Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing Paperback – September 1, 2014

I read this book immediately after "Proof of Heaven" by Dr. Eben Alexander. I found that the two books complemented and supported each other's message beautifully. These are amazing books, for those with open hearts, and eyes to see. I rank them all the way up there with the best spiritual classics I have ever read, such as the amazing "Ramakrishna and his disciples".What is the central message of each of these books? Learn to live in the Eternal "Now", which exists beyond our human conceptions of time and space. After all, "past" and future" have no intrinsic reality and are mere concepts in our consciousness. It is unnecessary to die or wait for a better life tomorrow, or after death. As Father Anthony De Mello SJ writes in his book "Awareness", it is always those who are most afraid to live right now who are most concerned with whether there is a life after this one. Nobody seems to understand the importance of: "Is there a life before death?"It is pretty clear to me, from the deeply personal accounts of these two authors during and after their NDE's, that they both experienced a spiritual awakening which was the substance of their NDE's. This explains their profound post-NDE interest in living fully now, and their enhanced ability to do so, after their respective illnesses. Only someone who is unafraid of living fully now, loses their morbid interest in a life after this one.They also provide interesting clues of how to do this: They echo each other in trying to convey how crucially important total self-acceptance is. This means no matter who you are, you must learn to accept yourself in totality, both the allegedly good as well as the allegedly evil parts. No matter how "bad" you think you are, or how "depraved", you need to learn to approve of yourself and to love yourself, including the "evil" bits, unconditionally. That opens the door and allows you to be healed. This, I think, is also the central message in the Bible: Despite being sinners, we can be saved. But a precondition is that we must stop judging ourselves and stop rejecting the parts of ourselves that we think are evil. As we succeed, we discover that only we were judging ourselves. The door to awakening is always an open door. Nobody, not God, nor any person, stands in the way of all this joy, the unconditional love and immutable bliss which can be ours right now, except our own unwise self-judgements.Some readers on this website were very critical of the touted concepts of unconditional self-love and unconditional self-approval, suggesting that these are very dangerous doctrines. They seem to interpret this as meaning "do as you please". However, doing just what you like, presumably at the expense of others, does not lead to personal liberty, or direct access to the present. Just the opposite. Further, having unconditional love for the worst criminals, doesn't mean that they should not be contained or restrained. As the great Ramakrishna is quoted as saying in his wonderful book "The Gospel of Ramakrishna" (also available from Amazon), "being love" doesn't mean you should not hiss like a snake. It only means not to inject your venom in your "victims". In other words, this world would be so much a better place if only we stopped being afraid, stopped judging, stopped our hatred, stopped worrying so much!Dr Alexander postulates that consciousness is a field that pervades all of space-time, and is in fact the very fabric of space-time. The human body is a filter or valve that limits that experience and confines it to a bodily experience, both authors write. Both authors however make it quite clear, based on their own direct experience of life in the Here and Now, that it is quite possible to experience the unity and non-duality of consciousness, pervading the entire Universe, right now. This experience is accessible to every person, saint and sinner alike. To begin accessing it directly only means that you must learn to get out of your own way. Well-established ways of doing so is through prayer, by awakening faith, and / or daily meditative practice.Besides the human body acting as a filter or a valve which restricts consciousness, language is the only other filter. We can't do anything about the former, but we can vastly expand our own direct experience and understanding of life, and its true meaning for each of us, by gaining insights into the terribly restrictive and distorting filter which language creates in each of us. The only barrier between us and our direct appreciation of the Eternal Now is our own language. The purpose of language is obviously to communicate, but we misuse and abuse it by killing ourselves, our neighbours and earth. How? Through self-judgement. By the same yardstick by which we measure ourselves, we unconsciously mete out judgement and our version of what we imagine to be "justice" on others and in fact our entire world. Therefore our journey to true freedom, if that is what we really want, must begin and end with ourselves.Insight into the afore-said is not an intellectual process. No traction can be gained by simply reading about this, although this can be an important first step. This is also the message we find in these two amazing auto-biographical books. In this regard, many readers were incredibly