Betty J. Eadie experienced a particularly detailed and spectacular NDE. She recounts it in her book “In the Arms of Light”. In her second book, “The Awakening Heart”, she recounts the rest of her journey. She has worked tirelessly to share the message of love, hope and joy she received during her NDE. Here are a few extracts from his book.
Life doesn’t stop at death
Life does not end with death. Death is a rebirth into a spiritual world of light and love. It is a transition from the physical to the spiritual. It’s no more frightening or painful than moving from one room to another through an open door. It’s also a joyful return to our natural home. A return to the Creator who sent us here and welcomes us back with loving arms. I know, because on November 18, 1973, I died of a hemorrhage during surgery.
I was shown that everything we do affects the rest of the world for good or ill, and I was given a life review. I experienced the effect of all my thoughts and actions. I learned that God loves us all unconditionally, that we are eternal spirits who have come here to grow and learn to love. After we die, we are welcomed into heaven with great joy and celebration.
Love is all that matters
The essence of what I learned is that love is supreme, because God is love, and the only way to be like Him is to love as He does… unconditionally. The message I brought back is this: “Above all, love one another”.
We have reached a crossroads, and a great awakening has begun in the world. People are hungry for answers and meaning in their lives. We are finally ready for God’s message of love. One of our missions on earth is to grow in the spirit by sharing that love. My prayer is that God will use this book to help us live more lovingly.
I think of the magnificent power of the ripple effect I’ve been shown. I know that by reaching even one soul with the message of God’s love, it will set off a chain reaction. This hopeful message will be passed on to others, and then to others. It will reverberate endlessly, reaching countless souls.
A Being of infinite love
At NDE, I saw Jesus. He didn’t need to show me the nail prints on his hands or the wound on his side to prove who he was. I belonged to him just as I was, and the fact that he suffered wasn’t the point. It was his divine love that manifested itself. The aura surrounding his body was brilliant white and full of energy. Even though this light shone around him, I saw that he was the light and that it came from within.
His voice resonated within me, the rich, vibrant tones penetrating my spiritual being. It was a melody I could feel as if I were an instrument he was playing. His voice gave me life and healed me. I have never known greater joy than his unconditional love for me!
The rays of light surrounding Jesus were filled with knowledge and love. The simple act of standing in his presence and absorbing him gave me the ability to extend love and knowledge within myself. My spiritual body filled with his divine love and understanding.
So many misconceptions about God
I began to see that I had passed on many misconceptions about God and life in general to my family, and that they were going to spread this knowledge to their family, and then to society. We are like empty vessels at birth: what fills us then is what we pour out later.
I had taught my children what I had learned about God, constantly warning them that God watches over them and knows all their “sins”. They came to believe, as I did, that if they did anything stupid, something bad would happen to them, and that God would be responsible!
My fears were expressed in them. I didn’t intend to use this in a threatening or punitive way, but as a warning – exactly as I had received it. But because of this, my children carried a fear and guilt that hindered their development and their love for God.
A new vision
My view of God changed dramatically and I began to teach my children differently. First, I taught them that God loves them unconditionally and that they are part of Him – literally, His spiritual children. As a parent, he only wants the best for them and will give it to them if their hearts desire it. We also prayed differently, from the heart, not just from the lips, repeating what I had taught them before. They also needed to know that God doesn’t punish them by making bad things happen in their lives. In reality, these things often happen as a result of our own bad decisions or the decisions of others.
Every morning, I woke up with the same thoughts. I longed for a place that didn’t exist on earth, a place my heart yearned for. The sounds and melodies of that heavenly garden where everything glorified God could not be reproduced on earth. And I longed more than anything for a small amount of the love I’d experienced there, but found that nothing could compare here. I now understood why it was important for us to cross the “veil of forgetfulness” when we come to earth… because the memory is so horribly painful. I missed the warmth of God’s eternal, unconditional love so much. To be deprived of it was what I imagined hell would be like.
