Posted on 15 July 2024, 8:34

A number of people have reported a “life review” during a near-death experience (NDE) – seeing every second of their lives flash before them in what might be called a timeless moment.  A man named Tom Sawyer had an NDE in 1978, one in which he recalled living every thought and attitude connected with decisive moments in his life and seeing them through the eyes of those affected by his actions. Popular NDE author PMH Atwater reported that she saw every thought she had ever had, every word she had ever spoken, and every deed she had ever done.

Physicist and author Dr. James Beichler speculates that a person who has a highly developed spiritual consciousness – one that has kept pace with the development of his mind – may not need a life review as the person has reviewed his or her life while in the flesh. Although I don’t know how developed my spiritual consciousness is, I attempted such a life review one night recently when I had a difficult time sleeping, hoping that it is a time-saver after I transition to the larger world. My focus was on the negative experiences rather than the positive. Those I left for another sleepless night.

Fortunately, I couldn’t recall any murders, thefts, or whatever else that might be classified as a felonious act. The word “bully” wasn’t really in my vocabulary when I was a kid during the 1940s, but one of the first things I recalled was acting like a bully with another kid my age. It was over a ridiculously trivial matter. If my after-death life review is like Tom Sawyer’s, I will feel myself being punched in the nose by my own fist. But hopefully the remorse I now feel for my one “bully” act is enough to avoid seeing it in a life review.

I recall rationing during World War II, in particular Super Suds, a laundry soap. My mother said that the amount allowed by the government was not enough for our laundry, and so I somehow cheated the system and managed to get two boxes of Super Suds at the store. I don’t recall how I did it, but I can still picture my mother’s joyous expression when I brought two boxes home. I need to feel more remorse for that one. What if some other person didn’t get his or her one box because I got two?

Being a practicing Catholic during my youth, I abstained from eating meat every Friday. However, there was one Friday when I attended a baseball game and couldn’t resist having a hot dog. As I munched into it, I wondered how many days I’d have to spend in the fires of purgatory because of my lack of discipline. Now that meat is permitted on Friday, I’m hopeful that all prior sins in this regard are pardoned.

In the fifth grade at Catholic school, each class contributed to a stage program. Ours was a tribute to singer Al Jolson and involved singing “Way down upon the Swannee River.” We all had to darken our faces with burnt cork, just like Jolson. There was nothing racist about it that I could see then or now, but today it would be considered by some to be a terribly racist thing. As I see it, applying current standards to past activities stages of spiritual evolution is part of the insanity we are now experiencing, and I’m confident that it will not come up in my life review.

“Culturism” was more common than racism where I grew up and various relatives and friends had derogatory names for people from three or four European countries. I do remember choosing not to use any of those names and fully respecting natives of those countries. Perhaps I can get points for that in my review.

Fewer Temptations

Without television, we had fewer temptations in those days.  We weren’t exposed to carnal scenes or foul language at home, or even in the movies that we attended once a week.  I wonder if those responsible for popularizing such influences today will see the effects of it all in their life reviews. Then again, perhaps it has just provided challenges and learning experiences.   

Jumping ahead to my adult years, I recall climbing a coconut tree on private property and pulling off a coconut for personal consumption. I don’t think I considered it as thievery at the time, but, in retrospect, it might be called that. I still have that theft memorialized in a photograph and hope the statute of limitations has run on it. 

I further remember visiting my parents and using their car to go to the grocery store. Not being able to find an open parking stall in the parking lot, I decided to take advantage of my father’s handicap placard and pulled into a stall reserved for the truly handicapped.  I justified my act by reasoning that I had Achilles tendonitis at the time, a result of too much competitive running. Also, there was another handicap stall available.  That violation remained with me for a day or two, but I don’t know if that was enough remorse. It may be that during a real-life review I will see a handicapped person unable to find a parking stall, then driving out of the parking lot and having a serious accident, all because I had used the parking stall he would have had were it not for my selfishness. 

I remembered the time that I copied something protected by copyright law and passed it on to several friends. Shame on me.  Also,  I recall renting a movie at a Blockbuster store and then lending it to a friend to see the movie, thereby cheating the store out of a possible rental to my friend.  When I heard that our Blockbuster franchise was closing, I wondered if I had contributed to it.

