It’s not unusual in our lives to encounter something that that seems outside our daily experience. A distant friend calls the moment you are thinking about them; two people describe the same dream, a sense that a departed love one has re-manifested in your life.
Over the years, Dr. Robert Abel has collected close to 900 stories describing unusual accounts of near-death experiences.
“I found these narratives fascinating and just put them in a drawer to think about. The pandemic allowed me to take refuge in my house in Tolchester and take a closer look at them,” he says.
Abel, a Wilmington ophthalmologist who lectures worldwide on vision and integrative medicine, says that his newly published book, Is Death a Mystery? Personal Stories that Lift the Veil offers narratives without a theological or philosophical bias.
Although he is widely informed by his life-long studies of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Lucretius, and medical research, he would rather leave the stories of near-death experiences as they are—for the reader to decide.
Abel describes a “your whole life flashes before your eyes” incident in his childhood while hiking with friends. As he dared to jump across a potentially fatal crevasse, his life flashed like a compressed cinematic moment. It was a life-altering experience and one that informed his empathy while listening to others.
The vignettes in the book describe a wide range of near-death, out-of-body, and spirit visitations without medical asides. In interviews, however, he is comfortable talking about neuroscience and their approach describing such phenomena as “merely projection” and will braid the discussion with quantum physics and Einstein formulations.
Clearly, many of us sense some indescribable dimension outside the five-senses. Abel has collected snapshots from those who believe they have been there, and all stories are linked by a common thread: healing, compassion, and love.
This video is approximately nine minutes in length. Dr Abel’s book Is Death a Mystery? Personal Stories that Lift the Veil may be found on Amazon.
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