We are diamonds in the rough
I knew that as part of His plan – as part of our growth – God can allow us to go through trials in a period of sorting, cleansing, purification. This forces us to make new decisions based on our faith and trust in Him. Each of us grows like a rough diamond. The jagged edges are then chipped off and the unnecessary roughness removed. Until we have many facets, many points of view. This also makes us less critical and more compassionate after experiencing the pain of life.
I saw that I could trust prayer. I knew and believed that if I asked for God’s will to be done in my life, my prayers would be answered in due time. I began to exercise my faith through prayer, as I had learned, thanking God for all things, even if they seemed negative at first glance. I could now see that God was teaching me to be patient and wait for him. By trusting him, believing in him and knowing that he was truly in control, I knew that he would give us, his beloved children, the right desires of our hearts when we asked for them.
Loving healed me
I needed to let go of the past by creating love here and now, in my life and in the world I now lived in. I chose to heal from my depression through service, faith and sharing love. By doing the deeds I’d been shown were part of why God had placed us here.
I began to heal. At first, I did little things: preparing a meal for sick friends, babysitting for young parents who needed to be together, telephoning elderly people who were shut in. These first small steps led to others, and others. I continued to give service because it required energy and concentration, and I appreciated the love I received in return.
As I continued the process of opening up to God and letting go, I healed faster. My service to others allowed me to make new friends, and I was blessed by their love. Most importantly, God was able to reach me through my open heart. I began to experience his loving presence again in great abundance.
Finding God in everything around me
Seeking God’s presence in my life was more important than ever. First I had to find Him in everything around me, then seek His presence within me.
When I began to see it unexpectedly, everywhere, in everyone and everything, my soul rejoiced and I felt like a child seeing everything for the first time and in a clearer perspective.
God is love
God is love, in its purest form. His love seeks nothing from us and demands nothing from us. His love is unconditionally given. Anyone who wants it can receive it. To be in his presence and share his love, we must become like him and learn to love without judgment or conditions.
I understood the fullness of love now that I had experienced it with Jesus. I wanted it now, here on earth, with all my heart. Not only in my life, but within me, as I had felt it before.
Love is shared
I reflected on the unconditional love I had experienced in the spiritual world. I remembered that the light emanating from Jesus was knowledge filled with love, while the weaker light I had noticed in myself was more a desire for love than love itself. However, the longer I remained in his presence, the brighter my light became, absorbing some of his light, which he shared with me. Then, just before I returned, I noticed that my spirit was also giving off an abundance of light – light that overflowed with love! It was his loving presence that I had absorbed, and it made me grow.
I know that as human beings, we have to share light and love with each other. By mixing and growing with each other. A spiritual exchange of energy, not the selfish pursuit of physical love.
Love heals us
Our unity, the part of us that is love, is in our cellular memory. It’s present in every one of us. It’s the most healing energy we have.
I understood that Christ’s message is to love one another. Nothing stands between us and God’s love. Except for the obstacles we put in the way of God’s love. I realized that the judgments I’d been making were actually hiding fears I didn’t want to see.
Love knows no bounds
Unconditional love has no limits. There is no “how”, “who”, “if” or “when”.
In the company of Jesus, I experienced the unlimited, unconditional love of my Creator, my God. The joy it brought me was incomparable.
I no longer wanted anyone to convert. I saw that they had to desire change for themselves. I knew that God, our loving Father, would place it in their hearts when the time was right. When we trust God, he guides and directs us to deeper knowledge when we need it.
Growth is a process, and when we take the time to internalize and understand what we believe, we are more richly blessed. Our beliefs shine in our face for all to see. All I had to do was freely share what I had been given and set the best example of love I could.
God is so close to us
I began to think of God as a father in my communications with him. “God” is a way of expressing Ultimate Source, Omnipotence, but the God I met was more like a father, someone personal and loving, not just an authority figure. We talked together like parent and child.
