Life review
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A life review is a phenomenon widely reported in near-death experiences in which a person having died (though in a handful of cases also while alive) rapidly sees much or the totality of their life history in chronological sequence and extreme detail.
The life review is discussed in some detail by NDE scholars such as Drs. Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, and Barbara Rommer. A reformatory purpose seems commonly implicit in accounts, though not necessarily for earthly purpose, since return from an NDE may reportedly entail individual choice. Interestingly, while experiencers, who appear to number into many thousands according to NDE studies, sometimes report reviews took place in the company of otherworldly beings who shared the observation, they also say they felt unjudged during the process, leaving themselves their own strongest critics. Although rare, there are also a few accounts of life reviews or similar experiences without an NDE such as the simpler out-of-body experience or under circumstances of intense threat or duress. While some scientists discount NDEs themselves or stigmatize their study, the large body of both NDE and LR accounts, when set under scrutiny, tends to defy dismissal as hallucination or cerebral effect, by virtue of its unusual detail, volume, consistency, verisimilitude, narrators' credibility, and its insistent recounting of vividness and panoramicity. The NDE and its derivative phenomena as a result tend to lie more in the realm of the paranormal and parapsychology, though that does not argue against their scientific study or reality per se.
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[edit] Duration
The perception of time appears to be subjective and has been described as from lasting less than a few minutes to instantaneous. Accounts differ by case as to what phase of an NDE experience a review might take place in .
[edit] Scope and clarity
Experiencers frequently append the term panoramic or holographic to the experience. In an LR the experiencer's perception includes not only their own perspective in increased vividness, as if they were reliving a given episode itself again, but that of all other parties they interact with at each point being reviewed. Betty Eadie's widely read account, in which she described the LR as her best conception of hell, also described the LR as extending, though presumably with some limitation, to ripples of one's life and acts out into further degrees of separation. The term 3-D is also employed to approximate the inclusion of different physical perspectives onto a scene; the LR's intensity was described by one reporting individual as enabling him to count every nearby mosquito; but equally common is the description of feeling the emotional experience of the other parties, including in one case virtually everyone in a room. While some accounts appear to describe scenes as selected, others more commonly narrate the experience as including things they had, probably naturally, long ago entirely forgotten, with "nothing...left out".
[edit] Effect
The effect of a life review is by all accounts a strongly transformative experience. Experiencers describe them as extremely unpleasant from the perspective of the unhappiness they had inflicted on others, including feelings they had never dreamed of as resulting, and equally pleasant from the perspective of the good feeling they had brought to others' lives, extending to the littlest forgotten details. Almost without exception, in result, experiencers report a sharp drop in materialistic outlook (both acquisitive and philosophical), an intensified compassion for others and sense of interconnectedness, newfound altruistic activities, personality changes (though occasionally entailing divorce), a new interest in self-education and spirituality, and so on. Dannion Brinkley as one instance described himself as putting off previously deep-rooted sociopathic traits ingrained from a difficult childhood through his work as a sniper in the Vietnam War. A frequent comment by experiencers is that they later strongly avoided unethical or inconsiderate actions because they wanted to avoid painfully reliving the receiving end of the action which they knew would await them.
The transformative effect is in fact so statistically uniform in comparison with other areas of demographic study that some NDE investigators point to it as much as to experiencer accounts' detail as evidence for the empirical reality of the phenomenon itself. Kenneth Ring's book Lessons from the Light also includes numerous accounts of an NDE permitting people hitherto blind, including cases from birth, as enabled to see (and interpret) the sight they had never before enjoyed.
[edit] Life review in popular culture
The life review is suspected to be the source of the expression "I saw my life flashing before my very eyes", and some have speculated it might be connected to details like records of life in Revelation 20:12 in the Christian Bible.
[edit] Further reading
- Lessons from the Light (Kenneth Ring, Ph.D; Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino): ISBN 0-9661327-8-5
- The Complete Idiot's Guide to Near-Death Experiences (P.M.H. Atwater, Lh.D; David Morgan): ISBN 0-02-863234-6
