PSYCHIC CHANGES

There are many people who have a hard time accepting anything labelled "Psychic." I can understand this, as I felt that way too, before I started to research the subject after my own first psychic experience and the research that I have since done on N.D.E`s. I became aware of dozens of scholarly articles that described psychic N.D.E aftereffects.

People who have N.D.E`s often believe that they have increased psychic abilities following their experience. These are not stereotypical people who gaze into crystal balls or dress like gypsies. Rather, they are people who are ordinary to the core but with one great difference: their ordinary life has been touched by an extraordinary N.D.E. Following their N.D.E`s many describe such psychic abilities as empathy (the ability to tell how another person is feeling ), intuition or precognitive skills.

In the field of N.D.E study, 45.0 percent of those surveyed answered `yes` to the question " Did you have any psychic, paranormal, or other special gifts following the experience? " Of the remaining, 19.1 percent weren`t sure, and 35.9 percent answered `no`. Although a positive response of 45 percent is astounding, I suspect the actual number might be higher. Those N.D.Er`s who were small children at the time of their experience may not have known that their current psychic gifts were present before their N.D.E experience. Also some N.D.Er`s describe dramatically heightened psychic abilities immediately after their experiences that diminish in a variable amount of time.

Here are two of the many stories collected during the research of N.D.E`s. These examples will give you an idea of some of the psychic abilities described by N.D.Er`s.

A lady called Romona was in an aluminium boat that slammed into a barge and flipped over. Romona was trapped beneath the barge. Struggling to reach the surface, she ran out of air and felt herself leave her body. She said that she felt "fine and so happy" in this out-of-body state.

Rescued and resuscitated with CPR, Romona discovered that she had psychic aftereffects. One of her best examples came on the telephone with her sister. Here is her story:

My brother-in-law died in 2000. He did not believe in the afterlife. I was on the phone with my sister, who lived in California. All at once I could see yellow, like someone had put a yellow sheet of paper in front of my eyes. Then it was gone and my room seemed to be filled with bubbles, thousands of yellow bubbles. They then went and I heard a voice in my head saying " Tell her about the bubbles! " The voice was so loud that I couldn`t hear my sister anymore. So I said " I have to tell you something! It makes no sense to me though, and it sounds a little crazy but I have to tell you: yellow bubbles. " She couldn`t believe it and was so happy. She then told me that one night, she and her husband watched a movie called Houdini. Bob, her husband was making a comment of there being no afterlife. She told him that she would think of a secret word....and whoever died first.....if there was an afterlife!....to somehow get the secret word to the one left here. To my surprise, those were the secret words: yellow bubbles. She picked them because they made no sense and nobody would ever randomly pick them or blurt those words out.

Marcia was under a one-and-a-half-ton structure when it collapsed. She suddenly realized that she was having an out of body experience, and then her late father and her sister appeared to her. Her sister had died of brain cancer several years earlier and her father had died just four months ago. Her father kept telling her to stay calm and breathe. After recovering from the accident and her N.D.E Marcia had started to have premonitions about future events, this is one of the most striking of her recollections:

I woke one morning and told my husband that a friend and business associate of his had died. I had talked to this person over the phone but had never met him. He wasn`t someone that I naturally thought about. I just matter of factly told my husband that he had died. A short time later my husband got a phone call, and a friend told him that this man had died...When my husband got the phone call and the man told him who had died, my husband remarked that he already knew about it. Then he remembered that it was me who had told him. I have had other premonitions about events that were to happen, but they weren`t life shattering things. I just knew different things that were to happen prior to them happening.

I love the casual way in which N.D.Er`s tell of these psychic events. As one told me, " I have come to realize that we all have the ability to `read` one another. There is something in the near death experience that triggers that ability in us ".

Although there has been a substantial amount of research into psychic near-death-experience aftereffects, few researchers have directly tested the psychic abilities of N.D.Er`s. This will certainly be an important area for future N.D.E research. If I have discovered anything in my studies of this subject, it is that near death experiences touch on a lifetime of questions that, to answer one, leads to a dozen more.

DECREASED FEAR OF DEATH

Few of us experience mortality as directly as do people who have had a near death experience. Yet despite having the frightful experience of nearly dying, most N.D.Er`s do not report an increase in their fear of death, but rather a decrease in their fear, or as in my case a complete loss of fear of death altogether. This is a consistent finding in a number of previously published studies. Here in brief is what N.D.Er`s have to say about death:

Catherine who nearly died after surgery, reported,

I had always been terrified of death, of oblivion. I no longer fear death at all now!

