|
Where do we go after death?
It’s common sense, at least in Brazil, the thinking that we’ll see again, in the spiritual world, our beloved beings who have departed to the beyond. Naturally, the ideas of Heaven and Hell complicate things a little bit, when the individual believes in them. After all, how could we know if a relative will be in the same conditions when we meet one another again right after death?
The subject has been covered objectively years ago in one of the editions of Veja magazine, the most important weekly publication in Brazil. The report tried to find out which answer would be the best one for the question: ”Where do people go after death?”
The journalist who signed the report said that the answer that people go to heaven for inquiries of this sort it’s nothing but a simplification of a Jewish-Christian tradition. And she suggested that, if the question is made by an 8-year-old or older child, we should say that when a person dies, the body is put in a coffin and buried, adding the information “nobody knows exactly what happens after death”.
Then, the journalist mentioned the answer that a teacher from São Paulo gave to her own son who asked if there’s any house in Heaven. Here’s the mother’s reply: “Son, no one who died has ever returned to tell us how it’s over there in Heaven”. The journalist’s comment was: “According to psychologists, this is a very correct answer. There’s neither lie nor fantasy in it. Death must be faced as something as natural as birth.
There’s no doubt that death must be faced as something natural. Death is truly just a change of state, because what dies is the physical vehicle that the soul utilizes until it doesn’t serve anymore. Once the body is dead, the soul breaks free from it and lives a new experience, no longer attached to the corporeal world.
What deserves analysis in the journalist’s text is the emphasis she gave to two mistaken pieces of information. The first: “nobody knows exactly what happens after death”. The second: “no one who died has ever returned to tell us how it’s over there in Heaven”.
*
This theme has been risen while we remember the tragedies that victimized so many people in the beginning of this year in the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro, especially the ones that fell over Angra dos Reis.
While trying to cope with the pain of those loses, it’s important to all of us and the ones involved in those sad episodes to remember that death doesn’t exist in the way we usually view it. Our beloved deads haven’t disappeared. They keep alive and we’ll see them again when we also overcome the lower spirit zones of afterlife.
Obviously, it’s not up to us to ask the journalist or the reader to accept the information within the works psychographed by Francisco Cândido Xavier, which describes in details the life in the spiritual world and the cities, that just like here, exist there. But to the one who works for a publication as important as Veja magazine isn’t given the right of hiding from the reader the experiences performed by renowned specialists of our epoch, such as the doctors Raymond Moody and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose researches resulted in the creation of a new science – Thanatology, which means “study of death”.
Doctor, psychologist and parapsychologist born in Porterdale, Georgia, United States of America, Raymond Moody became renowned worldwide as the author of books about life after death and near-death experiences (NDE), a term that he coined in 1975. Moody studied philosophy at the University of Virginia where he obtained a B.A. in 1966, a M.A. in 1967 and a PhD in 1969 in the subject. He also obtained PhD in Psychology from the Western Georgia College, where he later became a professor in that topic. In 1976, he was awarded an M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia and in 1998 was appointed Chair in Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Moody’s most famous book was made into a movie of the same name; Life after life, for which he won a bronze medal in the Human Relations Category in the New York Film Festival.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Swiss-born psychiatrist who deceased in 2004, is author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying, where she first discussed what is now known as the Kübler-Ross model. She is a 2007 inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame of the United States and author of four other books: Death: The Final Stage of Growth; Questions and Answers on Death and Dying; On Life After Death and The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying.
Moody and Ross weren’t, however, the pioneers regarding the study the subject outside the religious sphere, as other renowned and unsuspicious researchers have also dedicated their life to it before them, such as Ernesto Bozzano, author of The Crisis of Death, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the book The History of Spiritualism, containing narratives and information about the soul’s immortality and the conditions of life in the beyond.
|
