If we knew what lay beyond this earthly existence, might we be living different lives?
Anita Moorjani, who has “come back from the dead” in her book, “Dying to Be Me,” recounts her out-of-body experience lasting a couple of earth hours. But out of her comatose body, she explains, there was no time, no space, no beginning, no end, therefore no sequencing, no context. Past and present lives were happening at the same time—no future, only an eternal simultaneity.
Forever and eternity
It’s a familiar, although incomprehensible, truth, like the concept of forever and eternity in relation to our souls, and our idea of the afterlife, which most of us are predisposed to accept, and that Anita reaffirms and expands on. She shares her experience in the hope that her discoveries might work for us as they did for her, whatever our circumstances.
In her case, her new understanding of her own and everyone’s “magnificence”—being nonseparate from “God” even here on earth—made her realize why, because of her inordinate fears, she had to have cancer, and how she was just as sure that, after coming back, she would be completely healed.
Anita assures us we don’t have to be near death to ask ourselves whether or not we are living our own authentic and unique lives fearlessly. Not as our mother’s daughter or somebody’s wife, etc., but as ourselves—or in Anita’s case, as
Anita. In that way, we, too, would discover our own magnificence, because even here on earth, we are not separate from the uncontained, formless, faceless love energy that makes all things possible—the energy that we call God.
In that realized state, there’s no place for sickness, broken relationships and any negative situation. There would be no fear to precisely cloud our eyes from seeing our own beautiful reality. And, without fear, our motivations for living and the choices we make would come only from love of ourselves, the love from which love of others and everything else emanates.
My own experience
I watched Anita on Karen Davila’s show and bought her book immediately. I was particularly interested to validate my own out-of-body experience, which happened 25 years ago.
Upon returning home from the hospital, where I had gone suffering menopausal hemorrhage, and been supposedly decidedly dealt with by a simple dilation and curettage procedure, my blood pressure dropped to almost zero. I collapsed and lost consciousness.
As I was fainting I felt something within me resist the fall and go the opposite direction, separating from my body.
I could see not only my inert body, but everything else as if I were an all-seeing camera of unlimited perspective. Until I read Anita—“I had somehow become part of everything”—I didn’t recognize that state.
Out of body, I became free of emotion and judgment. I felt that everything was as it should be, everything belonged and fit perfectly. By simply recalling that state, I’m able to accept any situation as part of God’s perfect plan.
The experience lasted no more than half an hour, and, unlike vague or incomplete or distorted memories from my earthly, conscious past, it is retrievable at will, as if it just happened moments ago.
Unlike Anita, however, I was not allowed to tap into much deeper insights. But it was enough for me to become less afraid of what may lie beyond.
Anita’s book left me the conviction that, indeed, it is only on this earth that we are allowed to experience all of life’s emotions, pleasurable and painful. It’s become easier for me to be grateful for whatever happens. I now take feelings, good or bad, as themselves a gift to humanity from God, but I also take them as just feelings—they are not who I am.
Anita says that, when we pass on, there’s no religion or judgment. Only bliss and unconditional love await us—as John Lennon’s song “Imagine” suggests.
Reordering priorities
Although the idea that there’s no day of reckoning could bother some people because it violates their human sense of morality and justice, still it’s good to know all our departed loved ones are secure in the afterlife. But who’s to know for sure? Having been gone only for two hours, Anita herself may not have seen the complete picture.
At any rate, it was all Anita needed for her and her husband to change the course of their lives, to reorder their priorities. For one thing, she has gone on a generous mission to share her reassuring experience. Encouraged by her, her own husband left a successful corporate life and put up his own business, a dream he had been too afraid to act on.
They are finally living for themselves, but not in any selfish way; they are no longer prisoners of such things as mindset, religion, culture, race—or fear. Indeed, they have lost all fear of life and death. Their hearts and minds are worry-free, full of love and gratitude for every moment of life.
Anita brings us her own good news: Life-changing miracles are available to us now while heaven yet waits.