That God is in everything and that God is within -- that I am God -- is not foreign to the Christian religion. In the Bible, Ephesians 4:6; we find that God is “above all, though all, and in us all.” We also find a question in 1 Corinthians 3:16 by Paul that guides us in this direction: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

   This point may be evident and natural to many of us, but the reason that this message is important for organized religion, is that forgetting that God is within can lead to religious fundamentalism. In order to organize religion and grow their numbers, some religions command their followers to love God before their neighbor.

   This naturally leads to fundamentalism because it is a command to love a specific God that is put above the command to love our neighbor, and thereby, the comment to love God is opposed to loving a neighbor that believes in another God.

   However, if we listen to the evidence from people that have Near Death Experiences then we can get out of this conflict by understanding that loving God and obeying the Golden Rule are in fact one and the same. Since God is in everything; God is also in our neighbor, even if this person believes in ‘another’ God, and thus, by loving our neighbor we are also loving God.

   So, if we put the love of God and the Golden Rule together, instead of putting the commandment to love one specific God first, then we will find that the two commandments are one and the same.

   “Thou shalt love thy God with all your heart, mind and Soul and the second part is just as important: Thou shalt treat your neighbor as yourself.” Chris R. here tells us that the second part; to love our neighbor is “just as important” and this is what we can learn from the NDE.   

   We find the Golden Rule expressed in all religions and while some religions express this rule as a positive statement; to love our neighbor, others express the rule as a negative statement where we should not do on to others what we would not have them do to us.

   The reason this is so important is that we can learn from the NDE that the Golden Rule has a much deeper meaning than most people think of because of our interconnectedness with our neighbor.

   Michael tells us that, “I saw people, people I knew in life, and people I had never met but knew anyway.” His experience of feeling that he knew people he had never met comes from the sense of oneness that most NDErs experience. This is the ultimate oneness that Chris here testifies about: “It’s almost beyond description but somehow we ARE all ONE.”

   I found that Chris’ testimony had full support by the NDErs in my study, where 87 percent said that they agreed with the statement: “We are all parts of one whole.”

   After giving their answer, I asked each NDEr to explain this sense of oneness and Priscilla explained: “I feel that since my NDE, everything is connected. We are all related and there are no divisions, and I feel that is the same with plants, animals and the earth too.”

   Giving a longer answer, David said that,

While in the light I was connected to all those fragment [of light] it was like having the knowing from all the souls that ever were and all the souls that ever will be. Yet there was an even greater consciousness, a collection of the All, into the One.

   Connie takes the meaning of this oneness further by first explaining that, “It’s Oneness, and yet being aware of your uniqueness, too.” Then, she goes on to explain what the consequences of this interconnectedness with our neighbor means:

            I feel this would definitely be the end to all wars – if we only could feel another’s pain and sadness that way, we couldn’t harm anyone else. I believe it’s because we don’t feel another’s pain as they do, that we are then able to engage in war, etc.

   This is where the NDE gives us insight into the full depth of the Golden Rule. To the statement; “What you are doing to another; you are doing to yourself” I found that 86 percent agreed, and taking this insight deeper I also asked about the statement: “There is no other; we are the other.” Here 83 percent said that they agreed, and when I went even deeper through the Mayan quote “I am the other you” I found that 62 percent said that they agreed.

   Through this insight about our interconnectedness, we now have the reason that people experience negative life-reviews in the NDE. As we saw in the last chapter, the life-review is the ultimate teaching tool that teaches us the indisputable law of the universe: that all is interconnected.  

   Also the fact that people often have life-reviews where they experience themselves on the receiving end of their own harmful actions is a testimony to the deeper meaning of “we are the other.” The lesson we can learn from the life-review in the NDE is that the Golden Rule is not simply a figure of speech; it has a deeper meaning than most of us can comprehend through the profound oneness of “there is no other.”