Life On Earth After Death

This is from Linda Jo's columns of March 2013

I just finished reading a fascinating book, “Dying to be Me,” by Anita Moorjani. Anita is from India and was raised in the Hindu faith. Her parents moved to Hong Kong when she was just two, however, and she had a very broad upbringing, spending part of her schooling in a Catholic school and then later in the British Island School. Thus through her childhood she became a part of the worlds of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Catholicism, India, China and England.

When Anita was 43, married and living in Hong Kong, she became extremely ill with cancer of the lymphatic system. Because her best friend and her husband’s brother-in-law had both died of cancer despite all of the modern “cures,” she refused to undergo chemotherapy and radiation.

During those years of acute suffering she even went back to India for six months of yoga regimen. Finally, however, after four years, she grew worse and was rushed to a large, well-equipped hospital in Hong Kong, where the doctor described her tumors as numerous growths the size of lemons throughout her lymphatic system. At that point she weighed less than 90 pounds.

On Feb. 2, 2002, she actually died for many hours in what some call a Near Death Experience. For her, as apparently for others, this short-but-intense experience was amazingly exhilarating. As she put it, “Love, joy, ecstasy, and awe poured into me, through me, and engulfed me. I was swallowed up and enveloped in more love than I ever knew existed.”

Whereas she had always felt like an outsider there in Hong Kong and had always tried to please other people rather than simply being herself, her world changed radically for the better. For the first time, she felt her own worth as well as feeling a deep love for everyone else.

At that point she had an extremely difficult decision to make, for she could either stay in that perfect world where she felt no pain and felt as though she was no longer in her physical body, or she could come back to this world. She consciously, though somewhat reluctantly, decided to return because of her love for her husband and family.

In an amazingly short time upon her return, she recovered completely, without the surgery her doctors said she would need.

In this new world, she no longer worries about worldly matters, such as money, work or household and domestic issues, yet she says she doesn’t advocate “positive thinking.” One should rather let negative as well as positive thoughts pass through one’s mind without judgment.

Do not “carry any emotional baggage from one instant to the next,” she says, but rather “try to see each moment as a clean slate.”

I found this book quite inspiring as I read it, but I must admit that after I finished it and thought about my own experience with cancer 13 years ago, I realized that if I were to have any sign of cancer again, I would rush back to my wonderful Battle Creek cancer specialist, Dr. Stephen Smiley, and follow precisely whatever advice he gave me.

I would nevertheless recommend “Dying to Be Me,” as an inspiring book, and I would also recommend an excellent hour-long interview with Anita by Renate McNay, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jFN9XQeEn4.