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Overview
Don’t just age, engage.
In Opus Optimus, author Robert V. Smith provides an inspirational guide about how to live your life to the fullest, particularly if you are approaching old age or who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Drawing on the amazing potential shown by the survivors of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) for transformation in this life, Smith has created the Opus Optimus model to help you get the most out of your later days.
Smith’s model builds upon several important elements and principles such as:
- Developing keen intuition and the power to connect with others
- Finding goodness and value in all days
- Committing to doing and ensuring good
- Forgoing materialism
- Regretting and fearing nothing, including death
To illustrate these principles, Smith provides exemplars—including fascinating public figures like Michelle Obama and the late Randy Pausch—whose commendable lives show readers how they too can contribute. With advice from the practical to the spiritual, Opus Optimus will help you renew your later years.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632991164 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Greenleaf Book Group, LLC |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2017 |
| Pages: | 220 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.46(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Opus Optimus
A Model for Renewing Life's Later Years
By Robert V. Smith, Dusty Higgins
River Grove Books
Copyright © 2017 Robert V. SmithAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63299-116-4
CHAPTER 1
LIFE AND DEATH
"They say such wonderful things at your funeral and you miss it all. And, only by a few days!"
— Mort Sahl (1927–)
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2012), Americans' greatest fear is speaking in public (glossophobia, at seventy-four percent). The second is the fear of death, necrophobia (sixty-eight percent)! After these top two fears, percentages fall off precipitously (e.g., spiders, at thirty-one percent; heights, ten percent; confined spaces, 2.5 percent), so it is probably fortuitous that we cannot speak at our own funerals!
Kidding aside, Americans' prevalent fear of death is in curious juxtaposition to a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll (US Religious Landscape Survey, 2008) indicating that seventy-four percent of Americans believe in heaven (less, at fifty-nine percent, believe in hell); seventy percent believe that heaven can be achieved through religions besides their own. If we think we're going to a good place in an afterlife, then why all the fear?
This apparent paradox, along with how such questions are seemingly informed or misinformed by recent social science studies and belief systems, is explored here. Additionally, we will consider claims to encounters with the afterlife, including NDEs.
The most important part of this chapter, however, is the lessons for life that can be learned from NDEs and NDErs throughout the world. Post-NDE personality and behavioral changes and the model these changes suggest for living are the primary bases for Opus Optimus. The related question of what relevance NDEs have to the possibility and likelihood of an afterlife involves a much more complicated set of arguments and considerations. Still, we will explore these matters in terms of what we have learned from studies mounted to seek what some have characterized as the "heavenly connections" of NDEs.
This chapter will cover the following elements and principles of the Opus Optimus model:
"I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957)
Understanding the Fear of Death
It has been said that life is a fatal disease. While this expression represents a far more cynical interpretation of life and death than most individuals possess, anyone experiencing a loved one's death or the enhanced probability of near-term death from illness or military combat knows that thoughts about death are a complex mélange of cultural, emotional, and psychological elements. In our quest to understand death, one of the best sources of insight is the life and work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, our first Opus Optimus exemplar.
DR. ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
Serious Study of Death
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) began life as one of three triplet girls born to Ernst and Emma Villiger Kübler, a Swiss couple in Zurich. As a child, she labored to find an individual identity, a struggle compounded by her father who believed she should become a secretary or a maid.
Kübler-Ross ran away from home at sixteen with aspirations to become a physician, holding a series of jobs while she volunteered in care centers during World War II. Her voluntary work continued after the war, including a visit to Majdanek, a former concentration camp in Poland. The experience, which included observing carvings in the wooden camp walls of butterfly forms (which would take on greater meaning when she began studying NDEs), affected her profoundly.
Kübler-Ross entered medical school in 1951 in Zurich. She completed her studies in 1957 and in the following year, married an American medical student she met in Zurich, Emanuel ("Manny") Robert Ross. They moved to the United States afterward, where they both interned at a community hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. Nearly a decade later, Kübler-Ross become an assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of Chicago's Medical School. Here, working with four students from Chicago's Theological Seminary, Kübler-Ross began studying death, starting with a weekly seminar designed to assist understanding among caregivers. These efforts and her clinical practice focusing on death and dying patients led to what would become the 1969 best-selling book, On Death and Dying, which focused on theories about coping with death.
Kübler-Ross's book and a subsequent Life magazine article about her led to extraordinary attention and worldwide requests for lectures and interviews. It is important to note that Kübler-Ross did not always pursue her groundbreaking work under the easiest of circumstances. Because she often relied on interactions with patients who were not always under her immediate care, other physicians provided considerable pushback over concerns about patient privacy and even expressed personal jealousy.
Despite groundbreaking work, Kübler-Ross left the university to go into fulltime practice in Chicago from 1969 to 1973. After serving as president of the Ross Medical Association in suburban Chicago (1973–76), she founded Shanti Nilaya (meaning "the final home of peace" in Sanskrit) Growth and Healing Center in Escondido, California.
