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.qxd 6/6/08 4:44 PM Page 25Journeys in the afterlife 25light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety andwithout pain.The memory of very tragic experiences I had had wasclear but not saddening.I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had beentransmuted into love.Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated andunited the individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calmswept through my soul.I became ever more surrounded by a splendidblue heaven with delicate roseate and violet cloudlets.I swept into itpainlessly and softly and I saw that now I was falling freely through theair and that under me a snowfield lay waiting.Objective observations,thoughts, and subjective feelings were simultaneous.Then I heard a dullthud and my fall was over.7This profound experience stimulated his interest in finding out whetherother people had reported similar events in their lives.It was not a difficultsearch.In a short period of time, Heim was able to collect a large numberof accounts from war soldiers wounded in battles, masons and roofers whohad fallen from heights, workers who survived disasters in mountain projectsand railway accidents, and fishermen who had nearly drowned, and, aboveall, Alpine climbers, like him, who had survived near-death situations.Hepresented his findings in a paper given at the Swiss Alpine Club in 1892.Heimreported that 95 per cent of the cases he collected were strikingly similar.He came to the conclusion that some accidents were much more horribleand cruel for observers than for the victims.Further studies were made on death-bed visions (DBV), which emergedfrom the observers of the last moments of the dying, rather than from indi-viduals who recovered from a situation of temporary death.DBVs presentstrong similarities to near-death accounts.The phenomenon was largely inves-tigated by Ernesto Bozzano (1862 1943), an Italian psychical researcher anda strong defender of the concept of survival of bodily death, whose workis almost forgotten today.His survival model is based on what he calledthe phenomenon of bilocation , a term he used for the phantom limbsensations experienced by amputees, autoscopy, out-of-body and near-deathexperiences, and a variety of luminous or cloud-like emanations that clair-voyants claimed left the body at the moment of death that he thought of decisive importance to the argument for the survival of death (Alvarado2005).He believed these phenomena indicated the existence of an ethericbody within the somatic body that may exit the physical body during itslife (Bozzano 1934: 8).The interest Bozzano showed in survival after-deathlater continued with Sir William Barrett, a member of the Society forPsychical Research.In collaboration with his wife, Barrett collected numer-ous accounts of dying persons who reported the presence of deceased rela-tives, or religious figures, who were assisting them during the process of dying(Barrett 1986).However, the most extensive investigation into DBV wascarried out in 1961 by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson.Their work was 9780415455206_4_002.qxd 6/6/08 4:44 PM Page 2626 Journeys in the afterlifeinitially published as a pilot study Death bed Observations of Physicians andNurses (1961), and later as a book entitled At the Hour of Death (1977), wherethey provided an examination of a detailed questionnaire from two thou-sand doctors and nurses about the experiences of their dying patients in theUS and in India.They came to the conclusion that 10 per cent of patients,who were conscious in the last hour before dying, experienced vivid visions;52 per cent of these visions represented dead persons who were known tothe patients; 28 per cent were of living persons; and 20 per cent were of reli-gious figures (Osis and Haraldsson 1977).Other interesting results emergedfrom a study by Russell Noyes and Donald Slymen in 1971, who interviewed186 survivors of serious illness or accidents.The researchers were able to iden-tify recurrent patterns and they divided them into three stages: (1) the firststage is the phase of resistance, which is characterized by the fear of dyingand the struggle for life; (2) the second stage is a life review , during whichthe person relives important events, or their entire life; and (3) the final stageis a period of transcendence, during which the dying experience a mysticalrapture and a sense of union with a cosmic consciousness (Noyes andSlymen 1971).Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax carried out research with dying patientswith cancer.In their book The Human Encounter with Death (1977), theyargued that the passage from life to death could be seen as a rite of pas-sage.Elizabeth Kübler-Ross also studied the cases of many terminally illpatients, some of whom recovered from nearly fatal experiences.In her book,On Death and Dying published in 1969, she came to the conclusion that deathis simply like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon.Some of her patientsdescribed how someone was there to help them during this transition fromlife to death.This figure was sometimes identified as a deceased familymember or friends, an angel or a spirit being.In 1975, German Lutheran minister Johann Christophe Hampe wasworking on similar studies on dying people and on victims of accidents, whichwere later published in English in 1979 under the title To Die is Gain.In hisbook, Hampe attempts to illustrate the experience of death as lived fromwithin.He came to the conclusion that, far from being anticipated withfear and dread, death should be experienced as a gain.The presence of somecommonalities in the accounts he collected made him conclude that theseexperiences were something more than dreams and hallucinations.Hewrote:If dying is not oppression, my knowledge that I am going to die will nolonger oppress me.Instead of making me feel melancholy it will expandand deepen me.My loneliness is broken because these experiencesstrengthen my belief in the continuance of an indestructible core in meand my fellow men.(Hampe 1979: 134 5) 9780415455206_4_002 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]