MEETING JESUS DURING NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES

Jesus Christ is the only founder of a religion reliably identified in the afterlife. This fact was confirmed to me by Jeffrey Long MD, the founder and analyst of the extensive NDERF website.

Fortunately, most children have not been prejudiced against Jesus from a young age. PMH Atwater notes that pictures of the ‘holy one’ seen in the afterlife demonstrate a strange consistency amongst children of mixed cultures.

“It is striking that child experiencers of near-death states tend not to mix up racial skin tones, as do adults. Example: most Western children that I am aware of see Jesus as light brown, not white. It is the adults who sometimes see Jesus as white-skinned. Where this situation gets fascinating is when you invite experiencers to draw the high holy one/religious figure who visited them. To a person, you cannot tell the difference between a drawing from someone in the State of Wyoming from one done in Thailand or Israel or Russia or China or Nigeria. Patterning holds; differences in patterning only concern a few details of dress and behaviour. That’s it.”

A number of children have identified the ‘holy one’ to be Jesus later when looking at pictures in Bibles or elsewhere, which pictures, however stylised, generally try to depict the robes and the beards of first century Jewish men.

Jesus in NDEs

Here are brief extracts from just a small sample of the NDEs that record an encounter with Jesus. I have not tried to discover the religious beliefs of the NDErs who have related these encounters; my emphasis has now shifted to ‘who is this Jesus who appears in NDEs?’

Jesus seems to change his representation of himself such that he appears to NDErs in a way that does not frighten them. This puts new arrivals at ease and allows them to relax quickly while being with him. Descriptions sometimes go beyond the physical presentation to the mysterious nature of Jesus, as in this one given by Dr Mary Neal:

His hair was long. His features were indistinct. I don’t know how to describe this, but my impression of his appearance was that of love (yes, I realise we don’t typically ‘see’ love, but as I said, I don’t know how to describe this phenomenon of ‘seeing’ something we would normally ‘feel’). He conveyed…