This was written as part of my coursework at Marian University, where we were assigned to write about our interest in the afterlife.
Original Submission Date: March 10. 2023
One moment the rise and fall of Luke’s chest signified he was alive and the spirit that made him my beloved dog was there, the next moment as the medicine stopped his heart he was gone. Even though his body sprawled across the floor looked like the hundreds of photos I’d take of him sleeping, the essence that made him Luke was gone. Luke’s death was the first time I had sat with a loved one as they died and it impacted me profoundly as on paper death is black and white, one moment a heart is beating and the next it is not, but in reality it is a profound experience of essence leaving.
Despite his essence leaving his body and his cremains being planted under a tree in my yard, Luke hasn’t left my heart or my home. My entire family has heard him jump off a bed upstairs and we have heard the pitter patter of dog feet on the second floor even when the living dogs are on the first floor. I have also felt him snuggle up to me in bed even when Wendy and Clark, our living dogs, are sleeping on the couch. Luke is not the only ghost, for want of a better term, that I have encountered, but he is the most familiar. My encounters with other realms have rarely been visual but have most often been olfactory and auditory. For instance, there was the time my entire family smelled horses while wandering the halls of the Rosehill Mausoleum and when we turned the corner we saw crypts of the horsey set, easily identifiable by the horseshoes over the doors of the crypts.
It is not only encounters with spirits from other realms that has fueled my interest in afterlife beliefs, it is also my memories of past lives. Sometimes these memories are spontaneous such as the memory of holding my daughter close as we both slowly died of starvation in Colonial America. Or the memory of being a Native American Medicine Woman and saving a dying man who I would go on to have a love/hate relationship in future lives. Some of these memories are mere figments as if they happened eons ago, but others are as clear as the memories of this life.
I am interested in afterlife beliefs because of my own experiences and I believe that humans in general are interested because of their own experiences, but also because the afterlife is the great unknown. While people who have experienced NDEs can tell us about the gateway to the afterlife, they cannot help us understand people who have truly died and not come back. I am interested in both afterlife beliefs around the world and about afterlife-related extraordinary experiences. I am particularly interested in a comparison of afterlife-related extraordinary experiences between cultures. I have done research into shamanic beliefs across cultures and have been intrigued by the similarities. I hope to gain a deeper understanding of near-death experiences cross culturally.
Questions
- Is it possible to have shamanic experiences and to study them academically? I’ve found that it was difficult for me to journey and have shamanic experiences when I was studying shamanism academically.
- Do men and women have different near-death experiences?