Death-Related Experiences Record Type: Review   ID: 421
After the Beyond: Human Transformation and the Near-Death Experience Flynn, Charles P.
About the spiritual impact of near-death experiences (NDEs), Flynn looks at what many NDErs have had to say about life, death, and love. In the first chapter he provides an overview of the book. Chapter 2 examines the NDEs of a number of persons. The third deals with the difficulties experienced by NDErs in getting people even to listen to their stories, let alone accept them as valid. Next he deals with the difficulties NDErs have in incorporating their experiences in their lives. There follows an important chapter that examines some of the value transformations that NDErs undergo and presents two in-depth, extensive case studies of major changes in the lives of two NDErs. The sixth chapter covers research aimed at discovering whether a brush with death without an NDE leads to transformation. Various religious aspects of NDEs are examined in the next chapter, which emphasizes how NDErs adopt a theocentric attitude centered in a God of unconditional love. The implications of NDEs for Christianity is the subject of Chapter 8. Then Flynn looks at the positive effects NDErs exercise on the lives of nonexperiencers, to whom they direct the love of the Light they were imbued with by their experience. Next he deals with the meaning of NDEs for those who have not had any sort of transcendent or death-related experience and have not been influenced by anyone who has. He presents some of the more significant findings of an educational experiment¯the Love Project¯ that he conducted with several classes. In this project he attempted to provide his students with an opportunity to become more loving and caring after the manner of NDErs but in a context not directly related to the NDE. It is his hope that "the NDE and efforts like the Love Project . . . might provide a seedbed for large-scale transformation in a world close to annihilation through forces opposite to those of the love of the Light" (p. 8). There is a Foreword by Raymond Moody and an Afterword by Kenneth Ring. The latter points out that Flynn goes beyond Ring's Heading Toward Omega by saying we should not simply wait passively for the coming of Omega but should "participate actively in its emergence" (p. 163). Materials for the Love Project are included in the Appendices.
Publisher Information:	Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. 190p. Bibliography: 181-183; Index: 185-190; 4 tables

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