On Life after Death

It is not often that, in my articles, I review other authors’ books. In about one hundred blog posts I have written so far, that has happened literally a few times. As I come back to my core subject of survival and – in particular – the use of afterlife science for the benefit of the bereaved and the dying, however, it is my pleasure to point my readers to a little book which I discovered only recently and turned out to be a wee gem.

The author is celebrity Swiss psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004), primarily known by the general public for having introduced the “five stages of grief”. Or maybe not? The problem of the “stages” is that Kubler-Ross spent a lifetime working with the dying, and not the bereaved. Her five stages provide a general framework for understanding how a person reacts when he or she is told of imminent and premature death, not how a person reacts to the loss of a loved one. The process through which the five stages morphed from a general framework for the dying to a fixed, almost religious dogma artificially applied to anything and anybody, from the bereaved to those who have lost their jobs, is one of the extraordinary tales of the our modern era. Look up “Kubler-Ross” on Google, and see for yourself…

The little book (it’s only 85 pages) I want to briefly talk about is On Life After Death. It looks like a collection of essays, but in fact three of the four main chapters are the transcription of as many lectures that the author gave to various audiences, and the fourth one (perhaps the less strong, in my opinion) is the text of an audio lecture she recorded initially as an audiobook.

What I particularly liked about the book is that Kubler-Ross, speaking from the authoritative standpoint of somebody who has received 14 honorary degrees from Universities around the world, makes a clear, compelling and passionate case for the afterlife. She does so without “beating around the bush”, if my readers will excuse the expression.

She has spent thirty years accompanying the dying – particularly dying children – and she has investigated in excess of 20,000 cases of near-death experiences, and she tells it as it is. She doesn’t need – as many of us do – to bring tons of supporting evidence in support of her case. For her, survival of personality has been a direct experience, as a physician, as a scientist and as a human being, for her entire life. She mentions bits and pieces of the research, but her message is extremely focused, aimed directly at those in fear and in pain. Death as we understand it does not exist. And, this is the outline of what happens when we shed our physical body and move into a nonphysical realm of existence.

This book will not say anything much, or anything new, to most of my readers, who, I understand, have been reading about these subjects for years. There are tons of books on afterlife science – including the ones I have written myself – and there are even a few good ones going into details on what we know about the dying process and the way the afterlife is perceived by the discarnate personalities. No – this book is one that you may want to give as a gift to somebody who doesn’t have the time or the energy to dig into the evidence. This person will find a warm, unequivocal, comforting message, delivered by a person of the utmost scientific and moral authority. A wise, caring, extremely learned grandmother who tells it as it is.