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1. Introduction to Life and NDEs
The hard reality we face is that the ultimate goal in life is death. Death seems like a cruel absurdity that happens to us after enjoying the time of our lives. As it is with death, the meaning of life is also a great mystery. The meaning of life offers many questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? Have we lived before? Why are we here? Where are we going? Does life continue after death? Is there a God? These are profound questions that demand answers. Fortunately, there are answers to these questions and they come from people having near-death experiences (NDEs). These NDEs offer many insights including: Life is what people worship as God. All life is a manifestation of God. For us to benefit from life, we must rediscover our oneness with God here in the physical realm. There are many realms to life and this physical realm is only one of them. Life is a mission from God we chose to fulfill. Life is a great World-School where we come to learn the many lessons of love. Everything in life runs according to a perfect and divine plan. Life is an enormous cycle of improvements where we progress at our own rate to reach our Higher Self.
2. Life is a School of Higher Education
Life on Earth, say many NDErs, is not a random accident but a rigorous “university” for the soul. In this “school of higher education,” embodiment supplies the full curriculum: love in all its forms, the push-and-pull of desire and discipline, the friction of relationships, the limits and gifts of the senses. Tests arrive as troubles, not to punish but to reveal what we’ve truly learned – and what still needs practice. Soul growth here can be demanding, even painful, yet it is also unusually fast; the density of physical life makes lessons stick. Seen this way, Earth is a temporary campus within a much larger spiritual system. Our choices become coursework, our setbacks become tutorials, and love is the quiet teacher running through it all. We come to refine ideals into lived virtues, to verify change by action, and to graduate with a deeper capacity to love. Other realms exist, but the physical life offers the concentrated training our souls need most.
“The reason we are here in this physical world is for soul growth. This physical world is the ideal place for this. Spiritual growth in the spirit realms is more difficult. The reason is that the influence of our physical bodies gives us the opportunity for a full range of love (a child’s love, marital love, and parental love) which is ideally available here. Love that is misused or misdirected is best corrected here. In this physical world, there is the full range of physical and spiritual senses with which to act and communicate.” (Nora Spurgin)
“Our behavior on Earth provides a teaching ground for those in the spirit world.” (Betty Bethards)
“Life in this world exists for us to test our ideals and learn from them. Learning our lessons here in the physical world is the fastest way to learn.” (David Oakford)
“As long as we have life here, we are learning, our spirits are growing, and we are coming closer to the divine, even by the things we suffer. We may not always know what to do in our lives, we may be troubled and in pain, but be assured, as long as we are here, we are growing.” (Betty Eadie)
“Life in this world is the ultimate experience for our souls. It is ultimate because our souls evolve faster here than anywhere else. The lessons we need to learn are difficult to learn without having a physical form.” (David Oakford)
“Trouble is nature’s way of teaching lessons that won’t be learned otherwise. If we learn from the troubles of others, we can avoid most of our own.” (Arthur Yensen)
“Life in this world is a place for us to overcome certain weaknesses by applying ourselves to see that those weaknesses are truly overcome. Here we can learn for certain whether we have really changed.” (Edgar Cayce)
“Life is a boot camp and school for our soul’s spiritual education, and as such, it’s tough.” (Karen Brannon)
“This world is only a temporary place for our schooling. Our true permanent home is the spiritual universe.” (Betty Eadie)
“This world is only one realm of learning; there are many.” (Sandra Rogers)
3. Life is a Test After Which We Grade Ourselves
Many NDErs say life is less an accident we stumble through than a curriculum we designed – and keep evaluating. What feels hidden or confusing here is “veiled spirit,” a classroom where every choice becomes a lesson and every moment a question on the exam of love and truth. At death the veil lifts, the floodlights come on, and the familiar life review shows us our thoughts, words, and deeds as they truly were – not to shame us, but to help us see, understand, and grow. In this light we discover that we are both the student and, in a profound sense, the grader: we measure ourselves against the values we came to practice. Glimpses of this reality sometimes break into ordinary life, reminding us that tests can be good teachers, that hard chapters can refine the soul, and that studying death can illuminate how to live. The following reflections are from voices who learned, through brush-with-eternity clarity, that our days are not random – they are an exam in love, and the answer key is written in how we treat one another.