I shared my joys and fears with him. I began to thank him for the things he expressed himself in, which was pretty much everything. I began to look forward to these moments, and soon found that my conversations with him didn’t have to take place at night, on my knees, but that I could have ongoing communication with him throughout the day.
When love awakens
As my beliefs were challenged, both by my near-death experience and my increased abilities, the unconditional love stored in my cells began to awaken. My mind woke up, remembering the love I had felt in the presence of Jesus and how that love had filled me to overflowing and made me grow. Now my cells remembered an abundance of love, unconditional love. My greatest challenge was to learn how to use this love for a mission that had not been fully revealed to me.
I shared my message with these people. They just wanted me to tell them more about Jesus. They wanted to hear about unconditional love. They wanted to hear that they are perfectly who they need to be and that they are in the right place to progress in their walk with God. They wanted to feel God’s love, as I had felt it, and I couldn’t wait to share it with them. As I spoke to this group of people, I knew I couldn’t have stood there in front of them and shared any part of my experience, or any part of me, without knowing that God was there with me. But I knew that he was there with me, and that he would be there throughout my journey, more than I had ever known before.
Suicide is not a real solution
Suicide is a temporary solution. You leave your misery behind only for a short time, until you come face to face with it again in your life review. You interrupt your spiritual development, the growth that determines your experience in heaven. We’re all at different spiritual levels – here and there. If you don’t grow here, you’ll have to grow there. The wonders of heaven are beyond our comprehension. If we live in accordance with the spirit with which we came to earth, we can progress faster.
We do this by expressing the love of God that is within us. By loving God, loving ourselves and loving each other. It’s as simple as that. I’m sorry you’ve suffered, and I wish with all my heart I could share some of your pain. But you can find the love you need. God is always with us, he is constant. He is like the sun and we are like the earth. We revolve around him. He never moves away from us, but we often move away from him.
There are many atheists who live as faithfully, if not more faithfully, to God’s message of love than many religious people. But they’re missing something by leaving God out of their lives. If you can see ahead and know that death doesn’t end in the grave, you prepare yourself a little more and challenge yourself more. Knowing that you’re responsible for your actions and knowing the ripple effect they cause, you spend more time preparing for the other side than you do preparing for death.
We remain free after our death
God loves us so much that, even after death, he won’t force us to switch from one belief system to another without our having a choice. As I traveled through the dark space before the light, I saw many people who stayed after I left. I knew they didn’t know God’s love, even though God loved them. He kept them there, bathing them in love until they reached the point where they knew of his existence and could move on to another level.
I thought of the souls I had seen preparing to come to earth. I remembered that their deaths had been planned … like ours … before we came. I knew that some had come knowing that they would only stay a short time. These were souls who didn’t need a long life on Earth to develop spiritually. They chose to help grow those they touched during their brief stay on earth. I knew that the pain left by their deaths would be erased when we were all reunited as spirits, and that the suffering of those who had stayed longer was part of the spiritual development that brings us all here. We are here to develop our souls.
Life is a school
Life on earth is like going to university. Our minds stay here until we graduate, then we leave the campus to pursue our development elsewhere. Some graduate students may return if they have acquired enough knowledge to come back as teachers.
I thought of the spirits I had seen as they prepared to be born into the bodies of children whose lives would be short or hampered by disability or illness. Their light was the brightest of all.
When we open up to God to learn more about unconditional love, he gladly sends us the people we need to learn to love without judgment. Sometimes our existing love is tested just so we can see how unconditional it is. In this way, our spirit is enriched with a greater love, God’s pure love, and it shines brighter within us.
Choosing to love
I saw the heavens flash by to reveal the earth and its billions of people finding love, experimenting and making mistakes. I knew that it’s up to us to make the biggest decision, to choose for ourselves, each and every one of us, if we want to open our hearts to God and his love.
