LIFE AFTER DEATH EXPERIENCES

Have you any life after death experiences you’d like to share?  Here’s one that fascinated me when I read about it a few years ago - and that I’ve never forgotten.

A Captain Arthur Flowerdew, who lived in a Norfolk cottage with his wife, had since boyhood had visions – or flashbacks – of another life, in another country, in another time.  These memories (or whatever they were) occurred chiefly when he was on the beach gazing at pebbles.

He said that at the age of about 12, when he was on holiday with his family at Cromer and Sheringham, he found one or two amber or red rocks lying on the beach.  Picking them up, he remembered thinking “This is the color of the rock of that city.”

When interviewed by author Joan Forman for her book The Mask of Time he told how his lifelong vision of Petra (the ancient city in Jordan hewn from solid rock) had unfolded.  Over the years he had been invaded by images of a rock city with cliffs of amber and pink.

 He saw men in long Biblical robes – but no women or children; a city built in a hollow connected via a narrow gorge to the desert beyond; a stream running along the bottom of the gorge; gold and silver treasure hidden in the back of a temple; tombs carved out of the rock walls; an absence of statues or idols, although the people worshipped certain gods.  

Captain Flowerdew recalled being a soldier in that lifetime, as well as in this one, and having to guard the entrance to the city at the mouth of a gorge about 6 feet wide.

He remembered in vivid detail a fight at that spot when he and the soldiers he commanded were under attack.  A really huge man in a tunic and baggy trousers came at him with a spear and he felt a thump in his chest plus a searing pain in his back.  He could remember nothing after that.

Joan Forman, whose book was a reasoned and unsensational examination of the nature of time made credible by certain findings of modern physics, saw time as an integral part of matter and energy – not as an ever-moving, passing flow chopped up in equal parts by the clock.

She did some research on Petra and found that the city walls were not simply ‘rose-red’ but pink and amber and ochre; one city entrance was very narrow and there was evidence that the track through the gorge – called the Sig – had been used as a water-course; local deities were represented by blocks of stone instead of statues.

And when the Nabateans held the city (about 400 BC to AD 106) after the Jews had been taken into slavery, they might well have sent women and children into the nearby hills, leaving just men to guard the city and its treasure against an anticipated Syrian attack – an attack in which Captain Flowerdew’s former self may have perished 2,200 years ago!  

I'd love to hear of your life after death experiences.  Do tell!