Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [101]
But not for Granny. Granny was on the move. “I had passed the portal called death,” she wrote. “There was no fear and no anxiety. I seemed to be walking or going some place. I was conscious of the fact that I had left the world and those dear to me just as much as if you walked out of a room and closed the door behind you. After walking for a time, the light seemed to be breaking through and everything seemed to be getting much lighter when suddenly a light that I have never seen anything like before broke before me, and I was completely surrounded by a brilliancy that blinded me, so that I could hardly see. . . . A voice spoke to me and said, ‘Go back, you are needed there.’ As a soldier obeys a command spoken to him without a question, so I obeyed this command.”
An hour passed, and the friends next to Granny’s bed continued to hold vigil, unaware of Granny’s subterranean travels. Suddenly, “to the astonishment of them both, I opened my eyes wide” and began to speak.
“I heard my own voice talking, and this is what was said as they took it down. . . .‘It is wonderful.’ ‘It is beautiful.’ ‘The darkness is all gone, there just isn’t any more darkness at all.’ ‘There is no death.You don’t have to die.’ Turning to the [friends], I said,‘You never have to be afraid again.’ ”
At that moment, Granny threw off the covers. “I’m hot!” she declared, and rose from the bed, brushed her teeth, and asked for some breakfast.
When my grandmother returned from this ethereal voyage, she gave no external sign of the internal rewiring—at least, not in her personality. She remained an efficient, independent woman, one who would soon defy the convention of mid-century America and file for divorce. She continued her “healing” as a Christian Science practitioner. But the near-death experience instantly shifted her view of life, as if she switched from a magnifying glass to a telescope. Her prayer life, it seemed, increased in intensity by orders of magnitude, and she became somewhat famous for her healings.
“After that, she brought about the most remarkable physical healings that I know of personally,” my mother recalled.
“Do you know why?” I asked.
“Yes. She said to me, ‘Never be afraid.’ She said the whole experience taught her that there is nothing to fear, and that everything is love. That love was the light. There was no death, and so you need never be afraid.”
Back then, no one discussed such far-fetched phenomena. Even Mom was unaware of the details until she inherited her mother’s papers, four decades later.
Beginning in the 1970s, particularly with the advent of books like Dr. Raymond Moody’s Life After Life,1 thousands of people rushed forward to recount their journeys to the brink of death and back. These accounts contained many of the same elements: the white light, the beauty, the peace, the sense of viewing one’s body from the outside. Skeptics believe that these similar phenomena reveal not a universal mystery pointing to eternal life but a common neurological response to the brain shutting down. But tell that to my grandmother, tell that to anyone else who has touched death—and tell that to increasing numbers of scientists.
If out-of-body experiences represent a pivotal battle in the war over consciousness—that is, whether your mind, will, and identity are only the expression of brain chemistry—then near-death experiences represent the battle to come. The questions posed by these experiences are too spooky for most mainstream scientists. Does your soul survive death? Is this life a shallow introduction to eternity, and death a sort of summer recess between kindergarten and first grade? Are we like stick figures on a chalkboard who live in two dimensions—until one day we pop off the board and find a three-dimensional