Lauren was felt by the EMS team to be dead on arrival after a severe accident. She wrote in one study:

I am no longer afraid of death. I know now deep in my soul that there is so much more after life. I feel that once I have learned what it is that I am supposed to learn in this life or completed a task that I have yet to complete, that I will be rewarded with a life after death as will all of us!

Sharla, who nearly died of respiritory arrest, claimed:

The most significant part of the experience is that to me there is nothing to fear of death.

The fear of death is one of humanity`s most powerful sources of anxiety. There are many people today who are so fearful of death that they are unable to fully live a normal life. For these people, this fear may extend beyond the fear of their own death; they may fret endlessly about the life and health of others. The message N.D.Er`s share including their consistent description of reduced or absent fear of death, is so powerful that I am not surprised when people tell me that their personal fear of death was diminished just by reading accounts of near death experiences.

Those who have an N.D.E may still fear the actual process of dying. After all it often involves discomfort or pain, though modern medicine has made tremendous progress in easing that discomfort. Dying also involves a seperation from our loved ones and all that is familiar in the world. However, the great majority of N.D.Er`s believe that they have experienced first-hand of what lies beyond death. And what they experienced beyond death`s door leaves many of them fearless when they think about death. For most N.D.Er`s their lack of fear of death is associated with a conviction that death is not final and that a wonderful afterlife is real.

In its own way, the near-death experience has a healing effect on most of the people who have them. People who have an N.D.E may never fear death again. Although they don`t necessarily become religious, N.D.Er`s often state that they have become more spiritual, and with that change comes a belief in the sacredness of life and a special knowledge that serves to guide them for the rest of their lives.

INCREASED BELIEF IN AN AFTERLIFE

People who have a near-death experience are generally convinced that after bodily death a wonderful afterlife awaits them. They believe that they have personally experienced the after-life, and they like myself are convinced of its reality. At the NDERF website, people who have had a near-death experience have been quite open in describing the afterlife they encountered. There are hundreds of descriptions of what many N.D.Er`s describe as `heavenly realms`. When these are read consecutively, they provide an impressionistic view of what the heaven of N.D.E`s looks like. Here are two examples to illustrate what I mean.

David, who had a near-death experience after a heart attack in hospital, wrote,

Flatlined___went to a place that was beautifully lit....like the sunshine but much prettier and more golden ( kind of like sepia tones ). Seemed like a neighbourhood, and I was shown around to all the people that I loved and missed and they were all happy.

Kristin, after a seizure that stopped her heart and breathing, reported,

I feel so tacky saying this since it`s so stereotypical, but there was a bright white light, and I went to it, and when I got there, and I touched it, everything was beautifully white and scintilating and warm; it smelled sweet and inviting, like warm vanilla sugar. There were these unearthly beings and they talked to me to calm me down and stopped me from being frightened!

Ruben, whose near-death experience took place during a cardiac arrest, reported,

At first I was floating, surrounded by a very white and brilliant light, and as I descended I noticed that the white light was not just light: there were very, very white clouds that I was passing through. After coming through the clouds I found myself heading towards a very beautiful landscape, with green meadows, a river, butterflies and birds. I was moving toward a hill with a tree on the top. The sensation I felt cannot be put into words, but it was so wonderfully tranquilizing that I still have the desire to return and feel it all over again.

It is the experiencing of this kind of heavenly reality that contributes to the N.D.Er`s belief in the afterlife and to their reduced fear of death...and, for that matter, their reduced fear of life! When N.D.Er`s have finally processed their experience enough to be able to talk about it, they may share their experience to help others who are grieving, feel hopeless or doubt an afterlife. By simply being honest and giving of their experience, these people are helping not only the scientist who studies this subject, but they are helping the many who have had the experience, to realise, that they are not `cracking up` and that this is all very real.

It is a great comfort to me personally, knowing from personal experience, that the afterlife is real. Because after losing my son Andrew to cancer I am now confident that he is being looked after by my late parents and that he is still with me and waiting till I too arrive at that special place! Like many other N.D.Er`s I no longer have any fear of death because I know that death is just another door to go through, to reach the other side!! We are simply God given spiritual beings having a human experience. Our bodies are just the vehicle that we travel around in here on this Earth plane, and like all machines, they eventually wear out or get broken!

G xx