Preparing for the Miraculous

152 eleven talksThese protecting pathways are what gives the impressionof a tunnel, a bridge, or a narrow mountain pass. Stillcarried by his vital and mental body sheaths, the transitingperson perceives the Light of the higher, spiritual hemisphere(in fact the Mother’s Light). The more he comes nearerto it, the more intense it becomes. As Kübler-Ross writes,that light “radiates intense warmth, energy, spirit and love– love most of all, unconditional love; they feel peace, tranquilityand the anticipation of finally going home.” The experiencerswho have gone that far do not want to return tothe dark, difficult and painful world which they have leftbehind; they want to discard their vital and mental sheathstoo and enter there where all is existence, consciousnessand bliss: the psychic world.The mind-body problemAs mentioned before in passing, “a Gallup poll publishedin 1982 estimates that one in twenty adult Americanshas had a near-death experience. (This would translate todayto more than 15 million out of 312 million adults.) Furthermore,of those people who came close to death, thirtyfivepercent could report a NDE [near-death experience].Researchers believe that these figures are conservative estimates.Moreover, these figures indicate the pervasivenessof the experience in the general population. It’s importantto add that there is no relationship between a person’s gender,age, socioeconomic class, or religious orientation. NDEseems to be a universal phenomenon.” 4“On 15 December 2001, an unusual article appeared inthe medical journal The Lancet. Written by Pim van Lommel,a cardiologist at the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem,the Netherlands, it described the results and findings of aseries of interviews that took place over a period of eight4 See Wikipedia, on the lemma “near-death experience.”