket knife he let her play with and his gold watch and chain - including the fact that the watch had stopped at 1:17 and the knife casing had a decoration on it of a little shield surrounded by a flower garland and dated 1917. She also said her grandfather told her the shiny things belonged to her. Although her family was overwhelmed by what she told them, no one would give her the "shiny things" as promised to her in death, until, when she was twenty years old, her mother, while sorting through papers, was flabbergasted to find the grandfather's missing will. In it, he had bequeathed his watch, chain, and gold pocket knife to his granddaughter and namesake. At the time of his death, he had no granddaughter or namesake, nor did anyone have any inkling that he expected to have one, or that through perhaps an act of precogni- tion he was privy to futuristic knowledge. Carroll was finally pre- sented the treasures her grandfather said she could have when she "died" at the age of two. There is no way any of this could have been imagined by the two- year-old child, especially just after being resuscitated, and with such precise details that were all later verified. I discuss this case in greater detail in Children of the New Millennium, as Carroll had numerous near-death experiences in childhood, plus she was born with stunning pre-birth awarenesses. Lloyd L. Haymon of Friendsville, Texas, did not recognize the signs that a coronary was about to happen. He drove home with a tre- mendous pain in his lower right side, consulted a medical self-help book for advice, then called his wife. The next thing he remembers is lying on his living room floor with paramedics all over him, and the rush to reach a hospital with his wife sitting on the passenger side of the ambulance. His was a "code blue." Lloyd left his body and had a vision of his wife dressed in the clothes she once wore when he first met her. The vision faded as he "yo-yoed" from a space near the ambulance ceiling to inside his body, and then back out again. When he finally stayed in his body, he saw a strange sight: "At my feet is my younger brother who had died years before of cancer at the age of thirty. He is shaking his head as if to say 'No, no, it's not your time.' On my brother's shoulder is a bird. I look closer and it is my bird, Doolittle the parakeet. I couldn't take my eyes off Doolittle, and I want to ask someone why Doolittle is on my brother's shoulder." After the crisis was over, Lloyd recalled: "As my wife and I head home from the hospital, I ask her if my bird is home. She said no, so I say to her 'Take me to Wal-Mart because I need to get another bird.' She refuses at first, but I get my bird, Sailor. We let him out of his box once home and he flies up to the curtain and sits. My wife then tells me that Doolittle died for no apparent reason the day I had my heart attack. He died while the paramedics were working on me. She let him lie on the bed for three days before she buried him. "After she speaks, the new parakeet flies down and lands on my shoulder. Young, untrained wild birds do not do this. I put out my finger and Sailor jumps on it. The little guy says, 'Doolittle.' My wife and I both come unglued. Sailor became tame right then, and be- gan to talk, just like Doolittle did. When he died, we buried him next to Doolittle. My life changed forever. I became creative and started building furniture. I went back to school and became a clini- cal hypnotherapist. My attitudes, the way I treat people, have changed 100%. I know this happened, and I no longer fear death. In Beyond the Light, I spoke of Margaret Fields Kean who nearly died in 1978 after being hospitalized for about three weeks with severe phlebitis. A blood clot had passed to her heart and lungs and she became deathly ill. Then she was given injections for nausea that, due to the blood thinners she had previously received, caused internal hemorrhaging. Pandemonium reigned as she slipped away. While absent from her body, she witnessed the scene below her, then heard and saw people in the waiting room down the hall - right through the walls - as well as nurses at their station. She also knew their thoughts. Margaret went on to have a transcendent near-death experience in which she instantly knew and understood many things; her future, and that she would become a healer. This completely contradicted her vision of herself at that moment in her life, for she was content being a super-mom farm wife who rode horses, taught Bible classes, led 4-H and Girl Scout groups, gardened, canned, and baked bread. A heal- er? Ridiculous! Yet, when Margaret revived, she immediately began to heal other patients in the room around her by "reaching out" to them. Then, she "projected" into the isolation room of a white boy charred black by severe burns. She "sat" next to him on the bed, introduced herself, and proceeded to counsel him about his purpose in life. She told him it was okay if he chose to die as God was loving and he had nothing to fear. Months later, while continuing her recovery and still in great pain, Margaret was attending a horse show when a couple, hearing the loudspeaker announce her daughter's name as a winner, sought her out. They were parents of the severely burned boy. Before he died, he had told them about meeting Margaret and relayed all the wonderful truths she had told him about God and about life. The parents were thrilled to have finally located her so they could say thanks for what she had done for their son. The dying boy had identified her by name - even though the two had never physically seen each other or verbally spoken in any manner, nor had any nurse known that the two had ever communi- cated, nor had it been possible that Margaret ever could have known if the isolation room was even occupied much less who might be there. Faced with the challenge of "physician, heal thyself," Margaret Fields Kean successfully facilitated her own healing, then later that of thousands of others, before she moved to South Africa where she taught the native healers of Swaziland and Transkei her techniques. People trained by her carry on in her stead now that she has retired. I could share thousands of these case studies, each with some aspect that implies the survival of consciousness after death; yet, what impresses me the most is not evidence of an afterlife, no matter how compelling, but something far more important. The newer fields of inquiry along this line - nearing death awareness (NDA), after death communications (ADC), and pre-birth ex- perience (PBE) - all point to the possible existence of a single life-stream, a life continuum. That means the subject is not death; it is life. The concern is not survival; it is the ongoing journey. What emerges from the stories people tell, and from the research done about the stories to establish their value and authenticity, is a central theme indicative of a progression of souls, who seem to exit and enter a lifesteam as they negotiate a luminous spiral of learning and growth. The notion of an afterlife, then, is rather misleading in that it doesn't fit the profile given by millions and millions of people, a profile so persuasive it demands to be taken seriously. Take what we've learned so far (about subjective experiences), and compare that with recent revelations from the field of quantum physics (about ob- jective experiences), and you get an exact match: what physicist David Bohm calls the implicate order - where everything folds together in an unbroken wholeness - a universal matrix of worlds and realities without number in a continuum without end. It might behoove us in our enthusiasm to recount and explore near-death experiences to keep what we find in context with the true territory. . . a redefinition of life itself. ______________________________________________________________________ The paperback edition of Dr. Atwater's Future Memory in available via any bookstore by mid-July this year from Hampton Roads Publishing Com- pany. Children of the New Millennium should be on bookstore shelves by August 11th from Three Rivers Press; and several months later, look for her latest, The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Near-Death Experi- ence due out from Macmillan (her co-writer for this is David Morgan). New entries are appearing on her website at www.pmhatwater.com (especially in the NDE-Related Items of Interest section - which is a free listing of products and services either aimed at NDErs or by them for others). Available right now is the Subtext to Children of the New Millennium, which contains the three "missing" appendices edited out of the Children's book - either download directly from her website or order from her at P. O. Box 7691, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7691.
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