Extermination

Perhaps the most difficult dilemma for me and many others is where to draw the line on exterminating low-life creatures, i.e., house pests.  I’ve swatted hundreds of flies over my lifetime and ended the lives of thousands of ants and termites.  Add in some cockroaches, mice, rats and geckos, the latter especially rampant on the walls here in Hawaii.  If, as Tom Sawyer experienced it, I have to feel the effects of eliminating those creatures, I’m really in trouble. I’ll be eaten alive during my review.  I consider it every time I hear my wife scream and then arm myself with a flyswatter, all the while weighing the unsanitary effects of allowing the creatures to run about or fly free about the house against eliminating them.  A friend told me that his wife, apparently a mystic of some kind, talks to the creatures and becomes friends with them, but I am not gifted in that respect.

I often look back on my competitive running days with much fondness, but Gina, my wife, does not share in my memories.  She reminds me that after we both came home from our jobs in those earlier years, she was laboring away with household chores, especially cooking, while I was out running around the streets for my daily workout. I should have been home helping with the cooking, cleaning, child care, whatever. Because I couldn’t run on a full stomach, it was necessary for me to do the workout before the evening meal, not after, so it more or less boiled down to giving up the activity completely or continuing in my selfish ways.  There was really little room for compromise, but since Gina apparently recognized how important that activity was to my mental and physical health,  she never pushed it and I remained ignorant of my selfishness until later years. I was a victim of my ancestors’ mindset that women did all the cooking. I don’t think my father even cooked toast.  If, in my self-judgment, I am faced with justifying my pursuit of sport for an hour a day, I hope my higher self agrees with the way I did it.  Otherwise, I could find myself on a treadmill to hell.

There are things I have not mentioned or have forgotten, so I may face a life review in spite of attempting to do it before death.  But what’s the point of saving time if there is no time in that realm?

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

Next blog post:  July 29

Dear Mike,

Pre-death visions offer direct evidence for discarnate existence while NDEs offer only indirect evidence. In my view, NDEs are a proof for a spiritual or higher consciousness and they are only spiritual dreams. Of course, NDErs get some vague glimpses of eternal realities.

While I was looking after my grandmother in her terminal periods, one day I saw her staring into the space and looked embarrassed and asked, “Why you are all here?” I was shocked and remained in that shock until I read the joint book of Osis Karlis and Haraldsson Erlandur-At the Hour of Death. My grandmother died two days after her visionary experience.

Pre-death visions occurring 24 hours before death are considered more genuine and not neural artifacts. I got the opportunity to discuss my experience directly with Professor Haraldsson in one of the SPR meetings and express my gratitude for that book. What a towering personality he was!

Life review of NDE is a self-appraisal and without self-appraisal nobody can progress in their chosen career. Those discarnate who refuse such self review or assisted review would go down to inferior dimensions until they develop minimal spiritual insight. In this respect, I would like to highlight the wisdom involved in the Catholic sacrament of confession which is a rehearsal of future,  potential discarnate self-appraisal. In addition, it relieves moral and neurotic guilt feelings. Psychological therapies resolve only neurotic guilt feelings. One has to ventilate moral guilt feelings to a representative of the moral authority to get rid of the moral guilt feelings and plead for forgiveness.

NDE reviews are exaggerated and it has become a field of commercial spirituality. Combined with AI, it could offer misleading information about discarnate existence in the future.

Dr James Paul Pandarakalam

Michael,

I liked the Youtube link from Jon. Very interesting connections to have that access so quickly. I had a few takeaways from it (assuming it is real and not a clever edit, keeping the original date with updated information).
I have had precognition (nothing lately) so I know it truly exists. I was impressed with the God showed me this line. I never knew who was behind my precognitions as it threw my pedestrian world of talking to the dead in to the weird (should that be more weird). I had one gift and getting a second gift would make me sound more crazy. I would however like the title Prophetic Minister on my business card. My life review will be all the bad jokes and upsetting people with messages.
I did contact a physicist Jean Burn who had a clearer point of view.  I recently obtained The Parapsychology Revolution and was interested in your Models of Precognition p271. You are one of a few people to approach this with a scientific mind.
Jean wrote back with great links. It was her clear approach that I needed. Jean broke the problem down into three models, the future was yet to be written, the future was semi-fixed or the future was fixed. I grew up with free will so being pushed into the fixed future group was not an easy acceptance. I had this precognition chapter in my draft book and the following might help.
J. B. Rhine (the Duke group). The term ESP had precognition as one of their three gifts.  The 1934 monograph Extrasensory Perception did not mention precognition
Nobody cared about precognition. The world of science was not ready for it; it did not wish to have its hypothetical applecarts overturned.”
Prophecy in our time Martin Ebon (159)
Precognition contributes to the “very incomplete map of nature”.

