Book Reviews  --  Spiritual Exploration  --  Afterlife, Spirit World, Near Death Experiences (NDE's)

Author: Betty Eadie

Title: The Awakening Heart

Book Review 17.05.2009

(c) 2009 by Heidrun Beer

 

Betty Eadie: The Awakening Heart
 

Second book of the (half) native American NDE (near death experience) author whose breakthrough bestseller I reviewed last week.

If the first book was an "NDE Classic", then this one could be called a "Coincidence Classic". It is fascinating to watch how many times certain turns in her life are announced to her in advance, how she is told that the people needed to make everything happen as planned will be brought into her life at the precisely correct time, and how all this is then acted out on the stage of physical reality.

Cosmic planning! When and why do the key people come into our screenplays? Are we calling them? Are they sent to us? Where, when, how and by whom are these things planned?

Betty Eadie cannot answer these questions (authors like Robert Monroe or Bruce Moen have seen more of the "planning center" on the other side) - she simply tells her own experiences, she is not preaching, just sharing with us what happened to herself and her family in the wake of her first book being published, and we are left to come to our own conclusions.

It is so heartwarming to see what a wonderful loving husband she has. It must be quite a challenge to live with a person who is in a constant dialogue with God, who keeps fulfilling "orders from the other side", and who turns her life from shallow to substantial.

Holy Mary's husband Joseph comes to mind, who also trusted his wife unconditionally even under the most difficult circumstances. Mrs. Eadie's husband's name is Joe...

She is developing amazing abilities. One of them is the ability to heal with herbs, "tapping into some knowledge I didn't know I had." She keeps having visions and supernatural encounters, many years after her original NDE.

She joins two churches: "In one church I found a spiritual expression of God's love and in the other, a knowledge of God's plan." She remembers from her NDE: "I had been shown that, because we are at various levels of spirituality, any step closer to God is good, so we should never criticize any church or faith where people are seeking God."

She develops telepathy, but also starts to see into the future of people and makes accurate predictions. She perceives when her husband or her children are in trouble, and can help them with her prayers. Even when she herself runs out of strength and loses hope, she still helps them with her prayers.

Betty opens her own clinic. After having such a difficult time of finding back to a human life, she is finally well established again, when she receives the instruction that now "You must share with the world the message of God's love. Set up a meeting place that is open to all. Advertise it in the newspapers. All who come will be sent. Go there with your heart, listen, and speak from it."

Again she complies. She goes through personal challenges like the death of her father. Her nights are consumed by angel visits and prophetic visions that keep her from getting enough sleep, but somehow she manages to function from one day to the next.

Divine assistance keeps helping Betty with the publishing of "Embraced by the Light". She becomes used to all the coincidences that shape her way. She learns to expect them, to trust in them, to count on them, to build on them.

She becomes so famous that police is needed to regulate the traffic when she is giving a lecture. People are hungry for her message. "They wanted to hear about unconditional love. They wanted to hear that they are perfectly who they need to be, and that they are in the right place to advance in their walk with God."

One man becomes particularly important to her. He calls her at a very inconvenient time to tell her about his impending suicide, and she ignores all the pressing chores of the day and makes the time for a long, intimate talk with him. She has already been on the "other side", and she tries to make it real to him what will happen after that critical moment where he ends the life of his physical body.

"Taking our own life will cause us to lose opportunities that are needed to develop spiritually while we are on earth." - "After the death of our body, we have a life's review where we experience the ripple effect of our creativity - or the lack of it for that matter."

"I never asked for this, Betty. And I cannot imagine what I could possibly learn from all this pain. I want it to go away! You have got to understand, this is the only way that I see it." - "Well, I don't see it that way. Suicide is a temporary fix; you leave your misery only for a brief moment until you meet it again face-to-face in your life review. You interrupt your spiritual development, the growth that determines your experience in heaven. We are all at different levels spiritually - here and there. If you don't develop here, you will have to do so there."

He does not give in. Because of his stone-hard attitude - she has never learned his name -, she gives him the name "David Stone". His story becomes part of her lectures.

A touching moment happens when her brother-in-law, a professed atheist, nearly dies and has his very own near death experience. He comes back from his death with the same urge that fills her: to tell the world!

A new divine instruction arrives: She is told to change her clothing style and appear in a native American dress from now on, something she was never interested in. "It will protect you". Again she complies, and the protection works when an anti-abortion crowd gets her in trouble, until she can explain how she did not abort the very son who accompanies her on that evening, even though the doctors said that it would be better to abort him.

One particularly touching story is about a friend who after long years of friendship finally confesses to her that he is gay, and that he had such a hard time to reconcile his sexuality and his faith, that he too at one point in his life considered suicide. It is just beautiful to behold how her reality of unconditional love sweeps away the rigid patterns of church and society that she is used to! (Society has changed since then.)

And Betty also has some real miracles to tell that she hears from a man who comes to one of her lectures.

She realizes that she keeps learning:

"The more knowledge I receive, and the more I understand my own spirituality and the spirituality of others, the more I realize that I need to obtain yet more knowledge. Once you become aware of something, it opens a door and draws you into its knowledge. You walk through that door, and then there are more doors you have to choose among. You select yet another door and walk through that one, then there are even more doors to choose among. It is a constant challenge and a constant process, each door leading to others each time.

I have learned always to look for the next door. Whenever we reach a point where we think we are fully developed spiritually, we must be careful; we could find that we are caught in a maze or dead-ended. There is no reason to want to stop developing spiritually, because the wonders through each door are more beautiful than the ones before. Our journeys are their own rewards. We must never cease to seek more truth and knowledge and the understanding of God and his love."