“When we die, we will realize that we have been living behind a veil our whole lives. The veil will be lifted and the floodlights will shine on us. Everything in life is really veiled spirit. We are literally on display our whole lives. Every thought, word, and deed has been recorded since birth and will be fully exposed. Everything we have ever done in secret will be brought out into the light for review in front of God and all the heavenly hosts. Our entire life is one huge test and we will be graded on everything.” (Daniel Rosenblit)
“Life is a test. If you pass the test you’ll look back upon them as good experiences.” (Peace Pilgrim)
“None of us will fully fathom the great truths of life until we finally unite with eternity at death. But occasionally we get glimpses of the answer here in the world and that alone can be enough.” (George Rodonaia)
“The highest spiritual values of life can come from the study of death.” (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross)
4. Life is Like a River To Travel and Enjoy
Visit the NDE and Pre-Existence research conclusions about how we planned our lives on Earth before we were born.
5. Life Was Planned By Us Before Our Birth
Many NDErs return with a startling but consoling message: before we were born, we helped design the very contours of our lives. From this higher vantage, souls choose families, challenges, talents, and turning points as lessons that will grow love and wisdom – without erasing free will. What feels random from the ground looks purposeful from the summit; what seems like setback often functions as syllabus. This perspective doesn’t trivialize suffering or excuse injustice. Rather, it reframes life as a cooperative plan – “soul agreements” and opportunities – that we refine, forget at birth, and then rediscover through conscience, love, and the life review. In this view, guidance is constant, meaning is learned, and even detours can be repurposed toward healing. The following testimonies echo this theme: that existence unfolds within a larger choreography, one we helped compose, and that our task here is to meet each moment – easy or hard – with the love we came to learn.
“The universe runs according to a perfect plan. All the so-called injustices we see in life really has no meaning. The perfect plan is working itself out in its perfection.” (Jayne Smith)
“Life in this world is like a rigged roulette wheel in a casino. As much as we try, we can never be able to fully satisfy our selfish desires. It’s virtually impossible.” (Daniel Rosenblit)
“Nothing in life or death is an accident.” (Lynnclaire Dennis)
“There are no accidents in the universe. Everything that happens in life has a purpose.” (George Anderson)
“From the vantage point of the spirit world, there is no problem or disharmony on Earth that will not be corrected.” (Margaret Tweddell)
6. Life is About Giving, Love and Helping Others
NDErs often return with a strikingly simple message: what ultimately matters isn’t achievement, status, or accumulation – it’s how well we loved and how freely we gave. In the light of the life review, priorities reorder themselves; people become more important than pursuits, compassion outweighs correctness, and everyday choices of kindness take on eternal significance. Love shows up not as an emotion but as action – honesty in our dealings, fairness in our work, generosity with our time, tenderness toward nature and animals, and a willingness to leave each place and person a little better than we found them. Many describe a gracious reciprocity woven into the fabric of reality: when we give, we grow; when we share, we’re enlarged; when we return the gift of life through service, we discover more life. NDEs and spiritual insights point to this same compass: a life oriented toward giving, love, and helping others is not only the truest spirituality – it is the simplest path to a heavenly life, begun here and now.
