A strange
new aspect of the NDE phenomenon has come to light through the investigation of University of Connecticut psychologist Kenneth Ring. He has found that during the out-of-body phase of the event people sometimes are given information about the future??"either their personal futures or the future of the human race. At times the information is given to the percipient during the "life review," except that the review does not end at the present (as usually happens) but goes forward to reveal things that are yet to be. One woman told Ring that during a death crisis that occurred when she was giving birth to her youngest child in 1959, she left her body and encountered astral beings who showed her where she would be living and what she would be doing at a certain time in her distant future. Concerning the latter, she was shown a scene so vivid that she could see, hear and smell it. She saw herself as an older woman standing in the kitchen talking and laughing with her oldest daughter while the younger one (to whom in real time she had just given birth) was off playing with friends. There were small children in the picture as well as her husband. The picture proved to be an exact representation of the circumstances she found herself in when she related the incident to Ring almost 20 years later. All the people she had "seen" looked now as they had in that preview; her older daughter had divorced her husband, and her parents were helping her to raise her small children. And the kitchen she saw then was the one in her house now. Moreover, she was living in the town the astral guides had predicted she would be living in. Ring also learned that some participants in NDEs were given previews of what lies ahead for the human race. (We have already seen an example of this in Reinee Pasarow’s story.) These persons speak of troubled times??"war, cataclysms and economic woes??"followed by "a new era of peace and brotherhood which will emerge from these disasters," Ring says. "In fact, my correspondents usually interpret these disasters as a purging process which will prepare the human race for this new age." |