Just out of body not out of their minds

The Times
Just out of body not out of their minds

ONE tennis shoe, abandoned and rotting. There could be nothing more insignificant. But this tennis shoe could have a profound impact, as it kicks religion and philosophy in the backside.
This shoe appears to prove there is life after death. It was seen by Maria, a migrant worker visiting friends in Seattle, who suffered two serious heart attacks. During the second, at Harborview Hospital, she “died” and had an out-of-body experience (OBE).

Some parapsychologists suggest that the near-death experience, when a person feels consciousness drift away from the body and can even look down on the “corpse”, is the separation of the soul from the flesh.

Maria’s spirit breezed through the hospital walls and, on a ledge on the north wall, three stories up, she saw a sports shoe with its laces gummed under the sole and its toe worn and scuffed.

Maria survived, her spirit returned, and she told her story to a sceptical critical care social worker named Kimberly Clark. Clark went to look for the shoe – and to her shock, found it.

“The only way,” Clark insisted, “she could have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back for Maria – it was very concrete evidence for me.”

If Maria had suffered her heart attacks in London instead of Seattle, we would probably have never heard the tale – compared to the survival rate of 30 per cent on America’s West Coast, just 2 per cent of patients in British hospitals can hope to come back from cardiac arrest, according to figures released late last year. (That statistic isn’t weird it’s horrifying.)

Maria’s experience is just one of 20 or more well-documented cases at Kevin Williams’ near-death.com.

Stories of dazzling lights, the appearance of friends and angel guides, the murmur of heavenly music and the pervading sense of peace vie with visions of hell and purgatory that will make you sweat.

One of the most moving, since he is so loved by millions, is Peter Sellers’s account of a near-death experience, revealed to Shirley MacLaine in the mid-Sixties.

He told her: “I felt myself leave my body. I just floated out of my physical form and I saw them cart my body away to the hospital. I went with it. I wasn’t frightened or anything like that because I was fine; it was my body that was in trouble.

“I looked around myself and I saw an incredibly beautiful bright loving white light above me. I wanted to go to that white light more than anything. I remember thinking ‘That’s God’. I’ll never fear death again.”

Peter Sellers died from a heart attack in 1980.

www.near-death.com