Hi all. I'm a novelist and ceramicist. I am 72 now, have been a seeker since my early twenties, and have traveled to India more than a dozen times to visit the tomb site of Meher Baba. I discovered Skeptiko a few years ago while working on ceramic symbols of the world's religions, to be installed in a marble monument in Meherabad. I have listened to almost every podcast, always illuminating and full of diversity. In fact, in my novel, A Dredging in Swann, due out from Blackstone in January, the hero detective has a near death experience in Iraq. I was aware of NDEs before but was made more fully cognizant of them from Alex's many interviews on Skeptiko. Here's the passage from the novel:
"The next day Seb caught an RPG fragment through his armpit into his aortic arch. When they got him to the hospital his pulse was 180 and the pressure almost gone, and then he was gone and came up out of his body and saw the doctors and nurses working over him and then went down a tunnel of glorious light, and there was his dead father, who had killed himself, now benign and kindly, and he saw his whole life go by like shuffling cards, and some others that shined, and then one of the shining ones came forward and said, you have more to do, and embraced him, and the love that went through him and around him showed Seb everything about life that he would ever know. Then he woke up in the hospital, and they sent him home."
I am currently studying Aurobindo Ghose's The Life Divine, a book in full agreement with the work of Meher Baba in God Speaks and also in Infinite Intelligence, a book recently published from a newly-discovered manuscript. It was edited by Dr. Ward Parks. Ward, incidentally, would make a fine guest on Skeptiko.
"The next day Seb caught an RPG fragment through his armpit into his aortic arch. When they got him to the hospital his pulse was 180 and the pressure almost gone, and then he was gone and came up out of his body and saw the doctors and nurses working over him and then went down a tunnel of glorious light, and there was his dead father, who had killed himself, now benign and kindly, and he saw his whole life go by like shuffling cards, and some others that shined, and then one of the shining ones came forward and said, you have more to do, and embraced him, and the love that went through him and around him showed Seb everything about life that he would ever know. Then he woke up in the hospital, and they sent him home."
I am currently studying Aurobindo Ghose's The Life Divine, a book in full agreement with the work of Meher Baba in God Speaks and also in Infinite Intelligence, a book recently published from a newly-discovered manuscript. It was edited by Dr. Ward Parks. Ward, incidentally, would make a fine guest on Skeptiko.