“Life is about people, not pursuits.” (Laurelynn Martin)
“The most important thing in life is love.” (Dr. Raymond Moody)
“Anyone who has had such an experience of God, who has felt such a profound sense of connection with reality, knows that there is only one truly significant work to do in life, and that is love; to love nature, to love people, to love animals, to love creation itself, just because it is.” (George Rodonaia)
“A life of piety without a life of love (which occurs only in this world) is not a spiritual life. Rather, it is a life of love, a life of behaving honestly and fairly in every task, from a more inward source that leads to a heavenly life. Such a life is not hard.” (Emanuel Swedenborg)
“We are to leave the world a little better than we found it.” (David Oakford)
“If we learn to give what we have, we will receive more. This is a spiritual law. We will be given all that we are prepared to receive.” (Betty Eadie)
“The gift of life God gives us comes with a catch: We are to give the gift back.” (P.M.H. Atwater)
7. Life is About Receiving From God
Life, as many NDErs describe it, is a practice of reception – learning how to receive from God. We arrive on Earth already invited: to show up fully, to breathe the questions before we learn the answers, to let the Light tutor us in its time. What we call “difficult” is often the curriculum of grace; suffering becomes the doorway through which growth walks in. The challenges we meet are not designed to break us but to grow us – so heaven can develop within us. Receiving, in this view, is active: we accept truth and then live by it; we consent to be taught by experience; we endure pain until it ripens into wisdom. When the path feels beyond us, the Giver is not – provision arrives as strength, guidance, or, when necessary, a tender recall to the realm where progress continues. In all of this, the measure of our readiness is simple: the degree of light we develop in life is due to our welcoming it. The following traces this education of receiving – showing how presence, perseverance, and trust open the soul to God’s ongoing gift of life.
“Half the gain in coming into Earth life is merely showing up.” (Edgar Cayce)
“One little girl summed up what she learned from her NDE as: ‘Life is for living and the light is for later.'” (Dr. Melvin Morse’s research)
“The point is to live the questions now, and perhaps without knowing it, someday we will live into the answers. Live the questions and the universe will open up its eyes to you.” (George Rodonaia)
“All the suffering in our lives is actually for our good. Out of the most tragic of circumstances springs human growth.” (Angie Fenimore)
“God never gives us more challenges in life than we can handle. Rather than jeopardize our spiritual progression or cause more suffering than can be endured, God will bring us home where we can continue progressing.” (RaNelle Wallace)
“Life’s supposed to be hard. We can’t skip over the hard parts. We must earn what we receive.” (Angie Fenimore)
“Our ability to accept truth, to live by it, governs our progress in the spirit, and it determines the degree of light we possess.” (RaNelle Wallace)
8. Life is For Living
NDErs return with a remarkably consistent message: we came to Earth to live – fully, playfully, awake. Joy isn’t a reward at the end of the path; it’s the outcome of walking the path when we meet each moment with love and curiosity. Free will is our paintbrush; creation is our playground. When we loosen our grip on obligation and open our hands to wonder, self-knowledge blooms, and ordinary hours brighten into holy time. Heaven isn’t relegated to the clouds; it’s discovered here in life, in how we choose to see, give, and receive. The following reminds us to laugh more, risk more, and make our days a celebration of being – because life is for living.
“Our missions mainly have to do with love, but the purpose of life is also to experience joy, gain spiritual understanding and self-awareness, play with the joyful abandon of a child, absorb ourselves in the delight of each moment, let go of obligation and duty, and live for the pure joy of being.” (Jan Price)
“We are sent here to live life fully, to live it abundantly, to find joy in our own creations … to use our free will to expand and magnify our lives.” (Betty Eadie)
“Life is a joyful game to be played and everything works out perfectly. Sooner, if played joyfully with love. Later, if not.” (Dee Rohe)
“We mustn’t wait to find our heaven in the clouds. We must find it here because it exists here and will be whatever we make it and whatever we are willing to accept of it.”(Tina)
9. Life is About Preparing For Death
Life, say NDErs, is not just a dress rehearsal for a future life – it’s the rehearsal and the performance at once. Each ordinary choice becomes a shaping of who we’ll be when the body falls away. Earthly life is the training ground where love is practiced, character is tempered, and bad habits are unshackled while resistance still teaches. We learn to live from the inside out, so that when the veil lifts, we can step naturally into what we have already been becoming. In this view, death does not grade us so much as reveal us; it simply unveils the direction we’ve been traveling all along. The following affirms a simple, demanding wisdom: prepare for death by living well now. Cultivate unselfish love, educate your soul about the next world, and tend daily to the small acts that endure. Break what binds you while choice and contrast still refine you. For the light beyond does not change a life – it clarifies it – and our passage into that light is eased or burdened by the quality of our hearts today.
