Time and Near Death experiences

Most everyone has read about clinically dead people seeing a light, feeling loved, and out of body experiences. A lot has been written on this subject while many investigations are in progress. Why do people see their entire life pass before their eyes like it was a movie playing in fast forward mode? Well, I have what I believe is an explanation for that. It follows from the concept of eternity in the spiritual plane. Those places we call Heaven and Hell.

Well, the definition of time has eluded the best of the scholars from the beginning of time. Among well known philosophers, time fits into two categories. One school of thought is that time is a fundamental structure of the universe through which events occur in sequence. Time passes as events happen but time stands still when you have the perception that nothing is moving. Another group thinks it is a structure of the human mind by which we sequence events. Either definition requires that time be sequential. As Ray Cummings, an early writer of science fiction, wrote in 1922, "Time… is what keeps everything from happening at once."

When it is your time to escape the universe and go on to something much better or worse as the case may be, time stops. The one thing we must consider is that time might be an artifact of this existence and not of our destination after death. Heaven, and of course Hell, may have no concept of time. With no time as we know it, everything there happens all at once. This is sometimes a hard concept to grasp for the sequential nature of our brains here on Earth. But if you have events happening in parallel because there isn't time to separate it, the beginning will be the same as the end. They must occur simultaneously with all events overlapping each other

Let us suppose that time simply does not exist outside of this universe. So there won't be anything to keep events from happening together. When God made the world, it immediately  progressed from it's birth to it's death. The beginning happened along with the end and everything in between because time does not exist so nothing stopped it from happening all at once. Just like your life passing before you eyes but so fast it all happens together.

Think of it like living as flat Stanley on a flat sheet of paper with an apple passing slowly through your paper world. As the apple passes through, you only see a slice of it at one time. You have no idea it is an apple because you haven't seen the whole apple yet. The slices that have traveled through your world appear to be in the past and the part of the apple that hasn't passed through just doesn't exist to you yet.  However, once you leave the confines of that page by becoming 3 dimensional, you can see the complete apple already exists and has always existed. You can see the beginning of the apple and the end of the apple simultaneously.

The definition of eternity is time that neither begins nor ends. If sequential time as we know it does not exist and everything happens at once because time can't make it happen sequentially, that is eternity. Everything exists at the beginning and at the end so it is all eternal because it neither had an end nor a beginning. Eternity is a supernatural law much like sequential time is a law of our universe.


Time, as a misunderstood concept of this world, clouds our understanding of the afterlife. If you remove this restraint for all that happens, things mentioned in the Bible like knowing how it all ends start making a whole lot of sense. When your parents die, or your child, no time passes for them before you are reunited again. Death loses its meaning when you eliminate the concept of time. You never lived nor died but transitioned in and out of this universe. Life here is but an infinitesimal part of the eternal existence of your soul since the beginning when God created you. Time constrains our thinking; let it not constrain our God.