ROBERT MONROE; RONALD RUSSELL; JOSEPH CAMPBELL; UN COEUR SIMPLE; NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
Recently I have been thinking about 'out of body' experiences.
Yesterday morning I was sitting on a bench in the empty park, overlooking the local loch.
Along came an elderly lady, out for a walk, and she started talking to me.
It turned out that the lovely lady and her late husband were close friends of Robert Monroe, an expert on 'out of body experiences'.
The lady's late husband, Ronald Russell, has written the main biography of Robert Monroe.
Robert Monroe.
Monroe once said:
"I discovered, through my great astonishment, that I–the non-physical me-am composed of literally hundreds of previous life personalities and experiences.
"If we call it reincarnation that implies a law that forces you to do it. What “forces” one to come back into another life is addiction!
"For example, if there were something I didn’t get a chance to do in this life, I would get to do it in another life.
"My mother said that when she died, her sister and brother would be waiting for her.
"My mother said that when she died, her sister and brother would be waiting for her.
"Interestingly enough, the following Tuesday, as I was heading for the office, I felt her presence about 8:15 in the morning. Just to prove her point, she reached over and squeezed my knee.
"I couldn’t see her or anything, but I could feel here pressure. She was saying good-by.
"Five years later, we found out, that one year after her death, she was a one-year-old in a village in Italy.
"Five years later, we found out, that one year after her death, she was a one-year-old in a village in Italy.
"We got her name, address, in a non-physical investigation.
"We did find out that in that village there was a one-year-old girl that fit the name we had discovered in our non-physical investigation.
"Five years later we discovered that she was amazing, and attracted a lot of attention as a child violinist."
"So, she went back to do the thing she was unable to do in this life."
Robert Monroe Interview
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Felicité is a servant girl.
As Felicité is dying, she thinks that she meets the Holy Spirit.
The skeptic would say that she is deceived.
The non-skeptic would say that she may well have encountered the Holy Spirit.
Felicité is a fictional character in Gustave Flaubert's short story entitled A Simple Heart, or Le Perroquet.
"Felicité is very loyal, and easily lends her affections to the two children of her mistress, Mme Aubain.
"She gives entirely to others; although many take advantage of her, she is unaffected.
"She has no husband, no children, and no property, and is reliant on her mistress to keep her; she is uneducated, which bars her visits to the Church; her death is virtually unnoticed.
"Despite her life being seemingly pointless, she has within her the power to love, which she does even when she does not receive it in return."
Félicité has a beloved parrot called Loulou whom she has 'stuffed' when it dies.
"As she finally passed from this world to the next, Félicité thought she saw a gigantic parrot hovering in the opening heavens above her."
Flaubert
Flaubert was unlike Félicité.
"Flaubert was very open about his sexual activities with (male and female) prostitutes...
"He engaged in intercourse with male prostitutes in Beirut and Egypt; in one of his letters, he describes a "pockmarked young rascal wearing a white turban".[7][8]
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Anonymous writes:
Félicité's name is no accident.
The author of course knew it's derived from the Latin word for happiness.
Yes, the happiest people are those who care for others in humble simplicity.
The most miserable people are the envious, the pretentious, who seek adulation, to be better than those around them. Those who chase their vain desires to the detriment of others. Never satisfied with what they have. In futility, trying to fill a bottomless void with more of the same selfishness.
The diametric opposite of Félicité is Madame Bovary, having little loyalty to or appreciation of those who love her. In a vain and never-ending quest for more - for herself. Dying in misery and pain. And leaving behind those who need her.
A parable in two stories.
The kingdom of heaven and the depths of hell are within us.
Which we choose is up to us.
What about 'real-life' Near-Death Experiences?
The skeptics will call into question the evidence.
In 1977, at a hospital in Seattle, a migrant worker called 'Maria' had an Near Death Experience during a cardiac arrest.
"She later told her social worker that while doctors were resuscitating her, she found herself floating outside the hospital building and saw a tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge, which she described in some detail.
"The social worker went to the window Maria had indicated, and not only found the shoe but said that the way it was placed meant there was no way Maria could have seen all the details she described from inside her hospital room."
The social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, is still alive and available for interview.
But nobody knows the current whereabouts of Maria and so she is not available to confirm the story.
The skeptics will say that the story is not confirmed as being true.
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Might the Near Death Experience (NDE) have a purpose?
The NDE "is similar to the hero's journey, or quest narrative, the structure that the American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell identified and named the monomyth in 1949.
"The quest underlies just about every form of storytelling, from religious myth to Greek epic to Hollywood blockbuster to personal memoir.
"In this structure, a protagonist is shaken out of his normal way of life by some disturbance and - often reluctantly at first, but at the urging of some kind of mentor or wise figure - strikes out on a journey to an unfamiliar realm.
"There he faces tests, battles enemies, questions the loyalty of friends and allies, withstands a climactic ordeal, teeters on the brink of failure or death, and ultimately returns to where he began, victorious but in some way transformed."
davidrjolly.wordpress.com.
Campbell: "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?" Moyers: "Not in a long time." Campbell: "Remember the last line? 'I have never done a thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss."[20]
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Labels: Joseph Campbell, Near Death Experience, ROBERT MONROE, Ronald Russell, UN COEUR SIMPLE
posted by Anon @ 11:34
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