34.

A Final Dilemma

I   must    be  willing to  give    up  what    I   am  in  order   to  become  what    I   will    be.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN    (1879–1955)

Einstein was one of my early scientific idols and the above quote of his

had always been one of my favorites. But I now understood what those
words actually meant. Crazy as I knew it sounded every time I told my
story to one of my scientific colleagues—as I could see in their glazed or
perturbed expressions—I knew I was telling them something that had
genuine scientific validity. And that it opened the door to a whole new
world—a whole new universe—of scientific comprehension. Observation
that honored consciousness itself as the single greatest entity in all of
existence.
But one common event in NDEs had not happened with me. Or, more
accurately, there was a small group of experiences I had not undergone,
and all of these clustered around one fact:
While out, I had not remembered my earthly identity.
Though no two NDEs are exactly alike, I’d discovered early on in my
reading that there is a very consistent list of typical features that many
contain. One of these is a meeting with one or more deceased people that
the NDE subject had known in life. I had met no one I’d known in life.
But that part didn’t bother me so much, as I’d already discovered that my
forgetting of my earthly identity had allowed me to move further “in”
than many NDE subjects do. There was certainly nothing to complain
about in that. What did bother me was that there was one person I would
have deeply loved to have met. My dad had died four years before I
entered coma. Given that he knew how I felt I had failed to measure up to
his standards during those lost years of mine, why had he not been there