From 1977–95, Kübler-Ross served as Shanti Nilaya's chairman of the board, conducting her "Life, Death, and Transition" workshops and studying out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Her emerging interest in "spiritual guides" helped steer her life and work, though this belief became a source of derision from colleagues in the medical community. Two of her closest colleagues at Shanti Nilaya were unkind, which prompted Kübler-Ross's exit from the institution.
In 1983, Kübler-Ross moved from California to a three hundred-acre farm, which evolved into the physical location of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (EKR) Center. In 1985, she became interested in people suffering from AIDS — specifically, the adoption and care of AIDS-infected babies, going so far as to seek permits in 1985 to house pediatric AIDS patients at the EKR Center. During this time, AIDS was a very emotional and controversial topic because people didn't understand exactly how it was spread, and many opposed Kübler-Ross's plan to assist AIDS-infected children. On October 6, 1994, the EKR Center and her home were burned to the ground in an act of arson, causing Kübler-Ross to lose all of her papers and possessions.
During her career and throughout retirement, Kübler-Ross wrote and had published more than twenty books. Most of her latter years were spent in Arizona in the care of friends and relatives until a series of strokes necessitated moving to a hospice in 2002, where Kübler-Ross was to remain until her death.
Throughout her life, Kübler-Ross exemplified dedication, passion, and unconditional love for others, practicing what she preached beyond her circle of patients and those close to her. She sought to understand the mysteries of death and the afterlife, helping to illuminate seminal phenomena that potentially effect us all.
THE KÜBLER-ROSS THEORY
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dedicated nearly four decades of her life to studying death perceptions and experiences (including NDEs) among seriously ill patients and became an internationally recognized name. To explain how people cope with death, Kübler-Ross developed the following five-stage model:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Though these stages do not necessarily occur in sequential order or in toto, they are generally recognized as a sound framework for understanding the behavior of individuals experiencing a near-term prospect of death, such as diagnosis with a terminal illness, or emotions associated with a loved one's death. The steps and feelings also speak to the consciousness of all humans about our own anticipated mortality, the good experienced during our lives, and prospective loss of loved ones. The Opus Optimus lessons, especially those on regretting and fearing nothing, including death, along with humbly and reverently respecting and loving others, offer very positive responses to the challenges, so well elaborated by Kübler-Ross, that we all face in coping with death.
In recent years, Kübler-Ross's model has been further investigated and refined through results from robust studies with larger populations of healthy and near-death subjects.
AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY: MEANING MANAGEMENT
As noted earlier, not everyone proceeds orderly through all five stages as they experience bereavement or personal threats of death. One or more stages, in fact, may be experienced simultaneously. Educator Erica Brown (2013) offers the notion that, in the context of deathrelated experience, "acceptance" should be coupled with "inspiration," thus implying a need for optimism and focusing on the future.
Indeed, the acceptance-inspiration couplet is a critical component of an alternative death-coping method called meaning management theory (MMT). Psychologist Paul Wong and his research collaborators have proposed that MMT represents a desirable approach to personal death acceptance and defense against death-related angst. Wong and Adrian Tomer (2011) note, "From the perspective of MMT, the heart and soul of overcoming death anxiety and living an authentic happy life lies in the human capacity for meaning making and meaning reconstruction. ... More specifically, it is the life-enhancing and life-expanding quest for meaning that enables us to live fully in the light of death."
With this in mind, the Opus Optimus principles of reverence and humility, love, optimism, and lifelong learning could be powerful adjuncts to MMT's approach to death and dying.
In this context, it is interesting to note that psychologists Clay Routledge and Jacob Juhl (2010) found that among college-age adolescents, when life is typically full of meaning, fear of death is not triggered nearly as greatly by references to mortality. In converse fashion, when a sense of meaning in life may be diminished, death anxieties may occur more frequently and more profoundly.
Overcoming the Fear of Death and Finding Meaning in Life
Herman Feifel, a pioneering psychologist who studied death perceptions and fear for more than forty years in the later half of the twentieth century, offered somewhat contrasting theories to those of Kübler-Ross and Wong. In 1959, Feifel suggested that elderly subjects are less preoccupied with thoughts of their death than are younger subjects. Subsequent studies, including those by clinical psychologists Robert Neimeyer and Barry Fortner (Neimeyer et al., 2004), among others, confirm this conclusion with more refined results.
The most recent studies confirm Feifel's conclusions about the elderly with the caveat that personal perceptions and emotions can be modified by certain factors. Older people in poor health have heightened psychological distress fears regarding death and dying, which result in negative perceptions and emotions. Pathopsychological states, such as anxiety (especially when compounded by neuroses) and depression can also heighten fears of mortality.
On the other hand, those who report religious or spiritual passion, resilience, self-esteem, and a sense of meaning in life tend to have positive perceptions and emotions.
