What’s Next?

If you want to score with a bestseller, write about your near-death experiences (NDE’s). Of course, you have to have some first and be a halfway decent writer. Along with UFO encounters, NDEs command near-universal interest and attention. After all, to quote Shakespeare, death is that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (Hamlet, III, I, 90-91) All travelogues will be highly esteemed...

My own NDE-like experience included both dying and being reborn. So it also adds a whiff of a third highly interesting topic: reincarnation. The scene is on the 11th floor of the Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago. The date is May 22, 1961. The situation is my initiation, or “Opening,” into the Indonesian spiritual practice called Susila Budhi Dharma, or Subud for short. I am 21 and a half. The exercises, which I am still doing 63 years later, take place twice weekly for 30 minutes each. One is not supposed to do anything, just stand in a room with other members of the same gender and wait to be moved, or trained, by God the Holy Spirit, which the Muslim founder of the exercises, Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo (d. 1987) referred to as the Great Life Force. For the first five minutes I just stood there. The thought came to me that I might not have been a good candidate for the process, and then a drama began playing out in my mind. I was in the forest with many others. We were all digging a trench. I was a boy, a teenager. A man in uniform walked by behind me. I saw a gun pointed at me. I said in German “Nein, Nein. Warum?” (“No, no. Why?”) Then I was shot in the side of my head and was painlessly dead. In my Chicago reality I fell down onto the carpeted floor of the exercise room and lay there for some time. It was the most relaxing experience I have ever had, before or since. Then a voice inside me said I had to go back down there. “No!” I responded. “This is better here.” “But you have no choice.” Next I experienced descending through the clouds like the angel-in-training Clarence in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I saw Manhattan Island below me. The next thing I knew, I was standing up and dancing around the room. Then the official in charge of the Opening said “Finish!” I and the other members sought out our chairs along the walls of the large room. And indeed, I was alive again and back in Chicago.
​
Interestingly, many years later I was on the faculty of a Lutheran summer camp, Holden Village, above Lake Wenatchee in west-central Washington State. Most nights there was entertainment provided by campers or staff. On one particular night a Lutheran pastor from the Seattle area who used hypnotic regression with sufferers from PTSD asked for subjects for a demonstration. I volunteered. When he regressed me, I re-experienced being shot, presumably in a pre-concentration-camp execution of Jews, and again felt great peacefulness before being commanded to be reborn in a new incarnation.

Of course, none of us in our lifetimes really knows what happens after we die. My one wish is that when it happens to me—I’m close to turning 85 so it shouldn’t be too long—I’ll be permitted to find out. But in my next blog I’ll report on what my late wife told me in a dream about her situation after she passed. Stay tuned.

Could it be like this? I hope that we’ll find out in due course. Creator: Ben Goode | Credit: Getty Images