Posted on: Saturday, October 27, 2001
Faith
Fleeting review of life studied in near-death crises
By Michael E. Tymn
Special to The Advertiser
People who say they saw their life pass before them in an instant may be expressing more than a cliché or platitude.
This saying most likely has its roots in the near-death experience. The experience is such a phenomenon because time takes on a different meaning in that dimension. People who go through it are unable to explain how they can see every significant moment in a lifetime in a few seconds or minutes, but they have very vivid recollections of it nonetheless.
"It was absolutely, positively everything from the first breath of my life right through the accident," Tom Sawyer explains in the book "What Tom Sawyer Learned from Dying." The New Yorker had a near-death experience in 1978, at age 38, when his pickup truck fell on him as he worked under it.
One particular incident stood out of the many moments in his life review. About two decades earlier, when he was 19, a pedestrian made a remark about Sawyer's reckless driving. Sawyer jumped out of his hot rod and assaulted the man, badly beating him.
In his life review, Sawyer "became that man," feeling every punch. He felt the pain, the indignation, the rage, the embarrassment, and the frustration of his victim. "I felt my teeth going through my lower lip," Sawyer recalled.
After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, members of the Hawai'i chapter of the International Association of Near-Death Studies and Mainland members in an e-mail exchange pondered the possible life reviews that the terrorists might have experienced after their ethereal bodies left their physical bodies.
While the normal assumption would be that anyone committing such barbaric and heinous acts would have a very negative review, the troublesome aspect relative to the terrorist acts is that they may have thought they were doing Allah's or God's will. The issue then turned to beliefs, motivation, and conscience. If people think what they are doing is right, if they follow their conscience, are they then judged harshly?
According to views expressed by Muslim scholars in various newspaper articles following the tragedies, the Quran forbids suicide, and while it does say paradise awaits the martyr, a person who kills innocent people does not qualify as a martyr.
Those participating in the discussion agreed that terrorists are driven much more by self-righteousness, prejudice, ego, and hate than by love and other elements of their faith. Therefore, they were not entitled to positive life reviews.
"I suggest that each and every terrorist will actually experience his own physical death again, as well as the death of every other person on the plane, in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, wherever," said Dr. Barbara Rommer, a physician in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who has interviewed more than 500 people who have had near-death experiences.
"They will also feel the sadness, aloneness, anger, horror and physical pain of all those victims, and that of the victims' families and friends," said Rommer, author of "Blessing in Disguise," a book about less-than-positive near-death experiences.
If, as the study of these experiences suggests, there is an immediate life review upon dying, the terrorists should know by now that they were wrong. Very wrong.
