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I'm Over All That and Other Confessions - Shirley MacLaine

Whenever I brought my books home to read to them, neither [my Mother] nor Daddy had any problems with my expanding belief system.

She was a student of the patterns of nature; he'd had an out-of-body experience after a near fatal car crash, as well as a visitation from his best buddy who died on the battlefield during World War II.

When Daddy told me about the night he cracked up his car, he described a terrible crash and said he had essentially died. He went through a tunnel (a familiar description in many out-of-body experiences) and encountered his own mother and father, plus friends on the other side.

He said he knew he was going toward God and it would be like going home to him. However, he said, a guide of some sort stopped him from going all the way to the end of the tunnel (dying) and said he needed to go back because he had more work to do. The guide told my father that his son (my brother) needed him as well as his wife (Mother), but that I really didn't. Dad said he obeyed the guide, came back into his body, and felt the pain of his injuries and found himself inside the wrecked car.

The moment that he had a vision of his war buddy on the battlefield was important to him because it made him realize that the soul must live on after death. When he checked on the time of his friend's death, he found it was exactly the same time as Daddy had seen him.

These two incidents stayed with him for his whole life, and he understood my fascination with such things completely. When we had discussions about the afterlife, he said he absolutely believed in its existence because his own near-death experience was too beautiful to deny.

What he couldn’t understand was why anyone would want to come back to live another life.