Excerpts from Return From Tommorow
by George Ritchie
Ritchie, George G., M.D. Return From Tomorrow. Chosen Books Pub. Co., 1978.
Whatever I saw was enough to convince me totally of two things from that moment on. One, that our consciousness does not cease with physical death � that it becomes in fact keener and more aware than ever. And secondly, that how we spend our time on earth, the kind of relationships we build, is vastly, infinitely more important than we can know (p 16).
... Finding myself somehow suspended 50 feet in the air was an even stranger feeling ... Down the sidewalk a man came briskly walking ... I thought I could find out from his what town this was and in what direction I was heading. Even as the idea occurred to me - as though thought and motion had become the same thing - I found myself down on the sidewalk, hurrying along at the stranger's side (p 39).
Something was strange about time, too, in this world where rules about space and speed and solid mass were all suspended. I had lost all sense of whether an experience was taking a split second, or whether it was lasting for hours (p 45).
I stared in astonishment as the brightness increased, coming from nowhere, seeming to shine everywhere at once. For now I saw that it was not light but a Man who had entered the room, or rather, a Man made out of light, though this seemed no more possible to my mind than the incredible intensity of the brightness that made up His form. The instant I perceived Him, a command formed itself in my mind. "Stand up!" The words came from inside me, yet they had an authority my mere thoughts had never had. I got to my feet, and as I did came the stupendous certainty: "You are in the presence of the Son of God." Again, the concept seemed to form itself inside me, but not as thought or speculation. It was a kind of knowing, immediate and complete. I knew other facts about Him too. One, that this was the most totally male Being I had ever met. If this was the Son of God, then His name was Jesus. But this was not the Jesus of my Sunday School books. That Jesus was gentle, kind, understanding - and probably a little bit of a weakling. This Person was power itself, older than time and yet more modern than anyone I had ever met. Above all, with that same mysterious inner certainty, I knew that this Man loved me. Far more even that power, what emanated from this Presence was unconditional love. An astonishing love. A love beyond my wildest imagining. This love knew every unlovable thing about me - the quarrels with my stepmother, my explosive temper, the sex thoughts I could never control, every mean, selfish thought and action since the day I was born - and accepted and loved me just the same. When I say He knew everything about me, this was simply an observable fact. For into that room along with His radiant presence - simultaneously, though in telling about it I have to describe them one by one - had also entered every single episode of my entire life. Everything that had ever happened to me was simply there, in full view, contemporary and current, all seemingly taking place at that moment. The little one-bed room was still visible, but it no longer confined us. Instead, on all sides of us was what I could only think of as a kind of enormous mural - except that the figures on it were three dimensional, moving and speaking ... Every detail of 20 years of living was there to be looked at. The good, the bad, the high points, the run-of-the-mill. And with this all-inclusive view came a question. it was implicit in every scene and, like the scenes themselves, seemed to proceed from the living Light beside me. "What did you do with your life?" It was obviously not a question in the sense that He was seeking information, for what I had done with my life was in plain view. In any case this total recalling, detailed and perfect, came from Him, not me. I couldn't have remembered a tenth of what was there until He showed it to me. "What did you do with your life?" It seemed to be a question about values, not facts: what did you accomplish with the precious time you were allotted? ... If there were no horrendous depths, there were no heights either. Only an endless, shortsighted, clamorous concern for myself ... All at once rage at the question itself built up in me. It wasn't fair! Of course I hadn't done anything with my life! I hadn't had time. How could you judge a person who hadn't started? The answering thought, however, held no trace of judgment. "Death," the word was infinitely loving, "can come at any age."... I realized that it was I who was judging the events around us so harshly. It was I who saw them as trivial, self-centered, unimportant. No such condemnation came from the Glory shining round me. He was not blaming or reproaching. He was simply loving me. Filling the world with Himself and yet somehow attending to me personally. Waiting for my answer to the question that still hung in the dazzling air. "What have you done with your life to show Me?" Already I understood that in my first frantic efforts to come up with an impressive answer, I had missed the point altogether. He wasn't asking about accomplishments and awards. The question, like everything else proceeding from Him, had to do with love. "How much have you loved with your life? Have you loved others as I am loving you? Totally? Unconditionally?" Hearing the question like that, I saw how foolish it was even to try to find an answer in the scenes around us. Why, I hadn't known love like this was possible. Someone should have told me, I thought indignantly! But though these thoughts rose out of self-pity and self-excuse, the answering thought held no rebuke, only that hint of heavenly laughter behind the words: "I did tell you." But how? Still wanting to justify myself: how could He have told me and I not heard? "I told you by the life I lived. I told you by the death I died. And if you keep your eyes on Me, you will see more ..." With a start I noticed that we were moving ... The streets were impossibly crowded ... I noticed people unaware of others right beside them ... Like me, in fact, they were dead... But it was so very different from the way I had always imagined death ... Was this was death was like - to be permanently invisible to the living, yet permanently wrapped up in their affairs? "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth! For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also!" Those words of Jesus sprang into my mind now like an electric shock. Perhaps these insubstantial people, although they could no longer contact the earth, still had their hearts there. Did I? With a kind of terror I thought of that Eagle Scout badge; being a Phi Gamma; getting into med school. Was my heart, the focus of my being, fixed on things like these? "Keep your eyes on Me," Jesus had told me as we set out on this extraordinary journey. And when I did, whenever I looked at Him, the terror vanished, although the dreadful question remained. Without Him before me, in fact, I could not have endured the things He was showing me. Several times we paused before similar scenes. A boy trailing a teenaged girl through the corridors of a school. "I'm sorry, Nancy!" A middle-aged woman begging a grey-haired man to forgive her. "What are they so sorry for, Jesus? Why do they keep talking to people who can't hear them?" Then from the Light beside me same the thought: "They are suicides, chained to every consequence of their act." (pp 48-59)
