NDEs part 3: Reincarnation, Research, & Gnosis

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system. My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences. Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way. Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say. “Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.” So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791, “When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’” He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’” This was printed in Beaufort’s ...