Talk:Interfaith Perspectives:Reconciling the Spiritual Visions and NDE of Followers of Different Religions
By Sri Vishal Agarwal
Many individuals, who were declared dead clinically or were thought to be dead, have miraculously recovered. Some of them have reported meeting super-natural figures of light who asked the dead person’s soul to return to the world, causing the person to become alive again.
A few of the accounts diverge from the predominant descriptions that accord well with Hindu scriptural teachings, and include meetings with angels, seeing God and going to a heaven as narrated in the Bible. A book (Heaven is for Real) based on the recollections of a child born in a devout Christian family is very popular among American Christians. Similarly, many Hindus have narrated seeing their own Devatās.
Hindus do not find these conflicting accounts disturbing to our religious convictions. Death is a traumatic experience in which the ātman of the dead person is uprooted from this world and sent to the next. The ātman encounters a totally alien environment even while being attached to its prior existence when it lived in a body. Hindus would explain that just as Brahman assumes forms out of love for us, so also, he would ensure that the departed souls conditioned by their religious upbringing in this world are initially made to experience an environment with which they are more comfortable and familiar, so as not to exaggerate their trauma of death.
Similarly, we can explain the diverse spiritual visions of the followers of different faiths.