disappointed, and sceptical, because they found the accounts of each of the NDE's to be so brief, sketchy, and seemingly lacking in cohesion. However, what these two writers learnt directly, is that reality, instead of the distortion most people experience as reality, is unfathomable and inconceivable. It is beyond telling. No words can ever approach the Almighty. In Genesis in the Bible we find in the centre of the Garden of Eden the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life. The former is the man-made ego, developed from an early age using language as the means, and the latter is our eternal selves, to which we should make wise efforts to awaken to. As we succeed, we realize we were always in Eden, from the very beginning, always are, and always will be.How specifically is language a filter? Consciousness is an impartial mirror, which reflects anything and everything that appears within it. There is no "me" in that mirror. The mirror is the entire Universe. But we artificially create the "me" by picking from the mirroring what we like, and pushing away what we dislike. The only tool for doing so is our learnt language. Therefore, when we look at a tree, or a beautiful sunset, we don't simply see a tree or a sunset. Our thoughts, which includes our worries and fears, are superimposed on our perception, killing our joy and all that beauty that is ours, right here and now.So I think the true message of each of these books is not an attempt to convince the reader about a nicer life after this one. The true message for each of us is to do the necessary work, on ourselves, and in our lives, here and now, to awaken here and now. To the extent that we succeed, and know this immeasurable and unknowable Unity directly, we gain all the "Proof of Heaven" that we need to have. No scientist and no sceptic can ever take away that personal certainty.JP

This is, in my opinion, the best book ever published in the English language (and I suspect any language) of a single near death experience. It may also be one of the most important books ever published on the way we treat and view ourselves. I have known the author personally for several years, but the above statement (and others like it below) are not a result of this. Rather, the exact reverse is the case: Anita's scintillating honesty, her authenticity on all aspects of her experience, the love and integrity of commitment between Anita and Danny (her husband) who saw her through the entire ordeal of cancer, her compassion and care for the healing of others through the self-realizing of their own Magnificence, her intelligent, playful, wholesomely un-guru-like personality in the wake of such an extraordinary event having happened to a human being, is precisely what generated the friendship. When I had a most difficult and delicate personal issue to deal with a few years ago, I chose Anita to confide in, even though we had not known each other very long. I disclose this fact only to illustrate how highly I rate this person's integrity and authenticity.Those who know me on the NDE circuit know that I can also be a real stickler for evidence in the claims made for remarkable experiences (on this issue, more below), but with Anita it was just, purely and simply, never an issue. There is something about this kind of sincerity and honesty that just shines straight through, by the shortest path, like rays beaming through a stained glass window. I knew it. I saw it. And like the rays through the window, no one needed to say "we need to do some research to see if that is sunlight."Anita is not a saint or an Ascended Master. I believe she would be horrified to be regarded as either. She is a real human being, not a Levitating Adept. She can be funny, silly, and just too plain fond of chocolate and ice cream, like the rest of us. In fact, I'm not yet *entirely* convinced that she didn't come back from the other side just for the ice cream...but that's another story.Okay, so to the book. We've come a long way since Dante's Inferno haven't we? Sinners punished in an obsessive and disturbingly peculiar hierarchy of levels, each described in a kind of manic, fascinated detail (this is the Inferno, of course). Anita's book is like the absolute antipodes of the `Inferno'. Instead of a world in which we are already corrupt, fallen, sinful, begging for salvation, stamped on the foreheads with cosmic wrongness from the moment of our birth, Dying To Be Me inverts this picture and says no, that's all wrong. We are not miserable, "sinful", imperfect fleshly contraptions groveling at the divine chair for admission and redemption, in the hope that some pittance of grace will be tossed our way like pennies showered from the gloved and complacent hand of some passing monarch. Rather we ARE the divine, both occupant and chair, as well as tapestries, draperies, and the entire royal chamber. We don't need to seek grace because we are the grace that we seek. We don't need to hunt down, Sherlock Holmes style, the light of the divine, because the very act of arduous seeking blinds us to noticing ourselves as a powerful source of emission. This is Anita's message. How could we ever have fallen, before, for such a dysfunctional and crippling view of life and the cosmos? As if universal force creates us to pity us? To crush us down? To emphasize our smallness? The central