Those of us whose hearts have been awakened to God have a responsibility to share His love with others, as they make their own decisions. This is the very nature of service and love. All our lights shine brighter when we pass them on.
During a NDE, we don’t all see a being of light, the Father and Savior I still think about every day. We don’t all see Jesus. Some have told me they see the spiritual leader of their belief system, the one who got them there. Others simply see someone they love. Some told me they were greeted by animals.
Creating the kingdom of love
George uses the gifts at his disposal to convey his experience. At times, he describes the source of the light, love and knowledge that invaded him as God. At other times, it’s “infinite wisdom”, or something infinitely universal that we can’t grasp. It’s impossible for us,” he tells me, “to understand our Creator.
But George could grasp the divine purpose that unites us all, God’s creations, as spiritual beings in material bodies. Here on earth, we have to grow spiritually as we go through this world. Time is needed for earthly life to grow in every sense, for each person to connect with eternity and for eternity to connect with them, and for them to understand the unity of themselves with spirit. He saw that our purpose here is to participate in an awakening, which will occur, he says, when we “extend our spirituality so that matter is changed”.
In so doing,” he continues, “we will create the kingdom of God on earth – the kingdom of love. By unifying body and mind and feeling our oneness with all that exists in the universe and with God. Part of Jesus’ message is that the creation of the kingdom of love begins on earth, and that each of us is part of it. We are the ones who will create it.
Our soul remembers us
I’ve learned that within each of us, there’s a place where our spirit resides. We are born on this earth with our soul, the pure part of ourselves that we bring to earth from the spiritual world. As we develop, we lose touch with this spiritual part, our divine self, in a process of forgetting that is necessary for our development.
But we can lose too much, and when we’ve lost all awareness of our divinity, we become spiritually disconnected and depressed. To feel whole again, each of us can and must reconnect with our spiritual selves. As we are all at different levels of spirituality, each of us comes to this understanding in our own way.
Striking a balance
Finding a balance between body and mind is essential for mental and physical health. When I’m in this state of balance, my mind is no longer at the mercy of my body. I was taught in the spirit world that the spirit can control the flesh, elevating temporal desires to a higher, more spiritual level, and I found this to be true in my own life.
It’s when we achieve this kind of balance that we function in the most creative, spiritual and natural way. When I begin to feel the separation or lack of balance between flesh and spirit, I’ve learned to go into a quiet place inside myself and reflect on my spiritual needs.
Everyone has a different way of reaching this quiet place. Some people get in touch with their inner self using incense, music, rituals or other aids. There is no single correct method.
What works best for me is simply to stand still, which I can do anywhere, anytime. Then I invite God’s presence to enter. As I contemplate this invisible, spiritual part of myself, I feel it expand to become the larger part, filled to overflowing with his love.
Faith helps us move forward
In my travels, I’ve learned that it often seems easier not to move forward. Even the mud we’re stuck in often seems less frightening and challenging than the unknown path ahead.
Some people use faith as a reason to stay stuck. They often say, “I have faith, so I wait.” But faith isn’t a wait-and-see attitude: faith is action. You don’t have faith to wait. When you have faith, you act.
I developed my faith by putting God at the center of my life. I’ve learned that I have to maintain a great deal of peace within myself to achieve this. I have to be in tune with the love God has placed in me. I know that God is love, and if I don’t recognize that same love in myself, I can’t express it to others.
Our actions can bring us closer to God
Our actions can also bring us closer to God. We are all at our best when we give the most to others. When we are self-centered, love is hard to find. Love is God’s energy. It flows like electricity or a current. When you release it and allow it to flow through you, it must flow to the other people you touch. This is giving and receiving. When we give love to someone, the love literally flows through us and we can only feel it.
We’re here to learn, and for us, that means making mistakes. Learning to love is our goal, and our connection with God will help us achieve it, if we let Him. He loves us, waits for us and invites us to come back to Him.
