A Letter to Neale

Reader Question:

Hi Neale, Thank you so much for "Home With God"!! Finally my experiences with death and dying have been validated. I have been a nurse for 30 years and have worked with the dying for many of those years. Being in the presence of this holy event over and over again with people, I have witnessed such remarkable things.

I have so many stories I could tell, but don't share because people would think I am making it up. My upbringing was in a home with atheist parents. Speaking about God or religion was punished. I graduated from nursing school and my first assignment was the Oncology floor. Patients were there either for treatment or to die. I had no experience with death and dying, nor any spiritual foundation at that time. It was such a gift to be there!

Slowly, I began to discover the miracle of death. It brought me to God and my present spiritual beliefs. I have no fear of death and I am excited about seeing all those beloved on the other side.

My question pertains to the steps immediately after death. The first, as I understand it, is to become aware of leaving the body and realizing that life has gone on. The second is to experience whatever it is that we believe about what happens after death.

In my readings about near death experiences, people have stated they experienced a life review right after death. All events of their life passed before them, like a movie, and they re-experienced them from the perspective of others. Therefore, if our behavior hurt another, we would feel the hurt of the other; and likewise, if we helped another, we would feel their gratitude. In your conversations, was a life review discussed? Is this something that happens? Or only to those that think it will?

nikki

Neale Responds

Dear Nikki,

HOME WITH GOD describes essentially the very same experience that you have described here. Please read Chapter 30. There you will find the following...

Imagine now a large room where the portions of the mural that you looked at when you were coming down the Corridor of Time are mounted on the walls.
The entire mural is not there, only the parts of the mural, only the sections of the overall painting, upon which you focused as you moved through the Corridor.
These images now hang on the walls like an art exhibit, and you walk through this “art gallery” slowly, examining the pictures one by one.
As you explore these paintings deeply you experience everything that is happening in the painting. Not just what is happening with you, but what is happening with everyone else in the painting.

These images represent each of the moments of your life, and now, examining them, you have for the first time a complete picture of all that is going on in every moment.

This is often not what you thought was going on, and it is always more than you imagined.

and from Chap 31...

...you see all that is in the "art gallery," all the experiences of your life, and you can look at them objectively, as if you were flipping through a picture book, or watching a movie or studying a great work of art—which each experience is.
You study each moment until you feel that you understand it.
Then you move on to the next image, the next moment, the next “painting”.
In this way you move through and around the entire gallery; you make sure that you have seen the complete collection.
Every moment is important to you, because you realize as you examine the individual moments of your life that those moments are what you used to create your experience of Self—and soon you are going to decide how you wish to recreate your Self anew.

Okay, hold it one minute. I’m confused about one thing. I know this is all a metaphor, and not really “how it is”—

—describing “how it is” without using metaphor would make it virtually impossible for you to comprehend.

I understand. But even knowing this is a metaphor, I have to “pick it apart” a little. There is one thing I am not clear about. I thought I “regained” my identity when I emerged from The Essence, when my “meeting with God” was over. Otherwise, how would I know “who I am”?

You do.

Then how is it that I can go through this “life review”—take a look at all these pictures of moments from my life just lived—and not feel anything? I’ve done some pretty ugly things, I’m sorry to say. And a few nice things, too. How is it, if I have regained the identity that I shed in the early stages of death, that I don’t have any feelings of sadness or happiness or suffering over that?

When your “meeting with God” is over you regain your awareness of the limited identity that you held in your last lifetime, true, but you do not move back into that identity.
Rather, you experience your Self as much larger than that, much more unlimited.

In Chapter 31 I go on to use an analogy to describe how it is possible for the soul to undergo such a "life review" without feeling any pain or discomfort while we watch the "scenes" of our life, but knowing in fullness exactly the experience that others had as a result of our choice, words, and actions.

Hope this clarifies things for you, Nikki. Thanks for writing.

Hugs,