Curiously, however, half-hearted religiosity may deepen death fears, while non-belief may actually minimize fears about one's mortality. As Niemeyer et al. (2004) note, "Individuals who strongly endorse death acceptance are probably more able than others to see meaning in death by putting it into an overarching context. This in turn should enable them to experience less fear when thinking of their own death." Stated somewhat differently, when death is accepted as a part of a life filled with respect and love for others, and committed to leaving meaningful manifestations of such love at the end, the fear of death and our transition from mortal life can be eased. Moreover, with the acceptance of death as a natural event and a part of life, it is possible to focus beyond the "end" of earth-bound lives toward whatever goodness there might be in an afterlife. Indeed, these ideas are embodied in many religious beliefs.
LIFE — DEATH — AFTERLIFE
Ideas about the existence of an afterlife go back millennia and vary in differing cultural and belief systems. Students of comparative religions can articulate the specific beliefs that permeate many of the world's religions, such as Christians' belief in heaven as a rewarding afterlife made possible through the incarnation, life, and mortal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and resulting in an eternal interaction with a loving and radiant God.
Descriptions of afterlives involve a range of scenarios, from the notion of being "saved" and thus enjoying a deity's individual attention and love to joining a vast ocean of love running through a string of reincarnations to effect perfection prior to reaching nirvana.
Afterlife beliefs have evolved over millennia, undoubtedly formed by the wishes of the faithful and their leaders to lesson fears of death and offset the anxieties regarding having life's goods ultimately "stolen by death." And while believers may have faith in the tenets of scripture or various equivalents found in different religious persuasions, no evidentiary proof confirms the existence of an afterlife.
NDEs: More Than Faith
For millennia, humans have sought tangible evidence of an afterlife. For example, Zoroastrian belief in the prophet Zoroaster's bodiless transformation in the presence of God and subsequent return to Earth to minister to the Persians (The Gospel of Zarathustra) sounds much like an NDE. Beyond such beliefs, "evidence" of an afterlife has now been suggested by numerous clinicians and scholars based on studies of near-death experiences.
NDEs occur in victims of serious illness, accidents, physical or emotional trauma (including suicide attempts), and under general anesthesia, among other conditions. In many cases, victims are declared clinically dead (or are under general anesthesia) but are returned to life through medical intervention or spontaneous recovery.
The father of NDE work, physician, philosopher, and psychologist Raymond Moody, began his studies in the late 1960s. His first book, Life After Life, was published in 1975 and became an extraordinary best seller, with more than ten million sales. Moody continued his work on NDEs, sometimes including others who were either prominent in their own right (e.g., Kübler-Ross, 2001) or who would become well known later (e.g., Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, 2011), in part, through their work with Moody. Today, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of published studies of people experiencing NDEs and their possible connection to the afterlife.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NDE
Millions of NDEs have probably occurred worldwide, and those that have been studied by qualified investigators are generally consistent in their descriptions, even in cases of NDErs who have been blind since birth:
• Experiencing an extraordinary sense of consciousness, accompanied by feelings of peace and well-being while undergoing a rapid life review (or "seeing their life replayed"), sometimes through a 360-degree interactive panoramic or holographic experience
• Feeling the existence of a personal "spirit being" ascending and hovering above their clinically dead body, most often to view an immediate fate
• Traveling through tunnels, the end of which is lit with a compelling light or by a radiant being, via their personal "spirit body"
• Encountering an unconditionally loving androgynous entity (that possesses a great sense of humor!)
• Receiving from this radiant being a kindly and understanding judgment of their acts of kindness or quests for knowledge rather than specific accomplishments
• Encountering loved ones or deceased family members
• Experiencing supra-normal vision and subsequent projection into splendid surroundings (including lush plants and wildlife, especially butterflies), where feelings of awe, genuine care, and love are present
• Returning to their earth-bound bodies with a sense of sorrow, awakening at the point of resuscitation or other bodily human consciousness
Many NDErs report their experiences are unlike anything else they've encountered in life, including those NDErs who have previously used psychotropic and other mind-altering drugs.
Many also believe that NDEs change their lives forever. Afterward, individuals may feel as if they have a greater understanding of the universe, improved intuition about others, and enhanced powers (charismatic appeal) to assist others. Many NDErs subsequently become involved in professions that help others.
Perhaps most importantly, many of those who have survived an NDE no longer fear death.
What Do NDEs Imply About God?
In the late 1970s, I attended a lecture by Raymond Moody at The University of Texas at Austin. He spoke to a packed house about his landmark studies described in Life After Life. An enthusiastic question and answer session followed his presentation, and I recall two questions in particular: What do NDEs imply about the existence of God? Does the evidence for NDEs prove the existence of an afterlife? His answers to these questions suggested that he could not speak to the first and wasn't sure about the second.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Opus Optimus by Robert V. Smith, Dusty Higgins. Copyright © 2017 Robert V. Smith. Excerpted by permission of River Grove Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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