As You Believe, So Shall It Be

I listened to this video by Alon Anava, in which he describes how a profound near death experience (NDE) forced him to completely change his life from a totally secular to ultra-orthodox Jew. His story is interesting and entertaining, and he has a lot to say. His experience seems much longer than most, which I attribute to his upbringing. Most people who have NDEs don’t change their lives to the extend that Alon did, but I believe that his story illustrates the principle of As You Believe, So Shall It Be.

What I mean by that is the “afterlife,” for you, will be what you believe it to be. This can be bad news because we often are not really aware of what we really believe, what’s ingrained, deep down, from our earliest teachings. You may deny it now, you may swear up and down that you’ve completely given up all the crap that they drilled into you in Sunday school, but it very well could still be there. And it will determine what you experience after you die, at least for a while. In eternity, nothing lasts forever.

The good news is that it’s not all as bad and arbitrary as it sounds. You chose a mission in this life, you have a goal and a purpose. Your upbringing was a part of that purpose, more or less. Not that everything that happened and happens to you is part of some grand plan. We all have free will and you, and others, can go wildly off track, if you choose. That’s probably what happened in Alon’s case, but I say “probably” because you can’t really know that the arc of his life wasn’t part of his plan from the get-go. Truly, his message is much more powerful, and he reaches a lot more people, because of his struggles, but there’s really no way to know.

There simply is no question, even among skeptics, that NDEs change a persons’ life, in significant ways, and permanently. Perhaps the amount of change depends on how far they had deviated from their life’s plan. Or, perhaps, they needed to present a message to the world in as powerful way as possible. Everyone who experiences an NDE accepts, without question, that they have seen the afterlife, or at least the interlife, that stage where souls still retain their human personality and outlook. I guess skeptics like to reduce NDEs to hallucination or delusion because it allows them to reduce all religious experiences to mechanistic processes, which, by extension, reduces all human experience to mechanistic, and meaningless, processes. I question the sincerity of these skeptics. I have never met or heard of anyone who truly believed that their life was completely meaningless and pointless, that wasn’t suicidal. Many, many people profess a strict materialist and mechanistic philosophy, and brook no compromise is discussion, but still get up every morning, go to work, date, marry, have kids, and plan for the future, with no hint that it’s all a pointless, meaningless exercise. That’s because, deep down, they have hope, they are just too busy being right to admit it.

You are in no way a slave to what you may have been taught or some, unknown, “life plan,” you are free to do what you want, be what you want. But, the thing is, most of us have trouble in this life because of external things like society and expectations, the beliefs taught to us as children, and the “rules” we think we need to obey. Some of us are taught ideas that align with who we are, and we find we need to return to them as adults, while others, not so much. They need to break away from childhood teachings, in a profound way, to live a fulfilled life.

In a way, an NDE makes things easy. You now have a first-person, unshakable understanding of “what it’s really all about.” The rest of us have to struggle to understand what it’s all about and what’s best for us. There is no one path or belief or truth that is absolutely right and perfect for everyone. So we have to find our own, we are the final judge in implementer of our fate.

The funny thing is, NDEs show that atheists generally have it much better than the religious, they enter with no preconceived notions and thus have a pleasant experience. The religious like to think that they have the shortcut to heaven, but their beliefs of trials, judgment, and hell can very well be played out, as they expect, requiring them to work through it all, and let it go, before they will be able to “reach the pearly gates,” so to speak. This is not something imposed on them from above, but by their own beliefs. They create their own reality, for good or ill. The good news is that we all get there, sooner or later, it’s just a matter of how long it takes each person to shed their ego-based conceits, biases and prejudices, and see what is actually there.

The point of the journey to enlightenment is that your beginning that process early, so you’ll have less to deal with, when the time comes, and, as a bonus, you get a happier, more fulfilled life.