The Plowboy Interview: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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PLOWBOY: Elisabeth, let's talk about the moment of death itself. Based on your experience and research, what would you say happens when a person dies?

KÜBLER-ROSS: There are three stages of dying. The first occurs at the physical level, the one that concerns your normal consciousness and your body ... which is like a cocoon. When you are mortally injured, in a coma or whatever, and you lose consciousness, your brain ceases to function. The real you then emerges from your physical body and moves to the second, psychic, level ... like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. At that point you have what I call all-awareness: Your body feels whole, and you are completely and totally aware of everything going on around you. Blind people can even see when they enter the psychic stage of dying.

And—though it may sound strange—all this is quite easy to verify. I've studied thousands of cases of out-of-body and near-death experiences in which people traveled to the psychic level. In many instances, when these patients regained consciousness, they could tell everything that had been going on around them. The blind ones could tell me what color ties their doctors had been wearing. An old woman who had been in a complete coma told me that the nurse had said, "That old bag ... I hope she takes off." Many researchers have noted this sort of thing.

After hearing about these experiences, one begins to realize that no human being can die alone, for three reasons. For one thing, once you're out of your physical body, time and space do not exist, so you can travel to your living loved ones at the speed of thought. Second, you will see your family and friends who preceded you in death. You will meet them, you will recognize them, and you will be surrounded by more love than you can imagine.

And this, too, is easy to verify. I checked it out by collecting cases of tragedies in which a seriously injured child regained consciousness a good while after an accident had claimed the lives of other members of the family. Such youths would talk about what happened while they were unconscious ... saying something like, "I saw Mommy and Peter waiting for me," thereby identifying those people who had died.

The third reason why you cannot die alone is that you have a guardian angel. This spiritual guide-who's assigned to you and to you alone-helps you during your life, trying every means he or she can to keep you on course, so that you will do what you've committed yourself to do in this lifetime. When you die, you'll meet this guardian angel and experience instant recognition along with the greatest love you've ever felt.

PLOWBOY: But how can one scientifically verify the existence of these spirit guides?

KÜBLER-ROSS: You or I can know these things from personal experience, but right now, science cannot verify them ... because our technological knowledge doesn't yet have tools, or even a language, to deal with them. That doesn't mean that the things I tell you are not scientific or true, though . . . the fact is that science is still in its baby shoes!

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