While at Pieve a Elici (see my previous post on the reason why I was there at https://longoio3.com/2017/08/06/a-wonderful-place-to-experience-the-end-of-time/) I was advised by a friend to look behind the gracious fifteenth century tabernacle.

This is what I saw.

Memento Mori clearly. Perhaps, since Saint Pantaleone to whom the church is dedicated, was a helper of plague victims there may have been an epidemic like the Black Death in mediaeval times there.

Not all plague victims died, however. Some persons afflicted miraculously survived and provided clear evidence of a NDE – a Near Death Experience. Saints experiencing ecstatic trances such as Saint Teresa also describe sensations like an NDE in their writings.

While in Tamilnadu earlier this year we visited the Sri Ramana Maharshi Ashram in Tiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu and also climbed the holy mountain of Arunachala (see my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/the-fire-mountain/ for more).

Shri Ramana Maharshi had at least two NDEs one of which he described in the following words:

It was about six weeks before I left Madura for good that a great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting in a room on the first floor of my uncle’s house. I seldom had any sickness and on that day there was nothing wrong with my health, but a sudden, violent fear of death overtook me. There was nothing in my state of health to account for it; and I did not try to account for it or to find out whether there was any reason for the fear. I just felt, ‘I am going to die,’ and began thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a doctor or my elders or friends. I felt that I had to solve the problem myself, then and there.

The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.’ And I at once dramatized the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word ‘I’ or any other word could be uttered, ‘Well then,’  I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body ‘I’? It is silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it. So I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. This means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centred on that ‘I’. From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on. Other thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music, but the ‘I’ continued like the fundamental sruti note that underlies and blends with all the other notes. Whether the body was engaged in talking, reading, or anything else, I was still centred on ‘I’. Previous to that crisis I had no clear perception of my Self and was not consciously attracted to it. I felt no perceptible or direct interest in it, much less any inclination to dwell permanently in it.

Incidentally Louis Buss, the son of a late journalist-translator friend Robin, has reserached extensively on a Colonel Chadwick, who was profoundly influenced by Ramana:

A London friend, John Franklin, has been Hon. Secretary of the Alister Hardy Trust which researches into NDEs’ and has written a fascinating history of the Trust which has an interesting website at http://www.studyspiritualexperiences.org/

What characterises a near death experience?  It’s principally the feeling that one has become detached from one’s body, indeed has become literally disembodied, and is beginning a journey over a metaphorical bridge towards an unknown region. The feeling is so strong that one immediately starts telling friends (if they are around) about one’s last wishes, thank them for the last time for all the happy hours sent in their company, confirm there’s  a last will and testament and, most poignantly, ask to be forgiven for any untoward actions in one’s life towards them. The strongest feeling is that, whatever state of mind one is in when the NDE affects one, it is precisely that state of mind which one will have to ‘live’ with, whatever happens next.

I realise that I too have had several Near Death Experiences in my life. Just a few of them are

• In a youth hostel in Vancouver when I woke up feeling completely disembodied (No I hadn’t smoked anything!)
• After a pop concert in Cambridge.
• In 2012 in Longoio when I felt so disembodied that my body couldn’t even move, despite my staring at it from a height above it.

Have you ever had a near-death experience? Have you ever experienced any of these sensations?

• A sense or awareness of being dead.
• An out-of-body experience or disembodiment
• An experience like entering a dark tunnel.
• A sense of peace, well-being and painlessness. …

It’s not too strange how looking at those weird mediaeval death drawings on the back of the Pieve a Elici Tabernacle brought these reflections to mind. And what was played at the concert which followed?

Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the end of Time’……

PS As Woody Allen famously said “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”