“How we lived our lives in this world determines which afterlife realm we have earned and travel to after death.” (Betty Bethards)
“If we develop along the lines of unselfish love while in this world, we make it better for us when we die. It’s what we are that counts!” (Arthur Yensen)
“Our lives in this world is a preparation for a fuller, freer and richer spirit world. It can be compared to life in the womb being a preparation for a fuller, freer and richer existence in the physical world.” (Nora Spurgin)
“Day by day we are building for eternity. Every gentle word, every generous thought, every unselfish deed will become a pillar of eternal beauty in the life to come. (Barbara Springer)
“Our lives matter and is significant in determining how far we can go into the light.” (Grace Bubulka)
“The general rule of thumb is this: hellish life, hellish afterlife – heavenly life, heavenly afterlife. Death will not change a hellish life into a heavenly afterlife, nor does it change a heavenly life into a hellish afterlife.” (Dr. Melvin Morse)
“If we educate ourselves as much as possible about the spirit world, it makes our transition there even better. Even if we gain the smallest impression that there is life after death, we are able to obtain enlightenment and understanding. (Nora Spurgin)
“We are preparing for death throughout our whole lives.” (Edgar Cayce)
“Life in this world corresponds to our external nature handling external resources. Life in the spirit world corresponds to our internal nature handling spiritual resources.” (Nora Spurgin)
“It is best to kick our bad habits while in the world. It is easier while in physical form to break those shackles than it is to undo them on the other side, where no temptations are put in our way. There is no reward for behaving correctly while in spirit, because there is nothing to tempt us otherwise. The hard school is in the physical one, and it is here that we must meet and overcome the temptations.” (Ruth Montgomery)
“Our quality of life in the spirit world is directly affected our heart and activities in the physical world.” (Nora Spurgin)
10. Life is a Cycle By Which We Progress
Life doesn’t move in a straight line – it turns like a spiral, bringing us back to familiar lessons at deeper levels of understanding. NDErs often describe existence as an ongoing cycle of refinement, where we return to the classroom of Earth to practice free will, confront our appetites, and choose – again and again – the things that draw us closer to the Light. Progress isn’t rushed or forced; it unfolds at the pace our souls can bear. When we lean into growth, we ascend; when we cling to habits that dim us, we prolong our stay in the same corridors of learning. The gift is that nothing is wasted: every attempt, every stumble, and every renewed effort becomes part of a long arc of becoming. The following points to this sacred rhythm – an endless, merciful cycle through which we gradually shed what binds us and step, layer by layer, into who we truly are.
“Life is an endless cycle of improvements and humans are not perfect yet.” (Dr. Frank Oski)
“Any habit-forming pleasure, and they are endless, traps us into the cycle of rebirth over and over, until our appetites are finally put aside while we are in the flesh.” (Ruth Montgomery)
“Everyone who passes through this world must learn their final lessons in this world, where our free will is called into play in a fashion different from existence in other realms of reality.” (Edgar Cayce)
“We progress at our own rate to reach the light. If we do things that take us away from the light, then we are perpetuating our time here.” (Amber Wells)
11. Life is God
Life, as countless NDErs report, is not merely something we possess – it is the very presence of God moving through all that exists. In the radiance of the Light, people return with a simple but world-changing insight: God is not distant. God is the living current of love, consciousness, and light within every atom, every heartbeat, every breath. To honor life, then, is to honor God; to harm life is to turn away from God. This perspective reframes our daily choices. How we see one another, how we tend the Earth, how we meet suffering and joy – each becomes a spiritual act, a way of aligning with or resisting the light we’re made of. NDEs converge on a single theme: creation is the unfolding of Pure Consciousness, and life itself is God’s self-expression, inviting us to recognize, respect, and participate in it.
