Chapter 1
The Evidence: Stories of People Undergoing a Soul Experience
For truly we are all angels temporarily hiding as humans.
— Brian L. Weiss
Perhaps you find it hard to believe that we are Souls as well as bodies. Many people doubt it. Yet there is plenty of evidence that suggests that we are, all of us, far more than just the bodies we inhabit. We’re going to review some of this evidence now.
What Anita Moorjani experienced may seem completely unbelievable, yet the staff of the hospital to which she was admitted with stage 4b terminal lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system) have the detailed medical records that show the actuality of her transformative near-death experience. Anita has spoken about this event freely, and her book Dying to Be Me describes it eloquently. As you’ll see, this title is absolutely appropriate.
What happened to her sounds like something out of a movie. She was rushed to hospital in Hong Kong, where she lives, in what doctors believed was the final stage of her cancer, her body swelling badly, and she was deep in a coma. Her organs were beginning to shut down, and the doctors informed her family that this was the end, they could do no more for her.
What they didn’t know was that Anita’s sense of this event was completely different. As it was happening she saw herself from above, from outside her body. She could hear every word the doctors and her relatives said, and she realized that she had spent her whole life living from a place of fear, afraid of what others would think. "I gave my power to the world outside, and external events had the ability to control me—my behavior, moods, and thinking," she writes.17
When she felt this she knew, somehow, that she hadn’t finished whatever it was she needed to do on earth because she’d been too busy trying to be "normal." Suddenly, she felt flooded with unconditional love. With great reluctance she pulled herself away from the peaceful haven offered by death, and willed herself back into her body. The message, the thoughts she heard in her mind as she lay in the coma, have resounded in her mind ever since: "Go back and live your life fearlessly."18
What happened next astonished everyone. The tumors that had been so prominent on her body, all along her spine, began to shrink— by 70 percent or more in a couple of days. Her internal organs began to function again. She came out of her coma and, much to everyone’s surprise, she knew all about the medical discussions her doctors had agonized over—even when those discussions hadn’t been in the same room.
Within days she was sitting up, talking, eating without a feeding tube for the first time in weeks. Her cancer was completely gone.
The doctors couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Neither could anyone else. In fact the medical team spent several weeks testing her to see where the cancer had gone, and they were deeply puzzled to find absolutely no trace of it.
Anita is now a persuasive, powerful speaker and communicator and what she has to tell us is important.
What can we learn from this? First of all, her experience lets us know that we are more than just our bodies. Looking down on her own body in its hospital bed, she knew this.
Second, her ordeal lets us know that we have a purpose in life, all of us, and it involves living with courage. Not living this purpose, by comparison, will kill us.
It took a while for Anita’s purpose to become plain to her. Her near-death experience could, she realized, help others see their illnesses in a new way. She says, "I suddenly realized that both my getting cancer and healing were actually for the planet . . . to serve as an instrument of healing to take place in others."19
In fact her message has already gone far beyond her own experience, and people all over the world who have heard of her healing have started thinking differently, not just about healing, but about their relationship to Source, and what that means for them. Her mission is about healing in the very highest sense of the word. She is helping to heal us all, by bringing us back to our Souls. Her "Soul signature" became plain to her—and now she is living it.
The third thing we need to pay attention to is that she knew her Soul was linked to something much larger, something we could call Source or a world Soul, which contains all wisdom, all love, and all healing. The title of her book, Dying to Be Me, really does say it all, because she had to face the disturbing fact that her old way of living was killing her, and that as she faced death she was given the opportunity to be fully herself in its highest form. She chose life, and to embrace love, and so she became who she truly was all along capable of being. She realized she was a loving Soul, and not just a body.
We are all like Anita. We are Souls first, and bodies are the clothing we have so we can operate in our world.
You may feel that Anita’s experience is too unusual to be credited. If so, you can do no better than to look at what happened to Dr. Eben Alexander, whose 2012 book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, declares itself fully in its title. Dr. Alexander is a distinguished specialist in his field. He taught at Harvard Medical School and in a career that spanned 25 years he worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Boston Children’s Hospital. In fall 2008, he spent seven days in a coma suffering from meningitis. He was not expected to live. Towards the end of that time his doctors viewed his brain scans and declared that he was definitely brain dead; he would not recover. They could detect no brain activity.
Yet he did recover and is now fully healed. Looking at his brain scans, now, he can interpret them from his viewpoint as a trained neurosurgeon and know that he was by any measure dead. No one doubts this. But he is alive today, and he knows that during that time when he was technically dead he saw many things, most significantly a "brilliant orb of light" that he knew to be God.
Bear in mind that this was a man who had stopped believing in God or religion many years before this event. He believed only in science. His experiences have startled many people because he is a plain-speaking man of science who, suddenly, was surprised by an experience of his Soul.20 His conclusions are worth looking at closely, since he now says that: "the brain . . . dumbs down a higher consciousness."21 It is this higher consciousness that connected him back to the power he calls God, although he freely admits that this concept of God is much bigger than he can find words for. The normal actions of the brain—the everyday thoughts and concerns and worries we all tend to have—were what stopped him from knowing his Soul existed.
Dr. Alexander’s experience is every bit as dramatic as Anita’s, and equally well documented by hard scientific data. Each had an experience that had nothing to do with "normal" life and everything to do with the Soul. And just like Anita, Dr. Alexander has now made it his life’s work to alert us all, especially the medical establishment of which he is such a respected member, to the existence of the Soul and the limitless love that awaits us on the far side of everyday consciousness. Dr. Alexander and Anita have come to know each other, and they totally agree that we are Souls attached to bodies.
This leads us to some important considerations. Primarily, we have to recognize from this that we are more than just our bodies.
If we think about our bodies we have to admit that they are always changing. As babies we had one sort of body. As teenagers we had another sort of body, and at twenty we probably felt that we were our bodies and nothing more. Yet, as we grow older, that same body changes. All the cells in it completely renew themselves every seven years, such that no single cell is still alive after that time since they’ve all been replaced. Bodies seem to be closer to a sequence of temporary houses that we get to inhabit for a while. When we see that, we have to admit that we are more than our bodies. We can call that "consciousness" if we wish. Anita Moorjani would say that it is the consciousness of being a Soul.