message of this book is that we should simply *allow* the essential nature that nature herself intends for us.For myself, the section on Anita's younger years in Hong Kong really helped fill in some blanks and bring to life the whole picture for me. Everything from eating at the Bladerunner-esque Dai Pai Dong in the street, to sipping tea from little cups with tigers or dragons on them, to the vivid depiction of the `hungry ghost festival" and leaving empty seats at the dinner table for the famished dead. More importantly, based on what I hear in this section, it now seems a lot more evident to me, from the patterns she discloses of her childhood, that her fear really was a principal causal factor in her illness. You can sense its systemic presence through all the chapters of her childhood; it is there always, like a crouching bear, this sense of inadequacy, of trying constantly to measure up to essentially impossible and unreasonable standards, and of course (at that stage of life) failing.Turning to the issue of evidence, I don't think it is the most important thing in this case, but it is important enough in the subject at large, I feel, that I would like to mention it. The field of near death research is not without its problems. There are bogus experiences in circulation. Claims of medical events that evaporate when the least investigative pressure is brought to bear on them. These claims subtly (or not so subtly) undermine accounts like Anita's, because the public and the endless ranks of armchair experts, a nontrivial portion of which would still dearly like to dismiss ALL these experiences as not worth the paper they are printed on, are apt to tar all with the one brush. Well, the present account is not one of these. In fact, in terms of medical evidence presented, again even though I don't consider it the most important element of Anita's experience by far, it simply does not get any better than this in a published volume. The places and the doctors involved are named in the text. A full, detailed report written by a cancer specialist is included in the text. This is the only published near death experience I have seen, anywhere, EVER, that has got this right, and I have taken the trouble to make myself familiar with the great majority of them. The only comparison that even approaches was the case of Pam Reynolds, but that did not involve an anomalous healing. The evidential status of Anita Moorjani's case is singular and impeccable.The cancer reversal is (in our worldly thinking anyway) the most remarkable aspect of Anita's story. The aforementioned cancer specialist had this to say in his report:**minor spoiler alert**"Based on my own experience and opinions of several colleagues, I am unable to attribute her dramatic recovery to her chemotherapy. Based on what we have learned about cancer cell behaviors, I speculate that something (non-physical..."information"?) either switched off the mutated genes from expressing, or signaled them to a programmed cell death. The exact mechanism is unknown to us, but not likely to be the result of cytotoxic drugs."I have some background in biology, and genetics, and it is scarcely possible to overemphasize the significance of what is being said in this statement. But here's the problem: just another "medical fixit" is not going to solve this conundrum. There is *not going to be* an undiscovered protocol, a daring surgical procedure, a new type of scanner, an inrush of nanobots, a new cocktail of drugs worthy of being shaken and stirred by Tom Cruise...that is going to solve this matter. Because Anita was healed, self-healed, by direct unobstructed agency of the same universal life principle acting in her and through her, as gave rise to genes and bodies and doctors in the first place. All attempts to hunt the snark down other rabbit holes will finally lead to frustration. That was the "information" provided to the system. When Anita's consciousness was aligned in the native state with this universal source of life, aligned like Atman-Brahman, she said "I/We want to live", and since it was the universe itself that was saying it, there could scarcely be any dissenters.Once that happened, what took place in the cells of the body was merely like "handing a clerk some forms to sign." The miracle was not that she was healed. Nothing short of a miracle, either on this earth or off it, could have *stopped* her from being healed.This is the secret passage that medicine needs to explore, with humility and sincerity, if it really wants to deepen its potency for the ability to heal. Medicine has had its successes, and we should applaud those successes, but the fact is, even in a simple case such as bone-knitting, that nature does the healing, and we simply help to clear its path. That doesn't mean that we can't do anything. It doesn't mean there aren't intriguing possibilities and new directions to explore. But it does mean that just another mechanism, just another medicine, is not going to cut it. If the cause is in a high level (meaning-rich) expression or thwarted expression of the life principle, colloquially what we call the "spiritual", then messing around with pharmaceuticals and high tech instruments will be like trying to get rid of political corruption by deleting names from the telephone book.Anita's particular cancer seems to have had this kind