“Life is love is God. If you add anymore to this definition then you are not making it any better.” (Chuck Griswold)
“In each atom, in each corpuscle, is life. Life is what you worship as God … and Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.” (Edgar Cayce)
“To know that life is God, is to know how very special life is. We must be very careful how we treat things in life because how we treat things in life is how we treat God. Do we destroy life or do we respect it? Do we nurture life or do we abuse it? Do we value life or do we take it for granted?” (Elsie Seachrist)
“Life tries out different shapes and then returns to where it came.” (John Star)
“Creation is about absolutely Pure Consciousness coming into the experience of life.” (Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
“Life is light itself.” (Dr. John Jay Harper)
Bible (God is life): “From one man he (God) made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole Earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ [1] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.'” [2] (Acts 17:26-28). Notice in this Bible verse how the Apostle Paul references the Greek philosopher poets Epimenides [1] who lived in the 7th or 6th century BC, and Aratus [2] who lived from 310 BC – 240 BC.
12. Life is About Us
Life is the meeting point of God and us – a shared heartbeat running through galaxies and grass, suns and cells. We are not outsiders peering at distant creations; we are participants inside a living, divine body. The heavens are not merely above us but within our Higher Self, and the same Light that threads stars together also threads our minds, memories, and love. From this vantage, nothing stands alone. Rocks, rivers, animals, people, darkness and dawn are woven into one conscious tapestry. Humanity’s gift in that tapestry is awareness – the capacity to dream meaning into existence and to recognize God in the ordinary. Our bodies, too, carry an ancient lineage, flowing from a river of life that has never truly been interrupted. Life is about God and us, together – co-creating, awakening, and learning to see the Whole we already belong to.
“The solar system we live in is our larger, local body. We are much bigger than we imagine. The world is this great created being and we are the part of it that knows that it is.” (Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
“The Earth, the sun, the moon, the darkness, the light, the planets, and all forms of life plants, rocks, animals, people are interconnected.” (Josiane Antonette)
“The universe is God’s dream. Humans are already legendary throughout the cosmos of consciousness. One of the things that we are legendary for is dreaming. We are legendary dreamers. In fact, the whole cosmos has been looking for the meaning of life, the meaning of it all. And it was the little dreamer who came up with the best answer ever. We dreamed it up.” (Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
“Our physical bodies have been alive forever. They come from an unending stream of life, going back to the Big Bang and beyond.” (Mellen-Thomas Benedict)
“Life (existence) is many things: a river, a test, a challenge, a pilgrimage, a journey, a mission, a world of fun, a school, a transition, a preparation, a shelter, and a lesson, just to name a few. But life, in all its entirety, really is all of it. Life is God.” (Kevin Williams)
13. Conclusion: Living the Answer
Taken together, these NDE insights describe a single, luminous thread: life is a classroom, the test afterward, the river of life, the plan, the play – and at its heart, life is God. We are not here by accident. We enrolled into this classsroom beforehand. We helped arrange the lessons. We will be graded in our life review by the love we actually live, not the ideas we admire. The hardships that bruise us can become teachers; the joys that surprise us can become prayers. Every ordinary moment – how we speak, forgive, share, create – tilts us toward light or away from it.
If death reveals who we have been becoming, then preparation for death is simple and demanding: become now what you hope to awaken to then. Receive truth and live by it. Give more than you receive. Choose joy without denying sorrow. Trust that nothing real is ever lost, and that every honest attempt at love is preserved.
To see life as God is to treat life as holy – every person, creature, and corner of the Earth included. To see life as “about us” is to remember our part in the Whole: conscious co-creators, legendary dreamers, apprentices of love. We will circle through lessons as often as needed, but progress is certain when we act from love, courage, and truth.
Let us live the curriculum we chose: learn quickly, love freely, receive humbly, and give generously. Let us make of each day a small heaven – because heaven begins wherever a human being becomes a conduit of the Light. And when the veil lifts, may we find that we have already been walking in it.
