Effect
The effect of a life review is often a strongly transformative experience. Experiencers describe them as extremely unpleasant from the perspective of the unhappiness they had inflicted on others, including feelings they had never dreamed of as resulting, and equally pleasant from the perspective of the good feeling they had brought to others' lives, extending to the littlest forgotten details. To some extent, this experience resembles purgatory. The Tibetan Buddhist understanding can be found in The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and is known as Bardo Thodol (the stage between life and afterlife).
Experiencers often report a sharp drop in materialistic outlook (both acquisitive and philosophical), an intensified compassion for others and sense of interconnectedness, newfound altruistic activities, personality changes (though occasionally entailing divorce), a new interest in self-education and spirituality, and so on. Dannion Brinkley as one instance described himself as putting off previously deep-rooted sociopathic traits ingrained from a difficult childhood through his work as a sniper in the Vietnam War. A frequent comment by experiencers is that they later strongly avoided unethical or inconsiderate actions because they wanted to avoid painfully reliving the receiving end of the action which they knew would await them.
The transformative effect is in fact so statistically uniform in comparison with other areas of demographic study that some near-death experience investigators point to it as much as to experiencer accounts' detail as evidence for the empirical reality of the phenomenon itself. Kenneth Ring's book Lessons from the Light includes numerous accounts of a near-death experience permitting people hitherto blind, including cases from birth, as enabled to see (and interpret) vision during the experience.
Read more about this topic: Life Review
Famous quotes containing the word effect:
“In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded.... He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)