After
Subsequent to her experience, she spoke of it very little and suffered a long-term depression, which she attributed to the anticlimactic nature of returning to corporeality after experiencing the heaven of afterlife. She slowly became involved in near-death groups and studies and gave talks, going on subsequently to write her account in book form, which met with runaway success.
While her account incorporated elements of traditional Christianity, it also met with a certain degree of resistance as well, largely to its teaching (as she reported she was given it) that some denominations might approximate truth better than others but that different teachings were more appropriate for certain individuals at their given stage of spiritual development, and that therefore judgment should not be passed on them for where they were. Unlike many fundamentalist Christians, and despite her own strict Catholic upbringing as recounted in her book, after receiving her near-death experience, Eadie refers to God as "he" instead of "He" and insists that all religions are necessary for each person, claiming that each religion is necessary for each person because of their different levels of spiritual enlightenment, contrary to the views shared by many Christians worldwide that only Christianity is the one true valid religion. Curiously, Eadie also claims that after her encounter with Jesus, she learned that Christ and God were in fact two separate entities, a view conflicting with that of her Protestant-taught tradition of the Holy Trinity.
In addition, unlike some other Near-Death Experiencers, Eadie claims that reincarnation does not truly exist, and everyone only has one chance on Earth at life. She taught similar withholding of censure on individuals for things like atheism and homosexuality and rejected a common traditional image of hell as an eternity of suffering, suggesting that her life review experience, in which she was made to live and feel the full positive and negative consequences of her cumulative actions in intense detail, including their effects on all around her, were a more than adequate equivalent and probably what the term truly signified.
She also stressed that her key lesson was that life's purpose was to learn love and to grow through the exercise of free will, including making mistakes. Other teachings she said she was given included the idea that there were few if any true accidents, that human lives and paths were chosen, agreed to, and prepared for in advance, with memory of such details suppressed and veiled. Suicide she said she was told was wrong because it deprived people of opportunities to learn and grow, and that there was always hope in life.
Read more about this topic: Betty Eadie