Gradually I began to notice something else. All of the living people we were watching were surrounded by a faint luminous glow, almost like an electrical field over the surface of their bodies. This luminosity moved as they moved, like a second skin made out of pale, scarcely visible light... My own unsolid body, I now saw, was without this glowing sheath. At this point the Light drew me inside a dingy bar and grill. A crowd of people lined the bar three deep ... Then I noticed a striking thing. A number of the men standing at the bar seemed unable to lift their drinks to their lips ... And these men, every one of them, lacked the aureole of light that surrounded the others. Then, the cocoon of light must be a property of physical bodies only. The dead, we who had lost our solidness, had lost this "second skin" as well... I watched one young sailor rise unsteadily from a stool, take two or three steps, and sag heavily to the floor ... I was staring in amazement as the bright cocoon around the unconscious sailor simply opened up. It parted at the very crown of his head and began peeling away from his head, his shoulders. Instantly, quicker than I'd ever seen anyone move, one of the insubstantial beings who had been standing near him at the bar was on top of him. He had been hovering like a thirsty shadow at the sailor's side, greedily following every swallow the young man made. Now he seemed to spring at him like a beast of prey. In the next instant, to my utter mystification, the springing figure had vanished. Twice more, as I stared, stupefied, the identical scene was repeated. A man passed out, a crack swiftly opened in the aureole round him, one of the non-solid people vanished as he hurled himself at that opening, almost as if he had scrambled inside the other man. Was that covering of light some kind of shield, then? Was it a protection against disembodied beings like myself? Presumably these substance-less creatures had once had solid bodies, as I myself had had. Suppose that when they had been in these bodies they had developed a dependence on alcohol that went beyond the physical. That became mental. Spiritual, even. Then when they lost that body, except when they could briefly take possession of another one, they would be cut off for all eternity from the thing they could never stop craving. An eternity like that - the thought sent a chill shuddering through me - surely that would be a form of hell. I had always thought of hell as a fiery place where evil men would burn forever. But what if one level of hell existed right here on the surface - unseen and unsuspected by the living people occupying the same space? What if it meant remaining on earth but never again able to make contact with it? ... To burn with most desire where you were most powerless - that would be hell indeed ... But if this was hell, if there was no hope, then why was He here beside me? Why did my heart leap for joy each time I turned to Him? All the sights and shocks assailing me were nothing compared to the main thing that was going on. Which was, quite simply, falling in love with the Person beside me. Whichever way I looked, He remained the real focus of my attention. And that was another of the things baffling me? If I could see Him, why couldn't everyone else? How could they miss Someone closer, more brilliant than the noonday sun? Unless ... For the first time it occurred to me to wonder whether something infinitely more important than I ever believed could have happened that day when at age eleven I walked forward to the altar of a church. Was it possible that I had actually been "born again," as the preacher said - given new eyes, whether I understood any of it or not? Or, could these others see Him now too, if their attention was not all caught up in the physical world they had lost? "Where your heart it ... " As long as my heart had been set on getting to Richmond by a certain date, I hadn't been able to see Jesus either. Maybe whenever our center of attention was on anything else, we could block out even Him. (pp 59-63)
We were moving again � So far in our journeying we had visited places where the living and the dead existed side by side: indeed where disembodied beings, completely unsuspected by the living, hovered right on top of the physical things and people where their desire was focused. Now, however, I could see no living man or woman. The plain was crowded, even jammed with hordes of ghostly discarnate beings; nowhere was there a solid, light-surrounded person to be seen. And all of these thousands of people were the most frustrated, the angriest, the most completely miserable beings I had ever laid eyes on. At first I thought we were looking at some great battlefield: everywhere people were locked in what looked like fights to the death, writhing, punching, gouging. It couldn�t be a present day ware because there were no tanks or guns, only bare hands and feet and teeth. And then I noticed that no one was apparently being injured. There was no blood, no bodies strewed the ground; a blow that ought to have eliminated an opponent would leave him exactly as before. At last I realized that of course, having no substance, they could not actually touch one another. They could not kill, though they clearly wanted to. Up to this moment the misery I had watched consisted in being chained to a physical world of which we were no longer part. Now I saw that there were other kinds of chains. Here were no solid objects or people to enthrall the soul. These creatures seemed locked into habits of mind and emotion, into hatred, lust, destructive thought-patterns. Even more hideous than the bites and kicks, were the sexual abuses many were performing in feverish pantomime. Perversions I had never dreamed of were being vainly attempted all around us. Whatever anyone thought was instantly apparent to all around him, more completely than words could have expressed it, faster than sound waves could have carried it. And the thoughts most frequently communicated had to do with the superior knowledge, or abilities, or background of the thinker. �I told you so!