So, precognition pierces the fabric of time and we see the “future”. It is random in nature, upsetting in impact and like a place that one you visit you remember it well.
Prophecy in our time Martin Ebon (p165)
Thanks,
Bruce

not exactly on subject, but very timely.  Jon Beecher just sent it to me.  See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey0qVzG8_vU
and start at 10 minutes.

Mike,

Just a few comments.

First, I believe It would be very difficult to do a life review before our spirit leaves our body for good. We cannot remember everything!

Life is so full of things we have thought, said or done ...or NOT done; for we are responsible for all wrongdoing we have done and all the good we could have done but did not do. 

People who have been put in our path that we could have helped but did not. We do waste a lot of time while on earth. There are always so many regrets!

Also, regarding our actions or inactions, according to spirit communications received… OUR INTENT is as equally important as the act itself, sometimes even more so.

Also, a life review may show us where we possibly wronged or hurt someone but we may not have realized it at the time. So a new lesson to be learned. 

The review after our death I believe is different then an NDE. After an NDE, many people come back with new found spiritual and moral knowledge of themselves and life as a whole. A fresh perspective on life. This experience hopefully changes them for the better going forward when they come back.

I do not believe they happen arbitrarily but for the development of the person’s spirit; whether the experience was a good one or not, I believe it serves that kind of purpose for the person. Whether they take advantage of it is up to them.

The review of our material life after our death I believe is very different then an NDE. There is more study to it for a longer period of time.

Your articles keep us thinking! Thank you!
Take Care,
Yvonne Limoges

Michael,
I understand your reluctance to squash “low-life creatures” in your house.  As the years have gone by, I have been more accepting of those beings in my house, contrary to my wife’s wishes. (And I don’t think pesticides are healthful for humans.) It came home to me when I started to think that all living beings have a consciousness, that they are aware of their environment.  I have been able to observe behaviors in even what humans regard as the lowest of creatures, ants and spiders, which suggest that they have emotions, especially fear, aggression, jealousy and as I have observed in birds who also have a kind of “love” for their mate and children.

My biggest problem is with mice!  They are filthy creatures who foul and destroy my belongings.  I have tried to be accepting of them but I cannot. I have caught them in live traps and taken them out in the woods only to have them, the same one, show up again in my house.  I have had snakes in my house which I also catch and release outside.  And I know a lot of damage is being done to the joists under my house by a groundhog chewing on them and on my door frame.  I have caught opossums, raccoons in live traps and released them miles away from my house, hoping I don’t get caught by the County Animal Control Board for releasing them.  And yes, I have caught and released insects including spiders, cockroaches and millipeds outside.

Actually, while they all may have a spark of God and be in the process of evolving in consciousness, I think that I should be allowed to defend myself, without penalty, against any other creature that attacks me in some way.  I try to be kind in their execution if necessary and I think to myself that I am sending them back to their next incarnation.  - AOD

Michael,

You sound like a saint compared to me. In fact, I’m so evil I laughed through much of your confession. I would have made a terrible priest and likely would have laughed at children and even teenagers and told them, “Go and enjoy life. Don’t come back until you have something serious to confess, something worth listening to!”

I’ve been the “other woman” in a few affairs. I’ve certainly hated a lot of people. I told my brother-in-law to “go to hell” a couple times. An officer pulled me over for crossing a double solid line and asked me, “Do you know what you did back there?” to which I replied innocently, “What did I do, Sir?” Of course, I knew what I did back there, but I also knew how to answer the question without overtly lying while also telling the truth. He explained what I did. I thanked him for “letting me know” and promised to be more careful in the future. He let me go.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed your confession. I encourage you to say three “Hail Marys,” four “Our Fathers,” one “Glory Be to the Father,” and move on with your life.

A chucklefest for sure there Mike.  Now consider all the life reviews of your past lives.  Are they up to date?

Michael, if this is all that comes up in your life review, I believe you’re a candidate for canonization.

My own life review during a sleepless night only got me up to about age 9, and my offenses were a lot worse than yours. Like releasing a bag of marbles onto the floor at dancing school. Blowing up pumpkins on Halloween. Tying a dead rat to the light switch string in a dark broom closet at boarding school. Throwing a brick at a passing car. And yes, I tried bullying once, but it wasn’t my style. If I have another sleepless night, I’ll continue. But I’m petrified of my teen years, when testosterone kicked in. Let’s not even go there.

Bart Walton

Wonderful post, smiling here. Perhaps any Catholic guilt you may be feeling over these minor transgressions is the thing to review. Just ribbing you here. I knew Tom Sawyer, a wonderful soul who is now enjoying those incredible realms beyond. Thanks for all your work!

Mike,

This is the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. You have to be raised Catholic to fully appreciate it.

Stafford