Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the near-Death Experience

One of the earliest of the now many motion pictures that have featured stories based on NDEs was called Resurrection, which enjoyed a measure of popularity when it was released in the early 1980s. Starring Ellen Burstyn, it depicted the life of a young woman who, after suffering a near-fatal automobile accident, during which she undergoes an NDE, eventually becomes an enormously talented healer with almost magical powers to restore damaged bodies to health. Because I had some very peripheral connection with this film when it first appeared and eventually met some of those involved in it, such as its screenwriter, Lou Carlino, I happen to know a little about the incidents on which this film was based. For example, some of the events in the life of the protagonist, after she becomes a public healer, are actually recreations of episodes that occurred to a well‐ known American healer, Rosalyn Bruyere, who served as a consultant to this movie. However, Rosalyn herself told me that she never had had an NDE as such, so she was not really the prototype for the NDEr the film portrays. When I asked Lou Carlino about this, he simply said that, in fact, there was no one NDEr who served as his model here, but rather his story reflected something of a composite of those he had met or read about.

But this was, of course, a movie churned out of Hollywood's dream

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