of cause. Now we live in a complex world of multifactorial causes. No one, and I'm sure Anita would agree with this, should conclude that the same cause holds in every case. BUT, even in those other cases, with different causes, such as ageing, exposure to radiation, or even other diseases altogether, so much unexpected light may in the future be shed even on those cases by open-minded pursuit of this type of case, that a whole-hearted exploration is more than worth the doing. There is more to all this than just some new age fad. In the fifties, a boy was cured, by treatment with hypnosis, of congenital icthyosiform erythroderma of Brocq, a hideous condition capable of causing almost total skin coverage of hard, horned scale (icthyosis). There's a thread here. The consciousness cannot be left out of the picture, not if we really want to get to grips with this. And this is surely the most important direction in which Anita's account should launch us: how others can also be brought to this kind of healing. But it is not just the technique that will have to change; it is the people behind the gloves...and this is not a concept that Western Medics are used to.I was also glad of the way that Anita placed the emphasis on this life, and not the "afterlife". Although not everyone will agree with me here, I think another signal breakthrough of Anita's case, and her book, is that it begins to wrest the near death experience away from the somewhat clammy hands of the "life after death" brigade, with which it has "too long languished", to coin a phrase. Again, the message of Anita's experience is not some hurried affair in which we frown our way through life as quickly as possible, like so many grim commuters with the brims of our hats pulled down low against the rain, in order to get to some promised land "elsewhere". Life, the universal creative principle, is pouring itself in to *this* world, to this universe, to the now. It is pouring itself IN, with passion, with vigor, not OUT. On this point I agree with Anita absolutely, and it has been my own view for a long time. "The main show" as the author states it, is "here", not "there". This doesn't mean that an extraordinary state or harmony and fulfillment is impossible. It simply means that we have been too hasty (as the Ents would say) in assuming that life was seeking it, building it, elsewhere, and not right here in the universe of action and expression. I think, myself, that this offers a much healthier vision of the near death experience, and Anita's experience may signal a turning point in the way that said experience is glossed and understood in society. Rather than a portal to a realm that is in some sense an idealized continuation of our human life, experiences such as Anita's suggest more that the near death event is a kind of interface between the dynamic, active, expressing realm of being (the "here") and the underlying Fundament or potential which is the high octane source behind it all. But the Fundament isn't satisfied just being potential. It wants to be active, it wants to express, it wants the "here". Thus Anita, the universe as Anita, realized not only that she wanted to come back, but that it was good to come back; it was good and joyous to express again as Anita Moorjani. In a sense, the needy hankering after an afterlife, like all needy hankering, short-circuits this joyousness. We need to trust that the Fundament is simply always there. It's not going anywhere. We will always be it.I don't agree with absolutely everything that Anita says. For instance, the commentary on rapists and murderers was not particularly convincing to me, for reasons I won't indulge to go into here. But I don't think Anita would mind this. As I say, she is not a guru and I suggest that people don't treat her as such. She does not have the answer to everything, nor should she be expected to. That's a bit too much responsibility for one person! And after all, one of the very reasons we may all be different is precisely because each one of us is capable of bringing unique contributions, and insights, to the structure of existence and this magical (though admittedly sometimes confounding) thing called life.However, that is a minor matter. I do in fact agree with the great majority of what Anita says, a situation that I can honestly say has occurred only about two or three times in forty years of reading.Make no mistake. You will count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a book like this, an opportunity like this, presents itself to you in your lifetime. I won't quite go so far as to say that you should drop everything and read this book. No wait: actually, I *will* go that far...you should drop everything and read this book. No, really. I'm not kidding. No...REALLY, I'm not kidding. I am extremely selective in what I choose to endorse, and this is, without qualification, my biggest endorsement ever. I'm even slightly embarrassed because it is so out of character for me. Anita is not in this for the money. But from me to you, for the few dollars you spend on this book, I personally guarantee you that it will repay its value one hundred fold before you even reach the back cover. Don't say I didn't warn you.I am proud to call Anita Moorjani my friend. And I am profoundly glad she is in the world...first for Danny, and secondly for the world.