� �I always knew!� �Didn�t I warn you!� were shrieked into the echoing air over and over. With a feeling of sick familiarity I recognized here my own thinking. This was me, my very tone of voice � the righteous one, the award-winner, the churchgoer. Once again, however, no condemnation came from the Presence at my side, only a compassion for these unhappy creatures that was breaking His heart. Clearly it was not His will that any one of them should be in this place. Then � what was keeping them here? Why didn�t each one just get up and leave. There were no fences. Nothing apparently prevented them from simply going off alone. Unless there was no �alone� in this realm of disembodied spirits. No private corners in a universe where there were no walls. No place that was not inhabited by other beings to whom one was totally exposed at all times. What was it going to be like, I thought with sudden panic, to live forever where my most private thoughts were not private at all? � Gradually I was becoming aware that there was something else on that plain of grappling forms. That entire unhappy plain was hovered over by beings seemingly made of light � Could it be that each of these other human wraiths, wretched and unworthy like me, was also in His presence? In a realm where space and time no longer followed any rules I knew, could He be standing with each of them as He was with me? I didn�t know. All I clearly saw was that not one of these bickering beings on the plain had been abandoned. They were being attended, watched over, ministered to. And the equally observable fact was that not one of them knew it. If Jesus or His angels were speaking to them, they certainly did not hear. Their eyes sought only some nearby figure to humiliate � And suddenly I realized that there was common denominator to all these scenes so far. It was the failure to see Jesus. Whether it was a physical appetite, an earthly concern, an absorption with self � whatever got in the way of His Light created the separation into which we stepped at death (pp 63-67).
For hours each night I�d recall every sight, every sound of that incredibly vivid time. First that hellish realm, where people who no longer belonged to the earth could not escape it either � couldn�t escape the involvements, the hungers, the pride they had allowed to dominate them here (p 84).
[15 months later] The lonesomeness I had felt that year, the alienation from the world and the things that went on here, wasn�t it all a longing to go back to the time when I had stood in His presence? But could you ever find Him by going backwards? The very nature of the Person I had met was His now-ness. He was overwhelmingly and everywhere Present, so that no other time could even exist where He was. It was no good looking for Him in the past, even when that past was only 15 months before. I knew that afternoon that if I wanted to feel the nearness of Christ I would have to find it in the people that He put before me each day � We walked around in back; there was the tree stump on which I had sat, only a little over two weeks before, praying to be allowed to die. That prayer had been answered. In a sense in which I never meant it, I had indeed died. For the first time in many months I had put aside my self-pity, my self-incrimination � all thoughts of any kind about myself � long enough to get involved with someone else. And in losing myself, I had discovered Christ. It was strange, I thought: I�d had to die, in Texas, too, to see Him. I wondered if we always had to die, some stubborn part of us, before we could see more of Him � That was the beginning, for me, the moment when I began to integrate the near-death experience in Texas with all the rest of my life. The first step was to stop trying to recapture that other-worldly vision of Jesus, and start looking for him in the faces across the mess table � I discovered something else. The more I learned to see Christ in other people, the less I was crushed by the death and suffering our medical unit dealt with. It seemed like it would be the opposite � but when I recalled the Texas experience honestly, there had been much in that �other realm� that was frankly hideous, scenes of agony worse than anything. I had told myself I wanted to leave this earth because I had seen a better place. But that wasn�t true I began to realize: the afterworld I had glimpsed was both infinitely brighter than this one, and infinitely more savage and terrible. Why hadn�t the evil side of that world crushed my spirit, as the negatives of this world had done? I had started reading the Bible and one day I came to a Psalm that seemed to help. �If I ascend to heaven,� I read in Psalm 139, �You are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there!� Of course, that was the answer: Jesus had been there, in those scenes of Sheol. It was His light, His compassion in which I was seeing the awfulness, and that shed a ray of hope, even in hell � My trouble began, I saw now, when I took my eyes off Jesus and onto myself � I began to understand, reading the Bible, how all-important our lives on this earth are, in His plan. How terribly wrong I had been to detest mine, to ask Him to take me out of this world before His work in me here was done. I thought of the wretched souls I had seen in that first post-earthly realm, trapped in hatreds and lusts, fixed on material things forever out of reach. Somehow none of them had finished growing up in their time on earth, whether it had been long or short � With my self-centeredness, my prejudices, my self-righteousness � how had I dared ask to die! In yearning for Jesus had I forgotten what He showed me? That plain crawling with the unhappiest beings I had ever seen, each insisting on his own superiority to the annihilation of everybody else � had I seriously wanted an eternity in some existence like that? Would I ever, in fact, reach the point where I�d be willing to say, on my own, I�ve done what I�m supposed to do on earth? (pp 111-118)
|