When American studies professor Suzanne Gordon was 10 years old, her father died. Gordon can even remember watching emergency room doctors pronounce her father dead. And she can even remember her mother coming second to life.
Her mother`s experience has stayed with Gordon throughout her life, prompting her to dig further into the work of near-death experiences.
Millions of mass in this area have been affected by these occurrences, she said, creating a web of Americans who share a mutual experience of bridging this earth and the afterlife.
A near-death experience is "a distinct, subjective experience that people sometimes report after a near-death episode. In a near-death episode, a soul is either clinically dead, near death or in a place where death is probable or expected," according to the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Inc. As a researcher in this field, Gordon hopes to prepare the general public around the work of near-death experiences and legalize the field.
"There`s a genuine motivation to educate, not only the medical profession, but society," Gordon said. "And the cause I need to publish a word that`s really an instruction book is because I think it`s important for the ageing population to get a beginning of information where there`s no agenda. In this book, my attempt would surely not be to convert you that there`s life after death."
In Gordon`s new book, An Insider`s Guide to Death and Death and Its Challenges to Medical Science and Religion, which is in its initial stages, she presents the results of more than 10 years of work and 50 case studies from the Washington area to equate the lives and experiences of people who both knowingly and unconsciously underwent near-death experiences. This is the first study in the discipline of near-death experiences that uses ethnography to conduct research, Gordon said.
One such case report was that of Neville Johnston, who in 1977 was walk out of a Manhattan theater when a man walked by and guessing him 3 times. He was rushed to the hospital and declared dead on arrival. But Johnston, who is alive today, said he saw himself pronounced dead.
"As shortly as it happened, I remember looking down and thought `there`s a torso on the land in my clothes, in a consortium of my blood,`" Johnston said, adding that after meeting what he called a "counselor angel" and spending time in heaven, he awoke alive and lying on a hospital bed, with newfound abilities - Johnston said he can now see the preceding and future lives of others and acts as a medium between this earth and the next.
"I don`t live in the same timeline as everyone else," Johnston said. "I chose to recognise my experience. When I was first talk about this, people thought I was crazy, but people have a right to do what they know to do."
Growing up in Southeast Washington, Gordon switched from one faith to another, exploring an array of cultural perspectives on spirituality. While her religious ambivalence never allowed her to fall on one set belief system, her fascination with spirituality remained.
She explained how traditional Western views harp on the impossibility of near-death experiences and try to assign scientific explanations to the unexplained. However, the beliefs of indigenous and Eastern cultures are more receptive to the mind of living and death operating in a bit of different but intertwining dimensions.
"I`m almost an anti-religious soul in price of religions as political institutions," Gordon said. "Most religions are begun because someone had an live like a near-death experience and it became a profoundly shifted worldview and so a religion gets built up about it and charges you money and makes a lot of regulations. I went to so many different churches trying to find something that made sense."
Gordon, who has been a professor at this university since 1998, started in the communication department before moving to the anthropology department. She now teaches classes around the sociology of religion. But because of the singular nature of the area of near-death experiences, Gordon said, her work has no position at the university.
"Wouldn`t I know to, but, I mean, where?" she asked.
But while there are no plans to get a form on near-death experiences to the university, Gordon`s "mission of spirituality" is continuing in other ways. As a founding member of the newly formed American Center for the Consolidation of Spiritual Transformative Experiences, an organisation dedicated to creating a safety net for those who have had near-death experiences by offering them direction and a smell of security, Gordon hopes to serve others deal with this phenomenon and their motivation for a religious mission.
"So many people have trouble because they don`t recognize what these experiences are," Gordon said. "The doctors don`t love what they are. It turns people`s lives around, and they don`t have anybody to speak to some it. People are changed by these events."
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