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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004)
Known for her best-selling work
On Death and Dying
, which has been
of enormous help to those treating or caring for terminally ill patients,
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was an early pioneer in NDE research. She wrote
the Foreword to Raymond Moody’s groundbreaking
Life After Life
.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss physician, who had to struggle from
birth. The first of triplets, she was a scrawny two-pound baby and later
felt that this gave her the feeling that she always had to prove herself
worthy of life. She needed to be tough, as she eventually qualified as a
doctor in the face of her father’s opposition. After the war, she travelled
to Poland and went to the erstwhile concentration camp at Maidenek,
where 300,000 people had died.
I personally saw trainloads of baby shoes, trainloads of human hair
from the victims of the concentration camps being taken to Germany
to make pillows. When you smell the concentration camps with your
own nose, when you see the crematoriums when you are very young
like I was, when you really are an adolescent in a way, you will never
ever be the same again.
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She was also changed by Golda, whom she met there. Golda had
survived the gas chamber by a miracle and after a period of rage, had
Spiritual and Mystical Experiences
211
realized that in fact we are all capable of being like Hitler, if we allow
hatred to dominate in life. Golda had chosen to forgive and love.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross also saw hundreds of drawings on the walls of the
barracks where the prisoners had spent their final days, drawings of but-
terflies. It was many years before she understood that they represented
the spirit being liberated from the cocoon of the body and the image
remained with her.
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shed-
ding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness
where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able
to grow.
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Years later, when she was practicing medicine in the USA, Elisabeth Kübler-
Ross began spending time with her terminally ill patients, and found her-
self listening to them. In those days, there was a denial of the inevitability
of death in the medical profession. The patients, however, were unhappy
at being fobbed off with excuses and wanted to talk about death and
make preparations to leave this life, rather than endure denial. Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross began to study the stages these patients went through from
their diagnosis onward: anger, denial, bargaining, depression to accep-
tance. This was the basis of her book, and she found the pattern applicable
in all situations of loss or hardship, in life as well as in death.
She set up a seminar at the University of Chicago to study death and
dying, for students of medicine, sociology, psychology and theology, which
was also attended by hospital staff and relatives of patients. Patients too,
would contribute from time to time, and a Mrs Schwarz recounted an
OBE, which was a completely new experience for the class. Sometime after
that, Mrs Schwarz died and she appeared to Elisabeth, encouraging her to
continue her work. This led to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s increasing involve-
ment into research on what happens after death. She began to interview
people who had been revived after their vital signs had indicated that they
were dead. She discovered more about NDEs and began to understand
death as a transition from one state of consciousness to another.
Convinced that her second task in life was to tell people that death
does not exist, she lectured and wrote widely, using her patients’ stories
as examples. Her life-story,
A Memoir of Living and Dying, The Wheel of
Life
includes accounts of her many mystical experiences, and ends with
the words,
Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of
your life. It all depends on how you have lived.
Religious and Spiritual Experience
212
Death is but a transition from this life to another existence where
there is no more pain and anguish.
Everything is bearable when there is love.
My wish is that you try to give more people more love.
The only thing that lives for ever is love.
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